But Hunter shared my ire. “And that’s now?” he said, anger and disbelief crackling through each word, making his voice tight. “Now that Vanessa and Felix are dead? Now that the troop is weaker than ever? Now that the Shadows are more powerful than ever?”
We all looked at Tekla with raised brows. It was a good point.
Tekla sighed again, closing her eyes, momentarily slumped, before she straightened and rose as well. She crossed to us—nonthreatening, diminutive, powerful—and in the most motherly action I could ever recall, took each of my hands in her own and held them to her chest.
“There’s only been one other time in my life that I was so perplexed about the Universe’s intentions, and that was when fate decreed my beautiful, strong, and brave son should die, even before his first battle. Even before he’d truly begun to live.
“This was as great a loss. You were.” She shook her head at me, seemingly still confused. “Why would we find you, a woman so clearly gifted and unique, only to have you sacrificed and then go on as before? Like nothing had happened?”
So that was her perspective, I thought, trying to see it all from her side of the “board.” And she was right. Put that way, it made no sense.
Tekla went on. “So even knowing Warren was still suspicious of me, still watching, I disappeared into my labs, into the world of my books and charts and stars. I had to trust that the Universe would lay the answer bare for me, if only I knew how to look. And that, my friends, is the real problem with most people. They can’t see how their lives are to unfold because they don’t know how to look.”
“And you do?” I said, trying and failing the keep the skepticism from my voice.
Chandra made a sound across from me, like she wanted to defend her Seer, but Tekla only inclined her head, looking regal in her certainty. “For me it’s like reading Braille. For those like Warren, they are only interested in the message on the page of the sky if it says what he wants to hear.”
And she raised her brows, silently asking which sort of person I wanted to be.
“You told Warren that I should sacrifice my soul to Midheaven,” I said, reminding her of our conversation in the car.
She didn’t even blink. “I told you what you needed to hear.”
I clenched my jaw. “And how did it help me to think you wanted me dead?”
“You were made to act independently and with force. To drive yourself into the future. We all have to actively choose our own lives, Joanna. If you don’t claim your life for yourself, you won’t ever be of any use to others.”
“And you still think me . . . useful?”
“I still think you’re the Kairos, yes.”
I pulled away at that, not meeting her eyes, or Hunter’s. When I finally looked up, though, I was decided. “Vanessa said you believed I am forever lost to the Light, and that I’ll never be super again.”
Tekla must have seen my resolve, because she didn’t bother to soften her words, and ticked my points off on two slim fingers. “You are. And the full of your powers can’t ever be recovered.” And then she spread her arms. “Yet here you are. Still alive. Still influencing the stars.”
I tilted my head. “Bringing to pass an apocalypse?”
“Sitting in front of me with the ability to create your world as you want it to be.”
I looked at her for a long time. The room grew oppressively silent, and I imagined Chandra holding her breath behind my back, felt Hunter’s gaze hard on my face, and Tekla’s even harder one burning into my skin. I imagined snakes and spiders slinking along the walls, pausing in their buggy little tracks to eavesdrop on the future. Finally I looked up at Hunter.
As he searched my face, I saw a man twenty years his senior looking back at me, time and experience wearing on him, but the same steely and calculating resolve taking in the rest of the world. All of it. All of me. Finally he nodded.
I turned back to Tekla. “Tell us more about this impending apocalypse.”
23
And that was how Hunter and I—newly reunited and with barely a hello—ended up on our honeymoon.
Of course, being practical saviors-of-the-known-world, we skipped the wedding bells and the I dos and carried paranormal weaponry inside our luggage in lieu of a bridal trousseau, but we held hands until it was time to tip the bellhop in the honeymoon suite at the most prestigious hotel and casino in the world, Valhalla.
