“Other than the one earlier tonight.” Liam lifted one eyebrow. “You need to understand the well-being of my talyan is vital to the city. And to me.”
“Alyce is …” Various words jumbled through Sid’s head and then sank beneath a layer of pure primitive sensation—possessiveness. He couldn’t hold back the announcement any more than he could stop his body’s immediate heated reaction to the thought of her. “Alyce is mine.”
Liam sighed. “Yes. I got that. And you are hers.” He propped his big fists on his hips. “And both of you are mine. I will not have a pair of interlocked rogues running wild in my city. God knows what chaos you’d unleash.”
Sid clenched the front of his shirt where he’d done up the buttons unevenly. His wrist pressed against his hip bone, and even through the fabric, he swore he felt the spark of the reven flaring in time with his radial pulse. “Worse than what you had before we showed up here?”
“Smart-ass.” Liam rubbed his forehead. “It has been a long night. It’s going to be a longer day. We’ll present you as a symballein pair to the rest of the league first thing tomorrow. Maybe I’ll have Jilly make cookies for the occasion.”
Sid stiffened. “I can’t stay here. I have to go back to London. My father and the league there are expecting me.”
“Expecting this?”
Sid bristled. “Of course not. I have to talk to him. To them. I’ll make them understand.”
“And Alyce?”
“She will come with me.” He’d have to explain to her too. Never mind that he’d done a terrible job of explaining anything so far.
“You think the Old World is ready for a feral waif and a possessed archivist?”
Sid’s muscles tightened again at the doubt in Liam’s tone, but this time he welcomed the teshuva’s forceful poise. Being on the wrong side of one war had obviously given it the ability to take a few hits and come back swinging.
But he thought of Alyce’s way, and for once he kept his mouth shut.
Leaving the league leader to watch the sun clear the rooftops, Sid returned to his room—his own room, not Alyce’s. He couldn’t face her quite yet. And he still had to call his father.
He dialed on the antique rotary behemoth scented faintly of cigarette smoke—undoubtedly a rescue from the salvaged junk upstairs. The apprentice Bookkeeper who served his father picked up on the first ring. “At-One London.”
“Hullo, Hugh. Is Dad back from lunch?”
“He sent me out for tea on my own today.”
Even through the long-distance line he heard unsaid words, like the bitterness of cheap tea leaves. Or was that the work of the teshuva, picking up clues so subtle he’d missed them before? “Hugh? What’s wrong?”
“I think he throws away the biscuits I bring. He’s getting so thin.”
“He has stage four cancer.” Sid almost bit his tongue. That was definitely the demon, blunt and cruel.
“So you should be here,” Hugh snapped back, no devil but honesty in his tone.
Sid took the hit. Let the teshuva heal that pain. “Which is why I need to talk to him.”
Without responding, Hugh transferred his call. His father’s phone rang several times before it clicked over. “Son?”
Sid closed his eyes. How could a mere voice—far away and softer than it should be—hurt him? “Dad, how’s it going?”
“Inevitably forward, with moments of relativity.”
“You’ve been reading Stephen Hawking again, haven’t you?”
“Needed something to tide me over. Hugh won’t share his manga since I made notes in the margins.”
“We all have our limits,” Sid said. “Speaking of lines in the sand, or concrete, as the case may be …”
“Chicago has always been a contrary league,” his father mused. “And since their last Bookkeeper was unreliable, I don’t doubt they’d give you trouble.”
“Actually, Liam Niall wants me to join them.”
“As their Bookkeeper? It’s not London, but—”
Sid winced at how badly he was mangling this. “As talya.”
Silence.
Even the teshuva couldn’t pick up a sound. “Dad?”
“What happened?”
“I wish I knew.” He thought of the blank pages in the Bookkeeper archive tally, and his fingers itched for a pen. “I really wish I knew.”
“Sidney … Son, this is … I don’t know what to say.”
Considering all the words tumbling through his brain, none of them in coherent order, Sid could relate. “Not much to say. Which is possibly why the talyan don’t tell us anything.”
“You sacrificed your soul to get an inside angle?”
Sid tried to deflect the defensive flare at the accusation. “Bookkeepers make sacrifices all the time. Say good-bye to blissful ignorance, a nine-to-five job, any meaningful family dinner conversation. …”
“Sidney, this is not a time to joke. The other European masters will never accept a talya in the Bookkeeper ranks.”
“Why not? Who better to understand?”
“But the danger—”
“Somewhat offset by immortality.” Sid tried to keep his tone teasing.
But his father was having none of it. “The danger isn’t to your life and soul—at least, not just that—but your impartiality.”
Sid sat heavily on the corner of the small desk. “What’s the point of impartiality? It’s not as if we’re going to root for the other side.”
“The teshuva were the other side.” Through the phone, the creak of a chair conjured up the image in Sid’s head of his father leaning back at his big polished desk, quite unlike the dinged hutch tucked away in this empty room in a salvage warehouse. “The teshuva were part of the army that sought to vanquish light and order and life. That they repented is marvelous. Without them making amends to scour the earth of the remnants of that dark army, we’d be even deeper in shite.”
Sid choked back a laugh. “Is that the approved Bookkeeper term?”
His father wouldn’t be distracted. “The angelic- and djinn-possessed exist in complete opposition; yet neither have their own version of Bookkeepers. Why not? Because they are sure of their actions. Right or wrong, dark or light, they strive forward. The teshuva, though, they can never again be certain they are on the path. And so they have us. Their conscience. Without our unblinking, dispassionate witness, they may again stray.”
Sid remembered sneaking the Bookkeeper key from beneath his brother’s pillow and creeping down to the workshop in the dead of night. He had never been dispassionate about what he’d learned. “Doesn’t there come a time when one’s deeds outweigh one’s failures?”
“For all their good intentions now, the teshuva cannot be trusted. They broke their faith once.”
As Sid himself had, came the unspoken corollary. A stillness, chill as death, sank into his bones. It was not just the condemnation he heard in his father’s words, but the demon, accepting its punishment.
He’d wanted into this league, to know its secrets, come hell or high water. He’d have to watch out for floods since he’d already conjured hell. Maybe the weakness of wanting that characterized the crave demon had made it vulnerable to him.
“Dad, do you think I betrayed you?”
In the second period of silence, the hiss of distance and the rush of blood through his ears seemed muted, as if the demon had pulled deep inside him and didn’t want to hear the answer.
“It’s not about me anymore, Sidney. My time here is past. Whatever I say, the other masters will weigh this with your unorthodox entry into the training and …”