“We need to know more about the female talyan. We need to find out what sparked your reappearance. We need to know what you know.”
“I don’t know anything,” she said.
“Then we’ll find out together.” He walked to the other side of the table, and she owled her neck to follow his progress. “Just let me …” The streak of red across the back of her dress made his teeth grind harder. In the darkness upstairs, he hadn’t noticed, but under the lab fluorescents, her skin gleamed white through the slashed fabric and smudges. “See, I was afraid of this.”
She craned her neck a little farther. “I can’t see. What makes you afraid?”
“That your talya friends play too rough. I thought no one tagged you.” Had one of the males staked a symballein claim? Liam would be pleased.
Meanwhile, Sid held his breath, waiting for her answer, and each nanosecond stretched into eternity.
But she shook her head. “I jumped from one of the shelves, but my knee twisted. I fell into a piano. Nim said it wouldn’t hold a tune anyway. To make it fair, she said I should stay on the ground because the men are too big to hide.”
“Oh, and we’d want to be fair.” In his relief—though he had no cause to be relieved—he couldn’t keep the snide note from his voice.
“Not to the tenebrae,” Alyce said. “But to one another.”
How quickly she’d become one of them. Sid pushed down a twang of jealousy more sour than any old piano. “The wire cut right through you.”
“It is nothing.”
“Let’s make sure of that.” He pulled a crash cart closer to the table, found scissors, and carefully cut down the back of the housedress.
Alyce clutched the front to her chest and stared over her shoulder at him, eyes ringed in white.
He kept his focus on her back and made a scholarly sound of concern. “Yes, just as I feared. It looks like you hit high C.”
After a heartbeat, her lips quirked. “I can’t sing.”
He lifted his gaze. “Really? I would never have guessed. You have a lovely voice.”
“No …” Her eyes clouded. “I remember. He said I mustn’t sing.”
“Who said that?”
“My master. I remember.”
Sid looked at her naked back, striped bloody where the wire had cut her. What had triggered the memory? “Why do you call him ‘master’?”
“That is what he was. I remember his face. But I …”
Sid summoned up his American history. He knew Archer had been possessed during the Civil War, but white slavery hadn’t been part of that conflict. Domestic servants from that period might have used the same word, though. He’d have to ask the talya male.
He poured hydrogen peroxide onto a square of gauze and wiped at the bloody streaks. Underneath, he found only diagonal red lines in her skin from lower lumbar to midthoracic, already closed. It was like a rejection of his touch, and a reminder that she was, as Nim had warned, talya strong.
But the wounds obviously went deeper than the teshuva could heal.
Though he dried her skin with a fresh pad, she shivered. “Never mind,” he said gently as he came back around the table to face her. “It’s not that important.”
“It was my life, and it’s gone.”
“I’m here to help you find a new life.”
She said nothing as he turned away to jot notes on his clipboard. Rates of wound repair were well documented in Bookkeeper archives, but not for female talyan. It wasn’t significant enough for master-level work, but maybe if he took an apprentice … Except he wouldn’t be here that long.
The scratch of his pen stilled. For a moment there, he’d forgotten this wasn’t really his place. When he took over London, some other Bookkeeper would have tea with Liam, spar with Archer, and continue unraveling the many secrets of the Chicago league—secrets including Alyce.
The pen made a dark blot on the paper as the felt tip bled out his hesitation. The stark proof of his conflicted desires shocked him. He’d given up everything to become London’s Bookkeeper after his father; to want something else would make a mockery of those sacrifices. His only goal here was to unravel some puzzle from the Chicago league interesting enough to satisfy the Bookkeeper council of his qualifications. Quickly he finished his scrawl.
Besides, if he finished deciphering Alyce, the next Bookkeeper would have no reason to obsess over her. She’d be just another talya—female, true, and of a rarer vintage than the ones that had come along so far, and no doubt mysterious enough to keep a scholar intrigued for all the decades of his life—but still just another talya.
In fact, he’d put a reference in her chart to just leave her the hell alone. He shoved the clipboard away. His thumb skidded across the page and left a black smear that obliterated his words.
He wrestled down his unwarranted temper and turned to Alyce. The red scores on her back were little more than white lines now. “It might not be all-powerful, but your teshuva knits you right up, just as it should. Which makes me wonder about your knee.” He circled around to face her and held his hands over her leg. “May I?”
She nodded, and he folded back the hem of her frock to midthigh. He cupped her right heel in his palm, his other hand behind her knee where he’d noticed the shortening of her stride. Her skin was silky under his touch, even the bony points of her knee and ankle softened by smooth, soft flesh. And she’d knocked him flat in the alley with one blow of that dainty foot—amazing, really.
He found himself lingering over the curves and hastened to explain. “Considering you run around the city barefoot, you have hardly any protective callusing. One downside of the demon’s fine detailing work.”
He straightened her knee by slow degrees. She sucked in a breath before he’d reached full extension.
He’d felt no distortion of the joint under his fingers, no faint grate of broken bones, no pop of misplaced ligaments. “Where does it hurt?”
“Inside,” she said.
He held back an impatient sigh. Bookkeeper training required a certain forbearing temperament, but Alyce was a particularly opaque text. “How long …” He reframed the question. “Have you always had the limp?”
Although insignificant reminders of past damage remained even post-possession, the teshuva’s virgin ascension should have zeroed out the structural imperfections of her body, like the ultimate drill sergeant perfecting a lone soldier for solitary combat.
She looked up at him, pale blue eyes half-lidded. “I remember. …”
He was focused on her, eye to eye, so he saw the moment it happened.
In his apprentice Bookkeeper classes, they’d studied other megavertebrate predators. Anyone working with immortal demon-possessed warriors whose sole mission was to destroy all forms of evil was well advised to learn the finer points of selective eye contact, noninvasive body language, and self-defensive tongue biting.
One of the first warning signs they’d learned was the “death eye.”
“You’ll recognize it right away,” their instructor had said. “It’s like looking into the eyes of death.”
They’d all snickered at the time.
Sid wasn’t laughing now.
Their instructor had explained how mammalian eyeballs were constantly in motion. The involuntary microsaccades supposedly allowed the eyes to refresh and correct their focus. The movements were tiny enough to evade casual observation, but nevertheless caused an imperceptible blurring of the eyes.
But in a moment of intense concentration, the muscles locked. With the tremors halted, the eyes became perfectly, lucidly clear. In a wolf or tiger or other predator, that sudden clarity signaled an imminent attack.
“Like looking down into a deep, dark well,” the instructor had said. “At the bottom is the soul. And in the case of the talya—a demon.”