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

long-distance call, she could certainly guess from the tone of his voice that she shouldn’t ask anything more. “He is my father, but he is also master of my guild. Bookkeeper knowledge passes from father to son to limit our exposure to the general public, but I still need to show him that I’m worth … that I’ve earned my Bookkeeper mastery.”
    “My master died long ago.”
    Sid sank down to the sidewalk below the phone. He tipped his head back against the steel post and stared up at the night sky, bleached old-bone gray by the light pollution of the city. Suddenly, he didn’t care to poke into her history any more than he cared to poke into the crevice between the slabs of concrete. Yet his damnable curiosity twinged. “How long ago?”
    “It’s hard to remember,” she said.
    Sid had read what little information existed on rogues. Psychosis among talyan—unmanageable psychosis, to be precise—happened more than the leagues cared to document. When the etheric energies of a demon’s ascension weren’t balanced, the newly possessed human slid quickly into insanity. Rogues typically came to bad ends. They wandered off in confusion or flamed out in a fury of tenebrae slaughter.
    How would Liam Niall and the rest of the Chicago talyan respond to a rogue in their midst? Certainly they had enough borderline personalities to make room on the fringes for one more. Alyce couldn’t keep wandering the streets alone.
    Never mind that she’d been doing just that for … how long exactly?
    Sid pushed himself upright. He hadn’t realized he’d slumped sideways against the telephone pole. He was seeping good manners along with his blood. But maybe she hadn’t gotten the reserved-silence memo since she missed the new-talya welcome seminar. “What bits do you remember?”
    She took a few steps down the sidewalk, her face half averted and her pale gaze fixed on something even farther away. She might not have gotten the memo, but the reserve seemed carved into talya flesh as plainly as the demon’s mark that peeked above her high neckline.
    “It was cold,” she said finally. “And there were lights. Not like candles and not like those.” She jerked her chin atthe neon over the gas station. “Like lightning behind clouds at night, but unfading. So beautiful …”
    Sid shook off the mesmerizing drift of her voice. “That’s the etheric signature of an unbound demon,” he said briskly. “Of course, you couldn’t see it until the penultimate moment, but it was coming for you.”
    She turned abruptly to face him. “Like tonight. Like the one coming—”
    “No.” He cut off her rising agitation. The redoubled harmony in her voice—the demon’s echo—chilled him. Why did she have such trouble focusing on the task of remembering? “The frequencies of the lesser tenebrae you fought tonight are much different from a repentant teshuva. You’ll learn.”
    At his correction, she curled one arm around her belly. The shielding gesture stung him almost more than the feralis bite. But she had so much to know if she was going to join the league and leave her rogue wandering days behind her. It had taken him years to get where he was; she’d have only one chance to prove she wasn’t a threat to the league.
    Where she clutched at the front of her dress, the neckline had tugged down, and he studied the teshuva’s mark. The lines of a
reven
most often lay quiet in the skin, like nothing more than the sketchings of an erratic tattooist. The contours and complexity of the fractal design hinted at both the subspecies and the energy level of the possessing demon.
    On Alyce, the
reven
was a simple wheal around her neck. Though she had tried to hide it with the conservative collar, the thin black wave ran just beneath the delicate line of her jaw and peeked out whenever she turned her head. Only a few curls spiraled off the central thread. Not a powerful teshuva, then. Perhaps she had survived so long and yet not thrived