“Nim!”
Not alone.
Wedged sideways in a gaping hole in the floor, the executioner’s sword glinted. Jonah had managed to hook his elbow over the floorboard. Only the oversized length of the sword had kept him from a long plummet down the glass-lined gullet of the abandoned bins.
She ran to him, stepping lightly on the patchwork beams.
He hung suspended. His legs swung above the four-story drop. Below him, the mad swirl of the battle reflected a million times in the facets of shimmering, shattered glass.
She flung herself down beside the hole to hook her elbow under his armpit. “Can you get a grip with your other hand?”
“It’s rotting from the inside.” He looked up at her. “Get out.”
“Do you know me at all?”
Despite his precarious position, he grinned fiercely. “I wanted to make sure you’d stay.”
She snorted. “Just reach up on the other side so you don’t crack the boards under me.”
The wood pulped under his fingers, and the tower seemed to list farther with every handful that tore free. Glass chimed as it fell, and she shuddered at a scream from below. Talyan or tenebrae? She couldn’t be sure, but something desperate and hurting.
With her counterweight, he swung one leg up through the hole. Even as the planks disintegrated, he heaved himself toward her. She pulled back, narrowly avoided yanking them both down another fissure opening in the floor, and dragged him away from the gaping center. The flooring around the outer edge seemed sturdier; at least it held their weight for the moment.
“Where are—?” She bit off the rest of the question in horror when Jonah shook his head.
“We have to get out of here.” He rose, pulling her to her feet. “If the building comes down with us inside, we’ll be minced.”
“The stairs peeled off the walls behind me,” she said. “We’re not getting out that way.”
“So where’d Corvus go?”
They both looked up.
Side by side, they raced to the gaping wall of the cupola. Attached to the outside, a ladder went up.
“Not down,” Nim noted sadly.
“Climb,” Jonah said. He started up.
He’d made it only halfway when dark wings launched over their heads.
It was Corvus, suspended below the wings of the float plane. The skeletonized cockpit was a steel death trap around him, but the wings held just enough glide to descend.
The tower listed again. It was going down. And so were they, one way or another.
Below them, indecipherable figures streamed from the doorway.
“Nim, follow me.” Jonah leapt for the fleeing Corvus, the executioner’s sword outstretched.
She hesitated for less than a heartbeat, and launched herself after him, thigh muscles screaming, though her throat was locked.
She caught his waist, heard the demonic screech of metal on metal as the blade scraped on the broken tail of the plane.
The blade skittered, then bit deep. Jonah reached for her shoulders to pull her up his body.
“Grab the fucking plane,” she shrieked.
“Don’t curse,” he reminded her. He heaved himself higher on the tail section, dragging her with him.
The plane listed sideways, its glide severely hampered by extra weight.
Behind them, the wood of the tower groaned and snapped. The chime of glass rose above it in crescendoing destruction.
The building gained speed as it collapsed, aiming right at them. They weren’t going to get clear of its shadow.
Corvus roared, and his djinni pulsed with a nuclear–mushroom cloud fury. But suspended in the darkness, there was nothing to rage against.
The cupola they’d moments ago escaped raced at them, smashing into the tail section. The planks crashed around Nim, knocking her free. Jonah cried her name, reached back for her. The sword wrenched loose.
And they were falling.
But not far enough even to scream. Nim hit the brush in a bruising tangle, rolled, slammed into Jonah. He grabbed her close and threw himself over her as the cupola boomed and splintered all around.
They lay in a daze, limbs entwined. Not just their limbs, but tree limbs. Carefully, Nim straightened. Nothing broken. Other than the tree. And the tower. And Corvus?
She stiffened, gaze darting. Even with the teshuva on high alert, she couldn’t distinguish the rusted metal outline of the plane. How much farther had it gone?
“Nim?” Jonah’s hands were all over her.
She batted him away. “I’m fine. You?”
“There’s blood on your face.” He cupped her jaw. “It shines to the demon.”
She winced as his thumb brushed the cut on her cheek where Corvus had backhanded her. The tenebrae-flustered teshuva had been slow to seal the wound. But she couldn’t push Jonah away again. She leaned into his touch. “That was crazy.”
“We’re down,” he pointed out. “And alive.”
“And everyone else?”
He didn’t answer, but rose and held his hand out to her.
If the wreckage of the industrial site had been Superfund-worthy before, it was positively apocalyptic now. Wood and glass crunched under their steps as they circled the crash site.
In the debris, they found Nando.
His gaze was fixed upward toward the black sky, no demon violet, no human spark. Nim stumbled to her knees in grief. Glass stung her palms in a hot flush of pain.
She flinched from Jonah’s hand on her shoulder. “If you say he’s in a better place, I’ll punch you.”
“At least he’s not here.”
She glared up at him and clenched her fists, driving glass shards deep. At least that explained the tears that clouded her vision.
“Jonah, Nim.” With his black clothes, Liam was a shadow in the night, except for the twinkling flecks of glass in his dark hair and the rampant reven at his temple. His pupils, blown wide with the teshuva, glowed. “We couldn’t come after you. The stairs . . .”
“I know,” Jonah said. “Nando . . .”
“I know,” Jilly echoed as she walked up beside the league leader.
In silence, they assembled.
“Lex is missing,” Sera said. “Also Marc, Argus, and Haji.”
“I found Lex,” Ecco said. He didn’t have to say more.
“Start digging,” Archer said. Sera nodded. “Crush injuries or lacerations will be bad enough, but the amount of birnenston that was sealed in the glass chambers will be fatal if we can’t find them soon. And the tenebrae could be drawn to the pain.”
Someone asked, “Corvus?”
Jonah’s voice was monotone, the demon harmonics threaded into one livid tone. “Gone.”
They started digging.
With improvised shovels torn from fifty-gallon drums, they managed to keep their fingers attached. Still, blood ran in slick rivulets from Nim’s hands and wrists, and her grip on the scoop kept slipping and she kept swearing. Jonah, bent to his own search a few yards away, said nothing and never looked up.
She dug and bled, and the teshuva healed her, slower and slower as the birnenston poison sapped its coherence, and so she bled some more.
They found Marc and Argus, dead. Haji they pulled from the ruins just as dawn’s gleam brightened the lake.
The talya was sliced head to foot, his blood a congealed pool brimming the glass depression in the remains of the elevator floor. “I tripped,” he mumbled with woozy incoherence. He touched the back of his head where he’d obviously knocked himself unconscious— and nearly scalped himself—when he fell into the sharpedged pit. “I never trip.”
Sera bumped his hand away. “Don’t touch.”
The words, the echo of her old life, sent claws down Nim’s spine. Her selfish cluelessness had led directly to this moment. She’d sold the anklet, never thinking, never caring.
Not knowing, she tried to remind herself. But in the devastation, the guilt clung dank and thick as river mud.