The Scent of Shadows Free with Bonus Material (41 page)

I wondered if this elevator would have opened to me only a month ago. There was no doubt I was operating in an alternate reality. Ions and electrodes bumped along my skin like blind bees, and a metallic taste rose to fill the back of my mouth. There was enough supernatural energy up here, I thought, to fuel a nuclear power plant.

I’m coming Warren, I thought, touching my breastbone. There was no answer, and I began to wonder if it were all in vain. Then, suddenly, there was no time left to wonder.

The elevator chime sounded like the report from Notre Dame’s bell tower. The doors sliding open were the hiss of a snake. My conduit was pointed at a mirrored image of myself, and my trigger finger pulsed. The doors began to close and I stepped into the foyer at the last moment. And they whisked shut, trapping me.

The Tulpa’s anteroom was immediately visible, just beyond a great marble staircase leading into a sunken chamber flanked by four Roman pillars. An identical staircase rose directly across from me to disappear beneath a pair of oak doors carved with mythic symbols, none of which I
understood. That, I immediately decided, was where I needed to be. I simply had to cross over this innocuous-looking sunken chamber that lay in between. A chamber, I noted, with a vast mirrored ceiling.

“Only in Vegas,” I muttered, and took a step forward.

An invisible door slammed open and hard-soled footsteps pounded on the marble. I braced, conduit in front of me, and two men rounded the corner and stopped cold, apparently surprised to see me. Everything on them matched; their suits, their earpieces, their expressions, all the way down to the guns held at their right sides.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Mortals. I tucked away my conduit.

“Hit her!” the second one said, drawing his short club.

“Don’t hit me,” I said, and thrust out my lower lip.

“Hit her!” he repeated, stepping forward.

The first guard regarded him like he was crazy. “I’m not going to hit a girl.”

He was looking at his partner as he said this, so he never saw my arm swing across his cheek. The slap of my open palm reverberated in the air, and his head ricocheted backward, but he rebounded quickly and snapped it back to level me with a look of pure hatred. “Bitch!”

He still didn’t touch me, though.

“I’m a bitch?” I asked innocently.

“Fucking bitch,” he snarled.

I smiled sweetly. “Then why are you the one who just got bitch-slapped?”

Even gentlemen had their limits. He lunged, as I knew he would, and I used Hunter’s baton to strike his wrist, sending the gun clattering uselessly across the foyer. The second man was already aiming at me, his gun chest level, point-blank. Superhuman or not, that was going to hurt. But his hands were shaking. I ducked below his sight line, darted in, and came up under those hands. My left knee came up with me.

Two quick strikes; groin, which had him doubling over,
and chest, which sent him pitching down the steps. His trigger finger convulsed, sending an errant shot to ricochet off marble, but I’d already followed him into the sunken room, leaping the last three steps to send a final knee flying into his face. I let him fall, and whirled with his gun in my hands. The barrel sank between the eyes of the first man, who’d followed me down the steps. I withdrew my conduit and pointed at his chest. “Shoulda hit me,” I told him.

His mouth worked, wordless as a guppie’s, his broken wrist forgotten at his side.

“Step aside, Thomas. And I’d do it slowly.” The voice rolled over us, and my stomach clenched.

“But, Mr. Sand—”

“God, that’s really your name?” I pivoted into an open stance, arms crossed; gun on Thomas, conduit on Ajax.

He was poised at the top of the opposite staircase, coiled like a watchful rattler, his transparent eyes shining with anticipation. He was wearing black, which only served to lengthen his bony frame, and I knew his barbed poker was secured like a second spine at his back. I could smell it.

“Step aside, Thomas,” Ajax repeated, sauntering down the marble stairs to join us in the sunken room. “Unless you want to die.”

I waved the gun at him. “Most horrifically, I might add.”

Thomas stepped aside.

“I was wondering how long it’d take you to find us, Archer,” Ajax said, halting at the bottom of the staircase. “I take it you met some of my colleagues in the boneyard? How’d you like them?”

“I wasn’t particularly impressed.”

“But you killed only two.”

And I tried not to let it impress me that he already knew about the battle in the boneyard. “Does that bother you? Their deaths, I mean?”

He shrugged. “Everyone dies. And everyone’s too concerned with their own demise to worry much about another’s.
It’s a small thing, really, when you think about it. Now, if you hope to see Warren again, drop your weapons. And don’t make me repeat myself.”

