Alyce whispered, “It’s hungry too.”
In the hollow emptiness of the crypt, she sounded like a ghost. Sid could have done without the rapt expression on all three talya faces. What did they see? When he stared straight at the portal, the verge was a pile of trash. But in his peripheral vision …
It wanted them. It wanted to suck their souls and hawk up their empty corpses like sunflower seed shells.
“What have you Chicago talyan done?” His voice broke across the words.
“Relax, Bookkeeper,” Archer said. “It’s dormant. Mostly. We think.”
Sid made a strangled sound. “Tell that to the people of Pompeii.”
Sera gestured at a row of milk crates at the base of the kliegs. “Pompeii didn’t have those.” The crates supported a small tower of instruments, only three-quarters of which Sid recognized. “Our last dear, departed Bookie was a megalomaniacal madman—aren’t they all?—but he knew his way around a soldering iron.”
Jolted out of his shock by professional jealousy, Sid edged around the gaping maw to study the machines. The boom in cheap consumer electronics had been a source of much glee for the engineering branch among Bookkeepers, though he had always kept more to the theoretical side of the equations. “It’s just a resonance sensor with a remote alarm—admittedly, that is fascinating—routed through a … oh.” He resettled his specs as he straightened. “Is that an etheric sequencer? With an inversion module?”
“Geek alert,” Archer muttered.
Sera nodded. “A demonic ant trap.”
Sid leaned closer and almost jumped out of his skin when Alyce murmured at his elbow, “What is that inside?”
“There’s nothing. …” A flicker inside the beaker, like a half-invisible moth, shut him up.
“A soul fragment,” Sera explained. “Thanks to Corvus, there are still bits wafting around the city. No tenebrae could resist such an easy snack.”
“A baited ant trap,” Sid said.
Alyce traced her finger over the gold-rimmed glass. “Poor soul.”
Archer toed the stack of perforated paper neatly stacking itself beside a printer that ticked every few seconds. “Nothing has eaten it, which means nothing’s coming over the verge.”
Sid locked his knees to keep from stepping back. “When you told London you had opened a doorway to hell, we thought you meant …”
Archer gave him a moment, then crossed his arms. “We didn’t stutter.”
“We didn’t imagine you meant this.” Sid flung one hand out toward the gaping maw.
Sera narrowed her eyes. “You thought we’d imagined it?”
“Talyan have no imagination,” Sid admitted. “But you are known to be … predisposed to postapocalyptic ideation. There were suggestions of group psychosis.”
Sera’s scowl deepened. “London thought we’d been taken over by evil?”
“If a demon can decide to repent, what’s to stop it from unrepenting?”
“So they sent you?” Archer’s harsh bark of laughter lacked amusement.
Sid stiffened. “I volunteered.”
Alyce smoothed his sleeve as if patting down his hackles. “I could look inside. I would fit.”
All three of them swung on her with a chorus in one breath. “No!”
Sid caught her hand, unwilling to let one word, no matter how vehemently uttered, enforce the command. “No, Alyce. If the door to hell is closed—at least for the moment—we are not peeping behind it just to see what jumps out at us.”
Climbing out of the hole was worse than going down. Chills spidered up Sid’s spine until his shoulder went numb from the tension, as if the hole breathed death and damnation at their retreating backs.
Alyce stood in the doorway at the top, looking down, until he bumped her out of the way. “Did you see the way it sparkled?”
“I’m not like you.” But he had seen enough that a full fortnight of Guinness wouldn’t erase the image: female talyan, hell portals, imprisoned souls. Had good begun drifting back toward evil? Was one small rogue just the latest symptom of a fatal breakdown?
There’d been nothing like this in the multimillennia worth of archives he’d spent years of his life memorizing. And what could one human Bookkeeper do about it?
Archer secured the door while Therese watched them with steady dark eyes.
“Do you know what’s down there?” Sid asked the diner owner.
“A bad thing.”
“And it doesn’t frighten you to be right on top of it?”
No purple lights moved in her gaze, but she felt a resolve more human and somehow more unnerving. “I have been closer to bad things. At least this time, someone cares.” She handed a bag of kanyah to Alyce. “For you, little one.”
Alyce clutched the wax paper baggie of golf ball–sized treats to her chest and murmured her thanks.
Sid—stomach churning with what he’d seen—dropped to the rear as their quartet left the diner and returned past the stained-glass museum toward the parking garage. Ahead of him, Alyce dug into the bag of kanyah. How could she eat after staring down hell’s gullet?
Stupid question. She’d hovered almost a hundred years—if her comment about the World’s Fair was to be believed—with her and her demon on the edge of starvation. His gaze lingered on her petite form an arm’s length ahead of him. His two hands outstretched would easily span her hips, and her waist nipped in smaller yet. He should run back to the diner and get another to-go bag so he could feed her bite by bite. …
Damn it, his brain was still rattling around like half a pair of dice. She’d survived without him bringing her sticky sweets.
He slowed, letting her pull away so that he wasn’t tempted to more accurately measure her dimensions.
As if she felt him retreat, she glanced over her shoulder. For a heartbeat, she met his gaze; then she held out one of the mottled white and brown desserts, and he wondered what hunger had been in his eyes.
He shook his head and dropped his glance, focusing on her bare feet. Her demon seemed as incapable of providing for her as he was. She was still looking back at him, and her sideways step emphasized her awkward gait.
He seized on the puzzle gratefully. “Alyce, did you injure yourself again?”
Sera shortened her stride to Alyce’s. “Again? What happened?”
Sid gestured at her left knee. “Alyce was limping when she fought the ferales in the alley, but the teshuva should have repaired any damage by now.” The teshuva mended constantly on the cellular level, though it offered no pain relief.
Alyce shrugged. “It’s always there.”
Archer palmed open the double doors out to the garage. The stark black reven flowing over his knuckles flared violet. “The demon is supposed to reset the body to pristine factory defaults when it takes possession.” His words bounced hollowly off the concrete pillars around them. “That’s part of the deal.”
Sera angled toward Sid. “You must have a theory.”
Reminding them a rogue was, by definition, out of sync with her demon seemed unnecessary. “Research on talyan therapeutic interventions is scarce,” he said. “We do know that which does not immediately decapitate, eviscerate, or exsanguinate a talya just makes him crankier, but by the time Bookkeepers see you after a tenebrae encounter, you’re healed.”
“Or dead and gone,” Archer finished with a scowl. “No middle ground. So why is she stuck with the hurt?”
Sid shrugged his still-aching feralis-bitten shoulder as they reached the league car. “X-rays don’t image ether-transmuted flesh, but I’ll find the reason.”
Alyce had tugged open the rear car door. Now she paused, and the frame creaked under her clenched fingers. “No hospital.”
“Never,” Sera soothed her. “But Nanette could help. She has a healing touch, and she knows what we are. This time of day, she’ll be at the church.”