Next to the mattress he lounged on, a fifteen-liter water jug, like the kind used to fill office water coolers, lay drained on its side. There was nothing else.
Alyce shifted in the doorway. “I have other retreats elsewhere. This was closest.”
Damn it again. He knew what had been on his face that time, without even the thin disguise of utter dark. “I’m glad you have a place to get away from the ferales.”
“I took this from one of them.”
For the first time, a smidgen of anger itched at the back of his jaws. A talya, dedicated to ridding the world of evil, was reduced to hiding in a feralis’s burrow? Where had the league been while she struggled with her demon and the passage of years?
She shifted to her other foot. “The devil didn’t need it anymore.”
His irritation dissolved at the defensiveness in her voice. Half-feral she might be, but she read his every fleeting emotion like the big letters on a phone booth. He gave her an admiring grin, so she didn’t think he’d condemned the theft. “I’m sure it didn’t need more than a quick sweeping up once you were done with it.”
After a long moment, she smiled back, so quick he almost missed it. “Shall I help you dress?”
The hesitant smile touched him, making him realize that was as close as she should get. If he was going to label her as his control group in his emerging female talya study, he couldn’t get too involved. “I’m okay.”
He wasn’t, of course. In the end, she had to help him drape the shredded edges of his coat sleeve over his torn arm. He didn’t even bother with the shirt, instead just pressing the wet wad into his wound to catch any spillage.
She gazed at the blood-soaked rag. “Sometimes I can salvage the pieces.”
“Don’t bother. I have another.” He had several more, with access to as many as he chose to buy. He would seem fantastically fortunate to her.
And he was, now that he’d found a rogue female talya of his very own.
Contrary to what she’d said, the pay phone wasn’t “very near.” Alyce’s limp didn’t slow her, but a cold slick of sick sweat drenched Sid by the time they’d trekked halfway across the city. At last, the gas station appeared at the end of the block with the box on its steel post clearly labeled PHONE.
Sid reached for his wallet, but his hand found only his empty pocket. “Bloody hell.”
Alyce stiffened.
He gritted his teeth. She was like a beaten dog, flinching from a yell. Of course, she could rip his leg off and beat him with it if he was the sort to kick a dog. “I don’t suppose you have any money on you? A few coins, maybe?”
She stiffened even more, shoulders rounding, though he tried to sound curious rather than reproachful. But damn, it had been a bad night—bad enough that he wasn’t going to be able to sulk back to the warehouse under his own power.
This left him only one choice.
He called the toll-free number. “Hugh, it’s Sid. I know it’s awfully early, but could you do me a favor—” He sighed as the line clicked over to another ring tone before he finished. The London @1 offices served as a finishing school of sorts for the eldest sons of Europe’s Bookkeepers, but the leagues’ heretofore strictly male definition of good manners hadn’t left room for secretarial charm. “No,” he muttered, “putting me through to the Bookkeeper was really not the favor I wanted to ask.”
“Sidney?”
Sid closed his eyes and reminded himself that routing the call through London kept him from the trouble of having to make a collect call to the Chicago league. Since he wasn’t entirely sure they’d accept the charges, it would be easier just to deal with the usual disapproval.
“Hullo, Dad.” His father would be at the big mahogany desk with the matching credenza that weighted the room toward Learned Respectability. It was the crack of dawn in London, but his father would be sitting at that desk, which faced away from the gorgeous panorama of the Thames—no sense getting distracted by the view. “How’s the weather?”
Over the phone came the thin creak of a chair spinning in place. “Foggy, but not as cold as Chicago.”
Sid opened his eyes. Alyce stared down the street away from him. In her thin shift, now minus most of the skirt, she must be freezing. But the only thing less gentlemanly than letting her freeze would be handing her his wadded tweed and bleeding out at her bare feet. “You were right about the cold. Speaking of your being right, I’m in a bit of a bind.”
“I’ll wire you money for the return flight.”
Sid tightened his grip on the phone. The pressure twanged across to his wounded shoulder. “Nothing so drastic. I just need Hugh to make a call for me.”
“Where is your—? Never mind. What’s the number?”
“It’s nothing you need to bother with, Dad. Hugh can—”
“The number?”
The tension crawled back up Sid’s spine to gather at the base of his skull as he rattled off the @1 Chicago phone number. Thank God he’d always been good at memorizing. “If you could ask Niall to send a car to the corner of Ontario and LaSalle, I’d appreciate it.”
“What sort of trouble are you in?”
“Dad, I’ve been here less than forty-eight hours. How bad could it be?” Before his father could enumerate, Sid countered, “How are you doing?”
“I’ve been here more than seventy years, Sidney. How bad could it be?”
The dry amusement in his father’s voice made Sid shut his eyes again. And this time he saw only the empty black. “Right then. I’ll check in again later.”
“Most likely I’ll be here.” The rasp of the chair grated through the wires again. “Be careful, Sidney.”
“I am, Dad. Take care.”
Sid waited until the line disconnected before he hung up.
“Your father is sick,” Alyce said.
“I know.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because my father is sick.” If the talya could hear cancer over a long-distance call, she could certainly guess from the tone of his voice that she shouldn’t ask anything more. “He is my father, but he is also master of my guild. Bookkeeper knowledge passes from father to son to limit our exposure to the general public, but I still need to show him that I’m worth … that I’ve earned my Bookkeeper mastery.”
“My master died long ago.”
Sid sank down to the sidewalk below the phone. He tipped his head back against the steel post and stared up at the night sky, bleached old-bone gray by the light pollution of the city. Suddenly, he didn’t care to poke into her history any more than he cared to poke into the crevice between the slabs of concrete. Yet his damnable curiosity twinged. “How long ago?”
“It’s hard to remember,” she said.
Sid had read what little information existed on rogues. Psychosis among talyan—unmanageable psychosis, to be precise—happened more than the leagues cared to document. When the etheric energies of a demon’s ascension weren’t balanced, the newly possessed human slid quickly into insanity. Rogues typically came to bad ends. They wandered off in confusion or flamed out in a fury of tenebrae slaughter.
How would Liam Niall and the rest of the Chicago talyan respond to a rogue in their midst? Certainly they had enough borderline personalities to make room on the fringes for one more. Alyce couldn’t keep wandering the streets alone.
Never mind that she’d been doing just that for … how long exactly?
Sid pushed himself upright. He hadn’t realized he’d slumped sideways against the telephone pole. He was seeping good manners along with his blood. But maybe she hadn’t gotten the reserved-silence memo since she missed the new-talya welcome seminar. “What bits do you remember?”
She took a few steps down the sidewalk, her face half averted and her pale gaze fixed on something even farther away. She might not have gotten the memo, but the reserve seemed carved into talya flesh as plainly as the demon’s mark that peeked above her high neckline.