She spun on her heel and fled toward the malice darkness. No quipping now; Corvus’s heels on the wooden floor behind her pounded out a rhythm of doom. The fury of the djinni was like an inferno at her spine. She wasn’t going to make it.
Through the tenebrae blackness, pockmarked with the stark crimson of malice eyes, a glint of gold shone.
Nim cried out as a blade pierced the shadows; then Jonah emerged a heartbeat behind.
Jonah had heard her voice, and the malice-evoked memories that had paralyzed him—memories where the jungle darkness had never lifted, where he’d never walked out—lifted at the sound.
And he saw her with Corvus Valerius hard on her heels, the djinni’s venomous form reaching ahead to snag her.
The teshuva in him hesitated in the face of such unrelenting evil. But he’d stopped relying on the teshuva. So he stepped forward into the fight without a second thought for his doubtful demon.
Nim shouted his name, her eyes bright with fear and, he thought, delight. Well, he’d be glad to see the long reach of the executioner’s sword too, if he were empty-handed.
He swung, knowing he wouldn’t connect, knowing too that Corvus’s djinni would instinctively remove his body from danger, and give Nim a heartbeat to escape.
“Go,” he told her.
Of course, she made no such attempt. Instead, she slowed and, incredibly, turned back.
He swung again. He’d already discovered that the sword, cleverly fitted though it was, was no substitute for his arm. The wrist cuff didn’t bend, and his entire body was forced to follow through with the blow. A strange dance of power and momentum and vulnerability. A death dance. But who would die?
Nim, the bold and ungrateful wench, darted back in. Even as the djinni was jerking Corvus away from Jonah’s third swing, Nim leapt in from the side. She grabbed at the gladiator, and Jonah’s heart curdled as he pulled back from another attack. What was she—?
Then the chain looped around the djinn-man’s wrist caught a flash of light.
She’d found the anklet.
Corvus lashed out with one birnenston-laced arm. The anklet gleamed. He backhanded Nim and slammed her across the room. She hit the wall in an arc of blood and crumpled.
Corvus’s roar tore through the malice cloud and the tower shuddered, sending Jonah to his knees. One of the rotted beams buckled beside his hand, and he rolled away from the sudden fissure that went five stories down.
The malice scattered toward the high corners of the cupola. As they lifted, he caught a glimpse of the other talyan whose teshuva had been overcome by the sheer chaotic energy of the massed tenebrae. Nando pushed upright and gave Lex a hand up, the malice malaise rapidly clearing from their eyes.
Jonah thought that if he could keep the djinni occupied long enough for the other talyan to recover, to take back the anklet, while he went for Nim . . . He lunged at Corvus.
Corvus ducked. As he spun away, he wrenched up two floorboards, one for each hand. Nails squealed free from the decayed wood. He wielded the two makeshift maces over his head, and the nails glinted like snaggle fangs.
“You talyan should have killed me when you had the chance,” he said. “Or, I should say, chances.”
“We tried. A good-faith attempt.” Jonah circled the hole in the floor, now three boards wide. The glass beneath the open space shimmered in the corner of his eye. Worse, a chill breath circled into the cupola. Somewhere below, the other women were piercing the Veil. And the demon realm was responding with its cold sigh. “Since you ask nicely, we’re willing to take another shot.”
Corvus tsked and shook his head. His blue eye drifted. “Too late. The djinni has made other plans.”
“How is hiding in the top of your pretty tower a plan?”
Corvus spat. Birnenston sizzled on the planks between his feet. “It works for heaven.”
Jonah cursed himself for engaging in repartee with a djinni-possessed man who’d left half his gray matter splattered across a sidewalk the first time they’d met. He vaulted across the hole in the floor, the downward whistle of the blade his only response.
Corvus met the blade with his board. The sword sheared through the wood.
Too easily. Jonah stumbled behind the swing, all his weight canted forward.
With a nasty chuckle, Corvus cracked the shortened board upward. He caught Jonah hard under the chin.
Jonah’s head snapped back. For an instant, he lost track of up and down as his feet went over his head.
But he’d already seen Lex and Nando right behind Corvus.
He might have felt more gleeful, except he knew the hole was behind him somewhere.
He scrabbled at the rotted wood that crumbled under his fingers until he finally caught himself. He shoved to his feet, staggered one step as his ringing brain caught up with the new direction.
Lex had Corvus in a half nelson, the anklet-bound arm flailing, while Nando moved in for the kill.
Not that any talya had ever killed a djinn-man before.
Corvus bellowed, but the sound held more fury than fear. The demon marks on his arms wept birnenston, and Lex’s face was cramped with the effort of keeping his grip. Jonah knew the other man’s teshuva must be faltering from the etheric toxin.
The djinni thinned to a yellow mist that choked the air with the stench of rotting eggs.
Was it trying to escape? Without a soul in Corvus’s husk to anchor it, Jonah knew that nothing prevented the demon from leaving. No wonder it had no fear.
The mist unfurled in a graceful, almost lazy spiral. Like when he and Nim had danced on the Shades of Gray and he’d spun her out to the length of their extended arms.
And then he’d whirled her back into his grasp, and the shock of her hitting his chest had nearly stopped his heart.
The djinni’s outward expansion slowed, stopped. Reversed.
“Nando, Lex, get down,” he cried. “Get down!”
The emanations snapped back into Corvus’s body, and the sudden compression of demonic energy in a confined space released a detonation of toxic ether. Weakened with age and neglect and the seeping battle stains, the cupola began to buckle.
The wall closest behind the djinn-man exploded in the damp stink of old wood. Malice circled, seeking escape, frenetic streamers of ether staining the air as the night poured in.
At its epicenter, the reven on Corvus’s arms burst with poison like a backed-up sewer. The beams around his feet groaned and sagged. His hulking body staggered but did not fall.
The talyan were not so lucky. Lex and Nando tumbled backward like a pair of dice. Lex went over the edge where the wall had been, with only Nando’s shout to mark his fall. The talya reached for his disappeared comrade. And then the malice sprang loose.
The second shock wave hit Nando and knocked him into the darkness after Lex, a split second before the force slammed into Jonah.
Again he clutched for some hold as he spun across the floor. But this time his fingers found only open air.
The hungry tongue of the tenebraeternum wind swirled up through the riddled floor and sucked him down.
CHAPTER 24
Nim came to with a hundred malice streaming by, their frenetic screams slicing by her like a thousand paper cuts. The wall beside her was half-gone, and the city on the horizon fuzzed and crackled with bad reception. She blinked hard, and the teshuva snapped everything into focus.
She bolted to her feet and tried to catch her balance. But the tower swayed under her. Not her demon slacking off; the whole thing was going to crumble. “Jonah!”
She was alone.