The Scent of Shadows Free with Bonus Material (26 page)

“Meanwhile he’s working day and night to stop the Shadows from injuring or influencing mortal lives and thoughts. If he can’t do that, he works to hide the resulting destruction. Covers it under a veil of confusion or bad luck, so there’s nothing or no one to strike out at—because, you know, that’s what the Shadows ultimately want. For their handiwork—destruction and chaos—to snowball. For human emotion to turn sour so they can feed off that negative energy.”

“But what he does isn’t right either,” I said, frowning because Warren had done the same to me; set me up—or, at least, let me be set up—to take the fall for Olivia’s death. “He tricked me into choosing all this. He played with my life just as much as the Shadows play with others’.”

“Ah,” she said, pulling her sweater tighter across her chest. “Now you’ve hit on the crux of what makes Warren tick. See, he cares more about the whole of humanity than he does about the individual person. To him the universe is a scale that must constantly be kept in balance. Choice, mortals’ and ours, is a secondary consideration.”

I drew back. “But that’s…ruthless.”

“Well, there are things in Warren’s past that make ruthlessness a virtue,” she said, and before I could ask what those things were, held up a hand, shaking her head. “Not my story to tell. Besides, the point is, what else can you be but ruthless when dealing with enemies who toss mortals around like pawns on a chessboard?”

She frowned, realizing that was exactly how I felt, and shot me a small, apologetic smile. “For what it’s worth, there are others who feel as you do. Their thought regarding
humans is, ‘But for one step down on the evolutionary chain, there go I.’ But Warren’s the troop leader, and they’re not.”

And Warren’s actions made a sort of twisted sense now that I knew more about him and his responsibilities. Would I have put the troop before myself? Probably not, which was why he hadn’t given me the choice. Would I agree that ruthlessness could be deemed a virtue? Probably not, which was why Greta wouldn’t share with me the particulars of Warren’s past. I sighed.

“Look,” Greta said, watching me carefully, as if reading my thoughts. “The deaths of our senior troop members have everyone rattled. It means we’re vulnerable. It means change. It means we might have to take on rogue agents, and there are some who are vehemently opposed to that.”

“And Chandra is one of those,” I guessed.

“Ah, Chandra.” She nodded slowly. “She’s painfully obvious, isn’t she?”

“I mistook her for a man when we first met.”

Greta winced. “Well, she wouldn’t have liked you in any case…even if you’d mistaken her for Miss America. Before your whereabouts were known, she was next in line to be the Archer. Your arrival has thrust her into a sort of noman’s-land, and she now has to carve out a new place for herself in this troop. But first we must allow her to mourn what she’s lost.”

I made a surrendering gesture. “Hey look, if she wants it that badly, she can have the honor.”

“No, she can’t,” Greta said, shaking her head as she forced me to meet her gaze. “Your lineage is stronger, and the laws are clear. We only go outside the existent bloodline if the entire house has been wiped out. Your mother was one of us, and the manuals have foretold your arrival. Read them, you’ll see. Your duty now is to fulfill that legacy. Ours is to show you how.”

I wanted to believe her, but her words and their meaning were having trouble getting past my own muddled thoughts. With the fall down the Slipper, the warm tea settling in my
belly, and the shock of being attacked by Ajax again, it was too much. Thankfully, Greta sensed that.

“Sleep now,” she said, getting to her feet. “You need rest. Tomorrow you’ll see the grounds.”

I leaned my head back against the pillow and let out a deep sigh as she took the teacup from my hand, then set a corner lamp burning low. The birds had settled again and were chirping softly to themselves, and the scent of roses clouded my brain even after I heard the soft snick of the door clicking shut behind her. By then my head was too heavy to lift, and I gladly let myself drift away from thoughts of duty and legacies and women who looked like men, and into the safety of my own mind.

