He didn’t answer, just led her to the end of the hall where a door stood a few inches ajar. He paused to let her change her mind, but she stiff-armed the door and sailed past him.
Despite his protestations earlier, he was mildly surprised there was no blood.
The young man—Andre—was seated in a chair centered in the middle of the room. He was not restrained, except by the prowling menace of Archer, whose teshuva flared in his eyes even under the bright fluorescents.
Ecco stood in the corner, arms crossed. The rot of decomposing husks clotted his gauntlets. Over the slow drip of ichor, his stare never left Andre.
“Where’s Liam?” Jonah pitched his voice low, loath to overset the precarious tempers in the room.
Ecco answered. “Jilly jumped in between him and a feralis rush.”
Jonah winced. He could guess how the league leader had felt about that. That the man had answered the phone spoke of his commitment. That he wasn’t present at the interrogation told Jonah how badly Jilly must have been hurt.
Andre gripped the edge of his chair. “I told her to fucking back off. I told her the fucking monsters don’t listen once I set them loose. They’re crazy, out of control.” He caught his breath. “She never fucking listened when I told her to back off.”
Archer never stopped his restless pacing. “That’s because for some fool reason, she wanted to save your fucking ass.” He snarled the last two words with demon harmonics, and Andre flinched.
Jonah knew that feeling, of the teshuva burning close to the surface, threatening to overwhelm what was left of his humanity. Then only constant movement—like Archer’s pacing or the concentration of battle—distracted the demon enough to keep his persona intact.
With the loss of his arm, sometimes it seemed he couldn’t move or fight enough to hold himself and the demon together. That loss brought to him courtesy of this boy’s master.
Still, he had survived, which had nearly not been the case for Nim.
As if sensing the spike of anger, Andre met Jonah’s stare. His face paled at whatever he saw there.
As if she didn’t care about the escalating threat of carnage, Nim nudged past him to approach Andre. “You’re the gutter punk who stole my anklet? I thought a minion of evil would be taller.”
He angled his head back insolently. “You’re the stripper Blackbird sent me for? I thought you’d be . . .”
Jonah took a silent step that put him right behind Nim, directly in Andre’s line of sight.
Nim waited a moment. “Naked-er?”
Archer stopped pacing, and Ecco made a noise that might have been a laugh. Or maybe a growl of the sort that preceded a fatality. Andre swallowed hard.
Without glancing back, Nim said, “Archer, Ecco, stop scaring the poor boy. He won’t be able to tell me where my anklet is.”
Jonah pitched his voice for her ears only. “I’m not scaring him?”
“You’re the kind of scary no one notices until it’s too late. So we’re cool.”
The young man scowled. “Why would I tell you anything?”
Nim gave a little huff. “Of course you’ll tell.”
Andre’s gaze shuttled among the male talyan, as if he couldn’t quite decide who was the biggest threat. Jonah wished he could clear up the question. But he’d let Nim play her game . . . at least until Liam came down to rip the man apart for damaging his mate.
But Nim said, very softly, “Not them, silly. Look at me.”
Andre’s stare snapped to her, and his eyes widened. Black pupils expanded to swallow the irises in a gulp.
Jonah felt a chill at the small of his back that he couldn’t blame on the damp waistband of his jeans. He didn’t think the punk was wrong about exactly where the threat lay.
Nim’s voice lowered, and Andre leaned forward in his chair. “You’ll tell me because that’s what men do.” She circled him. “They tell me things they shouldn’t. Do things they shouldn’t. I guess you’d call it . . . a gift.”
A curse. Jonah heard the word echo, distorted, in the demon harmonics of her voice.
Andre obviously heard it too, and shuddered, but his expression was rapt. Jonah had seen that entranced, hungry look before, when the Naughty Nymphette stepped onto the stage.
The chill crept farther up his spine, even though the thin cotton of his shirt was mostly dry. That wasn’t an air-conditioned subbasement breeze.
That was the tenebraeternum.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Archer stiffen. The mated talya knew what was happening. Ecco canted forward, as much under Nim’s sway as the young punk.
She came to a halt in front of the boy and leaned down, her palms flattened on the fronts of her thighs. At her fingertips, the black traceries of her reven blazed, matching her half-lidded eyes with violet intensity. “But don’t you worry about doing something you shouldn’t. Because Corvus sent you to find me. Didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“And didn’t you find me?”
“Yes.”
“Then won’t you take me to my pretty demon jewelry?”
Andre’s answer drifted off on a dreamy sigh, his breath visible in the plunging cold. “Yes.”
“No,” Jonah snapped.
“Oh yes,” Nim said. “Tell me.”
Archer pulled Jonah aside. “She’s opening a path into the demon realm.”
Jonah shrugged out from under the talya’s hand. “Hard not to notice.”
“Without the teshuva’s artifact, she shouldn’t be able to do that.”
The rare note of alarm in Archer’s voice almost made Jonah smile, except he was equally dismayed. “Which makes me think we don’t quite understand the purpose of the demons’ offerings. What if the relics don’t grant the power, or even channel it? What if the jewelry is a control?”
“Like a limiter that only allows a certain amplitude of power through?” For a heartbeat, Archer looked intrigued. Then he recalled himself, brows crashing down in a scowl. “Well, we’re missing hers. So you have to control her.”
Jonah choked back a laugh that would have sounded desperate. “How?”
“The way you control any woman.”
“Sera would have your head if she heard you.”
“Both of them. And while she was busy, she wouldn’t be tearing open the barrier between our realm and hell.”
Jonah couldn’t keep his gaze off Nim. Her soft croon spiraled up on a breath, visible in the deepening chill. She gleamed with the demon’s raw power, like a jewel herself.
Archer punched his shoulder, sharp and hard. “She doesn’t need another lust slave. Snap out of it and back her up.”
Jonah shook his head. “I don’t—”
“You’d better. There are no tenebrae here to shove back into the demon realm. Do you want her using her soul to patch the hole she rips through the Veil?” When Jonah shook his head again, trying to throw off his spellbound fascination, Archer continued relentlessly. “Do you want her to use mine? Ecco’s?” He paused. “Yours?”
“Enough,” Jonah growled. He wasn’t sure if he spoke to Archer or Nim. Not that it mattered.
He reached out to grab her. Her skin was like dry ice, so cold it burned, fusing him to her. When he tried to pull her back, away from Andre, he felt resistance. But not in her. She bent toward him, pliant and yielding.
The resistance was in Andre. In the soul stretching from him like a fish being teased from the river. As if Jonah were the fisherman, casting Nim upon the water like a lure.
He almost let her go, at the cruel mockery of the life’s work he’d once aspired to, a fisher of souls leading men from sin.
Instead, he was using sin incarnate to lure evil itself.
Because he shouldn’t have been able to see Andre’s soul. The teshuva had once—like their angelic and djinni kin—been privy to the warp and weft of the human soul, but they’d sacrificed the ability when they chose a third path, sanctioned by neither heaven nor hell.