The Neon Graveyard

by Vicki Pettersson

  “No, Joanna. It’s not your fight.”

  I looked back up, finding Micah. He was standing stiffly at his full seven feet of height, again battling back tears. I thought of everything Warren had done to me—the manipulation, the lies, the way he used me as a pawn and then a weapon—and I realized he’d done that and more to Tekla. To Chandra, too. To all of them.

  But it was Hunter’s hand on my arm that kept my trigger finger still. I pretended not to notice Warren watching me with a hate verging on madness, and allowed Hunter to draw me back.

  “Oh, this is rich,” Warren said, letting out a long, bitter laugh, finally turning his attention to Tekla. “First you foretell of anarchy in the troop. And then you lead it.”

  The prophecy Vanessa had told me about. The one that sent Warren into his war room, and that had made Felix run off for good. It’s anarchy, Joanna. It’s Warren’s worst fear. It’s the dismantling of the troops as we know them.

  So who had really brought this about? Me? Or Tekla?

  She lifted her sharp chin, and for a moment, lavender sparked before my eyes. Her aura, I realized. She was so affronted that even I could see it. “Don’t act so surprised Warren. I know you’ve had your eye on me. You’ve always thought me dangerous.”

  “I’ve always thought you had a screw loose,” he shot back, but sticks and stones couldn’t hurt her now.

  “But dangerous all the same.” Her tone turned censorious. “You should be careful not to so easily dismiss those you see as weak.”

  And Chandra stepped forward, bending to pick up the magical key with burned palms. Warren and I saw them at the same time, and both our eyes widened. She’d been the one to steal my conduit—a rogue’s weapon—from him. Suddenly Warren wasn’t looking at Chandra like she was weak. It might have been the first time he’d truly seen her at all.

  Then his calculating gaze darted between her and Tekla, trying to discern a way to break up this unlikely team. Finally his gaze landed on me.

  “Stop.” Micah said, shaking his great head. “Before you even start, just stop.”

  For a moment, all breathing ceased in the room.

  “I was there, remember?” Micah went on, tears rolling down his face, unheeded. “I helped you strip this girl down to nothing and turn her into something she didn’t want to be.”

  “I could have made her into the Kairos! If she weren’t flawed. If she weren’t—”

  “If she weren’t already the Kairos,” Tekla said. “All on her own.”

  Warren’s disbelief was perhaps the only thing we had in common.

  “Look at her,” she said, jerking her head at me. “Look, and see something other than what you want or expect. Better yet, look around her.”

  Warren’s gaze slid to me reluctantly, but after a moment his muddy eyes widened. “How did you do that?”

  I looked down, wondering what they were all staring at.

  “It’s your aura, baby,” Hunter finally said, voice awe-filled. “You’re awash in red.”

  And suddenly I saw it. “I am, aren’t I? It’s my power.” My ether. The essence, or quintessence, that made me . . . me. The same worldstuff that arose at Creation to comprise the stars. I looked up, amazed.

  We are all, literally, children of the stars.

  But it didn’t matter to Warren. To him I was just a rogue. I realized then that no matter what I did or regained or created, Warren would never look at me and see anything but fault.

  As if on cue, he spat on the ground. “Well, she isn’t Light.”

  “And neither are you,” Gregor said, joining Micah. Jewell was crying in the corner, not that I could blame her. I felt much like doing the same. But Riddick had crossed his arms, and Tekla was dead calm as she took the key from Chandra.

  “Your obsession has changed you, Warren. In refusing to recognize that power isn’t all that defines an agent, or a person, you have drifted from the Light.”

  “I would never ally myself with the Shadows!” Spittle flew from his mouth as he pointed at me with his good arm. His left, now streaked with blood from the high chest wound, hung uselessly at his side.

  Tekla lifted her chin. “Yet you have become one of them all the same.”

  “According to whom, Tekla? You?” he snapped, fully enraged. “You aren’t exactly blameless. You’re the one who told me to send Jo to Midheaven!”

  I looked to her. Yeah, what about that?