I slept that night with more soundness and peace than I had since awakening in my sister’s body, and it was probably due to Greta’s soft words, her tea, and the sense that even though I’d nearly been fried in the process, I was finally in a place where I was relatively safe. I know I dreamt, but there was nothing of reason or memory or meaning in the dreams, only my body healing itself in the long midnight hours, and the scent of warm roses overlying it all.

Then I crawled into the second half of the night.

I heard them yelling from my room in the opposite wing of the house, their voices stacking up on one another’s just as they had that first time a decade earlier. The novelty of hearing my mother actually standing up to Xavier had been enough to have me tiptoeing through the halls to their bedroom, and the interest sparked when I heard my name ping-ponging between them kept me there. I centered an eye between the gap in the door and leaned forward, careful not to bump it with my growing belly.

“I’m talking about the way you look at her!” my mother said, and I heard Xavier take a breath, but Zoe cut him off cold. “Like she’s filthy inside, Xavier. Like she should be ashamed.”

He paused before saying, “She’s carrying a monster’s child.”

My hand stifled my gasp and I drew back in the hallway, as I imagine my mother did in their bedroom. Then, in a new voice, she said, “Well, like mother, like daughter, I guess.”

I heard a crack then, an open palm ricocheting off bare flesh, and my mother’s surprised cry before an almost unearthly length of silence. Then, slowly, silently, almost deadly…

“There is nothing wrong with
my
daughter.” And she said it like I belonged to her alone. And though I was sixteen again in the dream, I carried with me the knowledge that Xavier was not my father. And deep down he must have known it.

“Zoe!”

His call had me rushing to hide in the portico of the adjoining hallway just before my mother appeared, and I watched from there as she strode away, seeing her with new eyes. It was like the bandages Greta had peeled away hours earlier had really been blinders, and in this dreamy reenactment I didn’t just see the sheen of tears on her cheeks, I saw the determination beneath them, and the hands clenched into able fists at her sides.

“Zoe!” Xavier followed, stopping right in front of the bisected hallway, giving me a clear glimpse of the bewilderment and anger muddling his normally composed face. The part of me that knew I was dreaming wanted to laugh. I’d forgotten all about this argument. She’d been gone the next day, and that’s what I’d been focused on. But it all made sense now, and my dreaming self did laugh as I continued to study Xavier’s confusion.

He
heard me.

Xavier’s head swiveled as if it was ratcheted on his neck, eyes finding me squatting in the dark like twin lasers fixing on a target. I froze awkwardly, smile dying on my
face as his chin lowered and his top lip lifted in a sneer, and I swallowed hard. I didn’t remember this part.

“Think it’s funny, little Archer?” he asked, in a voice throatier than his own, one raspy with age and power. He pivoted stiffly to face me, and I fell back, hampered by my belly…though I knew this was a dream and I was no longer pregnant. I wasn’t even there.

But those eyes remained fixed on me, colder and darker than I’d ever seen them, and they followed my frantic backpedaling pitilessly. I scrambled away as he began to stride toward me, each of his steps faster, crisper, than the last, but then my back was cornered, the stunted hallway dead-ending into a laundry chute, and I had nowhere to hide.

I took a large breath, intending to wake myself up—because I knew this wasn’t real; it hadn’t happened this way, and it wasn’t happening now—but a fat palm slapped over my mouth, and I tasted blood as my teeth cut into my top lip. I felt like a butterfly pinned to a board. I struggled, my limbs wheeled, the baby tumbling madly in my belly, but my head was immobile beneath that iron-straight arm. Then the hand shifted and my head was lifted, forcing me to look in his face.

There was a summer during my childhood that I remember being particularly hot. I took refuge one day beneath a giant pepper tree, brushing aside the long flowing branches to enter a shaded chamber, the spicy scent of those living limbs heavy on the searing air. I was just about to lean back on the peeling bark of the old tree when I saw the cicada shells dotting the trunk. There were dozens of them, all empty dead husks marking where life had once been lived.

