The Taste of Night (4 page)

I closed my eyes, tensed for the impact, and wondered so many things in quick succession, I felt dizzy. What was it going to feel like to die? Would it hurt? Would there be a bright light at the end of a dark tunnel?

Would Olivia be there with outstretched arms, forgiving me for not being able to save her?

Senses primed, I flinched when the spring action on the bow caught, though it almost sounded like it was done in slow motion. The arrow was nocked, and the string sang as the bow reached full draw. I held my breath, not wanting my last emotion on earth to be fear.

Behind me, Liam screamed. His hold on me gave suddenly, and I opened my eyes.

“Fuck!” he hollered through gritted teeth. He was clasping his right shoulder, fingers wrapped around the shaft of an arrow. “You have bad aim, you stupid bitch!”

The woman tilted her head. “Now why would you say something like that to a woman with a weapon?” She shifted and shot out his other shoulder, then looked directly at me and jerked her head, the universal signal for
Get the fuck out of the way.
I did.

She shot out his knees in quick succession, barely pausing to aim. Then the chamber was empty. “This thing have any more ammo?” she asked me. I shook my head. She glanced from me to my abandoned bag, smelling the lie but ignoring it anyway. “Oh well,” she said. “I guess we’ll have to use something else.”

Whistling the theme song to
Peter Gunn
she strolled over to Liam, now writhing on the ground like a landed bass. My heartbeat slowed marginally, but quickened again as she turned back to me. Liam’s conduit was in her hand, but she didn’t point it at me. Instead she handed it to me.

I glanced down, took it by the knobbed handle, and felt the heft of hinged titanium. It was a weapon meant for an agent larger than me, but the length of a forearm when folded, small enough to carry concealed in a large cargo pocket, which was where Liam had stashed it in his appropriated uniform. I grasped the knob, whipped it out in front of me, and it elongated with a biting snap. It was a bata, or shillelagh—an Irish fighting stick—and I glanced back at Liam with some surprise. I hadn’t pegged him as a Mick.

“Why?” Liam and I asked at the same time. She answered me.

“Because I can’t kill one of my own. Even if I use his own weapon against him, the kill spot will still identify me as the slayer.”

I hadn’t known that. I’d only used a conduit against its owner once, but he had been an enemy. Unlike the woman next to me, I’d never even thought about killing one of my own. Well…except Warren. But it’d been a fleeting thought, and only that once.

Okay, twice.

“Because it’s unnatural,” Liam spat, his shock still evident in the scent of rancid lemon rising from his pores. But he was angry too, and who could blame him? He’d probably thought he was needed to protect her in this operation. By some arbitrary whim, however, he was the one who needed protection. He wasn’t going to get it from me, and his partner—former—looked away.

I hefted his conduit, holding it about a third of the way from the butt, and his eyes widened when he saw I knew what I was doing. “You can’t do this, Regan! We were seen leaving together! The Tulpa will find out!”

“Nobody saw, Liam. I made sure of it.” Her voice was flat, but a wisp of regret flickered over her face, slithering across her features like a ripple over a pond, disappearing as soon as she realized I was watching. “Just do it,” she said, and turned away.

I stepped forward before that shadowy regret could turn into full-blown repentance.

I didn’t make him suffer. It wasn’t my style, though I’d kind of overlooked that when I’d tortured and killed the Shadow who’d taken Olivia’s life. This wasn’t personal, though—if murder can be termed an impersonal thing—just as I knew his wish to kill me was nothing personal. He was doing his job, Shadow versus Light, and I would do my job now. Still, I liked to think there was some difference between us.

“Your full name?” I asked, resting my thumb along the bata’s shaft.

He squinted up at me through pain-hazed eyes. “Why?”

“For the records,” I said in a voice that was merciless despite my words.

He hesitated, knowing I wasn’t talking about the Shadow manuals. A kill spot was normally recorded in written form for both Shadow and Light, but by killing him with his own weapon, I’d erase his death and his life from the Shadows manuals forever. I gave him time, and at length he came to the same conclusion I would’ve. It was better to be remembered by your enemies than to leave no legacy at all. “Liam Burke, the Piscean Shadow.”

I nodded to show I’d heard. Then, before any gratitude could enter his eyes, I lifted the bata over my head, and with one hand brought the knob crashing down between his eyes.