  Not long ago, she’d refused to help me escape a madman named Mackie. She and I had taken a long, lonely road trip back into Vegas from the rogues’ boundary of safety, and she made it clear that she’d lost all belief in me.

  Or maybe just let me think so.

  “It was the lesser of two evils,” she said simply now. “If Joanna hadn’t entered Midheaven, she wouldn’t even have one power linking her to our world. You would have forced her to give it all up.” And now her tone turned bitter. “Just as you do with all of us.”

  “I demand no more of you than I do of myself!”

  “True.” Micah again, closing in. “But instead of demanding, my old friend? You should have asked.”

  Warren flailed for an answer to that, but I couldn’t enjoy it. I was looking at Tekla thinking, As should you. The last few months had been the most painful of my life, and here she stood, telling us that she had known what would happen all along?

  Had she really allowed me to risk my life time and again because fate “decreed” I was the Kairos?

  Had she let me lose part of my soul because she believed it was for the best?

  Warren wasn’t concerned with any of that now. His only concern was himself, and what happened next.

  “You would all side with her, then?” he said, looking around without blinking. “After the years we’ve spent together?”

  He fought back a wince when no one answered, but disgust twisted his mouth. “You are all gray then. All rogues.”

  “No, Warren,” Chandra said, causing him to jerk back and look at her with that new gaze. “You are. Now get your ass on that emblem.”

  Warren hid the fear relatively well, except that he was trying too hard to remain still. That’s probably why he ended up shaking.

  “There are other exits,” he said, pushing to his feet from the trestle, standing on his own. He did as told, but defiantly, good arm swinging.

  “Not our problem,” Tekla said, unaffected. She must have learned it from him.

  And, of course, he’d have to find the exits, I thought, looking at Hunter. If there were any left. Solange had torn that world apart at the seams. But neither Hunter nor I said that to Warren. He’d find out soon enough.

  “Go on,” Micah said, when Warren stopped short of the Serpent Bearer mark. But when Warren turned, the bigger man refused to meet his gaze. So instead—again—it settled on me.

  “You know, I can’t figure it out.” He shook his head.

  “What?” Because from my vantage point, he’d had it figured out long ago.

  “You.” He said it wonderingly, and I started to think we were about to have our first real conversation since he’d expelled me from the troop. But then his expression fell. “I can’t tell if you’re more like your mother or your father.”

  But before I could reply, Gregor and Micah flanked him.

  “No,” he growled, struggling. He tried to reverse their grip. He tried to drag them with him.

  Micah—taller, stronger, pissed—jerked hard, and there was a popping sound, and a cry from Warren. His right arm fell, hanging oddly.

  “I’m your leader!” he bellowed, fury ripping the words apart. Micah growled his reply, and whipped him forward. Gregor held him still. And the Serpent Bearer emblem curled around his ankles.

  “No!” he bellowed again as he was tipped forward. “No, no!”

  But the sky and blasted stars swooped down, ripping away the sound, the man, yanking him into another world. The ragged breathing left in his wake was the loudest thing in the room. But while the othe
rs looked at one another, disbelieving, shocked at what they’d done, Warren’s final words haunted me. And I knew they always would.

  I can’t tell if you’re more like your mother or your father.

  Despite his expulsion from the troop, from this world, it seemed Warren wasn’t weaponless after all.

  22

  We left Midheaven’s thirteenth entrance immediately, and headed back into the real world . . . or at least the crowded antechamber linking the two. More candles and tea lights studded that room, a handful of which the troop had clearly lit on their way into the Serpent Bearer’s chamber. Eight chairs were pulled into a circle in the room’s center, and the heavy tapestry previously covering the bed now lay across the rutted floor beneath them. I wondered who’d put it there. The grays after seeing me off to Midheaven the first time, or the Light, right before my return?

  Either way, someone had been having a good, old-fashioned powwow, and I turned to Tekla, thinking it was time we did the same. “Can you please tell me what the hell just happened in there?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Chandra, baton still gripped in her right hand, had her familiar scowl on her face, though after what she’d just done, I wasn’t taking it personally.

