The Touch Of Twilight (3 page)

“No,” I replied immediately, shifting into gear as I lifted my brows. “Have you?”

His mouth quirked, but he shrugged one shoulder so his black T-shirt stretched across his torso. “You could just let him go,” he said, his voice unexpectedly soft.

I looked at him like he’d grown a second skull. “Let the man I’ve loved since I was a teen be corrupted and tainted by one of the most evil beings in the Las Vegas valley?”

“Let the man you love,” he said, emphasizing the present tense, “make his own decisions.”

I turned back to face the road. That was the stupidest idea I’d ever heard.

Hunter was too close, watching me too carefully, and he smelled too damned good to be trapped in a car with a woman who had extrasensory perception. This wouldn’t normally be so unnerving—men looked closely at Olivia Archer all the time—but Hunter knew what tight emotions lived coiled beneath the Botox and boobs. He’d seen and, more importantly,
felt
the sharp nosedive my nature took whenever I truly lost my temper. Not only did he seem not to care, it appeared to interest him further. Twisted bastard.

“Look, you didn’t know me then,” I said, before he could offer me any more sage testosterone-driven advice. “And despite what you think, you don’t know me now. Ben does.”

And while attraction was one thing, true knowledge of a person was rare enough that it was still celebrated with elaborate ceremonies—a church, a woman in white, a walk down the aisle…and, in those instances, only one man waiting at the other end of it to receive her. One man was all I needed, wanted, or could handle.

Hunter sighed audibly beside me, and the accompanying scent was a lacy pattern of spice and smoke. “You really know nothing of a man’s reaction to spurned love, do you?”

“And you do?” I shot back.

“I’m an expert.”

The quiet rejoinder made me wish I’d said nothing, and I shifted uncomfortably. When your senses were so keen you could sharpen knives on them, when you could feel life pulsing from the plant life around you, and the heat retained in the concrete even after a winter’s day, the desire radiating from a person you were forever yoked to with magical power was like licking sunshine.

I’d be lying if I said a part of me didn’t want to incinerate myself in that fire, to see how far and deep the connection could go, and if a physical joining could compete with, or complete, the breath-stealing intimacy of shared souls. Another, stubborn part of me said that wasn’t fair. If I’d been allowed to share Ben’s thoughts, if pieces of his soul and psyche could’ve been caught and interwoven with mine, I knew I’d feel the same intensity—probably
more
—for him. Hunter and I had simply crossed a frontier that Ben could never reach.

We remained silent as I gunned it down Boulder Highway, swiveling onto the 95 without slowing to head downtown. The stench of Shadow activity was as easy to follow as if it was transmitted through my
GPS
, and though it’d been less than a year since my extrasensory abilities had fired to life, using them was as natural to me as moving from sleep into full consciousness.

“It’s not him, you know,” Hunter said, after a bit.

I thought about Ben, probably two-stepping with Regan right now, holding her in a light, practiced hold. I remembered the way his palms had molded to my own back, and could almost feel them there now.
Mine first. Mine always. Always mine
. “Yes it is,” I said sadly.

“That she wants, I mean,” Hunter said, and I glanced over to find him watching me with stark compassion. “It’s you. She wants to get inside your head and injure your heart, and you’re allowing it. She knows she’s getting to you.”

He was right. My weapon hand twitched even as I nodded. I fought regret for the opportunities I hadn’t taken. I should’ve killed her five months ago when she’d first approached me as a Shadow initiate, and said she wanted to “help” me. I should’ve killed her once I discovered she knew who I was beneath the identity that was my safety and refuge and only remaining link to my dead sister. I should’ve slain her before she targeted my lover, using him to get to me. What I’d done instead was barter her life in exchange for information about the one person who, at the time, I’d have done anything to kill.

But he
was
dead now, and with nothing left to haggle with, Regan soon would be too. I swore it.

“Something else is causing the vibrational outbursts,” I said, changing the subject as we took the off-ramp down Casino Center Drive.

“Something else?” he asked, and I told him what Regan had said in the bathroom. Yet there wasn’t anything else in the paranormal realm—there were Shadows, there were Light, and that was it—and Hunter said as much as we veered north. I shrugged, unable to answer, knowing only that Regan’s surprise, and ultimate relief, had been real. Maybe Warren would know more when we found him.

