“He said he had taken other things from you.”
“A few good blows, yes, and insults when I had the breath.”
“Did he take your teshuva’s talisman?”
She hesitated, her bottom lip curling between her teeth. “I don’t know.”
“Think, Alyce. Corvus tried to take Nim’s, to turn her powers against us. Did Thorne want the same when you fought?”
“I—I can’t remember.”
He grabbed her arms and faced her straight on. “This isn’t the time to retreat into your old trance.”
She jerked out of his hold. “It isn’t my memory. I’m remembering more of my time before the demon, but once it came to me, it blocked so much. Whatever happened during my possession, that memory still belongs to the teshuva.”
Sid speared his fingers through his hair. “This is bad.”
She wrapped her arms around herself, where his hands had been, and water sluiced from her no-longer-white dress. “Why are you angry with me? I tried to kill him, but he has always been stronger than I am.”
Stronger than Sid too. The sensation of the demon quailing in him had been worse than food poisoning, a queasy mix of achy, shivering sick weakness, where the best idea had been to curl up and die.
He’d lost his mother and Maureen to the demons. He couldn’t lose Alyce too. That threat poisoned his soul.
When they rounded the farside of the pier, the exterior door of the diner stood propped open with a whiteboard A-frame sign advertising the lunch special.
They peered cautiously through the door, and Therese smiled with a touch of confusion. “Back for another course? I thought you were downstairs.”
Sid edged inside. “No one else came out?”
She stiffened. “A few glasses broke, all of a sudden, for no reason. If someone came through from the back, I might have missed them while I swept. Was someone else down there?”
What was he supposed to say? Sera’s notes listed Therese as friend with the only entry being She has seen evil. That wasn’t a security clearance, as far as a Bookkeeper was concerned.
Not that he was a Bookkeeper anymore.
“Please call Liam for us,” he told her. “Tell him we encountered … a difficulty. We’ll take another look.”
Therese didn’t ask more. “Thankfully the lunch rush is over.”
They went straight through to the storeroom, moved the shelf, and peered down.
“Dark,” Alyce said.
“Because we busted out all the lights.”
“Yes. Also, the verge is breathing out the dark.”
He recoiled a little. “How do you know?”
She held out her bare arm and ran one fingertip over the pale upright hairs. “I feel it.”
“A dunking in Lake Michigan in October might leave you a bit chilled too.”
“I don’t feel the cold. They burned witches.”
Why was she drifting back toward spacey Alyce? The stabilizing influence of the league should have been helping by now. He clamped his hand over her forearm. “You weren’t drowned. Or burned. Or hanged.” Despite the mark the demon had chosen to leave on her neck. “You weren’t a witch.”
She rolled her arm under his hand and matched his grip, pulse to pulse. Her stare was icy. “Maybe not then. Let’s go.”
They descended the ladder—Alyce hopping down each rung on one leg as if her knee bothered her—but the crypt was empty. Sid’s demon, on high alert, cast every corner of the chamber in an eerie demon glow.
No lurking djinn-man. If there had been, the teshuva no doubt would have been hightailing for its hiding place behind his solar plexus.
“Thorne must’ve dived out too.” Sid’s fists tightened at the thought of the djinn-man sharking through the water behind them. “Or maybe he broke the glasses to sneak past Therese.”
“Or he went out the other way.” Alyce pointed at the verge. “Through there.”
Sid stared at the turbulent doorway into hell. The demonic entity within him didn’t retreat, but the triplicate thud of his heartbeat rattled his chest. “That possibility scares me even more than the ones that had already occurred to me.”
They climbed back to the storeroom, and Alyce limped across the tile floor into the kitchen area while Sid pushed the shelves into place.
He followed her, frowning at her halting progress. “Our teshuva came back online as soon as we got beyond Thorne’s reach; yours should’ve healed the worst of that wound.”
She twitched aside the hem of her bedraggled dress and twisted to look down at the back of her thigh. “It’s still bleeding.”
The intake of breath at the sight of her white skin stuck in his throat. He couldn’t even blame the demon for that inappropriate lustful reaction. Here she was, soaked and hurt, and his thoughts immediately went to removing the remainder of her clothes.
“Let me see.” He turned her away from him beneath the bright kitchen light. “Bend over the counter there.” He’d never found it so hard to concentrate. His hands actually shook as he lifted her skirt.
The sight of her thigh, streaked with blood and livid with internal bruising—human fragile—doused him like cold lake water. “I don’t understand. Did Thorne land a shot with some antidemon bullet?”
When he probed the surrounding tissue gently, she tightened her grip on the edge of the stainless steel. “I fell into one of the machines downstairs.”
“There shouldn’t have been anything hazardous to the teshuva, nothing to interfere with its energy after we got away from Thorne’s djinni.” He frowned. “But something is preventing the wound from closing.”
She flinched away from his fingers. “It didn’t hurt when Thorne was chasing us. I ran without limping.”
“Other things to worry about.” Then he thought about what she’d said and followed the tight clench of her hamstring higher up her leg. “When Thorne was after us, our teshuva were out of commission. Something your humanity handles better than the demon?” The muscle was so contorted, no wonder she limped. He’d felt the old scarring during her physical at the lab—and when they’d gotten physical later—but that didn’t explain the flare-up now, unless during the attack something old had been uncovered. Nothing like new wounds to refresh old pain. But why would the djinni attack exacerbate an injury when her clashes with other tenebrae had resulted in talya-standard healing?
Down the curve of her thigh, where the tendons narrowed toward the back of her knee, the jagged tear thinned, but his fingers brushed a hard knot too hard even for teshuva-strengthened musculature.
Her eyes widened when he plucked a paring knife from the magnetized rack above the cutting board.
“It won’t hurt much more,” he promised. “But something got you, and it needs to come out.”
Alyce’s gaze locked on him. He slid the knife between the edges of the wound, and her eyes flared brighter violet. “It wasn’t the djinni.” Her voice broke into the lower demonic register. “It was the angel.”
“What—?” Sid hesitated when the knife tip scraped against another metal. “Don’t move.”
As if the contact had completed a circuit in her, the memory poured out. “I was in the hay field. Only winter stubble was left, but we needed broom straw.” She touched her forehead to the counter, muffling her words. “I saw them fighting. Angel and djinni. Light and dark.”
“You witnessed an etheric battle? Anyone with skewed vision—children, artists, schizophrenics—might see demons or angels, which is why they’re supposed to be more circumspect.”
“I shouldn’t have been there. I was young, and it was near dark and so cold, but it was better there. …” She lifted her head with a hiss when he prodded deeper. “Better alone in the dark than in the house with my father’s body. We were waiting for the burial, waiting as long as we dared because we knew that as soon as he was in the ground, we’d be chased from the farm to pay his debts.”