The Touch Of Twilight (18 page)

My face still ached with the residual sting of the Tulpa’s slap, but I shrugged. “That was before we came to an agreement. And I’ll heal.”

“Sure,” she said, feigning unconcern as her gaze darted sideways. “But will your changeling?”

“I’m fine,” Jasmine said, but she was guarded, clearly worried Regan would seek retaliation for my attack on her changeling.

But Regan hadn’t been looking at her. “Jasmine…where’s Li?”

“She was here a minute ago,” Jasmine complained, and she backed away to peer under the freestanding bookcases separating the back of the room into rows. “I swear, if I lose her again my mother is going to…”

“Oh God.” My eyes found Li at the same time Jasmine’s did. I was vaguely aware of Regan’s laughter—laughter and footsteps as she ran from the storeroom—but I bolted in the opposite direction, and dropped to my knees next to Jasmine, who’d been closer and had gotten there first.

“Wait, Jas!”

But she was already turning her sister over. “Li, how many times do I have to—”

We both gasped, momentarily stilled by the china doll cheek scored with three deep claw marks. It looked like she’d been attacked by a pit bull. Her beautiful skin hung in tatters, and blood pooled on the floor around her. Even once the bleeding was staunched, even when the furrows were stitched back together under a surgeon’s gentle hand, the child would be scarred for life.

But when she looked up at me, there was none of the loathing I expected in her watery gaze. There was no room for it with pain and fear and hope all jostling for space. “I did good, right? I protected you?”

The lump in my throat turned into a mountain. “Yeah, baby. You did great.”

She smiled with the good side of her face. I turned to Jasmine and found the piercing accusatory glare I deserved.

“Happy?” she asked, voice breaking.

God, no. I certainly wasn’t that. “
I-I
didn’t know.”

My voice cracked and a tear slid down the cheek that mirrored the injury to Li’s…except mine would heal. Jasmine looked at me in a length of charged silence, and for a moment I saw something akin to pity flickering behind her gaze, but she snuffed it out in the next. “Whatever.”

“I’m going to fix it.” I reached for Li.

“You’d better.” Jasmine said in a voice round with fury and disbelief. “
Hero
.”

But there was only one heroine present, and I lifted her in my arms and gently carried her from the storeroom.

I drove Li and Jasmine to the emergency room, and left only after their mother had arrived, assuring her all medical costs would be covered by the Archer Children’s Foundation. She thanked me repeatedly for “saving” her baby’s life from a vicious dog’s attack, while Jasmine sat in a plastic chair, swinging her feet back and forth as she alternated text messaging on her cell phone and glaring pointedly in my direction.

I wanted to tell her it wasn’t my fault. I hadn’t expected the Tulpa to attack, and I didn’t know how the injury had been transferred to Li instead of me or even her. But intentionally or not, I really had broken something vital to the balance of the supernatural system, and now not only were the manuals not being written, but a seven-year-old’s life had been permanently affected.

It was too late to return to Master Comics. The shop was closed and I’d received instructions to meet the rest of the troop at eight o’clock to examine the mask Chandra had stolen from Xavier’s. It was seven-thirty now and I still had to get across town in the rush of Friday night traffic, but at least it gave me time to think of a way to tell the others about Li, as well as ponder the smorgasbord of trouble now filling my plate. Okay, so it wasn’t all bad news. I’d learned the doppelgänger’s appearance had spooked the Tulpa enough to have him willing to bargain with the Light. I’d also learned Regan’s left eye wigged out when she was nervous, that she was overly sensitive about turning into a walking corpse, and I could best her in hand-to-hand if I played my cards right.

The news about Hunter having a side gig as a sex worker wasn’t what one would call
good
, but he always had a reason for what he did, and surely he had one for keeping it from the rest of the troop. Since I was exceptionally curious as to what that reason was, it was convenient to find myself swinging in front of the warehouse that served as his workshop with almost a quarter hour to spare. We were meeting here because we weren’t sure what would happen if we tried to take Xavier’s mask back into the sanctuary with us. Anything related to the Shadows was instantaneously incinerated as it slid down the secured chute leading to our hidden underground lair. I shuddered as I recalled the sole time I’d attempted entry without donning my protective mask. In contrast, we didn’t know if
this
mask was inherently evil—though there was something determinedly not right about a piece of wood that came to life and sucked out a person’s soul essence—but we couldn’t risk it being destroyed before we had a chance to examine it further.

