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

we’d have to do next time?”
    She held herself taut against the hard plane of his chest. “Is that a hammer in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?”
    His soft laughter warmed her cheek and still made her shiver. “Yes.”
    Something coiled deep in her, and it wasn’t any demon. A demon would be easy to banish in comparison. “Let me go.”
    “Are you going to attack again?”
    “If I say yes, are you going to kiss me again?”
    He opened his embrace and stepped back. “Just say no.”
    Her lips tingled. Her whole body tingled. But that was the hard part about temptation, wasn’t it? Saying no.
    Still, he was right that the sudden attraction had been a distraction. She looked away from him and froze. They’d distracted everyone, apparently.
    “Uh, Liam? We seem to have an audience.”
    He whirled, putting her against the fence behind him. After a heartbeat, he relaxed marginally. “They don’t seem inclined to attack. Unlike some others I could mention.”
    The haints hadn’t moved from their positions around the park, but their heads had swiveled, several looking so hard over their shoulders that their necks appeared broken, to face Liam and Jilly. Despite their new alignment, their expressions were still uniformly slack, eyes as blank as the windows in the neighborhood.
    Jilly huffed out a breath and stepped away from Liam. “Okay, that’s just creepy.”
    As if an unheard voice had moved among them, whispering, “Nothing to see here,” the watchers slowly returned to their neutral stances facing in random directions.
    “Like somebody cut their strings again,” Liam murmured. “But what plucked at them to begin with?”
    He glanced speculatively at Jilly, but she backed farther away. “Nuh-uh. I told you, no more testing.”
    “Something about you tweaked them.”
    “Me?” She wished she hadn’t squeaked the word.
    “I’ve been through this crowd a half dozen times and they never twitched.”
    “Well, aren’t you special?”
    “No, but you must be.”
    “My mama would be so proud.” She’d meant it as a joke, but she choked on the bitterness that welled up instead. “I want to get out of here.”
    He nodded. “We need to retrieve that bracelet.” For all the distractions flying around, he hadn’t forgotten what he’d really wanted. Of course not. She wasn’t that much of a distraction, after all. The realization needled her. “Fine. I don’t want a demon weapon laying around my apartment anyway.” Other than herself, of course.
    And from the unabated shiver of her skin, she wondered if she’d mind having the unfathomable demon weapon that was Liam Niall lying in her bed.
     
    They crossed out of the park to the other side of the fence, where traffic and life continued, unwitting of the army in stasis among the trees.
    Jilly glanced back as Liam waved down a taxi. She tugged her coat closer around her. “They’re like Emperor Qin’s thousands of terra-cotta warriors, waiting for the afterlife.”
    “Considering that more than one tyrant liked to take living victims as funerary accompaniments, I doubt what waited for them was heaven.” When the taxi pulled over, Liam opened the door for her. “Dictators have a bad habit of draining resources to build their clay armies. The djinn-man who drained these haints came to the same bad end. Now we’re left with the dust and debris.”
    Jilly deftly avoided his helping hand and slid in to the backseat. “Chinatown,” she told the driver before scowling at Liam as he climbed in beside her. “How can you talk like that? They are people.”
    “Are they? Without souls?”
    Jilly hushed him, inclining her head toward the front seat.
    Liam shrugged. “No one believes all the crazy talk about souls. Right?”
    The driver glanced in the rearview mirror. “I’m as infidel as they come.”
    Liam grinned at Jilly. “See?”
    Jilly settled back. “You’re very cavalier with other people’s souls, lives,