Probably too much to hope that he was exaggerating.
He directed the cabdriver down a street of brick bungalows with identical short walkways leading up to identical small stoops. Decades ago, Jilly knew, the homes had been respectably working-class. Maybe in another decade, gentrification would creep in. For now, the black security bars over the picture-frame windows dulled the daylight like half-shuttered eyes.
“Stop here.” Liam handed money over the seat. “I don’t suppose you’d wait.” When the driver merely looked at him, Liam shrugged.
Jilly stepped out onto the sidewalk and glanced both ways as the cab pulled away. With the trees bare and the grass dormant—as if the first hints of spring had zero luck making the faintest inroads here—even the fretful wind made no impression on the empty street. “It’s dead.”
“The soulless don’t die, as far as we can tell. It’s quite the spiritual quandary. Not to mention a logistical nightmare for the league.”
“I can tell you’re really broken up about it.” She crossed her arms against her chest. Pissed, she told herself, not nervous.
He lifted his head to stare past her, and the lock of hair pulled toward his temple shifted to reveal the stark swirls of the tattoo. “I don’t have the luxury to feel bad, Jilly.”
“Then you might as well be sucking down solvo yourself.”
“Sometimes I feel like I am.”
He squared his shoulders. The duster around his lean body hung as motionless as the rest of the dead street, as if the wind itself couldn’t touch him, he was so alone. A twinge of regret at her sharpness had her reaching out to touch his arm, to distract him from his introspection. Sure, she made it a point to flout authority figures, but she had to admit, as far as overbearing petty dictators went, he had a hell of an excuse. Literally.
Which reminded her abruptly that his long coat remained unmoved by the wind because of the weight of the hammer in his freaking pocket. The hammer he used to bash off the heads of monsters. Without flinching. Monsters of the same sort as himself—and her.
She should probably keep her weak, pointless—oh, and not to mention false—reassurances to herself.
So she let her hand drop.
He moved on, unaware of her almost blunder. “This way.”
Around the corner was another short stretch of bungalows. As they walked, he said, “Here’s the short, boring version. For millennia, the tenebrae have been satisfied with wreaking their petty, and sometimes not so petty, havoc on the world. But four months ago, a djinni broke ranks and decided to tear open the barrier that divides the human realm from the demon realm. It would have been hell on earth.
“But the djinni’s machinations freed a powerful demon that then possessed Sera. With its unusual powers, she and Archer were able to kill the djinn- man and close the rift in the Veil. But we paid a high price.”
He gestured for her to walk ahead to a line of stubby concrete pillars that marked the entrance to a park.
Jilly paused between the pillars. “I don’t see what—Oh.”
A small crowd of people had gathered in the park, but they stood so motionless, they almost vanished against the background of barren trees.
Liam’s hands flexed at his sides, though he didn’t reach for the hammer. “The surviving remnants of a djinni army. Archer calls them haints, says they remind him of stories from his Southern childhood.”
An army of young and old, male and female, all in a variety of skin tones and clothing styles. For the most part they stood, although a few sat at the picnic tables and benches and one perched on a swing, all of them facing in different directions.
“They’re waiting,” Jilly blurted out. “I can almost . . . hear it—no, feel it—on my skin.”
Liam slanted a glance at her. “Yes. The question is, waiting for what?”
“Whatever will make them whole again.” She shuddered at the waves of pining that flooded the park like an inaudible rock power ballad for zombies. “God, it’s worse than the kids at their worst.”
“Then there’s that whole destroying-the-world thing I mentioned.” Liam propped his hip against the concrete blocks. Despite the casual stance, his taut wariness prickled at her nerves. “They’ve lost their focus along with their djinni controller, but we haven’t found the source of the solvo, so more and more of these are forming. It’s only been a few months, and in their passivity they tend not to accumulate too much damage. I dread the day one of them takes a fatal wound, ends up in an ER . . . and continues to live, bloodless and rotting.”
She wrapped her arms around herself. “Can’t you do anything for them?”
He lifted one eyebrow. “Because in your line of work you know how easy it is to get help for the dispossessed.” When she scowled, he rubbed his temple and sighed. “I’m possessed, Jilly, not a miracle worker. The league destroys. We have no doctors or priests, and we can’t go outside our ranks. The world can’t help us. It never could, even before we were possessed.”
She stiffened. “Speak for yourself. I was helping.”
“Ask Andre,” he shot back. Then he closed his eyes. “That was unnecessary.”
“That was asshole,” she snapped. “Just because I couldn’t save them all doesn’t mean I wouldn’t try to save one.” Never mind that most of them passed through her hands without leaving a mark. At least not one that anyone could see.
“You can’t help these,” Liam said. “There’s nothing left to save.”
She knew he was right. The emptiness in the crowded park threatened to swallow her. And she would never let that sort of collective despair consume her again. She’d worked too hard to fight her way free from her family’s dysfunction to fall in with a tough guy from a bad crowd. The ring in her nostril had been a sharp-pointed reminder to herself—one she looked at every day—not to be led again.
She took a shuddering breath, the old knife wound gone seemingly only to make way for fresh pain. “So why are we here?”
“To show you.”
“You’re doing a lot of that.” She glared at him. “You’re not showing me. You’re testing me.”
“If you’re going to collapse on me, I’d as soon know it now.”
She challenged him. “Do I look like I’m going to collapse on you?”
He inclined his head in silence.
She stalked out into the crowd. He followed without protesting, although he opened his coat, leaving easy access to the hammer.
Nothing moved besides the two of them. At the far end of the park, she came to the chain- link fence that marked the boundaries. On the other side, traffic whisked past, oblivious. “I didn’t see Andre. Maybe . . .” She couldn’t continue.
Liam’s tone was neutral. “He might not be here, not yet, but all solvo addicts come to this in the end. The haints are lost to everyone, even themselves. Jilly, you can’t save this one.”
She curled her fingers through the chain link. “Then what’s the point of these demons inside us? Why did it tell me I could finally . . . ?” The wire bit deep as she tightened her fists.
He went still beside her. “You could what?”
She slanted a glance at him. The deep blue of his eyes was all the more intense for his stillness, though the restless wind had finally reached him. It ruffled his shaggy hair, covering and uncovering the stark black lines around his temple. “Nothing. Never mind. Who listens to the promises of a devil?”
Besides the obvious—them—of course.
She slammed away from the fence. “You’d think I’d know better than to listen to sweet lies. Even if—especially if—the lie comes along with a bribe.”
From stillness to a blur of motion, he spun on his heel and grabbed her arm. “The teshuva gave you a gift?”