That’s what it was like looking into Xavier’s face. All life had been extinguished in that giant shell of a man, and death itself stared back at me from those black orbs. I had time to wonder if his skin would crackle and crush into
dust beneath my fingers, like those cicada husks had, but then Xavier’s bullish features began to contort.

It was as if a giant invisible hand was pressing putty; his mouth and nose switched places, swirling grotesquely on his face, and his eyes and brows slipped to the sides of his face, ears disappearing altogether. Then the putty thinned, tearing high along his cheekbones and forehead, and peeling away to reveal blood, muscle, and finally gleaming white bone.

His eye sockets were black pools, dark and swirling and alive with something that could only be called unyielding rage. “So are you going to pick up where your mother left off, Archer? Will you come after me too? Think you’re ready to take me on?”

He poked me in the belly with his free hand, and I gasped against the palm still clenched against my jaw. The bony finger poked again, and this time I felt it in my gut, separating my intestines, scraping precariously close to my unborn child. The jaw of his skeletal smile click-clacked gleefully as I struggled beneath his invasive touch.

“Because I’m ready for you. Oh, yes I am.” He was getting riled up now, and smoke escaped through the bone of his nose to make my eyes tear, as embers flew from his mouth. “Ajax tells me you’re strong, as strong as Zoe even, but I can smell you on the winter wind, and do you know what you smell like to me?”

His finger stirred inside me, scratching and grating, making me whimper, and when he leaned closer, his breath reeked of minerals and the deep, fiery core of the earth. He opened his mouth and I nearly gagged on the rot of his blackened soul. “Prey.”

And I jerked awake, gasping for air, nearly choking as the powdery scent of Greta’s room mingled with the scent of the grave. “Fuck,” I rasped, gulping for air. “What the fuck?”

My hands went protectively to my belly, and I looked down, past the glyph that had lit on my chest, glowing
through my skin as hotly as it had during my run-in with Ajax. The heat was lessening now, though, and that was reassuring, as was the smooth, flat skin on my belly, unmarked by violence or pregnancy, or anything more alarming than the imprint of the sheets I’d been tangled in. I was about to breathe a sigh of relief when something wormed inside my gut. It felt like a finger, or a piece of one, was still lodged there. I screamed and backed up, head cracking against my headboard as an explosion of laughter boomed inside my skull.

Then the room was silent, but for my ragged breath and the fading volley of the laughter. I cursed again, and pressed one hand against my belly, the other against my face. I must have bit my lip while dreaming because I came away with blood there, but at least this time nothing moved inside me.

I glanced at the gilded clock beside Greta’s bed, 9:18, and rubbed at my eyes. Surely the headache behind my sockets was just because I’d slept in late. And the sheets were tangled and soaked for the same reason. Because I wasn’t going crazy.

And the Tulpa, I told myself on another steadying breath, had not just entered my dreams.

One of the lovebirds whistled as I swung my feet out of bed and made my way on shaking legs to the wardrobe mirror. There was a note attached to its beveled edge, a flowery scrawl on scented paper.
I’m off to work for the day. Make yourself at home. Warren will come for you at ten. G.

I yanked it down before studying my reflection in the mirror. There was a clump of dried blood by my temple, sticking out from my blond tresses like a spot on a Dalmatian, but I picked it free, then leaned forward and pulled down the lower lid of my right eye. Bloodless. Perfect. Whole. Other than the new wound on my lip, I had totally healed. And even that, I saw, was already smoothing over.

I exhaled the breath I’d been holding, and gave thanks to any deity who might be listening. The most extensive repair work needed on my body would be a hot shower and food in my belly. But my mind might be a different story. The remnants of my dream clung like quicksand, threatening to overtake me with every new thought.

