He was a devil.
She stood her ground since she’d never been fast enough to run from him. “Instead of watching, you could fight the monsters too.”
“Could I now?” For a fleeting moment, his furrowed brows made him look as lost as she sometimes felt. “And tell me, to fight at your side, all I’d have to do is forget myself?”
She couldn’t untangle the threads of puzzlement and scorn in his voice, so she answered simply as she started walking again and he fell into step beside her. “You are stronger than I am; too strong to forget.”
“Too bad.” The last light of the train gleamed off the sharp spine of his lopsided smile; then the shadows closed in again. “Ah, but that is the point, isn’t it? I am too bad, a monster through and through.” He bumped her with his hip, not gently, and her weak knee buckled, so she staggered. When she aimed a scowl at him, he laughed. “See? There’s the little sparkler I love.”
She blinked hard to force down the flicker of the devil in her eyes. “We are not monsters. We can atone. My Sidney will tell you.”
His smile faded until his wide mouth curled at only one corner like a snake raising its head to strike. “Your Sidney.”
She touched her cheeks, warm under her fingers. “Mine. He knows what I am.”
“And don’t I know you after all these years together?”
“We aren’t together.” She stopped and looked at him over her fingertips as he prowled a circle around her.
In the beginning, spurred by the demon, she had tried to destroy him once or twice—perhaps more—and each time he had left her so shattered, she had thought she would finally, finally die. She didn’t know why he had never lost patience and finished her, but he did not run from her. And sometimes she thought only that had kept her from sliding at last into madness.
But now she had Sidney. She let her hands drift down from her heated cheeks and drew herself upright. As she straightened her spine, her devil flowed into the spaces between the bones.
Thorne took a step back, eyebrow raised. “This love you’ve found will break your heart, I bet you.”
“Which is the only piece of me you have left unbroken.”
Thorne’s eyes glittered brighter than the bullet holes in the burning metal drums that warmed the homeless dwellers below the overpasses. “I have left other parts of you untouched. But I’m sure your Sidney will find a way to fill you.”
Forgetful she might be, but she did not misunderstand his allusion. “It’s not like that,” she whispered.
“It’s always like that. Older than words, old as evil is that.” Thorne’s laugh cracked like an open slap across her face.
Her cheeks heated, and with that flush of rage, she launched herself at the devil-man. But he only laughed again and struck her aside. The backhanded blow spun her into a parked carriage. Car, she reminded herself viciously as the glass splintered around her elbow and the alarm blared in her ear. If she could not remember “car,” how would Sidney ever teach her anything?
By the time she hauled herself out of the broken window, Thorne and his shiny black coat were lost to the night.
She looked down at the fresh smears of blood on her frock. Truly, she needed to find her last stash of clothing.
“Hey, what the fuck’d you do to my car?” A stranger raced toward her. He stabbed one finger at a small black device in his other palm. “I’m calling the cops right now—”
She raised her gaze, and he slid to a halt. The box clattered to the pavement.
“Pardon me,” she said. She brushed glass from her skin. “I slipped.”
The man screamed, turned, and sprinted away as if for his very life.
From the device, a tinny voice called out. “Nine-one-one. What is the nature of your emergency?”
Alyce retrieved the little box and set it on the front seat of the car, in case he forgot where he’d dropped it. Forgetting was so easy. By the time he stopped running, he wouldn’t remember the nature of his emergency, but his white-ringed eyes crystallized her determination.
With the peekaboo moon winking from behind the towers of concrete and steel, she made her way through the streets she haunted. She’d moved so often, over so many years, she wasn’t ever sure where she’d last been. The intersections bled together, and the buildings seemed to shift facades before her eyes—from flickering candlelight to the stink of gas to the hum of electric bulbs—as if they couldn’t remember who they were either.
She would clothe herself properly. She would find Sidney. She would know what she was. And maybe the blackness in her head would finally go.
Some days were worse than others.
All days were peppered with the buckshot of injustice, banality, and defeat, but evil seemed prone to arm itself in progressively higher calibers of wrongness as the days and decades passed.
Thorne Halfmoon had accepted that truth when his grandmother caught him on the roof of their crappy apartment building after six and a half pointless days of fasting and chanting. Though the Boys’ Life magazine he’d stolen from the rec center had been a little vague on the particulars of vision quests, in his delirium, he’d seen dark spirits aplenty, but he hadn’t found his spirit guide. And as his grandmother—cursing up a Thunderbird-scented storm—dragged his scrawny ten-year-old body down the stairs, he’d realized evil could always get worse and he would always face it alone.
But he preferred not to have to face anyone before, say, coffee. To open the boat’s cabin door with his first cup still brimming, unsipped, in his hand and find one of his exceedingly evil brethren standing on his deck, uninvited, was the nadir of bad taste and bad timing.
“You didn’t knock,” he said.
The djinn-man scrunched his thick features with exaggerated hurt. He tugged at his coat lapels as if soothing his ruffled feathers. “You wouldn’ta answered the door, would ya?”
Thorne spread his empty hand as if displaying a deck of cards. “For you? Never.”
“So. I waited. We got the time, am I right?”
“Wait a little longer.” Thorne slammed the door.
Too late, of course.
The other man’s heather-toned suit said Brooks Brothers, but his footwear was plain shit stomper. He booted open the door, and the heavy wood rebounded against the wall with a thud, rattling the round portal glass.
Thorne sighed in vexation. “You said you’d wait.”
“I guess we got the time, but not the patience.”
“Why start with virtues now?” Thorne stalked down the narrow stairs to the lower deck, his bare feet silent on the gleaming mahogany floorboards, and left the other man to follow, or not.
In his stateroom, he clunked his coffee cup on the mantel over the empty fireplace and dropped into one of the wingback chairs framing the hearth. The rose velvet armrest crinkled under his elbow as he slouched, chin in palm, tracking the other man with his eyes. The djinn-man lowered himself to the matching chair and shot his cuffs as if he owned the place.
Thorne dug his elbow into the nap until it squeaked. He really needed to redecorate—something less Colonial. “What do you want, Carlo?”
Carlo crossed one ankle over his knee and steepled his fingers. The managerial pose sent a quiver of annoyance through Thorne like the glass rattling in the door. “Times, they are a-changing.” His hard Chicago accent smoothed, as if the voice were no longer his own. “The deadlock that held the war between heaven and hell in balance has cracked. Magdalena is calling an ahaˉzum.”
Thorne smirked when Carlo stumbled over the Akkadian pronunciation. Probably ex–wise guys didn’t have much call for mastering extinct Mesopotamian languages. “A gathering of all the djinn-possessed? What is that psychotic bitch thinking?”