Which didn’t give any of them a chance to appreciate Corvus’s redecorating before the salambes descended in attack, and their flame-bright ether lit the interior like walking into a lava lamp of doom. Nim would appreciate the comparison.
Assuming they survived.
CHAPTER 23
Nim swore as Jonah passed her at the fence. He’d taken the newly adapted sword from Liam earlier in the night and hadn’t even acknowledged her when she suggested he give it a whirl before they went out.
He could lose his head with a crappy attitude like that.
What a terrible time to realize she wanted to keep him just the way he was. She was done with dancing alone.
The stream of oversized male talyan flowed into the grain elevator, forcing her to pause as the doorway swallowed him. Her pulse ratcheted to painful intensity. Simply losing sight of him was bad enough.
She stared up. The elevator loomed above her. At the very top, black against the haze of distant city lights, the wings and floats of the half-dismantled plane perched like a weathervane.
Archer rocked to a stop beside her. “Are you armed this time?”
She lifted the African throwing knife she’d picked out. With its uniquely asymmetrical four-pronged design, and every prong sharpened to a wicked edge, she didn’t even need to aim.
Archer nodded. “Stay out here with my defensive team.”
“Jonah’s inside. He needs me.” She knew she didn’t have to say more.
After a heartbeat, Archer nodded toward the tower. “Go, then. And don’t get dead.”
She didn’t bother rolling her eyes. She just returned the nod and ran for the doorway where the last talyan had disappeared inside. She crossed the threshold, and for a second, her world upended.
Ecco had explained how he neutralized and contained malice in etherically altered glass capped with foil blessed by an angelic possessed. No wonder they hadn’t sensed an overwhelming presence of tenebrae; Corvus had made the entire wooden tower into a blessed—or in this case, damned—bottle.
The ravaged interior still showed the bracing structures of the five-story vertical bins where grain had been stored, but the walls had been mostly torn away. What was left was honeycombed but asymmetrical, like a misshapen beehive.
And everything had been sheeted in etched glass.
Nim almost staggered under her teshuva’s disorientation against the reflected and distorted emanations of the tenebrae trapped behind glass. This was how Jonah must feel every day with his demon’s flow disrupted.
The thought of him straightened her. Where had he gone?
The combined force of the teshuva energy had created a protective no-fly zone over the gathered talyan, but a cloud of salambes hovered just above. Their virulent glow lit the glass as if someone had set the world on fire. And Jonah’s blond hair gleamed like gold.
Nim couldn’t help but hunch her shoulders as she raced toward him. Good thing she’d worn her sneakers; even the roughly planked flooring underfoot was coated with glass.
She called his name, but the sound was lost in the chime of shattering glass as a feralis—no, not one, but a handful, then dozens—began to break free of the walls.
And the floor. The slick glass heaved under her feet, and she fell to her knees. A half-shelled feralis—she recognized the patterns from the fragment from the club, but the rest was bony protuberances like fish bones—reared up over her. Whatever lock of energies had kept the tenebrae confined had been broken by the teshuva’s arrival.
As the other ferales rose, leaving monster-sized graves behind in the glass, she found herself reluctant to actually throw away her throwing knife. Keeping her pointy treasures close seemed suddenly wiser.
From her prone position, she kicked at the feralis. It went down in a tumble, squat legs waving in the air. Ha—certain advantages in fighting a mutated-turtle enemy. Once they were flipped over—
The feralis heaved itself to its spiny side and whirled to slice at her with snapping turtle jaws.
The disadvantages of fighting a mutated half turtle. She lashed out with the knife to force it away. It reared back, exposing the leathery folds of its neck embedded with glass pebbles. . . .
She struck with all the teshuva’s force. The knife bit deep, past the first and second prongs, buried to the third. She yanked back and rolled away from the fountain of black ichor. Splinters of glass ground into her palms.
The feralis wasn’t going anywhere and she didn’t have time to neutralize its emanations. She’d lost Jonah in the melee as the talyan engaged the ferales. The uproar of clashing energies had allowed the salambes to descend, like saber-toothed vultures, and the ruined glass walls glinted crazily.
“Corvus Valerius!”
She heard the shout, though she couldn’t see the shouter. But she felt the surge of demonic energy as the talyan focused.
There was Jonah! He was already running for the stairs, in a pack with five other talyan. Of course, Corvus wouldn’t be hanging here with the rabble. If anywhere, he’d be in the cupola at the top of the tower.
She blew past the remaining talyan. Ecco shouted at her, but she didn’t hesitate. She tagged behind Haji and hit the stairs with Jonah’s group before she thought how this probably wasn’t what Archer had meant by “Don’t get dead.”
Of course, he’d let her go, so he must’ve known that, dead or deadly, she had to be with Jonah.
The stairs had been built against the exterior wall. With the interior gutted, the steps clung precariously over the open center. A few treads were missing, and she almost plummeted through one gap as Haji, just ahead of her, cleared the opening with typical talya grace.
Locked in the glass prison, the demons had gone mad. The salambes dove at them as they climbed. In their spiraling frenzy, the salambes shredded trailing sparks that rained down on the talyan below like party streamers on fire. Their hunger beat against Nim’s awareness and licked in to taste her fear.
She gripped the ichor-stained knife and plunged upward.
Under her hand, braced against the outer wall, the tower quivered. Had the inner coating of glass been the only thing holding up the old wood? A hysterical laugh threatened, and she realized she wasn’t much better. A sharp and deadly gleam hiding rot. Jonah should be thankful she hadn’t returned his love. At least not aloud.
A stair crumbled under her foot and only a desperate push launched her to the next step. The talyan ahead of her raced on.
If she’d fallen, none would have noticed. Unless, of course, she landed on someone five stories down. Her stomach heaved. Been there; done that. Not fun.
A smash from above brought her attention upward. Jonah had reached the upper landing, just big enough for one man. The door ran with rippled glass. Corvus obviously hadn’t wanted the tenebrae to come knocking.
Unfortunately for him, the teshuva weren’t so polite.
With another blow from the sword, Jonah cracked through the glass. Then he rammed his shoulder against the door. So much for his lock finessing.
The wood crumbled before him and he disappeared inside.
“Not again,” she muttered.
The other talyan were right behind him, and Nim sped upward as the stairs behind her flaked away with the shivering tower.
There was no going back now.
She caromed through the doorway.
Into a seething black wall of malice.
She should’ve wondered where they all were. No gathering of tenebrae was complete without festive red malice eyeballs. Or maybe she meant “festering.”
In a way, malice were scarier than ferales. She could lop off the head of a feralis and disable its corporeal husk. Malice were cockroach quick, but there was nothing to swing at, just a creeping chill that turned her blood to ice and her teshuva to frozen Jell-O.