The scent of cloves teased her, and Ecco stepped out from behind the Dumpster. “I’ll go bottle up some malice and meet you back here. Lock up behind me.”
She followed him to the chain-link gate. “Do you think they’ll find Corvus?”
“No, or I would have gone with them. Blackbird is smarter than us.”
She eyed him. “Ever heard of this concept called allegiance?”
The big talya shrugged. “Doesn’t get you anywhere. Brutal, but true. Still, now we have the three of you.”
Her and Sera and Jilly. And whatever they could become together. “What are we again?”
“I think you’re our chance. That’s why I didn’t go with them, and why I’ll risk some serious ass kicking if your boys find out I’m not with any of them.”
“What happens if we get in worse trouble than they do?”
Ecco’s teeth flashed brighter than his gauntlet blades. “Yeah, that thought had occurred to me.”
When he sauntered out the gate, she yanked it shut with more force than was necessary.
He brought his gauntlets down his thigh with a hiss of steel on leather. “What’s with the attitude? You like trouble. You got through your old life wrapped in trouble. That’s why you didn’t need clothes.”
“Remember how I gave up my old life?”
“Nobody changes that much.” He flicked the stub of his cigarette through the chain link at her feet and walked away.
She waited until he’d disappeared beyond the corner of the warehouse, too far for even a demon to hear, before she answered, “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
She went to the dock, pulled down the big door, and latched it against the night.
Sera and Jilly weren’t waiting for her in the kitchen or in the lobby. She took a breath, closed her eyes, and let her senses flow.
She sensed the deadened zones, where Jonah had talked about energy sinks. And the leftover art no one had claimed from salvage held a sort of brightness from which the teshuva shied away. But a faint track led her to the stairwell and up to the roof.
The two women were sitting on matching bar stools, their feet propped on the low lip of the wall ringing the rooftop. A third stool was pulled up beside them.
Nim dropped onto it with a huff. “Couldn’t leave a note?”
“Wondered if your teshuva would sniff us out,” Jilly said. “Even without the anklet.”
“We already knew the artifacts didn’t give us our powers,” Sera said.
Jilly shrugged. “Tonight we’ll find out what they are for.”
Nim glanced at her. Dressed in cutoffs and a short sleeved cotton oxford, Jilly didn’t look like a woman who’d been nearly gutted earlier in the day. Except for the band of gauze that peeked through at the shirt’s unbuttoned neck. “You up for this?”
Jilly gave her a look. “I’m up.”
“I already told her we could wait,” Sera said. “The female talyan have been MIA for more than two thousand years. Another night wouldn’t kill us. Probably. Although weirder things have happened.”
Jilly huffed. “With reassurances like that, is it any wonder I got up?”
They sat looking out over the city, peaceful if not exactly companionable as the light faded.
Jilly finally stirred. “What do you think happened to all of us, all the women warriors?”
Sera sighed. “You know the league archives have almost nothing to say.”
“Then I’m guessing we all ran away,” Nim said. The other two drew identical breaths as preparation to argue, their eyes reflecting their outrage along with the last of the sky glow, but she held up her hand to stop them. “Think about it. A man wins a woman, and he brags out loud to whoever’ll listen. He hits her? He’s got a long story about how she walked into a door. Hell, he’ll kill her and scream about how she had it coming. But if she runs away? Vast, echoing silence.”
Sera puffed out her cheeks on a sigh stopped midstream. “That’s cynical.”
“And believable,” Jilly said. “Saw it often enough with the street kids I worked with. Andre told me some of the things his dad used to say to him. . . .” She shook her head.
Nim lifted her eyebrows. “You feel sorry for him?”
“What can I say?” Jilly tugged at the gauze bandage. “I’m a bleeding heart.”
“Har har.” Sera stood and stretched, blond hair rippling down her back. “Come on. Let’s meet Ecco halfway. I don’t want to be fighting the league barriers in the warehouse when we try our little trick.”
Nim stood, shifting uneasily from one foot to the other. “How will we find him? How will he catch the malice?”
Sera turned away from them, toward the city. Her racerback tank top displayed the traceries of her reven.. “Ecco has a way with the malice. He flays open his soul, and then they come to feast. Can’t you feel it? He’s out there now, like he’s ringing a bell and singing ‘Come and get it.’ ”
Nim shuddered. “How can he stand to be eaten alive?”
Sera shrugged. “He’s come to the same sort of serenity as the dying people I counseled.” The violet lights flared higher. “Except he gets to fight back. Unlike our missing sisters, apparently.”
“But we’re here now,” Jilly said. “Let’s do it.”
CHAPTER 16
They traced Ecco’s path to the next industrial park. He’d chosen an empty warehouse, the four stories of brick still standing but every windowpane shattered and the bottom eight feet of the exterior wreathed in layers of garbled graffiti.
Train tracks passed it, but the rails had been partially filled in with asphalt, the line abandoned.
“At least we won’t have to explain to Liam how the building got destroyed,” Jilly said.
“That does make it easier.” Sera kicked open the door.
The interior had been gutted; only broken glass and the support beams that disappeared into the darkness four floors up remained. The darkness was thick with etheric smoke as tangled as the graffiti, and in a strange way, almost as legible.
And the word it pulsed was “doom.”
Ecco whirled at the heart of it, gauntlets dulled but his teshuva alight to Nim’s demon-amped vision. A dozen forty-ounce liquor bottles surrounded him. Nim realized when he’d said he was bottling malice, he meant actually bottling them. Obviously, he’d had no trouble finding containers in the vacant building.
Not that the malice seemed inclined to participate. A cloud of inky darkness darted around him, staining the air behind it with streamers of demon sign, as the malice tried to avoid the bottles and get to Ecco.
He chanted obscenities, and his eyes blazed. Nim wasn’t sure she wanted to get too close either. “What’s our move?”
“You’re the lure,” Sera said. “Call them.”
“Me?” Nim stammered the word into multiple syllables.
Jilly wrapped her fingers around her wrist, where her woven metallic bracelet flickered with violet. “Bring them close enough and I’ll trap them all.”
“And I’ll send them to the other side,” Sera said.
“Although this is a bigger horde than we’ve tried before.” Did Jilly’s voice waver a bit? Her uncertainty was almost lost in the malevolent drone of the malice as they circled.
Nim took a breath. Too late to back down now.
But she wanted Jonah by her side, so badly her knees shook. Or maybe that was fear. Or maybe the reven wrapped around her thighs kicking in. She didn’t know which. And that was why she wanted him. He’d know. With his steady assurance, his unwavering strength, his devotion. Oh, not devotion to her—she knew that—but to the bond between them, which was almost the same. She wanted it to be the same.