  “I think we just overthrew a troop,” Hunter replied, arm sliding protectively over my shoulder. Unlike the others, who labored silently before us with Vanessa’s body, he was clearly pleased about it . . . though all of us, down to the last, were awed. Such a thing hadn’t been done in this valley since Warren had accomplished it himself.

  “I get why, clearly,” I said, running a hand through my hair. It was gritty with bunker dust and moist with sweat. I could use a shower, a meal, and about a weeklong nap. But first, “How?”

  Tekla sighed, not out of impatience but weariness. Wisps of hair were pulled from her normally pin-tight bun and plastered to her gaunt cheeks. She didn’t hesitate in movement or seem to harbor regret, but a glassiness had overtaken her gaze too. Shock, I thought. Even when you were the cause of great change, it still altered the foundation of your world. I knew that well enough.

  “Hold on,” she said, motioning to the chairs, before whispering to Gregor and Micah. They both nodded and, along with Jewell and Riddick, carried Vanessa’s body out of the room like pallbearers. Only Micah looked back, giving me a sad nod before he too disappeared. I took a seat across from Tekla and Chandra, and Hunter pulled his chair close to me.

  For a moment Tekla only stared at an indeterminate place in front of her, self-contained but not really there at all, and I couldn’t help wonder what she was seeing . . . and if it coincided with the strongest memories I had of her: looking like a vengeful angel when she took down a Shadow agent in an abandoned warehouse, screaming at me in a training dojo over shattered walls she’d constructed out of thought, or just a few moments earlier, expression brittle as she locked her former troop leader in another world.

  But Tekla went back to a memory earlier than all of those, back to the most painful moment of her life. “I have been a changed woman ever since I held my dying son in my arms. It’s a strange magic, the power gained in outliving your own child. When you get past the initial grief, if you do, you walk the earth knowing that nothing will ever pain you so acutely again.”

  Hunter shifted uncomfortably, and Chandra raised her hand to place it atop Tekla’s, which lay motionless on her lap. I said nothing. The grief Tekla was talking about? None of us could share.

  “It took me a long time to accept what happened. The world seemed muddied, confused. My thoughts were always clouded and heavy. I couldn’t find my way in or out of my own mind. Everyone thought I was crazy, and eventually I thought so too.

  “And then I found the written account of another Seer, long ago, who’d endured a similar tragedy. Her daughter had died in her first battle. What she described next was exactly what happened to me.”

  Dreams she couldn’t wake from, she explained. Her child speaking insistently in her mind, not letting go until she acted on what felt like commands.

  “But they were really prophecies.” Tekla looked up, blinking like she was surprised to see us there. “That’s how I figured it out. When Stryker died, the Scorpion sign reverted back to me, and my talents instantly doubled. You see, I’m more powerful than the troop’s last three Seers put together.”

  From the moment of Stryker’s death, Tekla had begun holding dual perspectives in her own mind. It was, she explained, like playing chess against yourself. “It’s the same game, but you’re looking at it from opposite sides of the board. Then I figured out that I wasn’t battling myself, but moving and calculating both sides to bring the match to its natural conclusion.”

  And turning on Warren had been a crucial move. Like sacrificing your queen to end a stalemate.

  “We thought you were going crazy,” Hunter said apologetically.

  She inclined her head, a wordless acceptance. “Because Warren told you I was going crazy.”

  “No offense, Tekla. But you looked crazy.” The first time I’d seen her she’d been wild-eyed and ranting. She’d also attacked me.

  “I was banned from the astrolab,” she said, the memory making her defensive. “I was deprived of my charts and books, the tools I use to make sense of the world, and all while grieving, a time when nothing in the world makes sense. I was sedated, and held in solitary confinement. Then I was left there.”

  “We were told she would harm us,” Chandra said quickly, speaking to me but looking at Tekla. This time it was the older woman who reached out to give comfort.

  “I know,” she said quickly. It was obvious Warren had fooled them all.

