The sick weight of the malice made her wish she’d chosen to jump into the water, after all. Maybe she could drown them, float them away—as her mother finally had.
A low moan raised tremors down her spine. For an awful moment, she thought the sound came from her.
She twisted her head and met the vacant stares of Corvus’s prisoners. From the black holes of their slack, gaping mouths came the whispering groan, despair or hunger or both.
They’d wanted freedom from this, she realized, from the torment that fed the malice so richly.
The watchers grew dim as her vision grayed, like shades of her hospice patients. Had guiding them to quiet grace been a terrible deception, only to assuage her own fear of the end they were all coming to someday? Was grace an illusion, peace a myth?
She was going to die with her questions unanswered. Or maybe only in her death would she have her answers.
At least she was about to find out.
Niall rattled off his report. “At five o’clock this evening, Bookie took a cab over to River North. He was dropped off near the Mart. That’s the last location we can confirm until he showed up at Nanette’s church.”
“We’re close,” Archer said. “Maybe Bookie will give himself away if he sees the place.” He glanced at the man slouched in the passenger seat. “You going to help us, Bookkeeper?”
“I need Sera,” the historian muttered.
Archer shifted the phone to his other ear. “Yeah, he’s going to help.”
“I’ll send everyone I can,” Niall said. “But this storm is closing down fast. And I’m getting strange reports. On the way to meet the cabbie, Jonah saw ferales herding people. I think Corvus’s army is on the move. They weren’t corpses yet, but if they’re with ferales, they soon will be.”
Archer glared out at the thickening snow. “If we don’t stop Corvus before he forces Sera to open the Veil, a few oddball ferales will be the least of our problems.”
“And the people with them?”
Archer hesitated. “They’re fucked.” He hung up to manhandle the SUV through snow soft and heavy as a burial shroud. “We’re all fucked.”
The water was a dark slash through the white as they crossed the bridge. They quartered the streets until Archer finally slammed his fist on the steering wheel. “He can’t just disappear.”
“The high tower,” Bookie whispered. His breath fogged the side window where he’d angled his pale face.
Archer ran a hand through his hair. “They’re all towers.”
In the middle of the next block, from behind a parked truck, a pedestrian stepped out into the street. Archer slammed on the brakes, and the SUV slewed sideways.
The homeless man, his coat hung awkwardly from one shoulder, never looked around, his gaze fixed upward.
Archer tightened his grip on the wheel as another oblivious walker—a girl in stiletto heels still not high enough to keep her out of the snow—followed the man into the street, her face turned toward the sky as if drawn by a hook in her lip.
Archer glanced at Bookie, then back at the pedestrians. Zane had said Corvus commanded an army of corpses. “Nanette. Those people. Tell me what you see.”
“What? Nothing.” Her voice rose with excitement. “Nothing. Just like Bookie.”
The odd couple cut between the parked cars, following a line only they sensed, and disappeared into a park. Archer pulled over, his hand on the door handle, ready to give chase.
“Over there,” Nanette said. “Three more of them.” The enthusiasm in her tone wavered. “Whatever they are.”
They followed slowly until Bookie clawed at his door, whining, “It’s here.”
“My God,” Nanette whispered.
Archer glanced in the rearview mirror. Nanette had her cheek pressed to the glass, as rapt as their unwitting guides.
He peered out at the dark high-rise. “What?”
“Don’t you see them? Stop the car.”
He hauled the wheel over, bouncing onto the curb. “What is it? Bookie’s soul?”
“No. It’s like . . . but not a soul.” She tumbled out before he could turn off the car. He got out, hand on his axe.
She stood, eyes bright, mouth agape like a child catching snowflakes on her tongue.
He followed her gaze.
High up, white and drifting, the birds, brighter than the clouds, flew through the storm.
They soared on other-realm winds that didn’t disturb the endless fall of snow. The trailing edges of their ethereal wings flickered with light as if from a distant dawn. They looped around the building’s crown in graceful patterns that almost reminded him of something, if he could only trace their flight with a pen.
“Bookie said tower,” Nanette murmured. “I looked up, and they were there.”
After a moment, Archer found his voice. “I see them too.” He followed the intricate dance, the patterns sketching ever-more complicated fractals into infinity, like Sera’s reven. His breath caught. “This is the place.”
He hit Niall on speed dial, handed Nanette the phone, and ran for the door.
“You don’t have to die, Sera.”
Nothing existed outside the evil movies in her head, but the voice snaked through.
“Everybody has to die,” she murmured.
“Not now you don’t. Just call on me.”
The demon. Her teshuva.
Or maybe the other demon. Corvus.
Either way, the voice was right. Her demon could save her.
She just had to damn the world.
Shouldn’t everyone fight the demons with her? Her wounds of abandonment would never heal, even if the teshuva came raging back. She sighed, a breath that felt like her last. She would not call on the demon. She wouldn’t make the world face its demons.
Not peace, but resignation.
Until the iron door exploded and her name came howling through.
In flash-frozen images worse than anything the malice visions had conjured, Archer crashed in, engulfed by a dozen ferales.
His flaring, violet gaze caught hers. As always, his glance blazed over her skin, slammed through her bones. Then he was fighting his way toward her.
The ferales raged out of control, in a melee of clashing claws and jaws, rending one another as often as Archer. A handful of the malice on her squealed and scrambled away.
Corvus dodged for the stairs, out of the fray.
The fanned blade of Archer’s axe spun through the air, its shining edge shedding ichor. In his off hand, the smaller knife flashed and pierced, but always another mutation of evil barred his way.
She dragged herself up, then stumbled a step toward him. Malice weighed on her, draining her spirit like bloated ticks. No way could she reach him; far too many monsters were between them.
Her broken leg twisted, and she sunk to the floor. A malice dropped back on its smoky coil of a tail and wailed.
Archer’s answering shout of defiance echoed across the stones. He rose up, scattering ferales. He stood, stark and alone, black coat in tatters around bare skin and crimson rivulets of blood.
“Sera!”
He reached out, as if he could hold her across the cavern, against the death and damnation that threatened.
The ferales swept in. Archer brought up his blades, winking fierce and fragile against the darkness. One hideous fiend towered over him, its slavering maw open to crooked rows of serrated teeth. The feralis roared and fell upon him.
Sera screamed, the cry ripped from her body and soul. She held out her hand, straining toward him. She needed to go to him. He needed her. She toppled forward, her body weak, her will failing.