Grabbing a change of clothing from my bag, I pushed out a deep breath and headed to the shower. A half hour
later I was steady again, and had donned a racer-back tank, hooded jacket, and terry-cloth pants—all pink, of course—my hair slicked into a low ponytail, face scrubbed shiny and clean. He’d said we were going to train today, and that, I knew, would go a long way toward helping me feel more myself again.

I’d considered telling Warren about my dream, but was shocked into silence when I opened the door to find him dressed in pleated khakis, a blue button-down shirt tucked in at the waist. His face was clean, brown eyes clear and rested, hands still callused, but smooth. Were it not for the snarls gathered back from his face, I’d have pegged him for a businessman headed off on his long morning commute.

“A full recovery, I see.” Warren looked me up and down appraisingly but didn’t meet my eye. The man who’d been so flippant and ridiculous when we’d first met had been replaced by a serious, almost severe leader, and looking at him I could suddenly name the question that’d niggled at me since I woke up with bandaged eyes in Greta’s room.

If there was no traitor inside the sanctuary, as Warren so fervently insisted, why was it still so important to him that no one know my true identity?

I couldn’t ask him now, not when he was still obviously angry with me, so when he held out the studded cell phone Cher had given me—obviously dropped on my fall into the sanctuary—I just took it from his callused palm and pocketed it as I followed him out the door.

As Felix had said the day before, the sanctuary was a place of respite, where beleaguered star signs went to replenish their energy, gain knowledge, and train for whatever force or enemy they were currently facing. Most of the time it was peopled only with the support staff, children, and initiates who dwelled permanently beneath the Neon Boneyard, but now it was brimming with the remaining star signs, and the rest of the compound was buzzing with the apparent novelty of that. Warren told me the others were in a meeting, no doubt about yesterday’s events, but would
soon begin the day’s combat training in a place called Saturn’s Orchard.

For me, however, the first stop was the barracks.

“Home sweet home,” Warren said, flipping a light switch and motioning me into the room. It was clean and shaped like Greta’s, but the similarities ended there. Gone were the feminine touches; the laces and frills and pastel-colored doilies. The concrete floors, like the walls, were bare and painted an unrelieved white. A queen-sized platform bed was pressed tightly against one wall, mattress naked, and a chunky coffee table in chocolate hardwood flanked one end. A wooden tray filled with rocks, all white, was the only item on the table, and a trio of white paper lanterns floated from the ceiling above it, the only lighting in the room. Twelve palm-sized floating wall shelves, also in mahogany, were suspended over the bed, and echoed the lanterns’ rectangular shape. They held clear glass votives, which no doubt lent warmth to the clean, modular room when lit.

Though sparse and utilitarian, it was still warm and sexy…though it said nothing about the person who lived there. I loved it.

“It’s perfect,” I told Warren, though what remained unspoken was that the three-hundred-square-foot room had better be perfect because my stay looked to be a lengthy one.

“What did Micah mean when he said he’d designed me so that Ajax couldn’t find me?” I asked, trying to keep the question casual as I peered into the adjacent bathroom.

“Micah’s a gifted doctor,” Warren said, joining me at the doorway. “Just as he can alter the nose on your face, he can also alter the makeup of your genetic template—your pheromones. He used science to create a synthetic formula, one different than your own, and his own magic as a fixative to secure it in place. Ajax didn’t know the new code, so he shouldn’t have been able to find you so quickly.”

He had, though, due to my distress over Ben. But I didn’t want to get into that yet. “And when he said that I was linked specifically to you?” I stared at his reflection through the bathroom mirror because it was more comfortable than facing him head on.

Warren looked marginally wary, but answered. “After inoculating you, he withdrew the essence of that compound from your bloodstream, then injected it into my own.”

I wasn’t sure I liked that. Was Warren trying to keep me safe, or was he just trying to keep tabs on me? After his accusations the day before, the latter seemed more likely. “So it’s like a tracking device…?”