The air exploded with the stench of the Shadow, the decay of his rotted core spilling from the deadly wound, before recoiling invisibly and imploding upon itself. I stood perfectly still as the air wavered around me, letting curls of evanescent energy roll over my body in little shock waves, chills popping up over my limbs and core before enveloping my face, cool and light and tickling, like a thousand bees swarming gently to their hive. My mind began to hum with it, and I swayed, dizzy, suddenly aware of myself as if from the outside; a bright torch of a woman with her eyes closed as she rocked on an unseen wind, one hand clasped tight around a stick dripping with blood as the light slowly drained from her cautionary glyph.

This was the aureole. The dictionary defines it as a circle of light that surrounds the representation of a holy person, like the halos emanating from an angel or the Madonna or a saint. There also happens to be a great restaurant in Vegas by that name. But none of those definitions applied here. Here it meant being infused with the ability to walk through
the world for twelve hours, imperceptible by Shadows or Light, unscented and untouchable. Now I could stand inches away from the Tulpa, and he wouldn’t know I was there. And even if he did, there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.

When it was over—or at least when the droning had lessened to a point where I could once again hear my own thoughts—I inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly. There was nothing of Liam in the air. I glanced down at the weapon in my hand. His conduit possessed no scent marking it as belonging to him either. It was just a stick now. I’d erased his olfactory impression wholly.

I threw the stick aside, almost at the woman’s feet, and glanced down. The arm Liam had cut with the tip of my conduit had mended, a mere scar now, and my injured knee was solid beneath my weight. My spine was straight and healed. I could be pierced by a thousand weapons now, even my own, and deflect them all like unwanted kisses.

I glanced over to find the remaining Shadow eyeing me nervously. Released from the fetters of fear and certain death, I saw what I hadn’t before. She’d orchestrated this whole thing. No wonder my glyph hadn’t kicked into gear. I’d been in no danger from her. And, I saw, she was young. Her long ponytail swished to one side as she asked, “You going to kill me?”

Without thinking, I shook my head.

A smile began its upward climb on her face. “I knew it,” she said, thumping her fist against her thigh. “I knew you could be turned. The others said you never would, but I knew.”

“I’m not turned,” I said, holding out my hand. She returned my conduit, and I tucked it back behind me. “I killed him, didn’t I?”

“You gave him Last Rites,” she pointed out. “You allowed him remembrance in your mythos.”

I shrugged. “It’s what I’d have wanted.”

“And if he’d refused to tell you his name?” she asked, tilting her head the other way.

“He was a Shadow agent,” I said, meaning I’d have killed him anyway.

“I’m a Shadow agent,” she said. I raised a brow, and she dropped her eyes. “Well, I will be soon. And you didn’t kill me.”

I really should kill her, I thought, nodding slowly. I
would
kill her. But there were things I needed to know first. “How’d you find me?”

She shrugged nonchalantly, but there was pride in the movement. “I saw you leave the bachelorette auction. I saw you enter the portal after that.”

That wasn’t what I meant, and she knew it. I’d faked my death, disengaged from family and friends, and I had been careful to steer clear of my old habits and haunts. So even if Regan had been studying the life I’d left behind, she shouldn’t have been able to find me. “You see a lot,” I murmured, but didn’t press. I’d find out what I needed to know…one way or another.

“Including your fingers. Like mine.” She offered me a small smile, and wiggled her fingers. The marblelike smoothness of the tips reflected unnaturally in the aquarium’s soft light. She saw this too, and her smile widened as she tapped on the wall of glass housing sea turtles. Mortal fingers would thrum dully on the great water-filled tank, but hers clinked like glass on glass. She glanced back at me from the corner of her eye with a look that could almost be described as shy. “In fact, if you take a closer look,
Olivia
, I bet you’d find we have a lot in common.”

I felt my own hands fist in my lap at the way she sang my not-name—it’d been sly, not shy—and the place where there should have been prints on my fingers pressed hard into my palms. “Did the Tulpa send you?”

“You mean your father?”

“Don’t,” I said, jerking reflexively. “Don’t call him that.”

