Forged of Shadows: A Novel of the Marked Souls by Jessa Slade Page B

and silent, down the stairs. She wasn’t ready for whatever he had to show her, even if, as Sera implied, she now had supernatural fighting skills to rival her old superfriends’, but she’d be damned—again, apparently—if she let him know that. They retrieved their coats from his office and headed out to the street.
    Despite her purposeful stride, in one long step he moved up to pace her. “I told you we’d look into Andre’s disappearance. We discovered his last general whereabouts.” Liam steered her down the sidewalk. His big hand cradled her elbow, the old- fashioned gesture so instinctive she wondered if the women he favored had trouble walking on their own. “He had a favorite corner. You already knew he was dealing solvo.”
    She lifted her arm out of his reach. “He was kicked out of the halfway house because of it. You said solvo has been connected to some bad shit.”
    “Soullessness,” he reminded her. “Yeah, that’s about the worst.” He ran his fingers through his hair, then drew one lock forward around the tattoo that spread from his temple, not quite hiding it, but enough that a passerby wouldn’t notice anything strange. Just a tall, lean man with eyes that had seen too much.
    She recognized that look. She stuffed her hands in her pockets, although it was harder to bury the unwelcome rush of sympathy. “How can a drug steal your soul? I mean, other than the metaphorical soul stealing.”
    “Not steal, in this case. Dissolve. Gone forever.” When they crossed the street, he passed behind her, edging her with the bulk of his body to the inner part of the sidewalk. “It’s a djinni weapon.”
    “Djinni?”
    “In the hierarchy of malevolent forces, the djinn rank among the most treacherous. The malice are clever but weak; the ferales strong but dim. Djinn are smart, strong, and unstoppable. And they possess humans just like the repentant teshuva. Only the djinn aren’t sorry for any of it.”
    “Humans possessed by evil incarnate?” She shook her head. “That’s no more shocking than repentance incarnate, I suppose.”
    His gaze weighed on her, heavier than his hand. “You don’t have to pretend this is easy.”
    What were her other choices again? “Would ignoring what’s right before my eyes be easier?”
    The faintest dimple appeared in one cheek as he gave her a lopsided smile. “That’s what most people believe. Of course, if you were most people, you wouldn’t be here with me now.”
    She couldn’t decipher from his tone if he was pleased or pained at her presence.
    Once clear of the sparsely traveled warehouses, they caught a cab across town. The backseat of a sedan had never seemed so confining. As he maneuvered the long length of his thighs, he took up his legroom and half of hers. Pressed against her door, she avoided the open flap of his duster, but she couldn’t escape her awareness of him. Even in stillness, big hands resting on his knees, he radiated a compelling force. More than the heat of his rangy body that seemed to lull the tension in her muscles, beyond the unique male scent of him that teased her with a hint of woodsmoke and heather, his aura of effortless dominion captured her focus despite her very best intentions not to be awed. The demon, or the man? She hoped it was the demon, as unwise as that sounded, because entrapment by a demon seemed more forgivable than being drawn to a man who broke all her private rules: too big to throw out, too tough to care, or too hard to forget.
    Determinedly, she turned her gaze out the window to the mounting evidence of gang tags, broken windows, and junker cars. “What are we doing this far out? None of the kids come here.”
    “You wanted to know what happened to Andre. Well, he wasn’t dealing in that alley anymore. He lost it a while ago.”
    The news stabbed her, deeper than Rico’s knife had ever gone. “Lost it?”
    Liam lowered his voice. “His soul. A lot of them from this side of town end up here.