“And think I am a rogue Bookkeeper. I’ve read the suggestions for dealing with a rogue talya. What is the protocol among Bookkeepers?” He couldn’t keep the remoteness out of his voice.
“You know perfectly well there is no protocol since this has never happened before.”
Not really the answer he wanted to hear. He might risk facing the council of masters himself, but he wouldn’t put Alyce in front of them. They did have rules about her kind.
All the years of studies that had spread so steadily under his feet crumbled around the edges. He’d always lived between two worlds—the Bookkeepers who hadn’t wanted him and the humans who would never have believed him. Now he stretched into a third dimension with the talyan.
Of course, the real world was three dimensional.
“Dad, I’m sorry this is coming as such a shock. It’s been … unsettling for me too.” He was relieved that mastery of the understatement came as industry-standard with Bookkeeper training. “When I get home—”
“Don’t come to London, Sidney.”
Short words delivered like crossbow arrows.
Sid gripped the edge of the table. “What?”
“There’s nothing left for you here.”
“You’re there.”
“Not for long.” A hesitation, and Sid braced himself for another volley. “Wesley is back.”
Sid closed his eyes. “And I can only say again, ‘What?’”
“Right after you left. We had tea together today. We talked a long time. It was good.”
Hugh would be overjoyed the old man was eating. “I wish I could have joined you while he is in town.”
“He’s coming back. To the league. For good.”
“Had I even left Heathrow yet?”
“Sidney,” his father chided.
“I don’t care about winning the council’s favor, Dad. I want to be there for you.”
“You were. All the years when your brother was gone, you were here.”
And now that the prodigal son—the one who hadn’t killed his mother—had returned, what use for the placeholder? Sidney remembered the steel cold against his cheek as he’d pressed his ear to the closed and locked workshop door, straining to hear the voices of his father and brother.
The possessed tended to lack close connections in the world; such isolation widened the flaws in their souls that made them vulnerable to demonic possession. He’d never considered himself one of those people, but apparently the teshuva had known better.
He didn’t remember what he said after that, but he didn’t think it was horrible or even particularly strained. His father asked him to call back soon; he promised—and the promise bounced around the hollow of his chest—then he hung up.
It was all very civilized, really, considering.
He threw the phone.
Whipping the cord behind, it bounced off the wall with a crash and a startled bing from its chimes. It left a satisfying dent in the plaster, and he was viciously glad he hadn’t been calling on a cheap plastic cell.
Without warning, his door opened. Alyce slipped inside.
He looked away. “I told you to go to your room.”
“But I belong where you are.”
“I know this is hard for you to understand, because you don’t remember how much time has passed since your possession. But this is a new era. Women don’t belong to anyone anymore.”
She tipped her head, studying him.
The fury in him that had launched the phone surged, like an electrical current seeking ground. “I am not your master, Alyce.”
“I know. My master was a bad man. The memories are coming back to me, in flashes. The teshuva doesn’t hold me so hard when I think of you holding me.”
His anger dissipated, leaving him flat. “The talyan cling to their solitary ways. I never thought the teshuva might want something else.”
“I don’t know if I want to remember more.”
“So, did you come here to break up with me?”
She tilted her head another degree, toward the debris on the floor. “You’ve been breaking things without me.”
It was hard to tease her when they barely shared the same language. He crossed the room to the broken phone and gathered the pieces. Without the churning anger to justify his behavior, he felt stupid to have ruined the old thing. “I just called my father.”
She obviously realized she didn’t need to ask how the revelation had gone. “No man would want this for his son.”
“Liam didn’t take it much better, and he needs all the talyan he can lay his hands on.” He dumped the phone in the trash before he pulled the broken spectacles from his breast pocket.
The sticky duct tape snagged on his fingertips; then the specs clattered to the bottom of the dustbin.
She laced her fingers in front of her. “I want you to stay here.”
He straightened slowly. How did she speak her mind like that, without fear? He’d abandoned her, rather rudely despite his understandable shock, after sharing … Well, according to what he knew of the symballein bond, they’d swapped more than body fluids; they might’ve exchanged shards of their souls.
He couldn’t blame her if she ripped out his heart and took back whatever pieces were rightfully hers.
He sat on the edge of the bed. “Come here.”
She didn’t hesitate, but instead just settled beside him, close enough that her fitted skirt lapped his jeans.
Not even skin-to-skin, and still his body prickled with awareness. Whatever beating his emotions had taken, the energy between them flowed unabated.
“I think in some ways you have the advantage on me,” he said. “Everything I’ve read about and analyzed and debated doesn’t mean much compared to what you simply know.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand anything.”
“Maybe not understand, but you’ve survived more than most on instinct alone.”
“You told me you would help me, and you brought me here. I want to do what I can to help you.” She gazed at him, her icy eyes an eerie mix of danger and innocent clarity. He wondered if the Arctic explorers of yore had felt the same tremor of excitement, stepping out onto the shifting floes in hope of enlightenment.
Of course, a lot of them had wandered off, starved, and frozen to death, their north-pointing compasses gone haywire as they lost the difference between the direction they’d always thought was right and what they discovered was true.
He’d never been a huge fan of analogies.
But it was daytime in the city, and only late October, which didn’t get that cold, even in Chicago. So he nodded. “Take me out, Alyce. Show me your world.”
They hopped a cab into the heart of downtown, and Sid was grateful for Alyce’s silence. She probably was afraid if she opened her mouth, he’d start talking again. Didn’t gag orders come standard issue with being talyan? Instead, he purged those old memories in the same way the demon erased scars.
Now they rolled around the place like unsettled marbles, dangerous underfoot. If Alyce had no one to hear her, no wonder her teshuva took her memories away. He was already sick of hearing himself, and he’d been possessed only a few hours.
The cab dropped them off on Wacker, next to the river. While he paid the driver, Alyce crossed the wide sidewalk and leaned on the concrete balustrade that overlooked the water, the gray towers looming beyond her in a hard straight frame around her gentle curves. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and observed her.
He’d gotten his first pair of spectacles when he was five. His astonishment when he’d realized that trees even at a distance had individual leaves had made his father chuckle. That same jolt of discovery went through him now as his demon-sharpened gaze lingered on the white arch of her cheekbone and the dark silky waves of her hair against the rough black wool of the coat he’d found for her.