I didn’t want to, but Hunter’s whip still gave me options. I dropped my bow, safety on, to my feet. The gun followed.

“Where is he?” I asked as Thomas lifted my conduit, examining it. The guard on the floor groaned and rose halfway to his feet.

Ajax shook his head, a grown-up amused by the antics of a small child. “Why don’t you give me the gun in your left boot, and then I’ll tell you.”

He was lying and we both knew it. Unfortunately there was nothing I could do about it. His guards were crowding in again, so I leaned down, eyes on his, and dislodged Hunter’s second gun. Guard number two moved to take it from me. I shot him through the chest.

As the body hit the floor, even Ajax looked surprised. “Well, well. An agent of Light who likes to kill innocents. How…invigorating.”

“Nobody who works for the Tulpa is an innocent.” And I shot Thomas twice. He cried out, and my conduit clattered uselessly to the floor. There. I liked those odds better.

“Done now?” Ajax asked, crossing his arms, looking bored. “I mean, there’s really no one left for you to kill.”

“Except you.” I leveled the gun at his chest. It wouldn’t kill him, but it’d sure leave a mark.

Ajax simply held up a finger, as if just remembering something. “Wait, we’re both wrong!” He pointed across the room. “Look behind you.”

I pivoted slowly, keeping one eye on Ajax while I faced whatever new threat lay behind me. But I gasped when I saw Warren there. His body was bound to a chair with casters, head hanging forward, hair loose, black blood pasting a third of it to his skull. But then even Warren was forgotten in a split moment. My eyes were all for the man holding him.

“You.” And I released the breath I’d been holding for a decade.

He was the same as before. I hadn’t imagined him. Of course, now the moonscape wasn’t stamping hollows beneath his cheeks, and the gentle breeze off the desert floor wasn’t rustling his hair into spikes, but the cruel, thin lips were the same. They were the ones I’d searched for in the face of every stranger for the last decade—walking miles and miles past syringes and feces, and alleys that never saw light, seeking them—and now here he was. Standing there. Watching me. Wearing fucking Armani.

“An old friend of yours, I believe,” Ajax said, a smile in his voice.

“Hello, Joanna,” he said, in the voice of my nightmares.

“Hello, asshole,” I replied.

“Now, now. I don’t think you’re in a position to be calling anyone names.” He leaned forward, lifted Warren’s head from where it lolled against his chest and looked into his face. “Do you, Warren?”

Warren’s neck swayed side to side beneath his grip, a motion that made my stomach roll over on itself. Carelessly, he let it drop again.

“Wow, Joaquin,” Ajax said. “Look at her chest.”

I didn’t have to look to know it was glowing. Heat fired through my body, pumped madly in my temples and veins.

Joaquin, however, did look. Then leered. And touched himself. “Pretty.”

I let my right hand drop to my side, a distraction as my left hovered over the pocket where Hunter’s whip was hidden. I was certain they couldn’t smell it—its master, after all, possessed the aureole—and both believed I was no longer armed. When Ajax took a step forward, I noted it, but made no move for the whip. I was biding my time. Drawing the tiger in closer. I inhaled deeply, but only smelled the two of them in the room. And the two dead guards.

And Warren’s agony.

“Wondering where everyone else is?” Ajax said, circling me to start the game of cat-and-mouse.

I shifted, keeping him in my sights. “It had crossed my mind.”

“Joaquin and I have thoughtfully planned this intimate little party just for you. Cozy, isn’t it?” He took another step forward. Joaquin tightened Warren’s body restraints, settling him at the top of the stairs like a king fastened to his throne. “We decided we want to get to know you a little better, Joanna. And Warren here gets to watch.”

“In other words,” Joaquin said, turning to me with a wink, “we want you for ourselves.”

He tossed one of Warren’s arms into the air in celebration. It fell limply back to his side. Warren, it seemed, wasn’t going to be watching anything.

I shook my head slowly, astounded at the magnitude of evil in the room. Of course, I’d destroy them both if I could—I’d discovered that I too could do my fair share of killing—but a part of me thought, What for? There would always be more sick fucks to follow in these two’s footsteps, and more after them. It was like treading water in the middle of the ocean, with no land, no ship, no help in sight. Eventually you’d have to stop, and let yourself sink.