I pulled to a stop in front of a street-side meter and switched from my impractical heels into a pair of black canvas boots with silent rubber soles, Velcro securing them tightly about my ankles. I’d have liked to change out of my black skirt and silk top, but there wasn’t time, so I locked everything but my conduit in the car, then took the lead on foot. I’d been a freelance photographer before my metamorphosis into a superhero, and had logged more hours on Vegas’s back streets than any other agent.

We slipped past the four-block stretch still remembered by locals as Glitter Gulch. Though having undergone an extensive facelift—including a canopy of light, a name change, and an exodus of most elements of urban decay—the Gulch would always be grittier and more infamous than its temptress sister, the Strip, and for that I was pleased. Long live the ninety-nine-cent shrimp cocktail.

For now, we strained to see beyond the canopy of neon and into the scarred landscape of an in-fill site, the still developing Union Park. The city had bought the railroad land that’d been Las Vegas’s original link to the rest of the world, and while the ambitious multi-use development promised to revitalize this historic urban center, right now it was a sixty-one-acre cross-hatching of cranes and gigantic mounds of earth. And a stark black void had opened up directly above the skeleton of one promising high-rise hotel and casino. I didn’t say anything about our new beard being located at what seemed to be the center of all that opaque darkness because Hunter’s stiffening posture told me he was thinking the same.

A beard was a mortal who acted as a front for troop activities. Beards—or goats, as the Shadows referred to them—were given gifts, usually monetary, in exchange for allowing us to own their lives. Most thought we were a new crime organization, while others were sure we were government special ops. Interesting that there didn’t seem to be any perceptible difference. Naturally, some beards figured out the truth and ran to the press with fantastic stories about superheroes and monsters battling for the soul of the city, but the stories never ran. When you had your thumb on the pulse of the entire valley, it was easy to intercept one frantic, babbling mortal.

The Shadows, of course, had no qualms about torturing and killing our human allies in an effort to ferret out our secrets, and seeing this unidentifiable black cloud so close to one of our beards’ outposts worried me. Meanwhile, they flaunted their allies, knowing we wouldn’t harm them. The most notorious of them? The man I’d once believed was my father, the seemingly untouchable casino magnate, Xavier Archer. I had to admit, the first time I’d heard the term
goat
, I’d laughed. The thought of a heavyset, thick-jowled billy goat wearing Armani cracked me up.

But I wasn’t laughing as we slipped past the construction fence into the old rail yard. The black cavity above the steel scaffolding appeared even denser as we advanced into the construction zone. Even the sky looked dry-erased around and above its field. Yet the structure below appeared sound, and more, the explosive particles that tasted like microscopic tin arrows on my tongue seemed to be drawing closer, pinging off one another with each breath, as if desperate to re-form whatever object had been obliterated. I doubted anyone inside that bubble of darkness could see a foot in either direction, but I covered my face with my mask anyway. I wanted my Olivia identity protected in the event that the particle-charged sac burst.

“You sure this is it?” I asked Hunter when he halted in front of one of a dozen construction trailers circling the shell of the high-rise. It was hard to tell one nondescript building from another in the haze.

“I’m the one who set it up,” Hunter replied coolly, angling his head back at the giant structure. “I did the research, scouted the location, picked our man, set him up as foreman. He’s in charge of this project in the day, and at night maintains visual surveillance of the entire downtown area from the top floor of that structure. His name’s Vincent Moore.”

Gone was the man whose deep gaze and subtle flirtation had made me squirm. Equally absent was the one who’d taken cheap shots at the urban cowboys. In front of me stood our troop’s weapons master, the man who lived and breathed hand combat, weaponeering, and all the arts of martial command that so perfectly aligned with an Aries’ natural physicality.

Physical talents aside, however, Hunter’s greatest weapon was his mind. Ever the tactician, he was constantly assessing and planning, and was more at home in a combat situation than in a La-Z-Boy. Like a general marshaling his forces, he called on everyone to be their best, and if you fell short—and I had on occasion—the silent rebuke was deafening. In short, Hunter was the hero we all wanted to be.

