The Neon Graveyard

by Vicki Pettersson

  “Maybe coming at it fresh will let me make new mental connections.” I didn’t have the experience of a lifelong troop member, or the knowledge that a Seer had, but I had wits, instinct, and a naturally suspicious nature, and all three were telling me this was a bullshit cover. Hunter had been hiding something. If I could find out what, I might be able to get to him.

  I lifted my gaze to Kai’s. “And maybe you could start earning your keep by helping me.”

  Kai shrugged, unaffected as he licked orange fingertips, then pointed to the map on the left. “Check it. So, like, yesterday, before we went off on our latest suicide mission? I was scoping the view with the infrared and then the black light, and then I let the strobes go for a bit because that was totally boss . . .”

  I sighed.

  “What? Anyway, sometimes things are written in, like, invisible ink or black light pens and shit, it’s an old cartographer trick, you know?” But he didn’t wait for my response, instead pulling out a jeweler’s loupe. “And when I put this Betty under the magnifying glass I found this.”

  He pointed to one of the wrongly marked entrances, then handed me the loupe, the same sort I’d used when I was a photographer. Holding it between my thumb and forefinger, I pressed it over the giant dot on the map.

  “A little higher,” he said, crunching. As far as I could tell, Cheetos were his sole nutritional staple.

  Bringing the flashlight closer, I slid the loupe over the paper, pausing when I caught a faint squiggle. One that elongated into an entire word. I drew back. “Pisces?”

  “Don’t look at me, man. I’m a Leo.” He shrugged, then jerked his chin at the marking.

  I bent over the map again. I had a basic knowledge of the Western Zodiac, but those raised in a troop, including Hunter, were ruled by the stars in the sky. Their lineage was tied up with mythology and astrology, as if the constellations themselves were their actual forefathers. If Hunter had tagged the entrance with a star sign—and then erased it—it meant something.

  “So he named the tunnel entrances?”

  “The not-entrances,” Kai corrected. “Totally nutter, right?”

  Totally. Even for an obsessed man like Hunter. “Any others?”

  He pointed to the connecting map. “Here, also erased.”

  I let my eyes travel over the map like a ticker tape, trying to see it, trying not to; moving close, then back again for distance. “What do you think it means?”

  “Dude had a crap sense of celestial navigation.”

  I scowled.

  “I’m serious, man. Looking at this you’d think he couldn’t MapQuest his way through the Universe.”

  I shook my head. “He can map the skies as well as you.”

  He’d done so for me as we lay in each other’s arms beneath a rendering of the constellations. He’d been a bit breathless as he explained about black holes and dead stars and their place in the Universe, and while I liked to think that had a little to do with my naked body warming his, his love for skies had been fierce.

  “Then he was hiding something from someone with full frontal access to that warehouse, man,” Kai said, with a shrug.

  “Warren.” My former troop leader still led the Light—and their campaign against me—even after destroying my life, and Hunter’s. At first Warren had seemed like a sort of mad fairy godfather, but I’d learned the hard way that being Light didn’t necessarily mean being right. Nothing, no one, was allowed to interfere with his troop’s supremacy. He might be on the side of good in this paranormal battlefield, but he was just as ruthless as the Tulpa.

  Then again, Hunter could have been hiding something from Tekla. She was a real Seer; powerful, mystical, and she studied the Universe’s mysteries like medical students studied anatomy. Kai was nothing like her. In his defense, though, he’d never betrayed me like Tekla. She’d recently admitted that she’d been the one to advise Warren to send me to Midheaven—costing me slivers of my soul, my love, and nearly my life.

  “Whatever,” Kai shrugged, popping open a warm can of Mountain Dew. “I done all I can with these. Too bad you didn’t know what your man was up to before you got tossed from the troop. Then you could have stolen every map in that warehouse.”

  But the agents of Light had since shut it down, clearing any sign of their time there, and confiscating all of Hunter’s belongings.

  Kai scratched his belly and stretched. “Then again, maybe Lorenzo just biffed it.”