“You didn’t think we were just going to kill you without having a bit of fun, did you?” Joaquin asked, his fingers drumming carelessly atop Warren’s slumped head. “You first, Ajax.”

“Oh, I couldn’t.”

“Really, I insist.” Joaquin waved the protest aside like he was swatting a fly. “I’ve had her before.”

“You are too kind.”

I had gone as cold and still as the marble blanketing the room. My mouth suddenly felt like I’d swallowed a quart of sand. “I’ll kill myself before I ever allow you inside me again.”

Joaquin shrugged. “Whatever. Suicide is of the Shadow too. Isn’t that right, Warren?” He took a knife from behind his back and placed its hilt in Warren’s open palm. Holding
the lax fingers around it, he made a cutting motion across Warren’s throat, miming suicide. Blood bloomed, and Warren’s eyes fluttered open long enough to roll back into his head, but he fell limp on a faint groan.

I had jumped, expecting to feel a sympathetic score of the blade across my own neck, but didn’t. Our connection was severed, probably because he was too far gone to be saved. And, I thought, for any of this to matter now.

An eye popped open from beneath the matting of Warren’s hair. And blinked.

No, I thought, inhaling sharply. It
winked
.

I glanced over at Ajax, but he was watching me with an almost rapturous expression. Joaquin wore a similar one as he continued to thrum Warren’s skull. I saw the bright red ribbons of newly healed scars winding across every inch of his bared skin, and had to clench my jaw against the anger rising inside me again.

“There’s something I’ve been wondering forever now. Something I just have to ask.” Joaquin stopped drumming. “Did you think of me often? I mean, of that night? Of the moment I penetrated you?”

I managed a mean smile. “Every time I sharpened a pencil.”

Ajax laughed. Joaquin’s eyes knifed into slits.

“Well, I thought of you,” he said, licking his lips. “The way you screamed for mercy. Did you know the taste of your skin altered on my tongue as I pumped and pumped and pumped away? It was like innocence…gone sour and ruined.”

My jaw clenched, but I didn’t blink. “Well, I’m all grown up now. Not a shred of innocence to be found.”

He shrugged. “That’s all right. I prefer the powerful ones even more. Like your mother. She was tasty.”

My heart jumped in my chest despite myself. “You lie.”

Ajax laughed again. “Joaquin’s toying with you. After all, your mother went into the arms of the Shadows willingly. She wasn’t like you. She didn’t distinguish between good
and evil. And you know why? Because she
knew
. There is no light and shadow. There’s only a gray rainbow, and a choice as to where you pin yourself on the spectrum.”

“You mean like
your
mother?” I said, and smiled when he froze. Both pair of eyes were fixed on me. I was the only one who saw Warren’s grip curl around the knife still in his hand.

“Don’t you talk about my mother.”

“Your mother, who was so bad she was good,” I continued, watching his already pale face drain of color.

“You think you’re better than me? Morally superior, because you’re a so-called agent of Light?” And I suddenly knew that’s what he thought.

“Half Light,” I corrected, careful to keep my eyes off the sawing motion behind Joaquin’s back.

“I told you before. There’s no such thing as better or worse in this world, or any world. You think you’re less evil than I, but all you really are is weaker. It’s only a matter of degree, you see? And of knowing at what point you’re going to break.”

I jerked my head once. “I told you before. I don’t believe that.”

A slim grin snaked up his cheeks. “And I told you I’d
make
you a believer.”

“You really want to know what I believe?” I said, taking a step forward, and I wasn’t just buying Warren time to do whatever it was he was trying to do. I really wanted to tell him. I wanted Ajax to know there was at least one solid core difference between him and me. “I think it kills you to see what you’ll never be. What your mother tried to be and couldn’t. You destroy things because you think it’ll erase her betrayal, fill you up, make you whole. Instead, with each death you grow emptier and emptier. The darkness inside of Ajax Sand casts its longest shadow over himself.”

“Spare me your false righteousness,” he bellowed, spittle flying from the side of his mouth. “You’re no better
than I am!” He motioned back to the foyer. “You killed those guards like they were junkyard dogs. Don’t try and tell me you didn’t enjoy the power that gave you!”

“Those guards,” I said, through clenched teeth, “were initiates, not innocents, and killing them before they metamorphosed just saved me the chore of having to do it later.”