Darkness Undone: A Novel of the Marked Souls Read Online Free PDF Page A

studiously blank. “A bath.” Maybe he couldn’t see, but she could, and he didn’t want his incredulity undermining their tenuous rapport.
    “A bath …” Her drawn-out sigh was wistful this time, as if she were imagining the lap of water and bubbles on her skin. Hell, he’d gone only one nonstop flight without bathing, and he shared her yearning.
    He did not mean “shared” as in sharing a bath. …
    He tried to grab the thought, but it spun out of his control—Alyce, lithe and wet, dark hair streaming. … A ripple of shivery heat racked him. Could it be the beginnings of the infection, perhaps? “Antibiotics, acetaminophen, reality check,” he muttered. “Stat.”
    Fingers danced across his forehead, her touch cool and fleeting. “You are speaking nonsense again. Are you fevered?”
    “Yes.” He grasped the excuse even as he edged away from her hand. “Do you have my clothes?”
    “Ruined. But here; your eyeglasses are in your pocket.” She pressed the frames into his palm. “I think nothing of mine will fit you.”
    Now she had a sense of humor. He perched the specs on his nose, as if there were something to see besides darkness. “I just need to find a phone without being arrested for public indecency.” He’d turned down the league phone Liamhad offered. He needed to maintain a certain researcher-subject detachment, after all. It seemed unlikely he’d find a landline in Alyce’s lair.
    “There is a box of phone very near here.”
    “You can read?” Ah, and here he’d told himself he wouldn’t do incredulous.
    “Not as much as you, I am sure.” A note of affront stiffened her tone. “But the letters on the side of the box are very large.”
    He winced. “I didn’t mean—”
    “Shall I take you there?”
    “Please.”
    He startled at a rusty groan and turned toward the rectangle of lesser-darkness that appeared in the black. She’d opened the door. The trickle of ambient light gave him hardly more information, but there wasn’t much to see, anyway.
    Next to the mattress he lounged on, a fifteen-liter water jug, like the kind used to fill office water coolers, lay drained on its side. There was nothing else.
    Alyce shifted in the doorway. “I have other retreats elsewhere. This was closest.”
    Damn it again. He knew what had been on his face that time, without even the thin disguise of utter dark. “I’m glad you have a place to get away from the ferales.”
    “I took this from one of them.”
    For the first time, a smidgen of anger itched at the back of his jaws. A talya, dedicated to ridding the world of evil, was reduced to hiding in a feralis’s burrow? Where had the league been while she struggled with her demon and the passage of years?
    She shifted to her other foot. “The devil didn’t need it anymore.”
    His irritation dissolved at the defensiveness in her voice. Half-feral she might be, but she read his every fleeting emotion like the big letters on a phone booth. He gave heran admiring grin, so she didn’t think he’d condemned the theft. “I’m sure it didn’t need more than a quick sweeping up once you were done with it.”
    After a long moment, she smiled back, so quick he almost missed it. “Shall I help you dress?”
    The hesitant smile touched him, making him realize that was as close as she should get. If he was going to label her as his control group in his emerging female talya study, he couldn’t get too involved. “I’m okay.”
    He wasn’t, of course. In the end, she had to help him drape the shredded edges of his coat sleeve over his torn arm. He didn’t even bother with the shirt, instead just pressing the wet wad into his wound to catch any spillage.
    She gazed at the blood-soaked rag. “Sometimes I can salvage the pieces.”
    “Don’t bother. I have another.” He had several more, with access to as many as he chose to buy. He would seem fantastically fortunate to her.
    And he was, now that he’d found a rogue female talya of his