  “Hunter Lorenzo doesn’t fuck up,” I said immediately, then blushed at my use of the present tense, as if Hunter was still here, active and alive. He was, in a way. Alive in my mind as surely as his child was alive inside my body. “I’m just saying those aren’t random markings. There’s a reason behind everything Hunter does.”

  “So maybe he had another hidey-hole. A loose floorboard or ceiling panel. Something like that.”

  I shook my head. “Too obvious.”

  And Warren would have scoured the entire warehouse by now. There wouldn’t be a dust bunny, much less an untouched wall panel. Forget about a map. I wished now that I’d taken a photo of that sky rendering over Hunter’s bed. “That one was marked wrongly as well,” I said absently.

  Kai looked up from picking orange dust from his nails. “Come again?”

  “Oh, this rendering of the night sky he had posted in the warehouse’s crow’s nest. It wasn’t like this though. All the constellations were in the right place, but he tracked the frozen stars as well.”

  “Dead stars?”

  I looked over as Kai’s voice sharpened.

  “Yeah,” I said slowly. “Black holes.”

  Giant stars that’d evolved, contracted, and died. The largest ones, Hunter had explained, had the shortest lives. I sighed at that.

  “Hidden in plain sight,” Kai muttered, nodding to himself before glancing at me. “Think it’s still there?”

  “I don’t see why not.” I shrugged. “But Warren knows Tripp and I broke in before. It’ll be locked up tight.”

  Kai scoffed. “They won’t bother with patrol now. Not with the Tulpa going commando on their asses.”

  “So it could be worth a look?”

  Kai looked at me like I’d been smoking ganja. “Bra had a mishmash of dead stars hanging above his bed. If he does everything for a reason, like you say . . . ?”

  Kai trailed off, and I turned my attention back at the map, peering through the loupe once more at Hunter’s tight, scribbled writing. Pisces. Kai was right. A man overly fond of maps had been making notations, hiding the proof, and putting himself to sleep by looking at black holes.

  It was worth more than just a look.

  “Now. The manual.” He held out his hand for the comic book Joseph had given us. I pulled it out, but held it back.

  “One more thing.”

  “Aw, man!” Kai flopped back like a rag doll, and wriggled there for a little bit. I just waited, and when he finally sat up again—still whining, face still pained—I had the flashlight pointed at a page I’d marked. One with a panel featuring the Tulpa.

  He was dressed in the skin of a mild-mannered professor, but pacing a room that looked to be used for formal worship. I pointed to the corner where a sand tablet sat on a table, a small rake used to erase the tablet’s images parallel to its side. But this drawing had yet to be erased.

  Kai squinted at it, then looked back at me, the light playing over the left half of his blank face. “So?”

  “So this symbol is important to the Tulpa. It looks to me like a snake wrapped around a stick. You’re supposed to come from a long line of Seers. What does it look like to you?”

  Kai tilted his head. “A snake wrapped around a stick.”

  I pulled back the manual and began to stand.

  “Okay.” Kai spoke quickly, holding his arms up to me in supplication, like I was taking off with his weed money. “It’s the Serpent Bearer, okay?”

  I straightened. “You know what that is?”

  “You don�
��t?”

  Immediately I called the others over. Once they were gathered, I told them I’d shown Kai a picture of the symbol the Tulpa was so interested in. He’d killed for it, fought for it, and was chasing it still. If he wanted it, so did we—and first.

  “You know what this is?” Tilting his head, Fletcher stepped forward, and the other men crowded closer as well. Kai shrank on his mat, cringing like a dog that expected to be kicked.

  “I told her I did, man.” He jerked his head at me. “In her world—the mortal one, I mean—it’s the healer, dudes. You know . . . it’s on the back of ambulances, doctors’ business cards, that sort of thing. The snake and staff, get it?”

  I fought the impulse to hit myself in the head. No wonder it looked familiar. It was so obvious, so normal, we hadn’t seen it at all.

  “Motherfucker,” Milo whispered, feeling just as stupid as I did.

  “What’s the Tulpa going to do with a doctor?” Gareth asked, crowding closer. The rave behind us had been forgotten.

  “Heal people just so he can kill them again,” cracked Gil.

