“Not on your life.”
“That is no longer necessary.” Corvus’s guttural voice smoothed. The djinni ascended. “And neither are you.”
He leapt at her, bashing with the post. She ducked and whirled. The lamppost slammed into the window of the vacant shop front, and glass sprayed.
When she straightened, Corvus was gone.
“No way.” She spun. The sidewalk in both directions was clear. She looked up. Could he have made that three-story vertical leap? She knew she couldn’t, even with the teshuva.
She eyed the abandoned lamppost, wedged into the shattered window.
She gritted her teeth against the grind of glass on her palms and climbed through.
Unrelieved darkness, of course. A girl could get tired of never having the spotlight again. She crouched on the table where she’d landed and tweaked the teshuva to survey the interior. The space had obviously been a fast-food joint, and needed only a fresh coat of primary colors and somebody to crank up the deep-fryer to be functional again.
She stared over the counter toward the kitchen area. Toward a glimmer of real-world light.
Nothing to lose. She eased off the table, careful not to crunch on the glass. Tiptoes were good for sneaking.
In the prep area, a wall had been cracked open. The glow came through from the other side. It was a soft, beautiful light, and she found herself drawn forward.
It was the back side of the stained-glass museum.
She’d noticed the sign earlier, though she’d never stopped in on all her trips to the pier. Now didn’t really seem the time either, but . . .
She ducked through the broken concrete blocks. The vaguely gladiator-sized hole meant she didn’t even get any dust on her.
The backlit, colored windows hung on panels throughout the room, seeming to linger suspended in the dark space. She’d come out in a room of eternal spring, with flowers and hummingbirds and sunrises and—oh, look—a cavorting nymph.
She eased her knife from its sheath, wishing she’d thought to pick up Corvus’s discarded lamppost. But at least it would be a red flag to the talyan on their way.
“Too late.” The voice hissed between panels.
She whirled, trying to target the source. “It’s never too late while we still breathe.” She thought of Jonah’s lips on her. “And sometimes not breathing isn’t too late either.”
“I wanted to breathe the rarified air, to fly with emperors. But they clipped my wings.”
She cocked her head, following the sound. “That was your penance trigger? I think you’ve paid for your sins by now.”
“And now the rest of the world must pay.”
“Not our call.”
“Who else? We are the only gods that still walk among them.”
She slipped around a window that showed a large golden bird feeding a circle of its young. The bird’s head was bent to its breast and the droplets suspended from its beak were bloodred. She winced in sympathy and blinked to clear the bright dazzle from her eyes. “I prefer to dance.”
“Then we shall.”
Corvus stepped out from behind the panel.
She couldn’t hold back a squeak of surprise and a startled step away. Her heel hovered over nothingness.
In the least graceful movement of her entire life, she flailed, arms windmilling.
And the knife lashed out and caught Corvus against his knuckles.
He snatched his hand back.
But not his fingers. Three severed digits thunked against the floor, and the anklet he’d clutched flew upward in a glinting arc of silver.
Nim had a split second and a snake-bite reflex to hook the anklet chain with the four-pronged knife.
And then she tumbled backward into the darkness.
It wasn’t a long fall. She of all people appreciated the difference.
Nim pushed to her feet, wobbling when her hands slipped in the shallow water. She must’ve blacked out for a moment when she hit bottom. How convenient that she’d landed flat on her back and spared her heels.
Best of all, the conk on the head seemed to have shorted out her tenebrae lure, although she vastly preferred Jonah’s method of distracting kisses. At least she felt like she fit back inside her skin, and her reven wasn’t pulsing like other-realm signal fire anymore. Or maybe the slick of slimy water all over her had extinguished the lure.
The lure . . . She fished through the water and winced when she sliced herself on something sharp. She lifted her knife from the muck. How many centuries before she forgot the sound of Corvus’s severed fingers pattering against the floor? She turned the knife side to side.
The rough-hewn bead of demon-mutated metal clanked against the upper prong where the chain looped around the blade. “Just as ugly as I remembered.”
She fastened the chain around her ankle, then stood to squeegee the front of her bustier. She grimaced up at the hole in the ceiling. No one was ever going to find her down here. How did a pier have a basement, anyway? The stained-glass glow across the opening gave the empty pit an embarrassingly cliché go-toward-the-light motif.
As if she needed inspiration.
The giant, creepy feralis down here with her was motivation enough to get out.
It was vaguely turtle shaped but with tentacles, as if Chihuly had collected an insane number of Japanese glass floats and made an art car out of a Volkswagen Beetle. With tentacles.
At least it was dead. No ether brightened its husk, only the glimmer of the glass orbs embedded in its shell between the limp, fleshy tentacles.
She didn’t usually like modern art, and she really didn’t like the look of this thing.
Options. Scream? Who knew what she’d bring down on her head. She’d already sworn a couple times, which hadn’t done her any good.
She screamed anyway. Her voice, doubled with the demon and her own frustration, shivered the surface of the dank water. The only other effect was that it hurt her throat.
So, not much in the way of options.
She eyed the feralis husk. The uppermost curve of its shell would give her an eight-foot boost toward the ceiling.
With a bit of grunting and more swearing, she centered the carcass below the hole. She scrambled up, cringing at the wet suck of flesh as her heels pierced the tentacles.
The ragged opening was tantalizingly out of reach. Well, what was a demon for if not tempting? She crouched, tightened every muscle, and summoned the teshuva to the forefront. Her vision shifted into the black-light range.
And she jumped. Her thighs burned as muscles and nerves ripped under the supernatural strain.
Oh, not even close.
She fell back to earth, knees bent to absorb the shock. Her heel punctured one of the orbs in the feralis shell. Glass sliced at her foot and chimed against the anklet chain.
And a geyser of soulflies burst from their prison.
She recoiled at the strange static hiss as they streamed past her skin. To her dismay, her teshuva wavered too, withdrawing from the soul exodus. Her thighs darkened with bruises, and blood from her cut ankle pooled in the empty glass bowl.
The cloud of soulflies dispersed slower. The pale flickers, like ash in the wind, drifted through the chamber.
Nim stared down at the husk where she crouched. She brushed her fingers over another of the orbs. A silvery storm danced across the inner curve of the glass, following her touch.
There were dozens, maybe more than a hundred, of the glass enclosures embedded in the feralis, some the size of her fist, some wider across than her forearm. This was what he’d been perfecting at the grain elevator. He’d learned to capture not just tenebrae, like Ecco bottling malice, but souls. Were all the orbs packed with soulflies? If all that etheric force was released at once . . .
She was standing on a soul bomb.
In the next heartbeat, she found herself standing on the other side of the chamber, her back flattened against the wall. Obviously, the teshuva wasn’t keen on sitting on a bomb either. If the teshuva didn’t like it, this must be part of Corvus’s reason for calling her here, for demanding she and the other talyan open the way to the Veil.