“Now we don’t have to chase them,” Jonah said.
“Because they’re about to be chasing us,” Nim shot back. She wished her voice had squeaked this time, because the panic sounded worse.
“Easier to clean up down here,” Archer said. “When we’re done draining them, we can just leave them to rot.”
Nim swallowed hard when everyone else murmured agreement. Liam’s rumble cut through. “According to the map, there’s an open junction just a bit farther along. Let’s fall back and let them bottleneck. Don’t incapacitate them too quickly; we’ll need to draw them into the junction and get around behind them before Andre, if it is him, realizes he’s in trouble and bolts while the ferales keep us occupied.”
They retreated. Nim would’ve urged a little more speed, but the talyan moved with their habitual maddening grace while she was tripping on the tracks again. God, if she didn’t get it together, she was going to leave a foot in the rails too.
“Don’t be frightened,” Jonah said. “At least, don’t be unnecessarily frightened.” She cast him a disbelieving glance, and he lifted one shoulder in apology. “Okay, then. Stay close and keep the screaming and swearing to a minimum. Ecco hates it when anyone screams and swears more than he does.”
“Hey,” Ecco said from close behind them.
Liam rocked to a halt. “Here. No cell reception, shockingly, so we can’t call in the second team. Jilly, Sera, scout ahead and make sure the junction is where the map says it is. I don’t want to get trapped against a locked Com Ed gate.”
Jilly stiffened, and for a second, Nim thought she’d protest. But Sera touched her arm, and with a sharp nod, Jilly led the way into the darkness beyond.
The silent communication tugged sharply at Nim’s chest. Despite years working with other dancers, she’d never had that sort of easy closeness. They’d been too busy screwing one another out of customers.
How nice it would be to have a friend or two at her back, friends with knives aimed outward.
She turned to face down the tunnel. The tension in the four brawny men around her pinged off her skin. “When are they coming?”
“They know we’re here,” Jonah said.
“No, they know you’re here,” she said. “The testosterone is like ozone in here. But it’s me they want.”
“They’ll be cautious because of us.” Liam cocked his head at a whistle from one of the women he’d sent ahead. “Too bad. As you might have deduced from the pieces falling off the ferales, it’s more convenient when they’re overexcited.”
“Then maybe we can hurry them along.” She took a deep breath and let out a shriek fit to melt concrete from the walls.
For a frozen heartbeat, she saw the belling wave of her cry reverberate through the corridor. As the echo faded, the walls trembled with some invisible force.
Jonah sighed.
“Yup, that did get ’em excited.” Ecco took a step forward, straddling half the track. Archer joined him, and the wall of warrior felt almost impenetrable.
Almost.
CHAPTER 9
Jonah tightened his fist. The middle position—neither in the front with the fighters, nor in the rear guard—rankled, even if Nim was unarmed. As was he.
“Sorry about the scream,” she whispered.
“Great idea.” When she stiffened, he clarified, “It was. Your thrall demon knew it instinctively. Fear is an aphrodisiac to the tenebrae.”
“I know all about aphrodisiacs,” she said. “Even without the demon.”
He could swear to that. For a second, he wondered why the tenebrae had responded to her so zealously. Almost as ardently as he himself, which wasn’t exactly a flattering comparison. And why did he have the sneaking suspicion the demons knew the reason?
Since the musing had no immediate survival value, he cast it aside. “Don’t let the fear overwhelm you when the horde overwhelms us. They’ll use that energy against you when you need to use the teshuva’s energy against them.”
“Is this the time for a schooling?”
“None better, since you’re about to get your first test.”
And then the shadow was upon them.
The malice hit first, in an inky boil deeper than the tunnel’s blackness. A quick handful of the incorporeal little demons squirmed past Archer and Ecco. Their solitary red eyes glared immaculate hatred. Liam stopped them with the blunt-force projection of his teshuva’s power, formidable as the hammer braced across his chest.
The malice shredded with multiharmonic screams and the stench of rotting eggs. Nim coughed.
Jonah tucked the hook under his left arm. “If malice get on you, they sting like ice. Don’t try to run away; you can’t. Let the teshuva rise—like when you let it choose your footsteps. It will match itself to their energy and consume them. The next wave will be salambes. Like the malice, but worse. They burn if they touch. Don’t try to run away from them either.”
“Why’d I bother wearing sneakers?”
“The ferales, slower, will come last. You can run from them, but you’ve seen our preferred method.”
“Seeing isn’t the same as doing.”
“You’re about to do.”
“Trial by fire?”
“And ice. And worse.”
“I wish you’d stop saying ‘worse.’ ”
So he stopped talking.
A second surge of malice welled like a black tide past Archer and Ecco. A few avoided the sweep of Liam’s hammer and ricocheted off the walls. Straight toward Nim.
Jonah stepped forward.
Since he’d lost his hand six months ago, the teshuva lurked off balance in him. It had healed the wound below his elbow, though it hadn’t touched the pain, but now the sinuous, twisting flow of its energy backed up in the scars of his arm with no way out. He thought he’d reconciled to all the ways the demon had betrayed him. This time, it had left him not just less of a man, but less of a monster.
With the malice aiming at Nim, though, he’d force that damned demon to rise.
The teshuva stuttered along his nerves like a reluctant diesel engine, agonizingly slow as the malice corkscrewed toward them, streamers of oily ether staining the air behind them.
He drew himself upright, taller than he would be on his own, with the demon expanding him into dimensions that were not his. But he felt the lack, the emptiness where his hand had been, where the dance of the demon through his body faltered at the dead end. The stump itched, then ached, then blistered as the teshuva’s energy bottlenecked in the scars.
The malice hesitated, skittered sideways, but darted in again. He lifted the hook like a lightning rod.
Then Nim was beside him. No, not just beside him; practically inside him, she was so close. She tucked herself up under his raised arm, her breasts pressed against his ribs.
When the malice arrowed in, they were both engulfed.
He’d expected the chill, even warned Nim, but the contrast with her warm body made his muscles scream. Or maybe that was her again. The thought made him grin, and he hoped no one saw the no doubt insane expression. He pulled her tight against him.
She wrapped one arm around him, holding him with a violence that flashed back to the hot confines of the Shimmy Shack VIP lounge. His flesh tightened, not with the demon, but with desire.
“Where’d they go?” Nim murmured.
The malice had vanished, as utterly gone as that longlost moment when the Naughty Nymphette had writhed against him.
But he didn’t have time to be grateful. Liam shouted as the rusting stink of salambes clogged the corridor.
A hellfire glow silhouetted Ecco and Archer. Crowding the passage beyond the men, the immense, hazy shapes of salambes advanced, their jutting scimitar teeth carving hieroglyphics in the ether. Chaotic emanations boiled ahead of them and stung Jonah’s skin like a million army ants biting for bone.