She frowned at the lax security. But they’d moved everything out to avoid birnenston contamination, so maybe there was no reason to lock up, especially since Bookie knew she was coming.
In the lobby, only the low night lighting was on, leaving the ceilings all but invisible. She eyed the shadows and remembered the swarms of malice in the building where they’d found Zane. Shaking off her unease, she headed downstairs to the lab.
The lower halls were entirely unlit, leaving indirect light from a few office windows to spread in pools along her path. Only Bookie’s lab at the end of the hall stood open and bright.
She took a few steps toward it, then slowed, her senses tightening.
She knew the violet flicker was in her eyes as the hallway took on a black-light cast, reflecting energy signatures her human eyes couldn’t see. The birnenston stench had dissipated, but faint smudges on the walls remained like smoke stains. She held her breath, listening, and heard nothing.
Nothing to see, nothing to hear, but all her senses, and the demon’s too, thrummed a warning.
She didn’t call out for Bookie. Soundlessly, she backed away, wishing she’d been quieter going through the stairwell door. She turned to run.
A man stepped out from a dark doorway she’d passed, blocking her return to the stairs. He faced her, a black silhouette. He took a step forward, and to her demon-pitched hearing, the step boomed with other-realm power, reverberating in her bones until her teeth rattled. Another thunderous step brought him within reach of one of the lighted rooms.
And still he was a black silhouette. Her enhanced vision couldn’t penetrate the unrelieved darkness that devoured him.
Now she knew why he’d taken the name Corvus—Latin for blackbird.
She bolted. Not Bookie’s office, obviously a trap. Was the historian there, wounded or dead? The next door down the hall wasn’t locked. She ducked in, then cursed when she flicked on the light and realized there was no lock on what was clearly a catch-all room and small at that.
She hauled a battered desk in front of the door. It wouldn’t stop Corvus, she knew. He wasn’t relying on his ferales anymore.
In the hall, each step boomed with etheric shock waves that sent her demon, trapped within her, fleeing in helpless circles until she reeled with vertigo. Her hypersensitive hearing faltered, so one moment her ears rang with the relentless footsteps, and in the next, only an eerie, lying silence.
No wonder teshuva didn’t fight the djinn. Her demon obviously thought they were doomed. Great. Abandoned once again.
Screw that. She pushed another desk in front of the first, then spun it ninety degrees lengthwise so that only a few inches separated it from the far wall. If he pushed open the door, the door would shove the desks into the wall.
That wouldn’t stop him either. Nothing would.
She cast around the small space, looking for something, anything, to defend herself. A box of file folders. A rolling chair. A shelf with a row of glass beakers. Maybe the acoustic tiles overhead hid a false ceiling where she could escape.
The door exploded inward, crushing the corner of the first desk. Splinters and a strip of metal blew through the room. The rebound sent the second desk spinning crazily. It knocked her to the ground.
She tried to roll and screamed at the pain in her leg.
Broken. She knew that physical sensation of sound, of bone grating on bone. The right femur was snapped in half. She wouldn’t be able to stand until her teshuva healed her.
From outside, Corvus shoved at the debris, all that was keeping him from entering.
She clawed through the wreckage, avoiding the chair that rolled toward her as he crashed through. Glass from the shattered beakers cut her palms.
Her fingers closed around the metal strip.
She rolled to her back, saw him looming over her, and lashed out with the thin metal.
He recoiled, but the tip grazed diagonally across his face. Blood sprayed. Before she could attack again, he lunged, pinning her wrist under his boot, grinding her hand into the broken glass. On either side of the bloody line, his eyes narrowed.
Okay, yeah, they were doomed.
He plucked the measly weapon from her grasp, slicing her fingers. She bit into her lip rather than cry out.
Without the teshuva focused on the djinni, she finally could see the man. Blunt features, thick neck, shaved bullet head. He looked like a gladiator. The scratch she’d given him was healing, almost lost among the myriad faint scars on his face.
But his eyes . . . She’d expected anything—crimson red, jaundiced orange, deep black, or blank white—besides this shimmering, celestial blue.
He wrapped his fingers around her neck and straightened, pulling her upright, up to her toes, then off her feet entirely. The ring on his finger cut into her throat. He held her aloft without straining.
“Where is your demon?” He gave her a little shake, as if she might be hiding it in her pocket. “Teshuva coward, where are you? You’d abandon your woman to fight your battles alone?”
She clawed at his fingers around her neck, prying at the large-stoned ring she could feel but not see. She kicked, but the agony in her leg almost made her vomit, not good while being choked.
Her all-too-human vision darkened. She supposed she should be glad for a relatively painless death, compared to poor Zane’s.
On the other hand, she finally understood Archer’s desire to go out in a blaze of demon-shredding glory.
She’d add her own demon to the ass kicking. The teshuva had promised her strength, and she was dying from want of air.
As the blackness closed around her, her last sight was those heavenly eyes, and her last thought that heaven should be pissed.
CHAPTER 23
Half buried in leaves beside the daybed, Archer’s cell phone buzzed. He glared at it balefully. Wouldn’t be good news. When was it ever?
Because he feared whom the bad news might be about, he answered on the last ring before the call went to voice mail.
The voice on the other end was tentative. “This is Nanette. Sera’s friend. I don’t know if you remember me.”
“The faith healer.” A prickle of unease went through him. “Is Sera all right?”
A pause on the other end. “She’s not with you? I had the impression . . . Sorry to bother you.”
“Wait.” He gripped the phone. “What’s wrong?”
“Someone needs to talk to her, rather urgently, and I can’t reach her. I remembered you gave Wendy, the nursing home director, the name of your cleaning service. I called them—who needs a twenty-four-hour dry cleaner?—and they agreed to give me your phone number if I promised to tell you not to send them any more business like yours. I said I would, and I have.”
Archer closed his eyes, struggling for patience. “Can we get to the ‘rather urgently’ part?”
“Do you know where she is?”
“Not at the moment.” Likely never again.
“We have to find her. She’s in terrible danger.”
“She’s possessed by a demon. Of course she’s in danger.” He tensed at the thought of what the angelic host would do to her if they discovered she could open a path into the demon realm.
“Not just danger to her soul. Real danger. I mean, her soul being in danger is real danger—”
“Urgently,” Archer reminded her.
“Sorry. I’ve just never seen anything like this. All he keeps saying is he needs Sera.”
“He?” Archer’s blood froze. “Nanette, listen. You may be dealing with a djinn-possessed man. And he is most definitely dangerous.”
“No, this is just a man. And he’s hurt.”
“He could be disguising what he is, to gain your trust.”