Dark glasses hid the driver’s eyes, an unnecessary affectation on such a gloomy day. “Hey, I’m already paid for.” He leaned a little farther out, exposing the tattoo curling around the side of his neck.
She backed away. “I said no.”
She’d checked her pockets on the way down from the atrium. As blackout fugues went, at least this one hadn’t been terribly inconvenient. She’d lost time and memory, but she’d remembered her house keys. She supposed she could plunge a key through one of those dark lenses and see if the eye behind was brown or blue or green . . . or white.
As if he sensed the spike of violence in her, he eased back into the car and sped away.
Lots of people had tattoos, she told herself. The car squealed around a corner, out of sight, but not out of mind. Emblazoned in her memory was the same sort of archaic, arcane symbol on the man she’d left inside: Ferris Archer.
She glanced back uneasily. Questions followed close on her heels, seething and maddening and ridiculous as rabid Chihuahuas. He’d teased her that she’d come up with conspiracy theories, as if that would make more sense than legions of demons and idiopathic perpetual whatever forces and penance triggers.
Okay, a conspiracy was sounding pretty good right now.
She shivered as the cold penetrated her uncertainty. She’d ended her postaccident counseling sessions with a colleague when they’d taken her father away. Maybe she needed to rethink her impatient proclamations of health.
Even as she swore to make the next available appointment, she realized she’d walked all the way home and climbed the stairs to her apartment without cane or pain.
She stopped with her hand on the doorknob. She tilted forward to press her brow against the wood.
What was happening to her?
She prowled through her apartment as if she’d never been there, but nothing seemed out of place, nothing suggested a reason for her . . . lapse. A quick check of the television told her she’d lost only a day. She sat on the couch and rubbed her hands over her thighs, frowning absently down the dark hallway toward the bathroom.
That’s where it had started, the peculiar, erotically charged dream about the man—the demon Ferris Archer. Her mind stuttered like a fingerprint-smudged CD, skipping and repeating, and she found herself standing in the bathroom doorway.
She flicked on the light. In front of the mirror, she reluctantly raised her gaze above the opalescent stone dangling from the fixture. Still just herself. No one else. She shook her head in an attempt to dispel the mist gathering in her mind. No one else in the sense that she wasn’t anyone besides who she’d always been; not that no one else was standing beside her. Who else would be here, after all?
In an effort of will she banished the image of Ferris Archer that appeared in her head, if not in her mirror. Just because he was tall and ripped and carried himself as if he could stop a speeding SUV with a single scathing comment was no reason to buy into his delusional fantasies.
As if reluctant to do the job alone, her fingers were slow on the buttons of her shirt and the fly of her jeans. Finally, shirt hanging open between her breasts, she peeled down the jeans. She stepped out of the pool of denim and raised her gaze to the mirror.
Gone. Her breath caught. Almost gone anyway. Once red and puckered, all that remained of the tangle of scars over her thighs and hips were traceries almost as unremarkable as her unbleached cotton underwear.
She turned, craning her neck to look over her shoulder. The contortion was effortless, and for the last six months, impossible. Under her wondering fingertips, only faint raised ridges remained of the scars on her lower back.
“I do not believe this.” She couldn’t stop her smile. She twisted the other way, just because.
What had Archer said? “Don’t bother trying to decide whether to believe or not. It’s true.”
At the thought of him, her smile faded.
And what if everything else he said was true?
“It will be one of the dark.”
The man twisted his fingers as he made his pronouncement. Ten white twisting worms. Unfortunately, too large a lunch for the crow.
Corvus leaned back in his chair. “Are you certain?”
“With the solvo spreading well, the dissonance should definitely have triggered the crossing of a specimen from the more powerful strain. The crossing was so unusually violent, the Veil is still in flux, which will make our task that much easier. All signs point toward a djinn crossing, and we do have an agreement—”
“Are you certain?”
The crow stabbed its beak out between the bars to grab a paperclip off the desk. It sidled away, working the shiny metal in its beak and cackling.
“Not entirely, no.”
Corvus nodded once. “Then we wait. And continue our preparations. The wound in the Veil will serve us, whether the demon will or not.”
The Worm twitched, as if impatience consumed every cell of his body just as, Corvus supposed, it did all mortal creatures. “Only my work has gotten you this far. I deserve . . .” Again, that twitch, accompanied by a conspicuous pallor.
Corvus let the outburst pass, as he let the thieving crow keep its little toy. “All our efforts shall be rewarded, eventually.” The Worm couldn’t begin to understand how long Corvus himself had waited for his chance.
The Worm nodded until Corvus thought his head would wobble off. “The demon must be djinn. I simply can’t believe the teshuva could muster such force across the Veil. I’ve noticed the impulse toward repentance diminishes in ratio to the threat of punishment. Which explains the remorseful teshuva’s mediocrity in this realm.”
“You simply can’t believe?” The Worm could do nothing simply, not even speak. “With the Veil isolating us from what lies beyond, our beliefs are all we have to sustain us.”
Rather than endure the Worm’s squirmings at the reprimand, Corvus swiveled in his chair to look out over the city. The sun burned a pale gray hole in the darker gray sky. The light raised forlorn glimmers in the delicate sculptures arrayed on the windowsill. The churches born of Rome weren’t the only ones to capture peace and beauty in glass. He caressed the stone in his ring, calmed by the vista and the promise of what was—at long last—coming.
“If Sera Littlejohn is possessed by one of ours, then she will fight for the Darkness. If not, she must die.”
“She’s on the move.”
Ecco’s voice crackled in Archer’s earbud, and he scowled up at the darkening sky where low clouds threatened snow. He remembered the restlessness that had driven him at his demon’s ascension, but couldn’t she have just done a little knitting instead?
“Wrong century,” he muttered.
“What’s that?” Even through the electronic connection, Ecco sounded as annoyed as Archer felt.
“I said I’m on it.”
“You’re not going to be able to sweet-talk her down this time, Archer,” Ecco said. “If she turns djinn, you need to take her out right then before she calls in the horde-tenebrae to lick your bones. Niall, you’re sure he’s the man for an action job?”
“Fuck you,” Archer said conversationally.
Niall was already talking over him. “Reserve this channel for the exchange of useful information, gentlemen.”
“I ain’t no gentleman,” Ecco said. “You must mean fancy pants. Hard to believe he’s got an annihilation-class demon in there at all. Just let me know where the fightin’ words channel is, and maybe I’ll find it—”
Archer ripped out the earpiece, ignoring Niall’s tinny squawk. He left the shelter of his car just as Sera stepped out of her apartment building.
She’d dressed for the falling temps, including the scarf she’d wanted last time. She tucked her chin down into the heather wool a few shades darker than her coat, and with her blond hair contained under a matching hat, she was just another gray shadow moving through the gray city.