After a long minute of silence, he said, “For a first hunt, that didn’t go badly.”
She raised one eyebrow.
“You didn’t die,” he amended. “Eventually, that might not sound like much, but for now . . .” He held his blade to the light, then wiped along its length. “So, what did you learn tonight?”
“I suck as a killer?”
“You didn’t die,” he reminded her. “You learned not to get slimed by malice. You learned ferales are weak at their throats, eyes, and spines, and almost impervious anywhere else. You learned how to bleed out demonic emanations.”
“But I’m still not sure what happened,” she interrupted. “When you grabbed me—”
As if she hadn’t spoken, he continued implacably, “You learned to leave your old life alone.” He raised his gaze to hers.
She said nothing.
He went back to the knife. “Once you let the demon reflexes take over, the rest is simple.”
She didn’t think he meant just during the fighting. She couldn’t restrain a shiver—which she knew he saw, so felt obliged to explain. “You threw me the knife, and I didn’t have to think. I was so angry at being frightened, I just . . .” She pressed her thumb lightly to the knife’s edge, creasing her skin. “And then I was so frightened at being so angry, I couldn’t . . .” Once again, the words failed her. Blood welled out of the furrow in her thumb.
Archer eased the knife from her grasp, while the tiny wound in her thumb faded to just another line bisecting the loops of her thumbprint.
She glanced at Archer’s arm where the feralis’s jaws had clamped like a bear trap. With a touch she told herself was cool and clinical, she lifted his hand to study the wound. The flesh was raw and tender looking but nowhere near the gruesome maiming she’d seen. She traced the black line of the reven where feralis teeth had slashed complicated new patterns. Violet sparked behind the stroke of her finger.
He sat unmoving, but the muscle in his forearm jumped into sharp relief.
She flushed and released him. “Sorry. I don’t know why I’m still shocked by it. It’s been—what?—three whole days now since I first heard of demons.”
He eased enough to smile faintly. “Seems like centuries.” He gave the blades a final coat of oil and returned them to the wall of weapons.
She raised her voice to carry across the room. “Has it been? For you?”
“What?” He didn’t turn to look at her.
“Centuries?”
“At least.” He said it so easily, she wasn’t sure if he was being sardonic or truthful. Or both.
“When will it end?”
“When I am killed.”
She grimaced. “Not you. The fighting. Will it end with the last malice and feralis? Will that be peace on earth?”
He shrugged, broad shoulders shedding her questions like rainwater. “We’ll never know. Because it’ll never happen.”
“Why not?”
Finally, he turned to her, bracing his shredded arm on the weight bench. “The teshuva and djinn that cross the Veil between the realms can’t exist here without our flesh to clothe them. The horde-tenebrae thrive on the wickedness done in this world, feeding on sin, spawning evil. They won’t be gone until we are.”
“We could teach people not to let them take hold. That man at the bar wouldn’t have wanted the malice on him if he knew he had a choice.”
“He knew he was furious. He knew he had fists.” Archer pushed away from the bench. “Would he have believed a fiend he couldn’t see drove both fury and fists? Would believing have stopped him, or made him think he had no option but to succumb? Or would it have emboldened him?” He straightened, managing to look down on her from across the room. “And unlike you, he wouldn’t have enhanced senses or speed or healing to help him, even if he wanted to resist.”
She bit her lip at the criticism. “Then how do we win?”
“Who said we’d win? We fight.”
“Forever?”
He let the word hang. “Until the end.”
She didn’t ask for a definition of end.
“Meanwhile, there’s a djinn-man out there somewhere who needs a name and a face and a severe ass-whooping.” He moved to the office area and flicked on the computer. “I have more of our histories and case studies in my bedroom. Make yourself at home.” He gave her another long look that lingered over her borrowed clothing until the cotton seemed to wear thin. “I’ll sleep on the couch tonight, and we’ll move you to Niall’s quarters in the morning. You’ll meet Bookie, and maybe he’ll have an idea what to do with you.”
How he managed to banish her so completely in a room with no walls she wasn’t sure.
She took a glass of water with her and sat cross-legged on the bed with a dusty-smelling manuscript in her lap. It listed those possessed around the world who’d banded together in leagues like the one headed by Liam Niall. All were men’s names, she noted, tracing her finger down the roll call. She stifled a pang of loneliness. Not for herself, but for those centuries of solitary warriors. “The world goes on without us,” Archer had said. Or had he just pushed it away? Not that she blamed him, considering.
Beyond the screens, she caught a glimpse of the tumbled dolls. For all his declarations of holding himself apart, he kept the league’s horrible little trophies, the only adornment in the otherwise empty loft. Did he really want to be so removed?
Suddenly she wondered if the tortured, mismatched dolls represented the defeated ferales . . . or the talyan themselves.
The thought made her wince. As if defending Archer’s detachment, the next pages warned of rogue possessed, talyan who refused to temper their possession so the demon ran always ascendant. Despite the lurid topic, she fought the heaviness of her eyelids. When Archer finished up, she’d insist on taking the couch since she’d already caused trouble enough.
She switched to a book on fighting techniques, hoping it would keep her alive, maybe even awake.
On the page about mitigating damage from highly corrosive feralis ichor when using explosives during husk demolition, she stretched out at the foot of the bed, propped on one elbow. Might as well get comfortable while reviewing such mayhem, she thought.
Somewhere in the part explaining the impossibility of removing the last of the psychic stains left after draining a malice, she laid her head down on her forearm, just for a moment.
The glistening snow lay so deep, she had to jump. Each bound took her higher, skimming the moon-bright earth. Her footsteps, farther and farther apart, left dark imprints in the snow, like lonely islands in a silver sea.
She spread her arms and pointed her toes, aloft like a ballerina. Her heart pounded with delight. And fear. If she fell, her feet were not under her.
She tried not to look down, but she did. Her shadow cast a hazy violet cross on the snow.
On her back in the snow, thrashing her arms and legs, she almost frightened herself with the violent waving, but then she realized she was making snow angels. She hadn’t made snow angels in forever.
She laughed, looking up at . . .
“Ferris,” she whispered.
He was seated on the edge of the bed, his hip near her curled knees. “I heard you. I thought it was a nightmare.”
She turned her head, knocking her nose on the book’s cracked leather spine. “I fell asleep.”
“Counting sheep instead of ways to eviscerate ferales?”
“With bedtime stories like yours, who needs night-mares?” She rubbed at her eyes. “I was going to tell you I’d sleep on the couch.”
He stroked the back of his knuckles through her hair. “You remind me of things.” His voice was a murmur, as if he hadn’t meant to speak aloud. “Things I’d forgotten. How do you smell of flowers here, in the middle of winter?”