Hunter’s workshop was as safe a place as we could hope for on this side of reality. It wasn’t a designated safe zone like Master Comics or the Downtown Cocktail Lounge, and was technically accessible by mortals and Shadows alike, but Hunter had the place so booby-trapped, the unfortunate Shadow who attempted a break-in here would be skewered, rotisseried, and served up to his or her enemies faster than you could say,
Would you like fries with that?
I’d seen him construct a weapon out of nothing more than toothpicks and twine, but the devices buried about his workshop were more than that; they were lethal works of art. Hunter did like his toys.

The steel bay door was open on the easterly side, and I assumed all alarms, traps, and missile systems had been turned off, so I pulled my Porsche to a stop next to his Ford Mustang, noting they were the only two cars here as of yet. Also convenient.

Clicking the alarm on my car, I glanced at the red Mustang and wondered if he used it for his security cover or if it was the ride for his side gig. What did a call boy drive on a date, anyway? And why, I asked myself as I shook my head, should I even care?

The workshop was housed in an isolated commercial district where the Strip’s biggest names in magic stored their props. Burton, Copperfield, Penn and Teller; they all had storage buildings the size of airplane hangars, so if our place ever
was
broken into, the templates and drawings and odd contraptions could be explained away as yet another magician’s illusionary trove of tricks.

What it was, however, was a place to plan, design, and test the weapons we used against the Shadows as we vied for control over the valley. The conduits designed to complement a specific agent’s talents, temperament, and training were conceived and honed to lethal perfection here. However, that was a relatively rare task—agents, with any luck, tended to live a long time—so the rest of the time it was a place to run sims and defensive programs meant to counteract our enemies’ machinations. Even the tools used to clean up a location affected by a paranormal battle were contained in raw form and made here. And Hunter’s hands crafted them all.

I’d once heard the Eskimo languages had dozens of different words for the concept of
snow
. Agents, I decided, should have the same extensive linguistic flexibility for the qualities of smoke, because the scent I inhaled upon entering the warehouse wasn’t the Shadow stench of incinerating flesh and hot ashes, and it wasn’t the suffocating fallout that had squeezed all the air from the molecules in the pseudo black hole the Tulpa had created downtown last weekend. No, Hunter’s scent was more natural, like the wisps rising from an isolated forest campfire, when the breeze was up and there was no other person for miles around. I located him by inhaling the heady mixture of clean sweat and a spice as identifiable as a sliver of ginger on the tongue, and my belly flip-flopped inside me. It’s true what they say, I thought, rounding the corner to find him shirtless, bent over a sliding table. Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire.

And this man was scorching.

He wasn’t overbuilt like a gym rat; his physicality was more raw and far less self-conscious than that. He was sleek in the fashion of panthers and fast cars, built for performance, with latent power almost quivering beneath that compact frame. Still, the first word that would spring to mind if you ever saw him backlit, in silhouette, would be
man
. I especially liked the way his shoulders rounded, how they rolled high and smooth, like statues on display, clearly the force behind his fist. I’d seen him pummel through a concrete barrier with a careless backslap, and couldn’t help but compare that to the way I fought. I had never solely used the torque of my shoulder. I used my wide hips, my long thighs, my agile mind. As a woman, my whole being had to be the force behind my fist.

And back when I was a
mortal
woman, Hunter was exactly the type of man I’d study from behind the lens of my camera. I’d see them moving across a room with unconscious, predatory grace, and wonder what it would be like to be that powerful. What did it feel like to be able to run faster, jump higher, hit harder? To feel synapses firing in split-second bursts beneath the skin, testosterone making me jumpy?

