Cheat the Grave (17 page)

“Not the Tulpa.”

“Which is why he's so hard to kill.”

Hard? I thought, with an inward scoff. Impossible was more like it. More impervious to attack than the beast next to me.

Io leaned forward, so close violet light sparked in her hair. “And it's also why he hates us all, Shadow
and
Light.”

Now that was a new thought. Was that why she, a ward mother of Shadows, had left the Tulpa's compound? But I
couldn't follow the thought to conclusion, not right now. I was suddenly a stranger in my own body and surprised to find those links Io spoke of, ones I'd tried so hard to forget these long years—were still there. No matter what I did, their mark was inside me, like some sort of injury.

Same as everyone else, crybaby
. I thought again of the first Shadow agent I'd ever met and battled, Ajax. His mother had defected to the Light side, leaving him embarrassed, outraged, and haunted by the betrayal. But if what Io was saying was true, he'd been dependent on the link as well, as attuned to his mother as a concert violinist's ear to the string. He'd used it to find her, and when he did, killed her. I glanced back at Io, shuddering and wondering if she'd unlocked those secrets in his body, and somehow helped him.

Io was holding her palms over me, not touching my skin, though heat from her hands radiated into my body, like flat lasers searching for signs of life below a bleak sky. She tsked, shaking her head. “Your chakras are blocked. Your spleen is almost entirely comprised of black bile. How do you even walk upright? You need to start allowing yourself to feel the things that have shaped and formed you, my girl. The ones that have
de
formed you. Once you accept them, you can present your new shape to the world.”

My mind winged over my long ago rape, my mother's abandonment, my sister's death, my ejection from the troop. My deformities. I paused a little too long on the thought of Hunter, probably because of his appearance in my not-dream, and whisked a tear away. Disconcertingly, Buttersnap ate it from my new fingertips.

“You need to make this old world conform to your new curves.” She tilted her head up at me, even though she was working below, and gave me a conspiratorial wink. “A confident woman's body…a most dangerous terrain.”

I nodded like I understood, but I really just wanted her to look away.

“By the way,
he's
over here. Want to feel him?”

“The Tulpa?” I shook my head. She could feel my father in me. How gross was that? She'd probably wrap her hands around the organ telling his story and come away with acid fingertips.

Io stared at my face, observing every pore with those unblinking eyes. “Well yes, him too. But I meant the other. The one you been trying to tell yourself is not meant for you.”

And she pushed without permission, moving aside ribs and lungs with a necessary gentleness. She could kill me, I realized, with a mere twitch of her thumb. My heart pulsed in her palm, faster when I realized she was cradling it, and then it expanded, opened to her. Opened to me too.

I smelled a doused campfire, wet wood and tobacco, soapy suede, sunset heat. I closed my eyes, dizzied, and breathed in Hunter—the way he was when he moved inside of me, when he bent his head to mine, when he met me halfway, then kept coming. My heart beat faster, my palms begin to sweat, my mouth parted, and I swallowed hard.

Then I thought of him pursuing Solange. “Dreams are the only place that man, that scent, exists.”

But even as I said it, I heard his dream voice—wrapped in hot tobacco and suede—calling.
Oh my God. What are you doing here? I've been trying—

Trying to what? Say he was sorry? Forget me, maybe?
Trying to come back to me?

No. I'd seen his face before he left for Solange, and Midheaven. He was resolute in what he wanted, and that was
her.
What he'd probably been trying to do ever since was sever this so-called soul connection the other women had been taunting me over. We'd shared a unique magic once, called the aureole. For a brief time he'd known my thoughts and I'd shared his. Swapped them as if we'd lived them. Took individual experience and made them our own.

Solange was obviously angry about this, so he was working to appease his
wife.

Fine. I'd happily agree to cutting the cord if it meant her calling off Mackie.

So I didn't care if he resided in my body like Io said. Like I'd just scented. Those campfire logs were really driftwood disappearing around a river bend. The heat of sunset was the end of our affair, and my job now wasn't to remember, but to excise him. If I just kept moving, maybe he'd work his way out like a splinter under the skin.

Io finally put my heart back in its place, like tucking an egg in its nest.