“Well he is, isn’t he?” She walked toward me, eyes hun
gry on my face, fingers trailing over the glass like nails over a chalkboard. I imagined the turtles cringing in their shells. “You have his eyes, you know.”

I gritted my teeth, and a flash of light sparked through the room, along with my anger. It was like a light switch had been flicked on, only for the bulb to burn out. I saw my reflection flash in the tank opposite me, and wished I hadn’t. My face was drawn, skeletal, with a humorless grin, and those eyes she had mentioned were opaque black marbles sunk deep in their sockets. The scent of singed hair rose up around us, and I knew if I opened my mouth, smoke would pour out.

“Oh look…his cheekbones too.” She took a step back, but it wasn’t fearfully. It was to regard me. She was young, yes, but dauntless. “Anyway, no, he didn’t send me. He’d kill me if he knew I was here.”

When I thought I had control enough, when my reflection off the glass was mine once again, and red didn’t tinge everything around me, I asked, “Why?”

“Because I came to warn you.” And even though we were alone, her voice dropped to a whisper. “My name is Regan DuPree. My mother was the Cancerian Shadow until she was killed by your Cancerian Light nine years ago. We’ve had an interim agent acting as the Shadows’ Cancer since then, but I’m to take up the sign on my birthday.”

“So you’re twenty-four.” Would be twenty-five, and undergo metamorphosis into a full-fledged Zodiac member by the end of the summer. I filed that information away as she nodded, and crossed my arms. A young initiate, helping out one of the agents whose troop was responsible for her mother’s death nine years earlier. That didn’t compute…though I suppose it depended on what kind of relationship she’d had with her mother. But she was also defying the Tulpa, who was still very much alive. There had to be a good reason for that.

“So what did you have against Liam? He was a Shadow”—I jerked my head at him, then her—“you’re a
Shadow initiate. You’re all still on the same side, aren’t you?”

“As far as I know there are still only two sides. Black or white. Bright or dark. Light or Shadow.” Her voice had gone cold, and I could tell she didn’t like being talked down to. Maybe that had caused some friction between her and Mommy Dearest. “Do I look like Light to you?”

She didn’t. As blond and pretty as she was, there was a merciless stoicism about her, the same as in a sociopath’s mugshot. But all her sociopathic outbursts lay latent in her future.

I shook my head. “I don’t get it.”

She sighed, like the story bored her but she’d indulge me anyway. “Look, I figured out who you were, and a few weeks later Liam followed me following you. The only way to keep him quiet was to tell him about your Olivia Archer identity. He said he’d let me kill you if he could take the credit.” She screwed up her face. “Liam was a sturdy agent, but he had absolutely no imagination whatsoever.”

She sounded like she was defending herself, and for a moment I couldn’t tell if she was talking to me or herself. Then the coy look returned, but this time it had an edge. “I understand his reasoning, of course. You’re slumming with the agents of Light right now, and fair game for anyone who finds you, but you’re also the Tulpa’s heir apparent, a woman who can walk both sides of the Zodiac with more freedom than the rest of us will ever know. You’re the reason all of us act, or lately don’t act. You consume the Tulpa’s every waking moment, did you know? You guide his every action and thought.”

She looked me over again, like she was trying to understand what the big deal was. Good luck. I’d been trying to figure out the same thing for the last six months. “You killed Liam because he didn’t want me on the Shadow side?”

“What better way to show you that I do?” she rejoined.

Boy, they trained these Shadows young
.

“Well, good for you,” I said as she beamed. I shook my head. “No, I mean really. It’s good for you. He’d have killed you right after he did me.”

Regan looked startled at that.

“What?” I asked, tilting my head now. “You think Liam trusted you not to tell the Tulpa what he’d done? Or at least tell someone about your part in it?”

She started to say, “He wouldn’t…” but trailed off, knowing he would. He had trusted her just as much as she did him…which was why she’d taken the first shot. She looked away, fumbled for a cigarette, and lit it right beneath a
NO SMOKING
sign. I said nothing, knowing I’d given her a good shake.

“How long have you known?” I finally asked.

“What?” she asked, blowing out a long stream of smoke. “That Olivia Archer died six months ago, and Joanna Archer, her half-sister and the black sheep of the Archer family dynasty, has been living in her apartment, driving her car, and squatting in her skin ever since?”