“Nim said it’s good for sneak attacks.”
“I bet it is.” He certainly felt sideswiped. From the unsubtle, longing glances from the other talyan, he wasn’t the only one.
She bit at her lower lip, watching him. “Do you think Thorne will come after us tonight?”
“Who?” Sid shook himself. “Thorne. I think he’s after something, and whatever he riles up probably falls within the league mission statement.”
“And if it doesn’t,” Archer said as he came up, “we’ll write ourselves a new mission statement.”
“Signed in ichor,” Sera added. The pendant around her neck twinkled violet like her eyes.
Sid stared at her. She was the closest thing to a Bookkeeper the Chicago league had had for close to a year. Her background was so similar to his—the education, the intellect, the curiosity. If she had been a firstborn male child of a Bookkeeper, the masters would have passed around cigars. But she was unapologetically, fully talya in that moment.
And when she curled her hand around Archer’s elbow and slanted that violet-shot gaze up to him, she wasn’t just talya but symballein.
Unrepentantly so.
Before Sid could consider the implications, Liam hopped up onto a chair to raise himself above the heads of the tall, muscular, well-armed crowd. “Listen up, talyan. Pitch lurked around the River Princess all day as she burned and never saw a sign of Thorne. We know he spent part of his evening gutting Fane. As for what he’s been doing the rest of the time … Well, I can only think he’s been brooding, and we all know what that does to us.”
A ripple of amusement softened the crowd not at all.
“So stay sharp. Sharp as your favorite blades. Because whoever out there is willing to attack a djinn-man in his home, and whatever a djinn-man thinks is bad enough that he needs to arm himself with an angel’s sword, is more than willing to obliterate us. Unless we get it first.”
There was no cheer, but Sid’s demon tightened into a ball of restless craving.
In pairs and triads, the talyan filed past Jilly and her map. In quiet times—a relative term, of late—they patrolled their favorite haunts independently, clearing the city of horde-tenebrae, one dark corner at a time. But with a djinn-man on the prowl, Liam had assigned teams across the city. They would be far enough apart to cover some ground, but close enough to come to each other’s aid, should the need arise.
Assuming they had time to call out to one another.
Waiting for final orders, Sid edged into an unoccupied corner and flipped open his cell phone. His fingers hovered over the keypad a moment, then punched out a quick number and waited through a few rings that gave him too much time to think.
“At-One London.” Despite the predawn hour on the other end, the answer was crisp and authoritative.
“Morning, Wes.”
This pause was longer than the first; long enough that he almost hung up.
Finally, a groan sighed down the line. “Not yet it ain’t.” Wes’s voice crackled with the sleepiness he’d held back before. “What the hell, Sid?”
“You’ll have to be more specific, I’m afraid.”
“Dad told me everything.”
“I’m sure he summed it up nicely. But I have another note to add. We’re going after a djinn-man who’s shaping up to be orders of magnitude worse than Corvus Valerius. I e-mailed what we know so far, in case—”
“Don’t say it.”
“Saying we might be slaughtered doesn’t make it more likely to happen.”
“Not saying it means I don’t have to think about it.”
“You’re going to be Bookkeeper of London, bro.” Sid let out one notch on the rein of his demon to growl, “You’d better fucking think. Since you can’t leave. Again.”
That was the worst sort of scientist: letting the dread of what could be become the horror of what was, creating the outcomes he’d anticipated.
Even as he thought it, Sid winced at his hypocrisy. Hadn’t he done exactly that with Alyce? After his mother, after Maureen, he’d feared he’d never be able to open his life to another.
And he’d made his fears come true.
It was too late to beat himself up, but no doubt there were entities aplenty standing in line to take care of the task.
“You’re right,” Wes said quietly. “I don’t know what you’re facing—hell, I still don’t know all of what I’m facing—but I won’t make you come back just to kick my ass.” He hesitated. “Although I hope … I do hope you’ll come back sometime.”
“Maybe.” Sid turned to face the loading bay, the talyan spread out before him like one of those monochrome black-on-black-on-black canvases he found so hard to appreciate as art. “My place is here. But I’m glad you’re with Dad.” The admission slipped from him as easily as the teshuva healed a hangnail. Because in the end—and this very well could be the end—it was true.
“He’s in his office,” Wes said. “Do you want to talk to him?”
It was Sid’s turn to hesitate, the teshuva in him providing no protection from this. And maybe Wes understood, because the line clicked over without another word.
“Sidney?”
“I’m sorry, Dad.” The apology cracked out of him.
“For what, exactly?” The hum of curiosity was as personal and familiar to Sid as his own handwriting. “Being possessed?”
“For that. For letting you down. For letting Mum—”
“No.” Dispassionate though his father claimed to be, the sharp refusal halted all discussion. “The demons were none of your doing, not the tenebrae that killed your mother, not this teshuva now. And you never, never let me down.”
Sid bowed his head into the cup of his hand, the phone cradled against his ear.
His father’s voice softened. “From the moment your mother told me she was pregnant again, I knew you’d go your own way. You were quick and fearless and always knew your own mind. I would have been proud to call you London’s Bookkeeper after me. But more than that, I am proud you are my son.”
Sid closed his eyes tight. What he wouldn’t give to have his father and Wes at his side, to talk over this attack, to talk about anything at all. … “Do you think you could keep the other masters from declaring me rogue if I came home for a visit?”
“Somehow I don’t think they could stop you with a few words. So,” his father continued, “about this girl. She’s the one?”
Liam had pushed up the loading bay door, and the night air swirled through. Sid lifted his head to breathe in the fusion of wet concrete, chilled steel, and something else, some primeval incense of coming battle. “My demon says so.”
“And you?”
Hadn’t he seen Alyce as two entities in the beginning? Girl and demon in discordance had been vulnerable, the girl confused and the demon lashing out. But they’d come to a balance. Now he was the one stumbling.
Was it too late?
The talyan were filing out of the warehouse to the waiting fleet of cars, solemn in their black like a line of mourners headed to somebody’s funeral. “I have to go, Dad, but … I’ll call you later.” Though he’d told Wes otherwise, he wished saying the words could make it so.
“I told you before to be careful—”
“Definitely too late for that,” Sid muttered, but he pitched his voice only to the teshuva’s range, so he heard his father’s continuation.
“And you didn’t listen. Perhaps you knew better than I all along. So be happy instead, Sidney.”
The words, part command, part plea, jolted him, and he mumbled out his good-bye just as the dark-haired, bustier-clad source of his too-lateness—and his happiness—slipped past him.
Gavril crossed the loading bay on an intercept course that would have put him in line right behind Alyce. Sid snapped the cell close and quickened his step to edge out the other man.