“Remember how you said you really liked my honesty?”
“I don’t think I said that exactly.”
She wrapped one long dread around the rest and tucked the edge under in a makeshift restraint and stood square to face him. “Honestly, I don’t want to go anywhere else with you. I don’t want to meet anyone you know. Now that I think about it—actually, I didn’t even really have to think about it—I don’t want to know you.”
The scornful words grated along his nerves. “Biblically, it’s a little late for that. We can’t reverse this.”
“Who said anything about reverse? If I really am faster and stronger, I figure I’m going to have a killer new routine worked out before the Viva Las Showgirls finals. I might even try fire dancing, since I’m immortal and all.”
He stared at her. “You’d turn your damnation into a striptease?”
“What are you doing with it that’s so much better?”
“Destroying evil.” The hook dug into his leg. “Winning back my soul.”
She shrugged. “That monster only attacked because you lured it in. And you only notice your soul is lost because you’re still looking.”
“Wrong.” He all but choked on the word. Her casual denial of what had happened to her—not disbelief, just dismissal—shocked him. “Possession wasn’t a choice, and neither is what you do next. The demon chose you to fight.”
“I’m a lover, not a fighter.” The sharp edge to her smile belied her words. “It should’ve asked me first.”
“It did. Not in words. Still, you accepted it.”
She waved one hand. “Entrapment. It’ll never stand up in court.”
Frustration made his temples throb. “You’ve already been judged and found guilty. And sentenced.”
She wrinkled her lip. “By you.”
“I played no part in your possession.”
“Didn’t you?” A merciless glint brightened her fathoms-deep eyes. “I saw you in my dream, you know. The one where you said the demon came to me. It was you I thought I was letting in.” A hint of violet lurked within the glint. “Into my body.”
Startled heat flashed through him. Liam had implied that both female talyan had had premonitions of their coming possession. At the same time, their partners had been driven to restlessly roam the streets, the unbound teshuva energies resonating with the demons already possessing them. The league leader had never said outright that the women had seen their ordained mates. Had been tricked by the image of the male talya meant to stand beside them.
He had been willing to lead the demon’s unwitting quarry from darkness toward the light. But he would never have chosen to be the temptation that caused her downfall. When he told her she’d had no choice, he realized, once again, the same had been true for him. “I’m sorry.”
She tilted her head. The dreads shifted across her shoulders but never obscured her far-too-perceptive eyes. “You had no hand in it—other than the hand you had in me an hour ago—yet you’re here to save me, even though you hate me. Why?”
“I don’t hate—” He bit off the protest. It wasn’t going to convince her. He continued, each word more clipped than the last, “When my sword hand was severed, the impairment left me out of step with my demon. I need a partner to rejoin the battle.”
Her gaze ticked over him, from his boots to his face. “Maybe you just need to learn another dance.”
“A tenebrae tango,” he agreed. “We will fight together.”
“You said there are others like us? Go fight with them.”
“I have. For a very long time.” Bitterness rippled through him in ragged waves, the same way the teshuva’s thwarted energy swirled and jammed in his gnarled scars without escape. “It was for one of them, I was maimed. And now I can’t …” The phantom muscles in his missing hand cramped, sending spasms along his reven. “Now I am even less than I was.”
She tucked in her chin with a dubious look. “Less? Really? So you were, like, Superman before?”
“I could never fly.”
“But the anklet, the demon weapon, gives you superpowers?”
“No. Without you, the anklet means nothing. But your demon is uniquely aligned with mine, in ways we can’t understand.”
“Can’t understand?” She huffed. “You mean, ‘don’t want.’”
“Wanting isn’t a consideration.”
She peered at him. “It’s always a consideration. You just have it sealed up tight. Which is bad, because when that one wanting hits you—and it will—it’ll be worse than if you wanted everything.”
“How very … voracious of you. Meanwhile, I believe together we can drive the horde into hell.”
“Oh, you just want me to be your new right hand.”
Said aloud, in her mocking tone, he realized accusing her of mercenary tendencies had been unfair. Now that his perfidy was revealed, he saw no reason to conceal the worst of what he was. “You’ll be the other half of my damaged soul.”