  “Meanwhile these perspectives, these voices—mine and Stryker’s, in tandem—they told me that something big was coming. They said we needed to be ready. And I would have to act subversively to bring about the change that would make all our sacrifices worth it.”

  “And let me guess,” I said dryly. “You told Warren.”

  She gave her head one shake, folded her arms in the wide sleeves of her robe, and took a deep breath. “He overheard me talking—to myself, my other voice, in my sleep.”

  “He bugged her room. A wiretap in the sick ward,” Chandra’s nostrils flared. “How sick is that?”

  “And when he didn’t like my predictions of the changes to come, he tried to force me to give up my star sign and my place in the troop.”

  I believed it. How many times had he told me that nothing was changing? He’d set Hunter up to prevent it, casting him from the troop. He’d done the same with me. All to ensure . . . what? That the troop would go on under his leadership as it always had? That there’d be balance in the valley—an equal number of Light and Shadow to play out some twisted, eternal game of homicidal one-upmanship? It didn’t make sense.

  “But you didn’t give up your star sign,” I said to Tekla, realizing he’d tried to do the same thing to her that he’d managed with Hunter and me. Somehow, though, she’d dodged it.

  “I wouldn’t. Even through the fugue of drugs and Warren’s pressured coercing, both my voices were adamant about that.”

  “And,” Hunter said slowly, golden eyes narrowed as he reasoned out his memories according to this new information, “the rest of us were preoccupied at the time with finding out why our agents, including Stryker, had been killed.”

  There’d been a mole in the troop. A spy for the Tulpa who’d almost taken the agents of Light down from the inside. Which, coincidentally, was when I arrived.

  Tekla nodded. “Of course it didn’t take any real power or clarity of mind to know that Warren was also a mole of sorts. I knew he was lost when he started ignoring my prophecies. Never before had he neglected to look to the stars. But suddenly his own will became more important than the sky’s patterns.”

  And the stars had taken on a new order in the skies. That’s what Vanessa had told me. That Tekla claimed we had to be open to new ways of viewing both the heavens and the earthly events they influe
nce . . . and that Warren wouldn’t listen.

  “So anarchy?” Had that been the stars talking, or Tekla finally getting fed up with being ignored.

  “Do you think Warren would ever change his mind? Start listening to reason?”

  No. You didn’t need to be a Seer to know that would never happen. But I held up my hands. “I’m not sticking up for the guy, believe me. But I’m curious as to what it all means. What are you doing, Tekla? Taking leadership? Installing a democracy? Dismantling the troop?”

  “Nothing that extreme, dear,” she said with a wry smile. “I merely mean to wipe out the entire Shadow troop. I thought you might want to help.”

  Hunter and I stared at her, openmouthed.

  “It’s the only way to bring peace to the people of this valley, Joanna. Surely you see that. And destroying them entirely will ensure another Shadow troop never assembles here again.”

  “Will it?” Because there was always some rancid motherfucker more than willing to step into the Tulpa’s shoes. There was no shortage of power-hungry people . . . in any world.

  Chandra stood, stretched. “Once an urban troop is destroyed the other side has a sizable advantage. It’s almost impossible to catch up again. Ask your friend Carlos.”

  I already knew what Chandra meant. The Light had been driven out of Carlos’s hometown, Mexico City. The mortal population had faced an increase in drugs, crimes, and killings because of it.

  And if Tekla could “see it all,” did that mean she was setting herself up to rule this city in the same way? “So then what?” I asked her outright. “The Light rules all?”

  She shrugged.

  Shaking my head, I stood as well. “I hate to say it, Tekla. But if you saw it all and didn’t help me? Didn’t even try to save me from a flood, from the Tulpa, from a woman who wanted to strip my soul into little pieces? Then I’m alive in spite of you, not because of you.”

  “I follow the skies,” she said unapologetically. “The stars told me you would prevail—we all will—if we act not at the earlier moment, but in the most opportune one.”

  She meant the kairotic moment, the supreme moment. In other words, as long as I continued to be the Kairos of my own life.