Read Online Forged of Shadows: A Novel of the Marked Souls by Jessa Slade - Free Book Online

There are a half dozen places around the city where they congregate.”
    She tried to picture herself turning to steel, hard as a knife. Hard as Liam seemed to her. “Have you actually found Andre?”
    “No, but we’ve been keeping track of these soulless clusters. We’ve had some trouble with them recently.” He snorted softly to himself. “The kind of trouble where they almost destroyed the world.”
    Probably too much to hope that he was exaggerating.
    He directed the cabdriver down a street of brick bungalows with identical short walkways leading up to identical small stoops. Decades ago, Jilly knew, the homes had been respectably working-class. Maybe in another decade, gentrification would creep in. For now, the black security bars over the picture-frame windows dulled the daylight like half-shuttered eyes.
    “Stop here.” Liam handed money over the seat. “I don’t suppose you’d wait.” When the driver merely looked at him, Liam shrugged.
    Jilly stepped out onto the sidewalk and glanced both ways as the cab pulled away. With the trees bare and the grass dormant—as if the first hints of spring had zero luck making the faintest inroads here—even the fretful wind made no impression on the empty street. “It’s dead.”
    “The soulless don’t die, as far as we can tell. It’s quite the spiritual quandary. Not to mention a logistical nightmare for the league.”
    “I can tell you’re really broken up about it.” She crossed her arms against her chest. Pissed, she told herself, not nervous.
    He lifted his head to stare past her, and the lock of hair pulled toward his temple shifted to reveal the stark swirls of the tattoo. “I don’t have the luxury to feel bad, Jilly.”
    “Then you might as well be sucking down solvo yourself.”
    “Sometimes I feel like I am.”
    He squared his shoulders. The duster around his lean body hung as motionless as the rest of the dead street, as if the wind itself couldn’t touch him, he was so alone. A twinge of regret at her sharpness had her reaching out to touch his arm, to distract him from his introspection. Sure, she made it a point to flout authority figures, but she had to admit, as far as overbearing petty dictators went, he had a hell of an excuse. Literally.
    Which reminded her abruptly that his long coat remained unmoved by the wind because of the weight of the hammer in his freaking pocket. The hammer he used to bash off the heads of monsters. Without flinching. Monsters of the same sort as himself—and her.
    She should probably keep her weak, pointless—oh, and not to mention false —reassurances to herself.
    So she let her hand drop.
    He moved on, unaware of her almost blunder. “This way.”
    Around the corner was another short stretch of bungalows. As they walked, he said, “Here’s the short, boring version. For millennia, the tenebrae have been satisfied with wreaking their petty, and sometimes not so petty, havoc on the world. But four months ago, a djinni broke ranks and decided to tear open the barrier that divides the human realm from the demon realm. It would have been hell on earth.
    “But the djinni’s machinations freed a powerful demon that then possessed Sera. With its unusual powers, she and Archer were able to kill the djinn- man and close the rift in the Veil. But we paid a high price.”
    He gestured for her to walk ahead to a line of stubby concrete pillars that marked the entrance to a park.
    Jilly paused between the pillars. “I don’t see what—Oh.”
    A small crowd of people had gathered in the park, but they stood so motionless, they almost vanished against the background of barren trees.
    Liam’s hands flexed at his sides, though he didn’t reach for the hammer. “The surviving remnants of a djinni army. Archer calls them haints, says they remind him of stories from his Southern childhood.”
    An army of young and old, male and female, all in a variety of skin tones and clothing styles. For the most part they