“I didn’t know what I was doing.” Louder and harsher his words came, as if he could raise a jagged wall to defend against the truth—against her. Those bristling defenses scraped her raw.
“Not so clear when it’s you, is it?” Bitterness leached the last of their shared warmth from her limbs, and she drew her knees up tight. “The circling teshuva must have been why the tenebrae came down on us at the club, following you.”
“But … it’s impossible. How did no one within the league notice an unbound teshuva?”
She hunched her shoulders. “I noticed. That is what drew me to the alley with the ferales. And you.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?”
The tight anguish in his voice, sharpened to a point with accusation, stabbed her. “I didn’t know what it was. It was just another thing I didn’t understand. And you seemed to know everything already.”
His breath burst out on a curse and a discordant laugh mixed together. He staggered off the bed, and his heels slammed hard on the floor. “You are wrong. I’m not like you.”
She rocked forward to kneel on top of the covers. “The shine in your eyes says otherwise.”
His hands hovered over the reven with the same horrified hesitation as a gutshot man staring down at his death. “This can’t be happening.”
She braced herself on the tousled sheets, a twinge of provocation stiffening her shoulders. “You tried to tell me it wasn’t so bad that I was possessed. Did you lie then?”
Again he swung his head up to her, the focus of his ire. “You didn’t have a choice.”
“You didn’t either.”
“You didn’t have a choice anymore,” he clarified. “It was already done.”
She bit her lip. “Do you mean you could have fought it off, as we fight the tenebrae? That I could have fought it?”
He flattened his palm over his hip, fingers digging into the coiling lines of the demon’s mark. “Of all people, I should have been able to say no. Who else but a Bookkeeper … But I was never supposed to be a Bookkeeper anyway.”
She shook her head. “Why—?”
“A Bookkeeper can’t be talya. We stand outside your world and our own.”
“That sounds awful.”
“That’s how we stay objective.” He paced at the bottom of the bed, three short steps and back again. The vicious whirl at each turn made her stomach clench. “It’s all I had.”
Now you have me. The words rose on her tongue. But for once, she did not speak her mind plainly because she knew his response would shatter her.
He was teaching her, more than he knew.
He snatched his jeans from the floor. Even in his eagerness to dress, his hands avoided the reven, as if it might spread like wet ink. “I have to go.”
“Where?”
He slipped into his shirt and yanked the front panels tight around his body. He swooped down and rose again, clutching his eyeglasses. “Don’t … Please don’t mention this to anyone.”
“You think the talyan won’t notice another demon?”
“I’ll explain the teshuva. But”—he gestured vaguely as he jammed the unneeded spectacles on the bridge of his nose—“the rest of this.”
The bed—and her, naked in it.
She refused to reach for the covering sheet. “And what would I say?”
The heat in his face reminded her of the desire that had warmed them both, but he was already sliding away.
He fumbled for the door handle, his demon-perfected vision skewed by the corrective lenses, but he didn’t remove the spectacles and he didn’t look back. The latch clicking closed was louder than the footsteps carrying him away.
She pursed her lips and slouched back on the pillows.
She should let him go. He was shocked, hurting, blaming her. She should keep her mouth closed and wait for him to come around again.
Waiting she knew. Untold years had passed her as she waited in her haze.
Without another thought, she rose and went to the bath to clean herself. What a delight it was to have warm water at her fingertips.
The white dress was spattered with dried blood and ichor from the tussle behind the Coil, so she dug through the shopping bags next to the bed. She found the spray bottle of liquid that Nim had promised, no matter how bad the fight, would remove all stains. Too bad it only worked on the external signs.
Alyce pulled on another new dress, also white. “White for innocence,” Nim had said while they shopped. “What talya could resist?” The ribbed fabric clung to her body, but it went down to her knees so she didn’t bother with the underclothes. She left her boots behind too. Sidney would not go far.
She didn’t know much, but she was coming to know him.
The warehouse halls stretched silent around her. Nim had explained the concept of energy sinks that dampened the teshuvas’ emanations when they gathered together. Still, the faint signatures swirled in Alyce’s awareness. One thread—brighter to her senses than the others—tugged her downward, down the stairs to the basement lab.
Of course, he’d have to know for certain.
He slumped on a stool beside the table where he’d kissed her. She touched her lips. If she tried that again, would she rouse him from his doldrums?
No, he was holding fast to his old ways. She couldn’t take that from him as cruelly as her past had been taken from her.
She crept around him and pulled up another stool, out of temptation’s reach. She sat and waited. Waiting was easier next to him.
Still, it was a long time before he spoke. “It’s true.”
She didn’t answer since she couldn’t disagree.
“I was going to run a spectral analysis, do a deep retinal scan—the teshuva presence warps certain structures of the sclera, you know.”
“I did not know.”
He tightened his fist in his lap. “Well, it does. But it’s quicker to just shove a scalpel through your hand and see if it heals.”
That explained the little knife on the table beside him, next to the abandoned eyeglasses. A smear of crimson discolored the white paper sheet smoothed over the surface. “Still hurts, though,” she noted.
“Like hell.”
She offered him a tentative smile that faded when he didn’t reflect it.
“I can’t be possessed, Alyce.”
She cocked her head. “You just said—”
“Certainly not by a middling-ranked crave demon.” His fist pressed into his flank over his hidden reven. “My whole life, I wanted one thing—one thing: to be a Bookkeeper.”
“My whole life, I only wanted …”
His gaze sharpened, and she realized the Bookkeeper hadn’t gone far. “Did you remember something?”
“Nothing.” She lifted her bare feet onto the stool to hug her knees. “I remember there was nothing I dared to want.”
“Nothing at all?”
“And that’s what I got. Nothingness.” How peculiar, then, that she had wanted nothing and her teshuva had led her to the crave demon that wanted Sidney. And yet he didn’t want her.
He shook his head. “It’s not nothing. There’s a whole world below the one where most people live their entire, oblivious lives. It’s beyond fascinating.”
She blinked. “Fascinating?”
“Good. Evil. The battle that started it all. The fight that never ends. And I just wanted to be part of it. But the Bookkeeper post passes from father to eldest son. I could have gone my entire, oblivious life without knowing what my father and brother were, without knowing what they knew.”
“Why would they keep that from you? Even as a child you must have had this curiosity.”
He gave a short, wry laugh. “Oh, I was suited to it. But the rules were set in stone. Quite literally.”