Despite the seeping pain, she struggled forward. The cupola wasn’t that big. The talyan couldn’t have gone too far, although the blinding malice swarm gave her the eerie sensation that she could step through a hole in the floor and plummet, sliced and diced by the spears of glass lining the walls all the way down.
She didn’t think that would end as well as the last time she’d fallen, when she’d ended up in Jonah’s arms.
As if her thoughts had conjured them, heavy arms wrapped around her from behind.
Arms, as in two. Thickly lined with virulent yellow reven. Nobody she knew well enough for such a friendly hug.
With a shout, she dropped into a crouch. The abrupt move broke the grasp. She swept one leg out behind her and whirled at the same time, the throwing knife biting through the air.
Air was all she hit as the man who’d grabbed her leapt straight up.
He hovered unnaturally aloft for longer than was possible, and her teshuva-aided vision registered a poison-yellow fog, vaguely human-shaped, around him. The djinni. It had jerked him out of the way of her blow and held him suspended an extra moment, like a toy dangling out of her reach.
Corvus landed lightly on his feet, but his wayward eyeball jolted unpleasantly in his skull, loose as a baby blue marble. The sulfur gleam in the other eye, though, sent the last erg of her teshuva bravery scuttling for deep cover.
She felt utterly alone.
He waved one hand with obvious irritation, and the malice smog lifted slightly. Around his thick wrist, links of rough chain cut into his skin. A large bead pressed against his pulse point, and the design incised into the dull silver glinted at her.
Her anklet. The key to her teshuva’s most potent trick.
“The Naughty Nymphette.” His voice rumbled, to match that shaved bullet head and thick features. “Finally.”
She braced her fingers against the floor, balancing her weight, and tightened her grip on the knife. All four honed prongs glinted at the corner of her gaze.
And didn’t give her any sense of conviction at all. Where were Haji and the other talyan? Where was Jonah?
“If I keep you talking, will you not kill me?” she wondered.
“Why would I kill you, sister mine?”
“I’m an only child. Anyway, I’m fairly certain my mother wouldn’t claim you. Sorry.” Maybe she shouldn’t piss him off. “My dad, though . . .”
Corvus shook his head. The human eye locked on her for a moment before it lost direction again. “Soul siblings.” He smiled and held out his hands. His reven had cracked and oozed down both arms. The human skin around the tracings blistered and smoked. “I am your brother-in-arms.”
“I have all the arms I need,” she muttered.
But Jonah might be lying injured only steps away and she wouldn’t know. And couldn’t do anything. Unless she got that anklet.
“Well,” she stalled. She shifted her weight to her thighs. Was she fast enough to spring past him? And could she bring herself to lop off his arm to snag the anklet? She thought yes on the lopping. As for the speed . . . She coughed to disguise a hysterical laugh. “Most of my routines are solo, but if you’re interested in the life, I know some male revues.”
His jaundice-tinged eye contracted. “No more of your men, Nymphette. I find myself quite tired of them.” His voice shifted, lighter than before. “You and I, though, together we could free ourselves of those who have sought to master us all our lives.”
Who was talking to her? The djinni escaped from hell? Or the gladiator who’d been tossed from the Colosseum with two broken arms and a demon hunting him? Or had the two joined forces for this rogue rampage against the respectable battle between good and evil?
She kind of understood where he was coming from.
He—whichever he was—must have seen some weakening in her eyes, because he took a step closer.
But, really, just because she knew he was right didn’t mean she was going to listen.
Quick as Mobi lashing after a rat, she sprang toward him. The longest prong of the knife scored his chest, but the yellow fog was quicker. The djinni yanked Corvus away, and she flailed past him.
On the plus side, she stumbled into the malice cloud and lost sight of him. On the minus side, she stumbled into the malice cloud and lost sight of him.
The wretched, sucking pain and despair of the engulfing malice was like the worst flu and the worst hangover and the worst night of senseless channel surfing ever. With the teshuva too overwhelmed by the tenebrae energy to fight back, she went to her knees. But she’d spent many a night crawling through bad hangovers, so she wasn’t going to give in to a bunch of etheric pests. Below her clenched hands, even the floor—the only malice-free thing she could see—was starting to gray as her vision dimmed. The edges of the knife glimmered and faded.
Was she really going to die for nothing, killed by nothing? Appropriate, when she’d always been nothing.
Wait, she didn’t think that. Her rapist had whispered that she had nothing to cry about. Her mother had told her she mustn’t speak. Her father had looked away as if she’d disappeared.
But she wasn’t nothing. Not anymore.
“Don’t touch,” she snarled.
She drew herself into a crouch and lashed out with the knife. There was nothing to strike, but the teshuva surged in her muscles, revived now that she was away from the djinni’s overwhelming energy. The malice recoiled in a wave, not from the knife, she knew, but from her demon.
She stood, wavered a little, and locked her knees.
“Ah, Nymphette.” Corvus’s rumbling voice seemed to come from all around, and the malice swirled in agitated funnel clouds. “You wound me. Not literally, of course. You tried to take my arm off.”
“I want my anklet back.” No point trying to hide from him. He could clear the malice with one burst of djinni power. And clear her teshuva again too.
“And it would look lovely against your tawny hide.”
“What? You’re going to skin me for a rug?” Could she sneak around through the malice fog, come up behind him, and commence with the aforementioned lopping?
“Don’t tease,” he chided. “I’ve no use for those I can walk over. Not anymore. The battle has progressed too far for pawns to carry the banner any farther.”
“Good news for the pawns.” She crept to her right, toward the voice, knife at the ready.
“It would be, were any still standing. Unlike you.”
“I’m not a pawn.”
“Not anymore.” Between one blink and the next, Corvus emerged from the malice cloud bank, and she bit back a gasp. The knife wavered in her hand. He seemed unfazed by the point aimed at him, skimmed in his stillhuman blood. “Aren’t you tired of dancing for your masters, Nymphette?”
With the teshuva’s strength sputtering, the weight of the knife pulled at her arm. “They were never my masters.”
Now Corvus was sneering. Jonah had doubted her too. And the teshuva, cowering somewhere behind her navel or something, obviously didn’t think she could pull this off.
Like she’d once taunted wallets out of the back pockets of the jaded, cheap bastards at the Shimmy Shack, she focused every nerve and muscle toward a single point. Or four points, in this case. She hauled back and let fly with the knife. The four prongs whirled into one glimmering circle of death.
And sank into Corvus’s chest through his raggedyman clothes, crisscrossing the shallow slash she’d landed earlier.
Both of Corvus’s eyes focused on her with malevolent intent.
Empty-handed, she felt way more naked than she’d ever felt with all her clothes off. In retrospect, disarming herself might not have been the smartest move. But since when did she ever look back?