“Nim and Jonah,” Sidney said. Together, the two were magnificent, all tawny beauty and dangerous eyes. “Alyce, Nim was possessed just this August.”
“Thank God I’m not the new girl anymore,” Nim said.
“God did not do this to me,” Alyce said.
Nim nudged her mate in the ribs. “I think she’s one of yours, lover.”
Jonah’s smile matched the simple curve of his hook. “Alyce, if ever there was a place for God’s grace, it is here.”
She shook her head. “My place is slaying devils.”
Nim smiled with all shiny teeth. “Yeah, she’s one of us.”
Sidney jostled Alyce’s hand, recapturing her attention. “Archer and Sera, Liam and Jilly, and Jonah and Nim are symballein. That means the unique signatures of their perpetual idiopathic forces—their souls—are so closely aligned that they are essentially two halves of a whole.”
“Which means he can keep up when I dance,” Nim said.
“Means he’s strong enough to stand up to me,” Jilly said, straightening her spine until her spiky hair barely reached Liam’s shoulder. He grinned down at her.
“He loves me,” Sera murmured. The ring on Archer’s finger winked as he wrapped his arm around her.
Alyce tried to breathe around the knot in her throat. They had found each other despite the shadows that lurked in their eyes and despite the devils that lurked under their skin.
Sidney turned her to face the rest of the room.
It was a roomful of talya males, all of them adorned in black, with big hands and piercing eyes. All without smiles. All without mates.
“This is Haji, the league’s tracker, and Baird. Over there is Lev, and beside him Luka. Then Pitch, Amiri, and Gavril. Gavril has bare-handed techniques you might appreciate, Alyce. Against the far wall …”
The names blurred in her head into a fog of glimmering eyes shot through with violet sparks. Around them, the air twisted with the edgy power of their teshuva.
“I came here to kill devils,” she blurted. “Nothing else.”
“Don’t worry about the killing.” Ecco limped to the front of the line. “That’s a given.”
Sidney took another step forward until his broad shoulders were silhouetted against Ecco’s dark bulk. “Ecco, Alyce was worried she had hurt you.”
“She did.” Ecco glared behind him when somebody snickered.
Alyce took a breath and edged up beside Sidney. “I am relieved it was not lasting harm.”
The hulking talya’s gaze lightened with the gleam of the devil as he turned back to her. “It might still be.”
This conversation was fraught with undercurrents that plucked at the hairs of her nape. Her throat burned at the line of her collar where the black wheal of the devil warned her of danger.
As if she needed any warning.
Sidney sighed. “And here I thought unrepentant demons were bad.”
CHAPTER 8
Sid sat in the folding chair beside Liam’s desk, the thick legal pad in his lap bent nearly double under his fist. It was just as well Bookkeepers were taught to avoid exposing off-the-shelf electronics to amped-up talyan; otherwise he’d have cracked in half a thousand pounds’ worth of fancy tablet PC.
“Pick a crisis, any crisis.” Liam hunched over his desk, his thumb and first two fingers in a stiff tripod over the reven at his temple. “If the city’s djinn-men are amassing somewhere, presumably they’ll have to come up with a secret handshake before they call to order and come to massacre us in revenge. So I’ll deal with Alyce first, since she’s closest to burning a hole through my league.”
The cardboard under Sid’s fist collapsed. “She’s not—”
“She needs to be bonded, now, if not sooner,” Liam said over his objection. “Did you smell the ozone in that room? Or maybe that was brimstone, and they’ve forgotten they’re supposed to fight for good.”
Pacing behind him, Jilly scoffed. “That was testosterone.”
“Worse than brimstone.” Archer tossed a glance at Sid from his careless lean in the far corner. “This is a dangerous experiment you’ve begun. We balance on the edge between good and evil, and little Alyce is not a steadying influence.”
Sid stared back at him without flinching. “All eight stone of her will drag us to our doom, undoubtedly.”
“She got you out of your tweeds. That must be halfway to doom for a Bookkeeper.” Archer’s gaze weighed heavier than Alyce soaking wet. “Speaking of which, you might want to check that wound. You’re leaking.”
Reflexively, Sid touched his shoulder. The gauze pad was still in place, but it squished wetly under his fingers, and a fresh bloom of crimson brightened the oxidized stains on the front of his shirt.
A reminder that tweed was better; it was more absorbent, and the patterns hid all sorts of transgressions.
Sera perched on the edge of the guest chair across from Liam. She’d tried to call Fane, with no answer, and she’d twisted her tension into the cherry red coat over her lap. “Alyce might not make our lives easier, but possession isn’t a choice. Not a conscious one, anyway. We can’t blame Westerbrook for her sudden appearance.”
Sid gave her a flat look. Was that supposed to be a vote of confidence? As if he might have summoned a teshuva if he’d gotten around to it?
Yet Bookie had done exactly that, and Sera’s possession was the result. Sid tossed the crumpled legal pad onto Liam’s desk. He wasn’t a fucking stenographer.
He was supposed to be, of course. But never had the Bookkeepers’ untouchable tenets of detached observation grated so close to the bone. The creed had nearly destroyed him—twice. This time he wasn’t the one at risk; yet his heart beat harder with the urgency of his fear. “Alyce isn’t a project or a problem or a possessed paramour.”
The first two weren’t entirely true—a smirching of Bookkeeper integrity—and the last … The last pierced him like a sharpened pencil lead.
All other extant female talyan were bound in symballein pairs, but Alyce had survived this long alone. She was special; he already knew that; so maybe she didn’t need a talya mate matched to her soul. Almost every male talyan ran solo, and other than being brutal, raging, pitiless bastards, they seemed fine with their solitude.
Caught on the point of the thought, he was forced to observe how unworthy and wrong it was. Alyce had been alone long enough. Just because he wanted …
Hell, he’d watched without a word as Maureen walked away, taking with her his last link to a world where monsters were mere abstractions. But she’d deserved a man devoted to her, who hadn’t already promised himself elsewhere, and her life had been at stake, if not her eternal soul. Hadn’t that lesson taught him anything about keeping his wants out of his work, out of his life?
He focused with more effort than should have been needed, suddenly glad Jonah had volunteered to give Alyce a tour of the sanctuary. She would have read the riot of emotions on his face and known him for a crueler bastard than any talya.
He settled on simple fact: “This shouldn’t be a problem. The leagues have always had to integrate raw recruits.”
“Not erratic rogues,” Liam countered. “Not females coming out of nowhere. And never so many so often.” He leaned back to stare up at Jilly looming over him. “Sorry, Chan, but you almost broke me.”
She pressed a smacking kiss to his forehead. “I love you too.”
He straightened to look at Sid. “Integration is grueling, which you Bookkeepers don’t appreciate, because you’re around for only one or two virgin possessions a decade.”
“Because we die of old age. How lazy.” Sid refused to think of his father back in London. He didn’t need to consult the catalog of what serving as Bookkeeper for a talyan league took from someone.