“A kiss,” she said.
She meant it as an explanation, not a request, but with no horde to fight, the demon seemed to sink away, replete, and his purely male impulses rose, not at all satisfied, so he kissed her again. When he finally reined himself in to draw back, he thought his heart had thundered off without him, leaving him breathless and light.
She blinked, her pale blue eyes shining under half-lowered lashes. “I meant, the kiss is what happened.”
“I know what you meant.” His husky growl surprised him, and he cleared his throat. “Was that the talya version of a first date?”
“And the teshuva version of a betrothal feast.”
He held himself unmoving. “Betrothal. The teshuva move fast.”
“Keeps us from being gutted by ferales. We should try those next.”
“Whoa.” Despite the inadvertent flinch from the word “betrothal,” he tightened his grasp on her. “I’m not up to the same speed as you.”
She didn’t look contrite. “Hurry.”
“For a girl as old as you are, you are very impatient. I want to look around.”
“There’s nothing else here. Except the two of us.” She narrowed her eyes a bit more with a flirty fluttering. “Is that what you mean?”
Despite all that had just happened, his body roused to her innocent guile. Apparently, the only energy to recover more speedily than a well-fed teshuva was unfulfilled male lust.
It was impossible to focus with her icy eyes burning through him. He took her by the shoulders and turned her to face toward the walls. “There’s something about this place. Your teshuva sees the little things mine doesn’t. What do you see here?”
She nestled back into his hands, but her tone was serious as she pointed. “The bricks are burned, there and there. Ichor scorched, deep. See? From the destruction of tenebrae stronger than malice.”
“Like ferales and salambes.” He followed behind her to peer at the wall where the mortar seemed to melt and sag. “This was the site of a talya battle?”
“There are many such places in the city. You won’t find markers, though—no one to know who fought; none to say who survived and who didn’t.”
“That would have been my job.” Sid straightened and dropped his hands from her shoulders. The loss prickled, but was it the loss of her trusting warmth or the hard work he’d thrown away? “As Bookkeeper, I would have kept those records.”
She went to the doorway and stood framed in the wan sunlight. She looked back at him; her gaze and the sky, melded together as one hue, dazzled him a moment. “We will have to remember ourselves.”
On the way out, he paused to bend the door back into some semblance of fitting.
Watching his own hands mold steel, he couldn’t hold back a stunned laugh. “Incredible.”
But then he held Alyce’s coat while she slipped her slender arms through the sleeves. He trembled a little when he turned the collar up to protect her against the wind, and her dark locks tickled his knuckles. With each moment going forward, he would have to balance between teshuva violence and human shock, between every day and eternity.
He shook his head and took a few steps away.
Abruptly, he turned and looked up in a burst of realization. “Wait. Now I know this place.” He tapped the back of his skull as if he could knock the reference loose. “It was in Sera’s skimpy notes about the last year. This was where Corvus Valerius brought her to try to tear into the tenebraeternum.”
“There was another verge here?”
“No, this first attempt was a failure. They ended up destroying the building but not Blackbird. The verge at the pier … I think that’s the beginning of something worse.” Sudden energy—his, not the teshuva’s—revved through him. “There’s still so much we don’t know, and now …”
“Now you are even more a part of it,” she said.
God, she saw right through him. And what did it say about him when the feral waif with no memory of her past tried to reassure him that he still had a place in the fight?
He tried to summon another smile. “Me and my demon, we’re there.”
If only because they had nowhere else to go.
Alyce tried to shelter in the lee of Sidney’s broad shoulders as they followed the riverwalk toward the lake, but the chill wind sneaked around him to nip at her ears. Still, the little whistle of it was louder than her companion.
His uncharacteristic silence worried her. But she knew one way—well, another way besides kissing—to distract him. “When did the world stop believing in demons?”
Sidney drifted to a halt near the decorative grillwork rail, the focus of his brown eyes going vague.
Ah, it was the look of a scholar confronting an interesting question. She paused beside him and tucked her nose down into the collar of the black coat he’d wrapped around her earlier.
“Some people still believe in demons,” he said. “Many more people would say they believe in evil, even if they don’t think much about what that means.” He leaned his forearms on the railing to stare out, as if the history were written in the gray chop of the water. “Paine’s Age of Reason in the 1790s let the masses question the mythologies they had taken for granted, including the existence of the devil. Maybe go farther back, to the First Great Awakening of the 1730s, when religion became a personal encounter with God, not an externally imposed experience engineered by intellectual and spiritual superiors. Before that, some of the more unfortunate elements of the Reformation still cropped up: persecuting heretics, burning witches, and believing in demons.”
He took a breath to continue, then let it out again. “More words, right? But you did ask.” His wryly amused expression faded. “Alyce?”
Despite the shelter of her coat, she shivered uncontrollably. “What did you say?”
“Which part?” He turned toward her to rub her arms, but the friction of the wool felt far away. “Are you all right? You asked when the world stopped believing in demons.”
“And witches.”
“In this country, I think the last witch hunts petered out beginning of the eighteenth century. The point where doubts crept in was probably the Salem trials in— Alyce!”
Without her conscious thought, she was running.
The demon whipped her like cat-o’-nine-tails against the backs of her legs, driving her onward with the uncontainable urge to escape.
She forgot Sidney was possessed too.
She’d gone a half-dozen strides before he tackled her from behind. They went down in a tangle of flapping coats.
She fought him. “Get away. Get away.”
“Alyce, I’m not leaving you like this.”
“We have to get away!”
“From what?” He hauled her upright, his head swinging side to side as he tried to track the threat.
Her breath heaved. “I don’t know. My devil says get away.”
“My teshuva says I’m going to have bruises from that kick, but nothing worse.”
She strained against his hold. “There is worse. There was worse.”
Sidney led her to the closest bench and pressed her down. He held her there when the teshuva tried to straighten her legs again, despite the suddenly fierce ache in her knee. “Why doesn’t your demon want you to think about the Salem witch trials?”
“It was me,” she whispered. The cold of the bench, the water, the sky, sank into her bones and out through her skin on the other side, as if she didn’t exist in between. “I killed my master. I was the witch.”
CHAPTER 15
It all flooded back to her in a cold rush, as if the demon had spewed back the memories it had hidden, and she clung to Sidney’s hand lest the deluge wash her away. “Every night that summer, the master of the house came to my room and whipped me. He wanted me to confess.”