“Holding the demon in balance is hard,” the league leader said, “but holding the league together against these upheavals is worse.”
Jilly brushed her hand down the side of his face where his reven flared. “We’re here. I’m here.”
Liam captured her fingers. “Which is why I am still here.” He averted his gaze from Sid. “You know about rogues.”
Sid nodded slowly at the nonquestion. “I’ve read about long-possessed talyan who lost equilibrium with their teshuva. And newly possessed who never found it.”
“Have you seen it happen?”
Sid noticed Sera and Jilly were watching the talya men with his same reluctant fascination. “I’ve read about it,” he repeated.
“Not the same.” Archer slouched against the wall, but the stark lines of his face gave lie to his relaxed stance. “They turn against everything, with no distinction between human or tenebrae, possessed or pure-souled, good or evil. Just … carnage.”
“That is not Alyce,” Sid said.
Liam lifted one eyebrow. “She ripped apart two ferales, spitted a djinn-man, and almost kicked your head off.”
Sid resisted the urge to touch his forehead. He’d forgotten about the bruise when she pushed him away from the attack in the alley. “My head is hard enough to take it.”
“And she Dumpstered Ecco,” Liam continued.
“Archer thought that was funny.” Sid wished he didn’t sound quite so much like a schoolboy sharing excuses.
Liam glanced at Archer reproachfully.
Archer shrugged. “It was funny.”
“How much more must this league take?” Liam pushed back in his chair, hands spread wide across his desk as if he had to hold it in place. “Last year, we lost good fighters—good men, emphasis on good—against Corvus Valerius. Our three female talyan bring their own powerful energy, but as someone standing on a nuclear bomb might tell you, power is a frightening thing.”
Jilly patted his cheek. “Gee, thanks.”
Liam kissed her knuckles. “I have to wonder—is Alyce the stray neutron that starts the fatal chain reaction?”
The silence dug deep in a way only four demon-possessed warriors contemplating fatalities could dig.
Sid’s hackles ruffled between unease and anger. The agitation propelled him to his feet. “If she’s going to explode, I’d better get a front row seat so I can take good notes.”
He stalked out of the room, wondering what whispers he’d hear following him if he had demon-amplified hearing.
Damn, but since when were the Chicago talyan sticklers for propriety? London had been thinking they were all practically rogue themselves. Couldn’t they see her for the unique opportunity she was?
The warehouse echoed his footsteps back at him. The talyan had the quiet tread of most predators, but the halls were unnaturally still even for them. Where had everyone gone? Run off to hide from the freakish newcomer? Poor Alyce.
He poked his head into a few empty rooms, until a muted hooting drew him up the back stairs. The warehouse—once an architectural salvage business, a mundane front and money-laundering operation for the league until it became one of their last resources thanks to the embezzling Bookie—still kept an upper floor of antiques and junk. He hurried his steps. Maybe being surrounded by the old pieces, assisted by a few pertinent queries, would loosen Alyce’s memory.
He took the last stairs two at a time and popped through the open door.
Just as an airborne red-and-cream-striped Louis XVI chair rocketed toward his head.
He ducked, and the chair exploded against the wall behind him in a stinging shower of splinters and horsehair stuffing. “Bloody hell!”
“Sidney?”
He straightened as Alyce materialized from between the shadowy towers of old furniture. “My God, Alyce, what’s happened? Where’s Jonah? Where’s Nim?”
She hefted a counterpart to the destroyed chair in one hand, as if the carved oak weighed nothing. “Nim is hiding. Jonah went downstairs to find a hand.”
“A what?”
Another missile blasted toward them. Was that a vase? Oh God, was it a Ming?
“Sidney, get down.” Alyce swung the chair, and the vase—please let it be a reproduction—vaporized on impact in a cloud of white and blue dust.
While Liam and the others had distracted him, the rest of the talyan were trying to kill her!
At the far end of the darkened aisle, an ominous hulking form passed, clearly planning to sneak up behind them.
Sid bolted across the open foyer toward Alyce and grabbed her arm. “Come on—we have to get out of here.”
“We just started.”
“And I’m trying to stop them from ending it.”
She frowned at him, her feet planted against his tug. “But I am winning.”
“Only because you’re still standing.”
“I don’t have to knock them down. I get points if I hit them and they can’t hit me.”
“Hit you? Why—?”
The whistle of another incoming vase silenced him.
Well, it was not so much the vase as the impact of Alyce’s arm around his middle as she jerked him out of the way. The vase shattered out on the stairs.
He clamped one hand to his specs as she dragged him toward a sheltering maze of armoires. “I don’t think this is a good game for you,” she said.
“A game?” His yelp of outrage turned into a real shout as he tripped over the remains of a midcentury end table missing one of its legs. Probably used in a giggle-inducing round of stake-a-Bookkeeper. “Who’s out there?”
“All of them.” Alyce peered around the corner of one of the ceiling-high industrial shelves that held a tangle of chandeliers. Miles of chains and wires and hundreds of lampshades littered the shelves. “Except Jonah. He said he’s not a lefty.”
“Who’s on your team?”
She grabbed a 1970s-era fixture and began unscrewing the globe. The frosted glass reflected the twinkling reven around her neck. “Now? You are.”
His pulse beat heavy in his ears, drowning out anyone who might be sneaking up on them. Had she misread their murderous intent? Or was it really a game? If so, it was a fucking murderous game.
Although maybe not to an immortal hunter.
He had grown up knowing the world teemed with monsters his schoolmates forgot about once they left their picture books behind. And yet he’d never felt so alone.
Alyce watched him a moment, then held out the glass ball. “Aim for where they will be, not where they are. They are faster than the devils on the street.”
The glass slipped against his damp palm. “How do I know where they will be?”
“They’ll be coming for me.”
“Alyce,” he hissed.
But she had already slipped from behind the cover of the shelves.
There wasn’t much floor space where she stepped out, just a haphazard jumble of tables, some of them stacked on top of each other, some of them turned top to top so the legs stuck up in a veritable woodland of potential impalements. Alyce slipped between them, her powder blue dress a ghostly blur in the darkness.
A darker form detached itself from the shadows beyond the chairs, on the other side of an upended Provençal-style butcher block kitchen table. Unless she could bend her vision around right angles, no way would Alyce see the talya from her position before he sneaked close enough to tag her.
Maybe that would end this insane game.
Or was it more than a game? A twisted talya courtship ritual, perhaps? A primitive proving of strength, speed, and fearlessness.
What a fascinating thought.
And even as his brain was polishing its spectacles and harrumphing thoughtfully, his arm drew back, muscles tensed until the feralis wound screamed. Knowing he was going to be housemates with American males, he’d watched a recording of baseball highlights on the transatlantic flight.