Those were, of course, the covetous thoughts of a girl who’d been victimized in a way most men could never imagine. Back then, before I was a hundred times stronger than all those men I so jealously and suspiciously studied, I equated physicality with power. I thought the stronger you were, the more you controlled your own body and destiny. I even remember swearing in the abyss of night that if I’d been born with a male body I would never let it get out of shape or allow it to be less than what it could be. I’d have sculpted it until David wilted beneath his fig leaf in comparison. I’d have taken up as much space as possible. I’d have run just to feel power pumping in my thighs.

I hadn’t felt that envious twinge since my metamorphosis, but it struck me now, and surprise had me holding back as I studied Hunter from my location beside the wall cabinets. I’d never seen him without his shirt before, and the ambient light from the low-hanging bulbs captured the cuts and grooves of his muscles as he worked. His skin was burnished like faded copper…the result of sporting beneath the desert sun, not worshipping. More, there was a tattoo high on his back, above his right shoulder blade, and when he shifted again I crept closer to inspect it. It was a perfect circle of ink so black, his tanned skin looked pale in comparison. One side of the circle was shaded, the other left naked in the classic design of yin and yang. But the artist had left enough skin bare on the shaded portion to spell one potent word:
Desire
.

On the naked side?
Fear
.

“You’re in my light,” he said, not looking up. He knew my scent too. In fact, every fresh encounter between us strengthened that knowledge, and soon those silty layers would be thick enough to form a solid bedrock of intimacy. If a team of archaeologists could dig up the emotions lying between us, unearthing the beginning of my relationship with Hunter, the aureole we’d swapped and shared would mark a distinct altering of the hostility that came before it. It was hard to hate someone when you’d stood not just in their shoes, but the very seat of their soul.

And right now, with his scent invading my pores and the sight of him with fewer clothes on than I’d ever seen before, my vision clouded. All I could see was that damned tattoo, like some of those emotions I’d experienced while inside him had been inscribed on his skin. I could all too easily recall the slide of his lips beneath mine as I passed him the aureole, the power in both his body and mind mingling with mine. It was a memory I didn’t want.

And starting an argument, I decided, would be a good way to push it away.

“I’ll stand over here, then,” I said, before pulling out one of the flyers Regan had pelted me with and dropping it in his line of view. It landed at the toe of his left boot, and he merely shifted his eyes, the rest of him still as he remained bent over his work. “I mean, this
is
your good side, right?”

Now he did look up. “Where’d you get this?”

I crossed my arms. “They’re plastered all over town.”

Now he did straighten, stretching blithely, which annoyed me for some reason. “And when did Olivia Archer become a patron of the smut peddlers?”

“Actually, Ben discovered it. He’s decided he doesn’t like you.”

Hunter turned back to the pencil and scale he’d been working with. “Oh, I’m real worried about the mortal who keeps stepping on his own dick.”

“Hey!” I straightened, indignant.

He waved my protest away and kept working. “Big deal. So Ben told the little sister of his not-dead ex-girlfriend—who really is his ex—that he doesn’t like me. Meanwhile he’s dating her sworn enemy. Stop me when this gets ridiculous.”

I circled to the other side of the table and leaned forward so I really was in his light. “You mean ridiculous like pissing off a P.I. so badly, he shared everything he’s learned about Hunter Lorenzo with his new girlfriend?”

That had him looking up. “What?”

I shot him a grim smile now that I had his attention. “Ben didn’t show that to me. Regan did.”

I saw his mind working, body still as his eyes wandered the floor, mentally covering all the angles as I had. The Hunter Lorenzo identity, the odds of Regan tracking him to Valhalla. Finally his tensed shoulders relaxed. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does if she ever sees you at the casino. What are you going to say, security is your side job? Or hooking is?”

His jaw clenched, but he still offered no explanation. “You worry too much.”

He meant I asked too many questions. Feeling my temper rise, I linked my hands to keep them from curling into fists, and worked on keeping my tone light and even. “I’m not worried, just curious. I mean, what kind of women call you? Desperate? Homely? College girls come to Vegas to party? Doctors’ wives left alone too many nights in a row?”

He turned away again. “Business etiquette prevents me from speaking of my clients.”