“Of the emotions, yes,” he finished for me. He caught my frown in the mirror and turned toward me, forcing me to do the same. “I know it sounds intrusive, Jo, but you’re more vulnerable than the other agents. I’d never have gotten to you in time yesterday if I hadn’t been able to track you through this linking agent.”

I folded my arms. “So, basically, I’ve been bugged?”

“
I’m
bugged,” he corrected, tapping his own chest. “It’s like I have a second heartbeat. I know when your pulse accelerates or slows, if not why. The blood running in your veins is like a current rushing through my ears. If you break out in a sweat, my body attempts to cool it. Basically I feel any metabolic change you go through. And yes, the sense of smell is that much greater.”

“A magnified sixth sense, then?”

“More like a seventh. An eighth.” He folded his hands in front of him. “Try it now, if you like. Think of something that unsettles you, and I’ll tell you the moment it enters your mind.”

“Okay.” I closed my eyes and kept my body very still. I thought of waking that morning in Greta’s scented room, the birds chirping softly on their perch, the relief that washed over me as I escaped my dream. I thought of giggling with Cher over fizzy water and peppermint lotion.
Then I zeroed in on the memory of the man across from me, asking if I’d killed an innocent, somehow entirely certain I could.

“There.” My eyes shot open to find him pointing at me. “My second heartbeat accelerated, my palms broke out in a sweat beneath my own skin, but the overriding sense was one of anger. Maybe a touch of fear.” He angled his head. “What were you thinking of?”

“Xavier. How he used to treat me,” I said, well aware Warren could smell the lie on me. I didn’t care. The man was
inside
me, or I inside him, and with these sudden questions about his intentions, I was determined to keep some things to myself. “So could you feel what I felt when Ajax found me?”

“I scented your fear when he entered the building. Your anger when he killed that girl…” He paused, before adding, “And the sorrow before all of it began.”

I’d known it wouldn’t take him long to circle back to that. I avoided his gaze and moved from the doorway, opening the closet to peer inside.

“You have to stay away from him, Jo,” he said, but I wasn’t paying attention.

“Whose room is this?” I asked, jerking back from the closet in surprise.

“Yours now,” he said, joining me to stare at the evenly spaced clothing filling the racks and shelves, the shoes and boots lined along the floor. All black, all female. “But it was once Zoe’s.”

Our eyes met.

He said nothing about the eagerness texturing the air in lacy patterns between us, instead using the opportunity to pull out the photo of Ben he’d taken from me the day before. I inhaled sharply as he held it up in front of my face. “You don’t want Ajax to find him, do you?” he asked softly.

Ajax who would track him, torture him, and skewer his innocent heart. And enjoy it.

I lifted my eyes, laid them dead on his. “No.”

“Then train your mind. Don’t even think Ben’s name.” He spaced these last words so evenly it was as if he bit them off. I found I couldn’t meet his gaze. “If you don’t control your emotions, you’re putting both of your lives in danger. Mine too.”

This time I heard the plea in his voice. I wanted to tell him he didn’t know what he was asking, but he did know, and deep down I knew he had a right to ask it. What was my personal sorrow compared to the greater welfare of the troop? The city? The universe?

We stared at one another, tension spiking between us. Desperation oiled the air, as much his as mine, and finally I nodded. No more lives would be lost because of me. I could at least promise him that much. Warren sighed and leaned back on his heels, and as if by magic the air seemed clearer, fresher around us. It sparkled invisibly, and I sucked in a deep breath of it. Now things could be right between us again. Almost.

“One more question,” I said, and held up a hand as the guarded look returned to his face and the air glimmered less brightly. “Could you sense what it was like for me when I penetrated the sanctuary?”

His hands fisted at his sides. Now it was my turn to feel and scent and taste raw guilt in the air, and it went a long way toward soothing my anger. “I tasted the atoms splicing in your body. I felt the sizzle of them on my tongue. Your boiling blood reeked in my nostrils, and I could smell the marrow melting in your bones.”

