When he faced her, Fane’s eyes were deeper than the shadows of the empty club. “Call the souls.”
Nim shook her head. “Bad things happen when I turn up the juice. Besides, the teshuva can’t see souls unless they’ve been shredded out of the body by solvo.”
“Not just solvo. Anything demon fouled.”
She wrinkled her nose. Charming. Demon fouled, was she? “I know Nanette can see the soulflies, just like me. Why can’t you just—?”
“Elaine,” he snapped. “Are you always this tiresome?”
“If you’d brought Jonah, you’d know the answer,” she snarled back. “And my name is Nim.”
“Do you want to find Corvus?”
“Duh.”
He gritted out each word. “Then bring me the damned souls.”
Wow. Now she was getting actual angels, not just missionary men, to swear. Unless he meant literally damned, and then she supposed it was a technical term and not an expletive. But at least now she was starting to understand. “You don’t want to sully your pretty white hands on those nasty, demon-fouled, damned souls, do you?”
“It is no business of the league how the heavenly order presides over the war with the tenebraeternum.”
She frowned. “I didn’t say anything about heaven. . . . Oh, you mean you’re not supposed to be here either. And your bosses—how many higher spheres are there anyway?—will notice if you get gunk under your nails. So you brought me to do the dirty work.”
He glowered at her.
She shrugged. “I’m not afraid of dirty work.”
“We have to stop Corvus.”
“What d’you mean ‘we,’ white man?” She walked into the middle of the room. No one had picked up since the attack, and the tables were still upturned, the chairs broken and strewn across the floor. But the bodies had disappeared. Which, in some ways, was even more eerie, since if she didn’t know better, she might have thought the mess was the result of a particularly uproarious bachelor party. But the wrong kind of stains remained, dark and spreading, the source of the lingering stink that had Mobi licking the air. Which made her feel a little nauseated.
She avoided the tainted patches, just as she had walked around the ether signs at the pawnshop all those centuries, years, okay, days ago. She took a breath, then wished she hadn’t. “You have to be ready to knock me out if the lure spreads too far.”
“Happily,” he said.
“You could at least look like you’re joking,” she said.
But mostly he looked like he had seen a ghost. And she hadn’t even started calling yet. The sphericanum must really frown on fraternizing between angels and demons if the mighty Fane was so anxious about what they were doing.
Which, along with actually finding Blackbird, sort of unnerved her now. Based on the name, she’d been picturing something small and fluffy—evil, of course, but fluffily so. But, then, she’d always been one to underestimate wickedness.
Her soul had been invaded and her anklet stolen—well, after she’d sold it—and her life was no longer her own. But if there was one thing she’d always been good at, it was making the best of her own failings. And where better than here, the murky, hell-hot, claustrophobic Shimmy Shack of Lost Souls, with an angel watching over her to revel in her failure . . . and still not let it touch her.
“Here I go.” She stepped up onto the unlit stage to gather the energy that would bring down the house.
CHAPTER 21
Throwing Andre off the pier with his spine crushed had been hasty. Corvus lugged the clinking duffel across the rough ground, salty crystals of sweat grating at the corner of his eye when he blinked. Where clumps of grass had poked up, it was hard to see the trash. But breaking bottles had their own special sound underfoot. He winced as he found another and added it to his duffel.
He trudged across the field.
Soul gone. Mind gone. His downtown aerie with its city view gone. His minions gone.
He paused in front of the tower. Nothing else moved in the hot stillness except an eerie, singing hum, like a wet fingertip on crystal. The etheric resonance of amassed tenebrae raised the birnenston-scorched hair on his demon-scarred arms.
Not all gone . . .
Who’d turned the stage lights on? Nim saw the strobe through her closed eyelids.
“Elaine?” The worried voice sounded far away. Much farther than the lights. “Nim, stop now.”
She couldn’t stop. She had to bring them all. They all wanted her. . . . They all had to want her. . . .
“No,” she whispered. The desire was hers to indulge, no one else’s. “Don’t touch,” she hissed. And she opened her eyes.
Cyril Fane stood below her, his hand on the stage as if he were about to boost himself up. Probably to punch her lights out, to stop the call.
But there were already plenty of lights, and she had stopped herself.
They hovered in vaguely human shape, unlike the drifting clouds of soulflies. The brutal terror of the ferales had destroyed their bodies, leaving their blood to soak the floorboards, but their souls were mercifully—maybe “mercifully” wasn’t the right word—whole and unbroken.
Not that they seemed reconciled to the distinction.
The souls shifted almost too fast for her demon eye to follow, blinking between the various stains on the floor, then reappearing to hover near the stage, then circling again, with faint etheric contrails connecting the dots. Even when they paused for a moment, they pulsed with an agitation beyond the need for words. Which, now that she thought about it, seemed problematic.
She glared at Fane. “They can’t talk.”
He looked away. “In stories, they always find a way to tell their secrets.”
“Stories?” Her multioctave shriek puffed the souls away like oversized dandelion blooms. “What, like ghost stories?”
He hunched his shoulders. “I don’t read much populist fiction. And the upper spheres of the sphericanum haven’t bothered with the aftermath before.”
“Then why didn’t we bring Nanette?”
“She’s the one who convinced me we need to get involved.”
“But you thought you could handle it. Handle me.” In her everyday human derision, the demon overtones melted away, and she shook her head. “Didn’t I tell you not to touch?”
She raised her gaze to track the wandering souls. If she was going to talk to any of them . . .
“If only souls kept their fake tits,” she muttered. She cleared her throat and called, “Amber?” She thought for a moment. “Myra? Are you here?”
Fane shifted in his loafers. “Maybe choose just one. We don’t want them all over us.”
Of course not. Who wanted soul smears all over? “Myra picked Amber for her stripper name, even though I told her amber isn’t worth shit without a big bug stuck in it. She said Myra sounded like a cow’s name. But you should’ve seen her boob job.” Nim kept her gaze out of focus as one of the souls drifted nearer. Maybe Amber, and maybe pissed about the wasted plastic surgery.
How, exactly, was an amorphous column of transparent Christmas lights supposed to pass along a message? And what could a murdered soul know about Corvus, who’d, after all, sent only his human and demonic henchmen? Yet another higher power who didn’t want to get his hands dirty.
“Myra . . .” Nim found she had no more words for the dead dancer than she’d had for the live one. “I wish I knew which of us got screwed worse.”