“Are you here?” he called softly.
No answer. That was all the answer he needed.
He pulled the door shut behind him with the rusty squeal. Good. She wouldn’t be able to sneak away down the stairs. She’d have to beat him fairly.
He suspected she’d be delighted to beat him.
He moved swiftly past the table jungle and through the tangle of light fixtures. He slowed in the jumble of urns—how many concrete planters and long-dried water features did one salvage company need? Half the urns could have easily hidden a crouching Alyce.
He didn’t bother looking inside them. She wouldn’t be hiding.
He kept a wary eye on the high shelves and stacked pallets. Without Nim to set rules about fairness when playing with the big-boned boys, the lithe and light talya would take every advantage. What advantages did he have?
“Alyce, I came here to tell you something.”
Silence met his salvo. But not a vast, empty silence as it would have been had he been alone. It was a close, something-watching-him-from-behind silence.
“I screwed up. But I understand now.”
“Understand what?”
Just as he’d known: No woman would let a man claim understanding without demanding proof.
He turned toward the echo of her voice. Judging by the bounce and distortion of sound waves, his teshuva guessed she was somewhere in the rows of abandoned funerary art—as if the urns hadn’t been pointless enough. Who bought a blank headstone secondhand? Worse yet, who bought a used one? At least there were no dead bodies up here in storage.
Yet.
He edged around a marble obelisk and came face-to-face with a one-winged angel. Its stance—off-balance and half-threatening, half-fearful with its face averted—made him think of Alyce. His heart stuttered painfully at the comparison even as he made sure to avoid where the second wing had been; only exposed rebar now, it could gut a man.
“I hurt you,” he said. “You have a right to be angry.”
Another moment of silence settled into the headstones, and then she said, “That’s what you understand?” Her tone, chill as the granite slabs, reflected her lack of enthusiasm.
He frowned. That had been a sincere and thoughtful admission, validating her feelings.
The sneaking suspicion nipped at his heels that maybe a soul of pure, unadulterated emotion like Alyce didn’t need his understanding or validation. She said what she felt and to hell with the consequences.
Even if hell was the consequence, because everything about her pushed him to a dangerous passion beyond his comprehension.
Her delicate etheric signature glimmered like a faint star in the darkness, almost lost in the glare of the city’s rampant emotional energy, the close shine of the talyan, and the interfering haze of the tenebrae. But he knew where to look. With his demon ascendant, he triangulated, he plotted—and, okay, he guessed a little—then he gathered his legs under him and leapt to the top of a mausoleum at the edge of the piled stone.
How the freestanding burial chamber, easily seven feet square, had come to be in the attic, Sid couldn’t guess, although he absently calculated the minimum weight of the intricately carved marble and estimated the load-bearing capacity of the floor joists. The mass was incrementally increased if he added the slight talya he found there.
Her cold fury added nothing to the floor’s burden and everything to his own.
Alyce stood with her arms crossed, more the avenging angel than mournful. Her eyes and reven glittered with amethyst sparks. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you. I thought you were going to your room.”
“Because you told me to?” She lifted her chin to a hostile tilt.
She’d seemed so willing to follow his suggestions before. But she was not a child or an invalid. The powers of observation he’d fancied so finely honed had failed him. He hadn’t seen what he hadn’t wanted to see. “I thought you’d want to go to bed.”
“I thought you might too. And I wanted to be alone.”
Ouch. So she considered him capable of blowing off the depths of her affections … and then coming to her bed anyway. If the mausoleum had been dropped on his head, he couldn’t have felt any more crushed. “Alyce, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“It is what we do.”
“To tenebrae, not to each other. You told me that once.”
“The devil part of us hurts the tenebrae. The human part learned its lesson well.”
As she’d learned her lessons from him. He’d been so determined to hold himself apart, detached, and now she stood in her no-longer-white dress, as cold and untouchable as any of the desolate statuary around them.
And he knew, with every neuron firing in his scientific brain, that it was for the best.
CHAPTER 21
Three hundred years of innocence, gone. Despite near slavery, despite demonic possession, she had been innocent. And in a handful of sunsets, this man had opened her eyes and unveiled her desire; he had taught her the meaning of sin.
But Sidney had left her there—alone.
Even the devil had not been so cruel.
Now he came to her, to explain. She could not believe now the things she had said and what she had revealed to him. She would have been smarter to have turned her back on a feralis. At least then the pain would have quickly ended.
But he was talking again.
“… the influence of the symballein bond,” he was saying. “That’s the reason you—we are infected with these epidemic emotions.”
“Possessed and infected.” She was careful to purge any of those epidemic emotions from her voice. “How inconvenient.”
He peered at her, clearly uncertain of her mood, as well he should be. She drew herself in tight and hard, like slamming the empty mausoleum door closed on its hollow core. Nothing inside, not even death.
That she would reserve for the tenebrae. Shredding the darkness around her had kept her alive, if not exactly whole, and the league had a place for her in everlasting servitude. That could be her solace again.
“Thank you for the swimming lesson,” she said.
He narrowed his eyes even more, maybe because this time he did hear her sincerity. “It was my pleasure.”
Never again.
She straightened. “If only we had learned more.”
He seemed eager to hear what he wanted to hear now. “Thorne gave us a few clues. So I wondered if you want to take a trip out to Holygrove Hospital.”
“A hospital? Why?”
“It’s not really a hospital anymore. It closed in the early 1970s. I’m wondering if you might recognize it.”
“You think I was there.”
“Maybe. Chicago had several asylums. Most are gone or changed, but Holygrove lingered in disrepair for a while and was finally abandoned.”
A bolt of something tried to pierce the cold, hard exterior she’d drawn around herself. Not hope. She wouldn’t allow that. Curiosity, she would call it. “You think my teshuva’s talisman might be there.”
“We shouldn’t hope,” he cautioned.
But she’d already told herself that. She would never be anything to him but a curiosity, and so that was all she could give back.
She jumped down from the mausoleum, surprised at how lightly she landed despite the heaviness in her body. “Where?”
“What better time to explore an abandoned insane asylum than right before Halloween?” Sidney muttered.
He’d spoken so quietly, even a teshuva should have missed it, but despite her best intentions, Alyce still found herself attuned to his every word.
Not that he ever said the words she wanted to hear.