“So then where’s the top floor?” I said, straining to see any sign of life in the pitch-topped tower. Now that we were closer, I could make out filmy veils of ionized air draping to the ground from the thick nucleus in the blackened sky. They were like black flags hung up to dry in uneven layers from the top of the two-hundred-foot scaffolding.

“It was blown to smithereens about ten minutes ago.”

We turned to find a filthy, greasy, soured, and tattered man approaching. His hair was matted with dreadlocks, and an authentic limp had him swishing and swaying in horror movie mode. “I can’t see him,” I told Hunter, “but boy can I smell him.”

Our troop leader stepped closer and his features sharpened, as if drawn by a coal pencil. His sun-slammed skin was muted in the dark, but brown eyes pinpointed us in beady assessment. He was dressed in secondhand fatigues and a tattered trench coat, his standard vagrant guise, and one that’d served him well. Mortals found him too frightening to approach, and the Shadows found him too repulsive to scrutinize. “Better?”

“Not particularly,” I said, eyes watering. Olfactory acuteness was both a blessing and a curse.

“It’s about to get worse,” he said, motioning us away from the base of the building. Sharing a confused glance, Hunter and I followed.

“I’m assuming you mean the haze,” Hunter said, as we sped up. Warren’s leg injury had done nothing to slow him down. If so, he’d never have ascended to troop leader, much less remained there.

“And the situation. Our contact was up there just before the corporeal explosion. Top three stories fell like hotcakes. Indication is they have him imprisoned on the same level used to gain access.”

We all glanced up, then diagonally to the crane that any enterprising Shadow could traverse. And they were all that. Shit.

“How many?” Hunter asked, meaning Shadows.

“At least four from the way they’ve managed to secure all lower-level passages. But my guess is more than half a dozen.” Warren smiled then, and I had to shiver a little. The look was off-center, brittle, slightly whacked, and thin. Don’t get me wrong, Warren was one of the good guys, but he was the leader of a troop of paranormal beings who got off on this sort of situation.

“An ambush then.”

“Their largest yet.”

The troop charged with the paranormal security and safety of the Las Vegas valley was huddled beneath an isolated hydraulic crane. The sheets of destroyed wave matter, presumably fallout from the explosion, hung around them in tatters on every side. In the right-hand corner we had a doctor, a reporter, an oversexed college student, and a reclusive psychic. In the left-hand corner there were a dental student, a taxi driver, and a high school teacher. They all turned as one to watch as a bum, a security guard, and a socialite joined to create the whole of Zodiac troop 175.

Or what remained of it, I thought wryly. The Zodiac chart had twelve signs, but our Pisces star sign had been murdered last year after our troop had been infiltrated by a mole working for the Shadows. Our Libra, I thought, with guilt, had died only last month. Their star signs had yet to be filled.

“Movement, Felix?” Warren asked, falling in beside him.

Felix jerked his head in the opposite direction of our approach. “I saw the Shadows’ Gemini. She was headed to the top of the crane.”

“Sure it was her?”

“Only Dawn can wear a leather corset and still manage to look that sweet.”

“Yes, she’s so sweet,” Vanessa said acerbically. Her hair was pulled back in a haphazard knot, soft curls escaping to frame her honeyed face, and she’d thrown on a mask similar to mine in style, because her reporter’s profile might be high enough to get her noticed by the Shadows. “I almost never want to put a foot through her chest cavity.”

“Violent,” commented Felix, brow quirked.

“Only when I see her.”

“You mean smell her,” said Riddick, wrinkling his nose as he sorted through his set of oversized carvers and picks, deciding at last on a palm-length bar with double-sided hooks. Hunter had designed the set especially for him, as he did all our weapons. Fitting for a dentist, I thought. His was the only weaponry that gave me the heebie-jeebies.

“Did she see you, Felix?” asked Warren, steering us back on track.

Felix shook his head, and his hair fell over his forehead. He was older than me by a few years, but had the look of a college freshman, and his smile attracted coeds like bees to honey. He enjoyed his cover more than any of us. “Don’t think so. But they’ve gotta know we’re coming.”