  Vincent folded giant arms over his chest. “Maybe he’s planning a resurrection, dudes. Just in case.”

  I shook my head. “He can’t be killed now.”

  “Seriously?” Kai leaned back on his palms, looking from face to face. “You shoobies really don’t know what this is?”

  “The fuck’s a shoobie,” retorted Vincent.

  I put a hand on his chest. “You really do?”

  Kai snorted. “There.”

  We all craned our necks to where he pointed.

  “Just north of Scorpius? See the star cluster?” I quickly located the Scorpio star sign, one of the twelve on the Western Zodiac, and well known to us all. However, this other cluster was not. “That’s Ophiuchus. The god of healing. The Serpent Bearer.”

  My jaw dropped.

  “It’s a fucking constellation?” someone said behind me.

  A tingle went up my spine. I didn’t know why the Tulpa would be interested in the Healer’s star cluster, but in the world of the Zodiac, constellations ruled all. Shivering, I pulled my short coat tighter about me and handed Kai the manual.

  “Research this symbol and that constellation, Kai. Find out the history behind both. The mythology. If it’s Buddhist in origin, study the Buddhist texts. If there are ties with Latin, find the root.”

  “Shaa. I’ll get right on that,” he said, reclining and turning away from us all.

  “Where’s Carlos?” I said, turning to Milo. He’d already told me Carlos had gotten hung up doing something else, yet he hadn’t mentioned anything to me earlier. Milo looked at Fletcher, but we were interrupted by Gareth, running our way.

  “We got company,” he announced, his rooster-comb hair bouncing as he came to a stop in front of us. His eyes were wide, and whatever emotion the others scented on him made them all straighten and turn to the border as one. Vincent, Milo, and Fletcher all edged in front of me so I had to push to my tiptoes. “Another rogue?”

  Vincent grunted. “I don’t think so. She smells . . . Light.”

  She? I inched from behind my would-be protectors, immediately spotting the female form, backlit by bonfires and utterly motionless. My breath left me . . . and stayed gone. “Chandra,” I still managed.

  Vincent’s head tilted my way. “A friend of yours?”

  “Not exactly,” I said, but started forward anyway.

  “So what does she want?” he called out behind me.

  I just shrugged—flanked by Milo and Fletcher—and headed to my old troop mate, my old enemy, to find out.

  5

  “That’s interesting,” I said by way of greeting, inclining my head at the steel baton Chandra had palmed, two-fisted, in front of her. The rogues might come to us weaponless and covertly, but Chandra was a full-fledged troop member now—given the Archer sign when I left—and she stood, chin jutted daringly as her eyes raced over the faces of the grays behind me. I crossed my arms over my chest, and stopped short of the boundary line. “Who made it for you?”

  “We took on a new weapons master,” she answered, making no move to lay aside the weapon, instead looking at Milo and Fletcher like she was dividing their bodies into zones, calculating where to strike first. I did the same with her, noting slight differences from the last time I’d seen her . . . mostly in the dark shadows smeared beneath her eyes.

  The rest of her was close to the same. Same strong, stocky legs arrowing into a surprisingly slim waist, wide swimmer’s shoulders, and thick chestnut hair, now half a foot longer than when we’d first met. Hard to believe I’d once mistaken her for a man. The softening of her features felt like a visual sigh, as if she’d long been holding her breath and had finally let it go. It wasn’t even that her physical appearance had changed, I realized, but that her very essence, her chi, had clearly softened.

  She still looked like she’d whack the first rogue to cross that line.

  “So is the new weapons master from Arizona?” I asked, trying to distract and smooth out the tension. We didn’t need to risk injury at Chandra’s hands—or, more to the point, her weapon—or vice versa, giving Warren yet another reason to hunt us. Besides, while Chandra clearly wasn’t here to join the rogues—she’d never turn against her beloved troop—she wanted something badly enough to be talking to me. I couldn’t imagine what was so important that she’d come all the way out here for that.

  She lifted her chin. “They’ve been a good sister troop to us.”

