“Hurts. But I can move.” She raised her hand to his cheek. “How can you?”
“Head wounds bleed.” So did all the other ones, but the teshuva was getting to them. He just had to ignore the pain. Even harder, he had to ignore the desire to rest against her touch. She’d rejected that—rejected him—to continue the fight. Well, fight he could give her. He lifted her to her feet. “Let’s go before Blackbird flies the coop.”
They took the steps at a staggering run. Frantic cawing echoed down the hall as they reached the top floor. Abruptly, the cawing stopped.
Sera put her hand on Archer’s arm. “He’s in there. That bird hates him.”
“Now you know why.”
They stepped into the room.
Corvus stood at the window, a black rag dangling from his hand. Beyond him, the city spread out in a winter spectacle, with the strange inversion of light and dark where the snowy night sky reflecting city lights was brighter than the buildings. Pinwheels of etheric energy burst up from the streets—horde-tenebrae, and worse, closing on their location.
Corvus did not turn. “So lovely.”
Archer realized the djinn-man wasn’t watching the advance of his world-ending army, but the spirit birds just outside the glass. He took in the dozens of sculptures on the window ledge and identified the motionless black tangle of feathers in Corvus’s hand, in the same glance.
“Where is Bookie’s soul?” He had to ask, though he doubted severed souls could be reunited with flesh. And with the rift widening, they didn’t have time to find all the souls of the people below, to satiate their hunger before they destroyed the Veil.
“A Worm’s spirit will never fly, so I let it go.” Finally, Corvus turned. His eyes glistened with leaching birnenston. “I see he betrayed me too, given the chance.”
“After you stripped his soul, he probably figured your deal was off.” Archer stepped to one side, distancing himself from Sera, making room for the attack.
Corvus lifted his head. “Ah well, his work survives him. When the Veil parts, there will be demons enough for everyone.”
“Not if I stop them,” Sera said through gritted teeth.
In mocking reply, the vortex found them. It whirled through the room, leaving papers untouched but rattling the glass birds on the windowsill like chimes.
“You started it,” Corvus reminded her. “But like your Bookworm, your task is done. You are free to go.” He raised his hand. The ring on his finger winked slyly.
“Sera,” Archer warned. “The ring.”
Mostly dull with a hint of iridescent shine, like sunlight on gray doves’ wings. The tint of a soul.
From the corner of his eye, he saw her touch the pendant around her neck. That was what Bookie had been muttering.
“Desolator numinis,” he repeated. “The soul cleaver.” No wonder the djinn-man had been so bold. With her soul sundered, she’d be as passive as Bookie, subject to Corvus’s whim.
Corvus froze when Sera pulled out the matching pendant from under her shirt. “The Bookworm kept more secrets than I guessed. I doubt even he realized what his work called through from the other side. Do you know what you are?”
Her eyes gleamed violet as she framed the stone between her palms. “I might not have all the answers. But the demon told me this stone could enslave it. And Zane told us you stole his demon. So I have a damn good idea what I can try.”
Corvus circled. His clawed hand flexed, startling a glimmer from his ring. “You? You would face off against me alone?”
“Yeah me. I’m the reflection of what you and Bookie invoked.” Her voice rose along with the vortex wind. “You made the emptiness that drew my demon. You wanted the hole in the Veil. You got exactly what you asked for. And I am not alone.”
The floor heaved. Something had shifted in the basement.
Corvus glared at Sera. “What is this sucking wound you’ve made? Can’t you feel the void calling the darkness back? We too are demon-ridden. Let them loose.”
“I won’t.” The vortex whirled through the room with an otherworldly shriek, like a spirit bird gone mad. It lashed her hair into a golden corona.
“If demon-kind walk the world, unfleshed, then we will be free of them, slaves no longer.” Corvus turned his poison stare on Archer. “You are old, though not as old as I. Tell her to set us free.”
For a suspended heartbeat, Archer felt the gladiator’s centuries of pain. Let demons and angels war on. Man needn’t be the battlefield anymore.
“Nothing would change.” Sera faced Corvus. “The true battle between good and evil is fought as it always has been, as it always will be, within the human heart.” She stood straight, still. “I will seal the Veil.”
“You are no healer,” Corvus said. “You have always ushered in the end. Live your fate.”
She shook her head. Archer dreaded the dire beauty of her in her steadfastness, and the anguish of what she denied them for the sake of an oblivious world.
“Then you will suffer eternally.” Corvus raised his fist. “Only a distillation of our souls will seal the Veil. We will be trapped for eternity between the realms.”
“So be it,” she said.
“I will not be bound again,” Corvus cried. His demon leapt into ascension, a jaundiced shadow that didn’t quite keep pace with its caster. When he charged Sera, the sulfurous pall shot ahead of him.
Archer hurtled forward with an answering roar, summoning demon-fueled strength and speed. But for the first time, he knew he would fall short. All the teshuva’s repentance was not enough to satiate the djinni’s hunger for extinction. Once, he would have gone with fierce joy to his doom, knowing death itself had nothing more to take from him.
But now there was Sera. From deep inside, deeper than the place the demon dwelled, he dredged up a power purely human, impelled by a force that to his desperate regret he had shut away in words not said—and met the djinn-man halfway.
The desolator numinis swept down. An ion comet trail glittered in the vortex-charged atmosphere. Archer felt its wake pass through him, felt a part of himself fall away, a weight that had grown too heavy, and another part, a lightness that made his heart ache.
The momentum of his leap carried them both toward the window and the row of glass birds.
Sera shouted a warning, but he’d already charted the trajectory. He’d been on this path a long time. And if, at the very end, he’d come to hope for something else. . . .
Corvus’s back hit the window as the vortex exploded outward. He screamed.
The glass birds blew apart, the shards a dazzling rainbow that followed Archer out into the night.
Surrounded by glittering glass and snow and a free flight of otherworldly birds, they fell.
CHAPTER 26
Sera cried out, the sound lost in the vortex howl.
Not again. She’d watched him jump from the hotel rooftop, just as she’d watched her mother leave her, not once but twice. She couldn’t survive another twofold abandonment. The demons couldn’t win again.
She didn’t remember racing down to the riverfront. Bookie and Nanette stood on the sidewalk where a dozen frantic-looking talyan converged. Corvus was an obscene snow angel, crooked and still. But her eyes were only on the black-leather-clad shape beyond, crumpled like broken wings.
The silence was devastating. White snow melted in the pool of crimson.
She fell to her bare knees beside Archer. Her demon couldn’t stop the icy pain.
Nanette reached for her. “Oh, Sera.”
Niall leaned over Corvus, prodding at the slush near the djinn-man’s head. “Still breathing. But this is gray matter. Damn it.”