“Are we done?” I asked. This emotional prodding was worse than the dream. Buttersnap licked a tear from my cheek. This time I let her.

Io smoothed damp hair from my forehead and offered me a surprisingly kind, and yes, motherly, smile. “I know you feel weak right now, but you know what Carlos would say?” She straightened and donned a perfect Mexican accent. “Don't underestimate the lowly. You're a night crawler now.”

And a gray. Frowning, I glanced back up at Io. “What does that mean?”

She smiled, and held out a strong hand. “Why don't you come see for yourself?”

Much of the Zodiac world was hidden beneath the known one. Midheaven was locked in the water and sewage system built to relieve our bowl-like valley of the seasonal floodwaters. The sanctuary where agents of Light were born, raised, and trained to battle Shadows was hidden below the Neon Boneyard, where the famous signage of Las Vegas's yesteryear was put to rest. The Shadows too had a place of sanctuary, though it had yet to be revealed to me. Following Io, I wondered about that. Surely Warren knew, or at least suspected its location. Had he said nothing to me, and ordered the others to do the same, because of the Shadow in me? Had he trusted me so little from the beginning? Did he think I'd go knocking on the door and ask to join their troop after he so thoroughly tossed me out of his own?

I wouldn't, of course. Accessing the sanctuary of Light had nearly killed me the first time I tried it, and the only way I could safely pass the security system unharmed was by donning a mask Hunter had designed to shield my Shadow side from the system's defensive light. The undoubtedly painful necessity of trial and error aside, I had
no desire to experience the Shadow side's equivalent, or hang out with a bunch of rotting, homicidal demons in my copious spare time.

But it was obvious from Io's unblinking, wide-eyed stare that the Shadows made their home belowground as well. A mutation like hers wasn't created in a vacuum. Basic biology demanded a reason, use, and purpose for everything in the world, and following this former Shadow ward mother—alongside a warden that would have eaten me whole a scant few weeks earlier—I couldn't help wonder at mine.

“What do you think?” Io asked, motioning with one great arm at the remnants of nuclear fallout like it was her own Buckingham Palace, half turning to me as she continued walking.

I thought it looked like the place had been bombed, but kept the snarky comment to myself. “You said the cell has only been here a decade?”

Because despite the postapocalyptic feel, the bunker was rather homey if you didn't mind living like a mole. Though the passageways were narrow in some places and wide in others, hollowed out shelves housed scentless white candles, and the walls beneath these were caked in mounds of wax. The ground was worn smooth, and looking up, I noted the ceilings had been sanded into roundness. It was as cool as a wine cave, though not cold, which I found surprising. Winter nights were as fierce in the desert as the summer's heat, the flat Mojave terrain welcoming of extremes.

In addition to the candles, cables ran along the passageways, metal hooks securing them into place, though where they started and ended, I didn't know. There were also objects cemented in the walls—pens, stones, medallions, broken pottery, silver rings—certainly nothing that would be out of place in a trash heap, though each was fastened with obvious care. I wiped my sore fingertips along a Scrabble tile caked in what was probably fallout, and Io paused, answering my unasked question.

“Every rogue carries a sort of talisman from wherever it is they've escaped. That's Melania's. She…she wasn't here very long.”

I frowned at the tightness in Io's voice, but she'd moved on. “This is Cedric's. He fled the valley last year. And you know who this one belongs to. See the flag?”

A patch from an item of clothing, the colors dropped vertically in green, white, and red. An eagle devouring a snake atop a prickly pear cactus. “Carlos.”

I felt rather than saw her nod. “Most agents don't even know they're carrying around pieces of the lives they've fled. It's an unconscious impulse, a way of staying connected to the home and family they've always known. But when they truly become a member of the cell, they're able to give up the old.”

She looked sharply at me here and I looked sharply back. I had no such object to release. I was still home.

“Don't worry,” she finally said. “Carlos doesn't force the issue and there's no ceremony to mark the occasion. When the time is right, each rogue simply picks out a spot on the wall that feels right and claims it as their own.”

I gazed along the length of rough hallway, gaze catching on dozens of talismans. “How many rogues are here?”