  “You mean they harbor the same concern over the grays spilling into their territory that you do.” It was a statement, not a question, so before she could bother with an unsatisfying answer, I asked, “Is he as good as Hunter?”

  “She,” Chandra corrected, glancing down at her baton. After a moment she added, “And no, she’s not.”

  Her answer both pleased me and pissed me off. This woman had known Hunter all her life. She’d once looked up to him with admiration and awe, yet she’d turned her back on him because that’s what Warren decreed, and I just couldn’t let it slide.

  “So I take it my crossbow didn’t work for you?”

  The conduits could be passed down from mother to daughter, and from the moment I’d touched the crossbow there was never any question it was anything other than mine. But an agent with an entirely new bloodline generally had to have their own made, and while Chandra had long coveted my palm-sized bow and arrow, the magical weapons chose the bearer as much as the opposite. There was no forcing the issue if the weapon simply decided it wasn’t yours.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, though her shrug was stiff. “Warren’s keeping it locked up tight.”

  I snorted at that. Obviously Warren couldn’t just leave a magical weapon lying around, and as a mortal I was supposed to be unable to utilize it anyway, but my anger at his pinching my conduit was more than that. I wanted and needed it to help me live. He thought I should be grateful to be alive at all.

  Yet why was he so intent on guarding the weapon now? Turning it against me at this point was overkill. Dead was dead, and in my case, the average kitchen knife could achieve the same results. Then again, Warren knew I wasn’t his greatest fan either. He’d want my former conduit in his hands in case he found himself, however improbably, on the pointy end of my soul blade.

  “So he still worries about me, huh?” I asked, shoving my hands into my pockets.

  Chandra leveled me with a dark stare. “A former ally is more deadly than a constant enemy.”

  “Don’t have to tell me,” I muttered, though I wasn’t sure I’d consider Chandra a former ally. She’d long lobbied for the troop’s Archer sign, and had been helpless to do anything but watch as the coveted star sign was unceremoniously dropped into my lap. That, along with my initial lack of knowledge and interest, had infuriated her. Yet my lineage trumped her experience. Considering everything that’d happened to me in my short time as the Archer of Light, I thought wryly, Chandra w
as probably okay with that now.

  Of course, that just meant whatever had her trekking all the way out to the Mojave’s ass side had to be important.

  “How’d you find me?” I asked. Who else knew that we were raving for rogues? The dueling sides of the Zodiac could track each other through the scent of elevated emotion, but rogues, by necessity, were experts at masking their stronger feelings.

  “Well, it wasn’t by your sassy new do,” Chandra finally replied, tilting her head. I let her look: I had nothing to hide. Seeing that, she nodded once to herself. “It looks good on you.”

  I had to fight to hide my surprise. “Well, it’s more to hide from the mortal population than anyone else now. The Tulpa has already seen me like this. So have all the Shadows.”

  “Yet as far as those in the real world are concerned, both daughters of the Archer dynasty are now dead.” One from a nine-story fall from a high-rise, the other victim of an international kidnapping. Now that the sensationalism surrounding both deaths had died down, the local socialite scene was a bit less shiny than before, and most people appeared more annoyed than distraught by our “passing.” It was as if someone had changed the channel during their regularly scheduled programming. “How does it feel?”

  “Freeing,” I said honestly. I could be whomever I chose now. And while my forced approximation of my sister had turned out to be good for me in many ways, it was a relief to lay down that bubbly blond package too. The identity felt like clothing that no longer fit—dated, uncomfortable, and belonging to another time and era. So Chandra was right. Both Archer girls belonged to the past.

  “So you’ve finally stopped hiding,” Chandra said in an overly showy voice.

  “I never hid. I was as transparent as I could be when thrown into a hidden underworld where half the population was already seeking my death.”

  “Well, you did a good job,” she said, crossing her arms. “All that bubble-gum gloss certainly had me fooled.”

  Already forming a retort, my mouth snapped shut. Had Chandra just paid me a compliment?

  “Of course, you did seem to revel in the Olivia Archer disguise.” She lifted her square jaw at my raised brow, then shrugged. “The power it brought you at least. Your last act, in particular, was exceedingly annoying.”