On a corner lit not by a streetlamp but by flames flickering in a bullet-pierced, fifty-gallon drum, he passed a man, fidgety as the darklings.
“Hey, Jack, nice night.”
Corvus slowed, then turned on his heel. “Lovely.”
“You looking for somethin’? I got it.”
The ancient malevolence in Corvus recognized more holes in the man’s soul than in the scudding clouds in the cold lead sky. “I seek my freedom.”
The man laughed, a sound as muddy as ruined glass. “Got your freedom right here in my pocket. Wanna smoke it or shoot it?”
“Along that path lies freedom through death. Not what I seek.”
The man threw up his hands. “You an idiot? A priest? Get the hell outta here.”
“Why, yes. That is indeed the way to my freedom. Getting hell out.” Corvus tipped his sunglasses down his nose and peered over the rim.
The dealer stiffened. “Hey, I gotta go—”
“Unbeknownst to yourself, you have been long gone, my friend.” The poison burned in the back of Corvus’s eyeballs. He stiffened against the pain, but the acid leak of tears spilled over, blistering his cheeks. He raised his hand. On his finger, the opalescent stone was a second icy burn against his scarred and callused skin.
The man scrambled backward, far too slowly. Corvus slashed his ringed hand like a scythe.
Following his sweeping gesture, a patchwork mist tore from the dealer’s body. To Corvus’s scalded eye, the severed soul glistened like a snail’s broken trail.
The dealer staggered back, clutching at the drum. It tipped, and flaming debris washed across the sidewalk. The dealer fell into the embers, gagging and weeping.
Darklings swarmed around Corvus’s feet like ducks flocking around a retiree bearing loaves of stale bread. Of course, they were embodiments of pure evil with needle teeth, and he threw them scraps of shredded soul.
Corvus left the darklings to their insatiable feast; not even a memory would remain to pass into eternity. He turned to the corpse sprawled on the sidewalk. The body groaned and stirred, clutching its head. Not a corpse quite yet.
Corvus hauled the dealer to his feet and brushed away the clinging embers. “Did you fall?” he asked solicitously.
The dealer hitched up his pants. “What you want, Jack?” He recited his mantra in a muddled tone. “I got it.”
“Not anymore,” Corvus said softly. “But you will still be of use.” He lifted one satchel over his head and settled the strap around the dealer’s shoulders. “Here is the fruit of your wicked labors, the harvest of your sins. With it, you will help me sow the next—nay, the last crop.”
The dealer boggled at him. Corvus sighed. “It’s the hot new shit, man. Everybody’s doing it.”
The dealer plunged his hand into the satchel. Glass clinked when he lifted out a slim vial. Even in the smol dering light of the dying cinders, the small tablets reflected a lunar glow like unstrung pearls. “You got sol?”
“Like you would not believe.” Corvus plucked the vial from the dealer’s grasp and returned it to the pouch. “Don’t set the price too high. Impatience and greed, my friend, will be the death of you.” Already had been, in fact.
He steered the dealer’s still-animate body through the pool of indifferent darklings. They already had what they wanted.
The dealer squinted at Corvus with vague suspicion. “What do I owe you, Jack?”
“Nothing. Do you know what a corvus is? No, why would you? It was an ancient naval weapon, like a gangplank with a sharp tooth on the end. The Romans dropped the corvus on enemy ships, which allowed their soldiers to rush across the bridge.” At the dealer’s silent confusion, Corvus rubbed wearily at his eyes. “I am a bridge, my friend.”
The dealer nodded. “You giving everybody a free taste, then they come to you.”
“A taste of freedom, yes, then they will come to me.”
The dealer looked crafty. “If you’re just the bridge for sol, what’re your masters gonna want at the other end? I ain’t paying twice.”
Corvus smiled thinly. “You are wiser than I thought. Let us just say, the masters have more pressing concerns. But you, my friend, needn’t pay them anything more. And I will take my reward in the hereafter.”
“You sure sound like a priest.”
Corvus inclined his head. “Perhaps in a manner of speaking.”
He sent the dealer away on a drifting tide of weakness like a plague ship. Corvus patted the remaining satchels. Two more vessels yet to be launched into the night.
In all his centuries, only recently had enough devotees of doom perceived the freedom he had sought for so long. The Worm thought his formula was the catalyst. But the hunger had come first. That emptiness had drawn the demon through the Veil, leaving the wound through which the rest would follow. And that craving would never be assuaged until the world’s isolation was ended, until heaven and hell collided.
At the mouth of an alley, a few misshapen hulks, lured by their smaller brethren’s littered feast of soul, drew back to let Corvus pass.
“Peace,” he whispered. “There will be more soon. Many more.”
Awareness crept back like dawn’s faint light. Sera smelled leather and wool and something wilder. Once again, the dream hadn’t quite gotten to the point where she had sex with Archer since they were interrupted by . . .
As if someone had booted the sun in the ass, consciousness came blazing back. Sera jolted upright on the unfamiliar couch.
Across from her, Archer straddled a hard-backed chair. “Back with the living.”
She remembered the eerie wail, the black monstrosity, Archer’s lips on hers. It seemed more like a dream than life.
“Where are we?” She swallowed against the dryness in her throat. “What was that thing?”
“We’re at a safe house. And that thing was a feralis. A lesser demon from the horde-tenebrae.”
“If that was less, I’d hate to see more.”
He made a noncommittal noise and pushed to his feet, spinning the chair to face her properly, as if he no longer needed its shield.
She shook her head at the strange fancy. She’d been unconscious. Why would he need a shield from her?
She tracked his path across the industrial warehouse- cum-upscale loft—spare and unpolished, just like him. “This is your place, isn’t it?”
“It’s both. Safe and mine.” In the foyer, he tapped at the keypad. Lamps came on around the room, though the disconnected pools of light hardly brightened the darkness.
She pictured vignettes of his life in the isolated circles. The low couch of leather and steel where she was still half reclining under a wool blanket. A computer workstation against one brick wall. A weight bench on the only rug softening the concrete floor. A kitchenette with one white coffee cup turned upside down on the rack beside the sink. Shielding the bed, a freestanding accordion of white plantation shutters, as if a chunk of destroyed Tara had landed in Chicago.
She slanted a glance at him. “So I take it demon-ridden don’t have girlfriends. Or interior decorators.”
He gazed impassively around the room. “Do I need one?”
“Decorator? Or girlfriend?”
“You tell me.”
Suddenly, lying unconscious in a strange place seemed safer than sparring with him—definitely safer than remembering that kiss, the rough silk of his mouth, and the raw grind of his body. . . .
She swung her feet to the bare floor. He crossed his arms, making no attempt to stop her, so she rose and edged away to one of the mullioned windows.
She flattened her hand against the glass. The daylight was gone, the street empty. “Why did you bring me here?”
“To give you a chance.” He stood just outside the circle of lamplight, where his black shirt and jeans melted into the darkness. The lit half of his face was hard, his jaw set so she almost felt the strain in his muscles.