Io shrugged. “The cell shifts as people come and go, though each member changes the makeup of the whole. Even when they're gone, they leave a bit of themselves behind.”

“Are there really that many displaced agents in the world?” Warren had made it seem there were only a few…and those were alone, broken, dangerous, or crazy.

“As long as there've been societies, there've been people on the fringe of them.” Io motioned me forward and we entered an anteroom that dipped dangerously in the middle, blown out rubble still trapped in the bottom of the bowl. A wire net crisscrossed the opening, ostensibly to keep people from falling through, but I shuddered, thinking it could just as easily be someone, or something's, cage.

“A sink within the sink.” Io jerked her chin at the hole. Her tone was dismissive, so I relaxed enough to turn my attention to what was by default the most interesting part of the room.

“More talismans?” I asked, though the objects in here weren't embedded in the walls, just piled along them. The wall candles were planted haphazardly by necessity, and the shadows they cast caught the strange objects in bumpy relief. It was light enough to see that everything was burned, twisted, melted, or savagely mutilated, and would have been unrecognizable if they hadn't been so patently mundane.

There were car doors, ripped from their hinges, with shattered windows and bubbled, peeling paint. A scorched tabletop missing all of its legs. Steel girders so gnarled they couldn't support their own weight. Giant slabs of concrete, plaster, an airplane propeller, front doors, and a mishmash of smaller debris caught in jars like fireflies made of rubble. The place was packed, floor to ceiling, with the scorched remains of every material known to man.

“It looks like Ali Baba's junkyard.”

Io snorted. “Welcome to Doom Town. And Survival City…at least what remains of them.” She shot me a wry smile as she reached atop a teetering pile of scrap metal and punched blackened keys on an old fashioned cash register. “Atomic cities. Fictional, except that they were real, down to the smallest detail. They used to piggyback on the nuclear tests, building homes, military operations, shelters…all in varying distances from ground zero. Then, boom!” She made an explosion with her strong hands.

“They built entire cities just to blow them up?” I asked, running my hand along what looked like the front of a train.

“Survivability testing.”

Looking for the rest of the engine, I peered around the train's nose before jerking back, letting out an involuntary squeak. A charred face stared back at me, the skin bubbled
and blackened on one side. A single blue eye locked on my face, and Io chuckled behind me.

“I see you've met Marge. She was reading the paper and listening to the radio at the time of attack. The scientists wanted to see what a thermal pulse would do to a human being, depending on where the bomb was dropped.”

“So they used mannequins?”

She picked up her pace as she crossed the room, no novelty to her. “And pigs.”

I shuddered, thankful I'd run into Marge instead of the pig. “But why is all of this here?”

“Shits and giggles, mostly,” she said, placing her hand on a perfect iron door. “It was Roland's idea to start the collection—he's inside—but we all joined in. Let's just say it can get monotonous on Yucca flat.”

And with that she yanked the iron door open. Carlos's voice reached out to wrap around me even before I saw inside. “She did it?”

Io nodded once.

“Fantastic!” Carlos clapped his hands once, then held out his arms as I ducked through the doorway. “Welcome.”

I said nothing, noting eight other pairs of eyes studying me. Tripp, hunched in an outcropping of the circular room was one of them. Fletcher and Milo sat together at a wider sandy bench, also outfitted with dark hemp pillows. The room was as sparse as the other had been cluttered. Yet five other men sat in similar alcoves. Some of the seating areas looked like they'd been blown away, while others like they'd been dug out with a spoon. All appeared positioned around an invisible round table. I met each gaze boldly, memorizing faces, trying to intuit thought, but it was useless. The men were naturals at hiding their emotions—both the physical expression and the accompanying scent. I wouldn't be able to scent them anyway, but if I were a betting woman, I'd pin them all as Shadows.

Former
Shadows, I corrected, with some effort. Grays.

Tables made of barrels and flat-topped sawhorses sat to
the side of each alcove, topped off by actual china settings, mismatched but shining. I'd clearly interrupted dinner, and my stomach growled, recognizing carne, tortillas, beans and rice.

“Come. Your meal is waiting,” Carlos gestured, indicating one of the empty alcoves. “As is your place in our circle.”

