She wanted to run after him as the djinn-men forced him to his feet in front of Thorne. But that was stupid, terribly stupid. There was nothing she could do against Thorne alone, much less against Thorne and his new army.
Blood streamed from Sidney’s nose. His teshuva would heal him, as long as it could, which might not be much longer, if Thorne’s speculative glance and the impatient twisting of the angel sword in his hand were any indication.
The knowledge of her weakness—and worse, that Sidney would want her to stay away—ate through her like acid. She didn’t have the power; her demon couldn’t even battle malice without setting up a sneak attack. …
Ah.
She crabbed backward, keeping the small table between her and the violent tableau. She needed distance from the overwhelming djinn energy.
The side room was a smaller version of the rest of the atrium, encased on all sides in triangular glass panes to view the lake and city. It was tight against the weather, but not against malice. The small oozy-smoky tenebrae had crept in from all around, drawn to the huddled hostages.
The malice darted and swirled like evil starlings, gobbling up the crumbs of negative emotion and emitting a fouler mess of hopelessness and despair.
A few of the hostages wept quietly. If questioned, they probably wouldn’t be sure why. Better to have something to cry about, Alyce thought.
And suddenly she was glad she’d told Sidney she loved him. Maybe that had been stupid too. But what she felt had been real, not pushed by the teshuva through the symballein bond.
The love had been hers and clear.
That she might not have the chance to fight for that love tore at her. The fear bled from her, from the tiny wounds her nails opened in her palms when she clenched her fists. They sank like lesser verges in her skin, opening to her darkest dreads.
The closest malice wheeled from the hostages and arrowed toward her, pursued by a handful more, and then still more. They spread as they came, making a black and crimson hollow of ether, like a mouth, more than Alyce-sized.
“I am afraid,” she whispered to them. “And you are hungry. Come taste fear.”
She held out her bare hands.
There were so many. They swept across her like a foul second skin. As her teshuva flared, the malice sprang into sharp relief—emphasis on the sharp. The greedy little maws reaching for her pain glistened with thousands of needle teeth. Their oily essence phased in and out of solidity to reveal claws and lashing tails that stung her, soul deep.
She drew them closer with the demon’s hooks. The malice struggled, sensing their doom on the threshold of where her dread did not own her anymore and became her weapon. Too late. And this time, the words gave her grim satisfaction.
The pressure built inside her like a madness, until she thought she would explode with it and lose everything.
Perfect.
She just had to ignore the fear that she would fail, though even the wisp of the thought buckled her knees, more crippling than a thousand malice. But she had been living with her fears for hundreds of years; she would not let them stop her now. She staggered for the side room, uncaring of the hiding places that might have sheltered her. The time for hiding was past.
She nearly crumbled, though, when she saw Thorne holding Sidney aloft, with one hand wrapped around her beloved’s throat. Sidney had kept his chin down and tight, and he clawed at the fingers crushing his windpipe.
That had never worked for the hanging victims she watched die.
The memory tried to sap the remaining strength from her, snatching at her last breath. She refused to stop.
Until she hit the wall of seething djinni emanations.
The conflicting flow went through her with an electric shock. Her head snapped back, and her spine arched into an agonizing bow.
And her burden of frenzied malice, desperate to escape her teshuva’s presence, sprang free with a cacophony of shrieks spreading across a dozen octaves. The etheric backlash swept the confined room in a visible shock wave, rippling through the air, rippling Sidney’s hair, rippling the windowpanes. …
The glass shattered, tearing huge holes in the metal framework that supported the windows.
Shards rained down in a glittering shower. The hostages and djinn-men alike ducked and covered.
Except for Thorne.
But as he raised his face to the glass downpour, seeking its source, Sidney swung his fist straight at the djinn-man’s nose.
Thorne dropped him with a roar.
The sound galvanized the crowd. The hostages fled toward the new openings in the walls with screams to match the malice. The other djinn-men hesitated, torn between chasing their prey and rallying around their leader.
Sidney had no such hesitation. He scrambled toward her. “Run!”
But she was spent. The malice attack had left her bruised with darkness. As he came toward her, she saw only the moment he had turned away, reversed for the time being, but sure to play out again, to rip her apart again.
The teshuva wavered in her, then steeled, like a cage around her heart, around her mind. Its alien chill settled through her. She raised her head to meet Sidney’s gaze.
He faltered, just one step, but it was obvious all the same. She snarled at him. No, not her. The demon. But she did not stop it.
“No closer,” it hissed. “Too late.”
And in another heartbeat, Sidney grabbed her hand. “I said, run.”
The heat of his touch torched her, and she gasped at the shock.
As he pulled her into his arms, another shower of glass tumbled toward them, alight with reflections of the plunging salambes and amusement park outside.
She looked up, dazzled—not by the lights and sparkling shards of certain death, but by Sidney’s unfaltering gaze.
“Remind me to tell you more later,” he said, “but I love you too.”
The words simultaneously lifted and shattered her. She reached toward him, but the glimpse of her unadorned ring finger made her falter. The demon’s protective haze grayed her vision, wavering along with her conviction, too close to the verge, too close to collapse.
No—she wouldn’t dread his answer. No, she never would again, not even to save herself from the truth. “I loved you from the first.”
“And I’ll love you until the last.”
She reached up to touch his throat where Thorne’s grasp had purpled the skin. “We match.”
He swallowed, and his pulse raced against her fingertips. “Symballein.”
She fainted, and the tenebraeternum—no longer held at bay—swallowed them.
“Damn,” Sid murmured. That hadn’t gone over quite as smoothly as he’d hoped.
He’d waited too long to proclaim his love and claim their bond, and the darkness had taken them. They were stuck suspended in the verge, the mouth of the beast, which was somewhat better than the belly of the beast, but still full of dangerous teeth.
He clutched Alyce’s small body to his chest. She’d fainted before, the last time she’d taken on too many malice. This couldn’t be worse, could it?
Other than the dozen roaming djinn-men, the unleashed angelic sword, and the exploding verge, of course.
Thankfully, no one was around to answer the question.
“Alyce? Sweetheart, no hiding now.”
His voice fell with a strange flatness, as if the tenebraeternum had no wish for sweethearts, no place for soft words.
He held her close, struggling to breathe the warm scent of her through his bloody nose. His heart ached with loving words, hoarded for years; words he’d never been able to say, and couldn’t say here, not on the verge of damnation, when anything he said would be tainted with shadows.
The gray around them was perforated with the verge views into other possibilities. Each opening while it gaped formed a bridge from the tenebraeternum to the human realm, a myriad of unhealed scars, real and imagined, each a link to the darkness.