After a moment of silence, everyone mumbled disagreement.
“Yeah,” Sera said. “I don’t think that either.”
“But it doesn’t really matter why,” Nim said. “All we care about is where.” She glanced at Jonah as if for confirmation, yet her expression was uncertain.
What else was he supposed to care about? He crossed his arm over his chest. He felt like the fragment: half–hollow shell, half–brittle glass. “The djinn-man needs to fall. And stay fallen this time.”
“You make it sound so easy,” Archer muttered.
Nim dropped her gaze. “How much more do we need? Andre told us Corvus mentioned a float plane. Fane dug up the turtle shell. And Ramirez said the bodies were contaminated with a gnarly acid. How many places could we be talking about?”
Sera gave a wry shrug and tossed the shard toward her computer. Over the discordant clatter and chime as it hit the monitor, she mused, “We live in an industrial city on a lake. Let’s see . . .”
“So look it up.” Nim pointed her chin at the computer.
“What am I looking up? Demons and esoteric glass-work and apocalypse—oh, hell?”
“I was thinking float planes, turtles, and hydrofluoric acid,” Nim said. “But don’t exclude demons from the search.”
Sera shook her head and crossed to the keyboard. “Right. Because Corvus Valerius is listed on Google. Besides that one Roman general, I mean.” She muttered to herself as she typed. “More generic? ‘Chicago airport’ and ‘industrial waste’? ‘Turtles’ can stay.” She sat back abruptly. “I’d forgotten they talked about an airport at Lake Calumet.”
“I remember,” Jilly said. “I dated an environmental activist for a while who talked about saving the marshes there.” She bumped her shoulder into Liam’s. “You would’ve hated him.”
“The feeling would’ve been mutual.” The league leader folded his arms over his chest. “The area was used for illegal dumping for decades, and a few rotting ferales’ carcasses might’ve been added to the pile on occasion.”
“And now they’re coming back to haunt us.” Nim gestured at the glass fragment. “Well? Let’s go check it out. What’ve we got to lose?”
Everyone looked at her.
She grimaced. “Oh, other than all that?”
“Tonight,” Liam said. “When the others wake.”
Under the thick, black sky, the lake was rippled glass. Tar and obsidian, Jonah thought, as he dragged in another humid breath. He let the breath out slowly as he stroked the oar silently through the water. Across the wide deck from him, Lex manned the second oar and matched his paddling. The pontoons weren’t made for rowing, but they hadn’t wanted to announce themselves with motors.
And, more important, the square, stable craft left room for fighting, should any ferales come winging out of the dark.
Behind him, the second boat they’d “borrowed” was equally silent as they explored the shoreline. Somewhere inland, two other teams poked through the wreckage of industry and the forest that had sprung up around it. But his cell phone, set to vibrate, was as stubbornly still as the woman at his side.
No one had been left behind tonight. He’d understood that to ask her otherwise was pointless. Despite her play at shamelessness, he knew she felt the guilty sting of losing the anklet. But if Corvus had holed up somewhere ahead . . .
The sweat that stained his shirt felt suddenly clammy and chilled.
Kneeling at the prow, Nim turned her head abruptly. Her eyes gleamed violet in the night, and his heart leapt in atavistic delight at the hunter’s glow. “There,” she whispered. “In that tower.”
He followed her gaze. The grain elevator stood abandoned, ringed in a thicket of undergrowth. No terrestrial light shone there, but to his demon’s eyes, a flicker of etheric disturbance shot across the single upper-story window and then vanished.
His phone twitched in his pocket. Sera texted from the boat behind them to all the talyan; she’d seen the demon sign too.
Perhaps it was nothing; a lone feralis ghosting through the empty building in pursuit of a sickly bat to add to its corporeal husk. Suddenly, he couldn’t say which he wanted more: another false alarm or Corvus’s crushed head on a pike.
His phone vibrated again. A call this time, conferenced to the rest of the teams. He tilted the phone so the other talyan could hear.
“We’re just outside the fence around the elevator,” Liam said. “The ground is littered with bones. And turtle shells. Jonah, you’ll have to beach the boats. The dock looks completely rotted out.” The league leader’s voice deepened with satisfaction. “And if you’ll direct your attention to the top floor, you’ll notice the rusted-out skeleton of what appears to be a float plane.”
Just as Andre had told them.
“Not getting much demon sign.” Archer, from the second ground team, sounded disappointed. “If it is Corvus, he’s gotten lazy and lonely.”
“Then he’ll love to see us,” Jonah murmured.
Nim’s violet gaze fixed on him, then shied away.
Liam’s voice crackled. “If there’s no etheric interference to distract him, the djinni will know we’re coming. Let’s move.”
The flare of teshuva energy was certainly a giveaway, Jonah thought, but he couldn’t contain the surge as he drove the boat through the water. The second boat, with Ecco and Nando at the oars, was right behind him.
The two pontoons hit the brushy shoreline in a burst of mud and murky stink. Jonah jabbed the oar into the muck and heaved the boat another length onto solid ground. The end of the oar clacked against his new cuff as he vaulted over the prow.
Despite his speed, Nim was already ahead of him, half-lost among the rushes. He couldn’t call out to her without giving away their location.
As he raced after her, he fumbled over his shoulder for the executioner’s sword strapped against his spine. He hadn’t had time to practice the move, to smooth out the reach and grab, much less the twist and latch that locked the blade to his cuff. The metal cuff that Liam had made laced ingeniously up his forearm to his shoulder, like some bizarre cyborg warrior.
He hadn’t even swung the sword yet.
Off to his right and a little ahead, Ecco stumbled and swore. Jonah swept past him. Maybe he’d keep the big talya on his right, and if his first practice swing accidentally took off anybody’s head . . .
The teshuva rose in him, tightening his muscles, sharpening every hazy, starlit glimmer of grass. He vaulted over a fifty-gallon drum rusting in the weeds and landed with a crunch of old bone. Nim was only a step ahead of him.
From the water, the grain elevator had looked surrounded by overgrowth. But an unnatural clearing spread from the base of the tower to a chain-link fence on the outskirts. The fencing rattled as, somewhere along its length, the first talyan went over.
Nim hit the fence at a dead run. Clad in black from head to foot, she was a shadow against the dark sky. He jumped beside her, hooked the top curve of the sword over the upper rim of the fence, and yanked himself over. To his relief, the blade didn’t detach from the cuff, nor the cuff from his arm. And, even more of a relief, now he was ahead of her.
She’d already made it clear she had no qualms about confronting Corvus on her own. He’d make sure she didn’t get that chance again.
From the inland side, a dozen talyan converged on the tower, Liam in the lead. He charged across the clearing like a human—human plus demon—battering ram. The hammer shone in a gleaming arc over his head. And he brought it crashing down against the door.
Jonah could’ve sworn they’d decided on something not quite full frontal, but maybe he’d missed an IM.
With one entrance and the risk of bottlenecking, they had only the element of surprise to get enough of them in the door. So he was right on Liam’s heels, with the rest of the talyan breathing down his neck.