The other men remained silent as I eyed the seating more closely. The benches weren't just smoothed out, but sported glyphs and symbols as mysterious and meaningful as those I'd seen in Midheaven and on the chest at Caine's shack. And someplace else, I thought, furrowing my brow.
Why couldn't I remember where?

“This drugged as well?” I asked sarcastically, pointing at the food as I sat.

Carlos shrugged, unapologetic. “I took the opportunity to see if you could return to Midheaven via your dreams…even without your powers. This proved you can.”

“Is that why you said gnawing on your little night crawler would open my eyes to ‘that which was previously hidden'?” I lowered my voice an octave, and put on an accent as I picked up a tortilla. Warm, fresh…delicious. Okay, so they lived somewhat better than moles, I thought, settling back, surprised to find the natural dirt alcove comfortable.

“Sí, mon
. I needed you to stay under long enough to determine you were still a part of that world. And you are. Entwined in its fabric, you have changed it as much as the knowledge of it has changed you. What do you expect when you gave up a portion of your soul to get there?”

Two-thirds, to be exact, I thought, chewing. Not that the remaining third was a worry. I was never going near the real entrance again. Especially after that dream. “And why would you want to see that?”

Why had he given me a tracking device that reacted to body heat and adrenaline? Why return prints to my fingertips? Why coat my organs with an armor that made them
impervious to all but the most magical of weapons?
What
exactly, I now wondered, did Carlos want out of all this?

He didn't pretend not to know what I was asking. Instead he smiled so broadly, teeth blinding against his honeyed skin, that I was momentarily startled. Could the leader of an underground rogue cell, with a past tailored to bitterness, really be so guileless? Even as I had the thought, he spread his arms, as if inviting me inside. “First, let me introduce you to your fellow grays.

“You know Tripp from before, and you've already met Milo and Fletcher.” Carlos strode to the center of the room like a lion tamer in a cage. “To their right are Alex and Oliver. On the other side we have Gareth, Roland, and Vincent.”

“Not Vinnie,” the last man said, in a voice that screamed old school Bronx. I let my gaze pass over him with disinterest before landing on Roland. The collector. He looked at me like I was the one who blew up Marge.

I looked back. “Met your girlfriend outside.”

Oliver snickered from the other side of the room, and when Roland's gaze returned to me, it was as narrow as not-Vinnie's had been. “Pretty, ain't she?”

“I think you make a beautiful couple.”

Carlos cleared his throat, a too-bright smile widening his face. Well, what did he want? Pom-poms and a spirit song for waking up in a nuclear crater with a bunch of leukemia breeding trash? Not that it mattered to the
non
humans in the group, I thought wryly.

“There are currently four more of us,” he said, “but they've gone on a recruiting trip to Salt Lake.”

I nodded to indicate I'd heard, but took my time looking not-Vinnie over, then did the same with each man in turn. Alex was obviously Mexican, like Carlos, though shorter and rounder. Oliver's genetic background was indistinguishable, probably some Americanized bastardization of British and German and Irish. Roland was as black as Io, while his tablemate was what one would expect from a
not-Vinnie from the Bronx. I paused on Gareth, who was lanky, not even into adulthood, and sported spiky dishwater blond hair that reminded me of a rooster's comb. I'd wager he was less than a handful of years past his second life cycle. Obviously used to the speculation about his age, and sensitive about it, he thrust out his chin and took a menacing step forward. I ignored the implicit challenge and studied each face again.
Interesting.

Carlos anticipated my question as I turned my gaze back upon him. “There are no female rogues in the cell. The nature of a matriarchal world means women are the first and most targeted of us. When a female rogue is discovered, both Shadow and Light dispatch as many agents as it takes to destroy her. We lose them as quickly as we gain them, so you're the only one.”

“Um, I hate to bring up the obvious—” Wasn't joining the cell going to make me even more of a paranormal pariah than before?

“You're already targeted,” Carlos interrupted, with less concern than I'd have liked. “You already know the history of the struggle between rogues and agents in this valley. You know the laws as laid down by the ruling troops, and the dangers we face as independents. We've also given you some of the tools to survive those dangers, and trust me, they'll come to good use.”

“When?” I asked warily, not entirely sure I wanted to know.