He took her chin in his hand, tipped her face up, and kissed her.
When he stepped back, her eyes sparked violet.
“There’s your demon,” he said. “And for the rest, you have me.”
“Right. I have you to save me. But who’s going to save you from me?”
The question was so ludicrous, he could only stand with his mouth open for a moment.
“Never mind. I don’t want to talk about it.” She stared across the parking lot, as if she could will a prepaid cab out of the evening.
He bit back a curse, not wanting to give her the thrill. “Let’s go get your snake.”
He finagled the lock on her apartment. Inside, the atmosphere pressed obsessively close, enlivened only by the snake that coiled against the glass as soon as Nim stepped through the door and by the blinking light on her answering machine, which played back a half dozen messages from the police.
“This is Detective Ramirez again,” the last message started. “Miss Hamlin, as I said before, we just want to talk to you about . . .” The brisk, masculine voice faltered. “About what happened at the Shimmy Shack. I’m starting to get worried that you didn’t make it out alive. Please, Miss Hamlin, call me.”
Jonah lifted his brows. “Detective Ramirez is playing good cop and helpless cop, I guess.”
“It’s nice he worried.” Nim opened the tank to let Mobi wind up her arms. “I didn’t make it out. Not entirely.”
Jonah’s fingers twitched, remembering the feel of that silky skin where scales now rested. “You’re alive. Despite all your efforts to the contrary.”
While she packed a bag—he wondered if she understood she’d never be back, and thought she must when she tossed two overflowing gym bags into the hallway—he called Liam from his cell.
“Nim is still alive,” he said. “How about Jilly and Sera?”
The league leader grunted. “If it was a close thing, that was none of my doing or Archer’s. I have to admit, Ecco’s recounting of the attempt was . . . interesting.”
“Define ‘interesting.’ ”
“The three of them—Ecco watched for the most part; imagine that—took on more tenebrae than I would have believed possible. And lived.” Liam paused. “If Nim had been able to control her lure, using shorter bursts, maybe, or closer range, they might’ve systematically cleared the entire district. Without us.”
Jonah stared down the hall to where a rolling suitcase hit the opposite wall, trailing lingerie. That had been deliberate, he thought. “Oh, they need us.”
“Do they?” Liam sounded thoughtful. “Did the league of yesteryear get rid of the female talyan because they were a menace? Or because they were too good?”
A pair of thigh-high leather boots, stainless steel rivets glaring like accusing eyes, sailed out of the bedroom to land in the suitcase. “Trust me, they are not that good.” He turned away. “Besides, if banishing half the teshuva-ridden fighting force for being female was a terrible idea, eighty-sixing the male half is no better.”
“Had a come-to-Jesus moment out there on the boat, did you?” Amusement crept into Liam’s voice.
“Somebody came,” Jonah said. “More than once.” He waited while the league leader finished choking. “I—better than any of you—knew what unappreciated power a woman brings to a pairing. I’d been a long time without it, but I never forgot.”
Liam was silent a moment. “I understand now,” he said finally. “But how can we risk them again?”
Jonah closed his eyes when he heard Nim’s steps in the hall. “What makes you think you have a choice?”
“I’m ready,” Nim said.
He turned and showed her the phone in his hand. With Mobi coiled tight around her neck, she looked like some exotic queen. She gave him a look quite suited to a queen disgusted with her courtier, then went to the kitchen.
Loading up the dead-rat Lunchables, of course. “We’re heading to the warehouse,” he told Liam.
“It’ll be quiet there,” Liam said. “Still have some men down, but the rest will be out on a second sweep of the airports. Andre swore—and I do mean swore—that Corvus has a lair near an airplane, so we’re expanding the search to private airfields. I’ll check in with you later.”
“Yeah.” Jonah shut the phone with a snap.
In the kitchen, Nim was standing at the sink with a pair of fat-bladed kitchen shears in her hand. How big were those rats? “Are you sure you—Nim!”
She hacked off a huge handful of her hair.
A second handful of waist-length dreads hit the floor before he could speak. “What on earth are you doing?”
“Making sure nothing not of this earth grabs me by my hair again.”
He winced, glad for Mobi’s sake the snake was exploring the half tub of standing water in the sink. “Isn’t that a little extreme?”
“Extreme?” The next slice left a bare finger’s span of stubble at her nape. “Did you see what grabbed me?”
“Then at least let me—” He held up his hand, appeasing, when she turned with the scissors raised.
She lowered them immediately, but ire still snapped in her gaze, disguising some deeper shadow—not the demon—he couldn’t quite identify. “I’m not the Naughty Nymphette anymore.”
The same shadow was in her voice and twisted her tone upward, almost as if she were asking a question. He struggled to understand, but he was missing something, something as potentially hazardous as a rogue tenebrae.
He hadn’t felt this incompetent since he’d learned to brush his teeth left-handed.
“I’m glad you’re taking this seriously,” he said. “But you don’t have to maim yourself.”
“It’s just hair,” she snapped. “It’ll grow back.” Then she looked aghast, and her gaze slipped to his missing hand. “Won’t it?”
He knew he had better not smile. “We’re still alive, and human, for the most part.” He poked the toe of his boot into the mess she’d made. “That was a lot of weight you were carrying.”
Violet arced across the tight crescents of her narrowed eyes. “You said you liked my hair.”
“I did. . . . I do,” he added quickly as the violet brightened. “I’m not with you because of your hair.”
“We’re together because you still think you can turn me into a weapon for the light side.”
“You are.”
“I’m not.” The violet drowned in her murky gaze. “If I was good, how could I have been so wrong? The tenebrae I called could have killed everyone in the fight.”
“ ‘Good’ doesn’t always mean ‘right,’ or ‘not dangerous.’ ”
“I don’t want to be dangerous.” She let the scissors slip onto the counter. “Not to you.”
He stepped into her space, close enough that she’d have to consider the breadth of his shoulders and his hard weight. If she called his manhood into question again, he’d end up flexing for her. “For you, I’m willing to take the risk.”
“For the world, you mean. For the sake of goodness and light and kittens and—”
He touched the severed ends of her dreads. “For you.”
She swayed toward him until his knuckles bumped her cheek.
Then she closed her eyes, shutting him out, and pulled away. She grabbed an opaque plastic bag from the freezer and tossed the brick labeled RAT JUNE into his hovering hand. “I’ll get my bags. You carry Mobi.”
Now she was insulting him not by making him a beast of burden, but by burdening him with the beasts. “I can get the bags,” he snapped. He looped the gym bags over his shoulders and grabbed the handle of the rolling luggage bag. He tucked the rat brick under his abbreviated arm; it was that or grip the plastic with his teeth. “Anything else?” He thought he managed to ask the question without undue sarcasm.
Nim shook her head, the faintest color on her cheeks. Shame, he hoped. Not that she exhibited much of that. Or maybe she’d just always hidden it under all that hair.