The big talya returned the look, and in his hands, the spoon seemed suddenly lethal.
Jonah smoothed his hand down the back of his neck. The short hairs prickled against his palm. What was wrong with him? He wasn’t the sort to beat his chest and crow. But the incense scent of Nim was still on his skin. This was why saints renounced the temptations of the flesh.
“I’d join that advance team,” he said. “If Nim is in danger from her demon’s strength, I want that anklet.”
“Not to mention, who knows what havoc Corvus could wreak with the artifact at his disposal.” Archer swept his hand over the map again, encompassing the city with his gesture.
Jonah remembered the pull of Nim’s allure. “I think the artifact does the djinn-man no good without the matching demon. Which is why Corvus went after Sera last winter.” He flattened his palm on the map. “Which is why we’ll have no trouble finding him again.”
Ecco stirred the soup with unnecessary vigor. “Because he’ll be coming for Nim. And you don’t seem to care.”
Jonah stared at him from beneath lowered brows. “Tell me again how you think you could have her, and I’ll show you how much I care.”
Archer sighed. “Your mark is on her, Jonah, as surely as the demon’s. Ecco is just teasing you about taking her.”
“No, he’s not,” Jonah said, just as Ecco protested, “No, I’m not.”
“No one is taking anyone.” Sera stood in the kitchen doorway, her voice more threatening than her mate’s. She cast an admonitory eye over all of them, lingering on Ecco. “Stop stirring so hard. You’re going to puree that chicken. Jilly only broke a few ribs, not her jaw.”
Archer went to her side. The tender way he brushed her blond hair behind her ear made Jonah avert his gaze. “How’s she doing?”
“Oh, you know how a sucking chest wound sounds worse than it is, at least when the teshuva are involved. All that gasping and bloody foam and turning blue, even though the demon is working its magic. The B team actually took a harder hit than we did. Haji will be down for three days at least with a compound femur fracture. The shattered bone did a lot of damage on the way out. And Nando almost lost an eye, which would have been . . .” Her glance went to his hook, and she stopped herself.
Jonah waited for the gut-curdling shame that usually followed those mortified shifts of gaze. But it seemed carnal relations had an undermining effect on shame. “It’s always funny until someone almost loses an eye.”
Sera drew her chin back in surprise. “Your mate is rubbing off on you.”
“She has made rubbing an art.” The words popped off his tongue with Nim-flavored tartness.
Ecco made a pained sound, slammed the spoon into the pot, and stalked out.
Sera watched him go. “What’s his problem?”
Jonah grimaced. “Where to start . . . ?” He’d taken his share of needling from the big talya over the decades and rarely found ways to return the favor. Another disreputable Nim skill he’d acquired with their demonic resonance.
He rather liked it.
“Start with the part where you believe Nim is a menace without the anklet,” Archer interrupted.
Jonah gestured at the pendant hanging from the cord around Sera’s neck. “Did you ever try your tenebraeternum trick without the teshuva’s talisman?”
“I never had reason to.” Sullen rainbows gleamed under Sera’s fingers when she touched the etherically mutated stone. “I’ve had the necklace ever since the demon first came to me, even before its first ascension.”
Archer pulled her under his arm. “We always thought the desolator numinis was the weapon and Sera was the trigger. The same with Jilly and her knot-work trap.”
“Jilly had her bracelet from the beginning too,” Sera said.
Jonah wondered if he should be proud that his demon-matched cohort was the first to pawn her artifact and thus reveal a new facet of the female talyan. “Nim shows every sign of being as dangerously unstable as league records warn about in the few references we have to female talyan.” When Archer and Sera stiffened as one, he waved his hand. “Don’t bristle. I didn’t write those books.”
“No,” Archer growled. “But your brand of dogma may have lost us our other halves for the last few millennia.”
“Not dogma,” Jonah said. “Just the truth of what I’m finding. Nim is a lure, just as Jilly makes herself a trap, and Sera is an exit from our realm through demonic emanations. But Nim did it without the anklet. Which makes us stronger than we knew.”
“Not if she destroys herself—or us—in the discovery process,” Archer said.
“And not if you think of her like that,” Sera added.
Jonah scowled. “Like what? A weapon? That’s what we all are.”
“That’s not all she is,” Sera said. “Not to you.” But her tone wavered uncertainly.
Archer completed her unspoken thought. “At least she’d better not be. Or maybe Ecco was right.”
Jonah straightened. “I don’t have to explain myself to you. You don’t know anything more than I do about how this bond works.”
“Love,” Sera said. Again, her tone lacked conviction.
Jonah shook his head. “They call it the mated-talyan bond. Nothing in there about love.” He narrowed his eyes at Archer. “You didn’t believe in love.”
“No more than I believed in demons. And look where that got me.” He unfurled his fingers toward Sera in an oddly courtly gesture, but the smirk he turned on Jonah was decidedly fiendish. “Tell yourself what you will, if it helps seal your bond. But watch your sacrifices don’t cut too deep.”
He ladled out bowls of soup while Sera rifled through the silverware drawer. Then she whisked herself out of the kitchen with the tray balanced in her arms. Off to feed the invalid and the hovering mate, no doubt.
Caring and cooking pots. Before women had returned to the league, the talyan had been a tribe of taciturn loners, united only by their mission. After Carine was gone and they’d found him, their habitual solitude—bordering on the monkish—had suited him well. The loss of his arm, though . . . that had set him apart in a way he couldn’t abide.
And when exactly had his separation—him from his arm, him from the league—ceased to eat at him? He thought he knew.
“Nim is mine,” he said. “I won’t risk her, even for my own salvation.”
Archer lingered, his hip propped against the counter. “Isn’t that why you were in Africa? To save others and thus save yourself? The demon lets you make the same mistake over and over. Until you don’t.”
Having told Nim the story already, Jonah found the admission slipped from him more easily this time. “Actually, I became a missionary for the adventure.”
“Well, she’ll give you that too.” Archer’s grin flashed and faded. “We’re not perfect, Jonah. In fact, we’re as far from it as a mob of selfish, frightened, brutal bastards can be. The sooner you admit that, the sooner you can be something else.”
He headed for the door, and Jonah waited until the other talya had gotten halfway out before he spoke. “And what will I be? The man I was?”
Archer didn’t look back. “Your list of sins is long enough. Don’t add stupidity.”
Behind him, a half dozen talyan—looking lethal and hungry and all sleepy-eyed, except for Nando, who was wearing an eye patch and looked only half-sleepy-eyed—filed into the kitchen.
“I smelled soup,” Nando said. He squinted around the eye patch, as if somebody might be trying to hide his supper.
Lex jostled him. “Out of my way, pirate boy. You’re missing an eye, not a leg.” One of the other talyan elbowed him, and he ducked his head with a rueful grunt.
Jonah left them to their dinner and jibes, and took his muddled thoughts with him.