I swallowed hard. I hadn’t exactly realized that
that’s
what had happened.

“Come on,” he said, palm reassuring on my shoulder. “I’ll show you the rest.”

We strode along corridors just wide enough for two bodies side by side. A strip of red neon, like a racing stripe, ran along the walls near the floor, lighting our footfalls and marking our progress, before dimming again behind
us. In the brief volleys of light I could make out symbols on the walls—runic, perhaps, or some long-dead language I didn’t recognize—but we walked so quickly their shapes were nothing more than a flash burned on my retina, replaced in the next second by another, then another. Warren, used to them, took no note.

“Warren, what if I don’t gain any more power? I mean, what if I just tried to control my emotions and live a mortal’s life. Would they leave me alone?” These questions were more rhetorical than anything. We both knew I was beyond letting sleeping dogs lie. I’d seen too much. And there were too many deaths on my hands.

Warren shook his head. “They’d find you eventually. In the end you’d just have fewer ways of defending yourself. Crossing over into the Neon Boneyard via an alternate plane was the first step in gaining more power, a necessary one, because now you have the knowledge, even when you return to the mortal world. Entering the sanctuary was the second step because now you’ll be able to enter any portal closed to mere mortals.”

“Which means?”

“Which means,” he said, squaring on me, “you now have front row seats and an all-access pass to the supernatural realm.” I regarded him, unblinking. “What? Haven’t you ever had doors that won’t open when you twist the handle, though you could have sworn you saw someone else disappear inside only moments before? How about elevators that won’t come when you call them? Or the feeling that someone is watching you, only to turn and discover nobody’s there? Well, those doors and elevators—portals is what they really are—will now be open to you.”

He motioned to the wall in front of us. I looked closer, spotted a discreet seam running from ceiling to floor, and pushed. Nothing. I pushed harder with the same results, then looked at Warren. He ushered me back, then with another flourish of his hands the barrier separated and the
walls folded back on themselves like a Japanese fan. Beyond lay a steel elevator, doors already open wide and inviting.

“Neat trick,” I muttered, getting in. “I thought you said they’d open to
me
?”

“You need a little practice. And patience.”

I scowled and looked away, ignoring the censure in his voice. The elevator panels were mirrored in a smoky gilt frame, and revealed the strangest couple staring back. A fashionista in a dashing pink warm-up, and an indigent dressed up in someone else’s hand-me-downs. Barbie goes slumming.

“So these…
portals
, they’re a part of an alternate reality?”

“Exactly,” he said, pushing a button marked down. The doors whisked shut behind us. “You’ll have to be extremely careful at first. You won’t know what’s waiting on the other side of any given entrance, but you’ll learn.”

Visions of monsters lunging from the closet and from under my bed had me sighing. Dammit. I’d only just gotten over that phobia.

The elevator slid open and we stepped into a stunted hallway leading to a set of double doors, again in smoked glass.

“Hold the elevator!” The glass swung open and a figure rushed past before halting and backpedaling. “Oh. Hello, Warren.”

“Vanessa.” Warren inclined his head. “This is Olivia, our new Archer.”

“A new Archer? I hadn’t heard.” She feigned shock, then held out a hand. Her grip was surprisingly firm, and I could feel her too-smooth fingertips pressing against my palms, but the rest of her was amazingly normal.

Bronzed skin of middling color, she was of middling height, also, and average weight. Her hair was dark with soft wisps of fringe escaping the bun she’d piled on her head, and revealed a natural curl. There was the taste of
the exotic about her, some lineal bent that darkened and thickened the lashes around her honeyed eyes; a cast on her heritage that would allow her to tan easily in the faintest beam of sun, but it didn’t immediately step forward. She could have been anything from African to South American to Middle Eastern. Which meant, I realized, that she’d disappear easily in a crowd. “Vanessa Valen. I’m the Leonine force around here, your sister sign in the Zodiac.”