“The Hall of the Slain,” I murmured, spreading the weapons out on the table as Hunter closed the door behind me. They included key pieces from my mother’s hoarded arsenal, my newly reclaimed bow and arrow, as well as Hunter’s whip, retrieved from a hidden alcove in the underground pipeline. Tekla had given it back to him in the underground lair, along with an invitation to return to the Light. To sweeten the deal, she’d also included explosives. I ran a finger along one of the barbs on the whip, wondering if he’d accept. “The dwelling place of those who never die,” I still murmured. “Where dead warriors feast and gods abide.”
It was also the property I’d inherited upon my stepfather’s death, which he’d only owned and operated because he’d been the Tulpa’s mortal beard, a powerful front to the paranormal don’s otherworldly operation. Hunter had worked as head of security for years, and knew the place even better than I. He’d long been trying to ferret out exactly what the Tulpa was hiding on the twenty-fourth floor.
And now we knew.
“The third stupa will be just there,” Tekla had told us, pointing at a celestial map so marked up it would send Kai running for his dirty bong water.
Having apparently conferred with all her voices and charts and stars, Tekla explained that she’d matched up the first two entrances to Midheaven using the sky’s moving Zodiac, sidereal time, and a bunch of other calculations I’d never understand. Probably a small animal sacrifice and some south Caribbean hoodoo as well, but when she said there was a third and final remaining entrance, I didn’t doubt her for a moment.
That was why the Tulpa had built Valhalla. Why very few people were allowed up to the top floor. And since he was still seeking the Serpent Bearer, my guess was he’d had no more luck with Valhalla’s stupa than the one I’d already destroyed in the mansion.
But it meant he was still sacrificing souls. It also meant that, technically, Warren wasn’t really trapped in Midheaven. If he found out about Valhalla’s stupa, he’d be able to get out. So Hunter and I were to storm the castle from the inside and destroy the last remaining entrance into Midheaven.
Posing as newlyweds was a perfect cover. We could hole up in the suite closest to the twenty-fourth floor and put a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door for anyone but room service. That gave Tekla the twenty-four hours she needed to organize the Light, who would enter the casino en masse, providing the distraction we needed to sneak up and destroy the stupa.
“Call this number,” I’d told her, handing her a slip of paper as she dropped Hunter and me behind a T-shirt shop on the famed Strip. “Carlos will help but it’ll take the grays at least twelve hours to sneak back into the city.”
Tekla flinched before she could stop herself, but ultimately nodded. She knew, as I did, that a direct call from her would allow a temporary truce, and the grays would come more quickly to help. “And I’ll call you when my team is planted.” Then she and Chandra returned to their sanctuary, leaving Hunter and me to get to Valhalla ourselves. There, we were to study her maps and blueprints, and wait.
It was full dark as I went to draw the curtains tight around the room, and the city was coming to life below me, a blur of slow-shutter action, light, and energy. I smiled down at it—its folly, its vice. People liked to point to Vegas as the center of moral decay, but every place, no matter how large or small, how flashy or plain, had a reason for being. It was a need born partly out of the surrounding terrain, partly by necessity, but wholly by those who peopled it. In Vegas’s case that meant the world at large.
So what need had created a mecca of illicit entertainment o
ut of the Mojave’s litter box? What, I wondered, were people so desperate to escape in their real lives that they were willing to trade money and time and energy to disappear for even a few days into a town where they knew all those commodities were likely to evaporate?
Pleasure, for one. That was obvious enough. The desire for wealth was up there too. Love, definitely—or at least companionship. And all of it served up with good food, butler service, and a healthy side of Lady Luck to boot.
Yet after all I’d seen and done in the last year, I’d begun to think that most people were oblivious to the luck already bestowed upon them. I’d certainly been guilty of it. Sleepwalking through my present as I sought to escape my violent past. I’d been so focused on not being a victim, and so fearful of being seen as one, that I wasn’t heading toward a future I wanted as much as I was running away from one I didn’t.
And that could keep you treading in place for years. Even a lifetime.
On that thought, I let the curtain fall and finally looked at Hunter.
He remained by the door, but shifted on his feet when I turned, and ran both hands back through his hair. It was clean now, if a bit too long, though it obviously hadn’t been anything but finger-combed for a while. He did that now, an anxious habit, and my heart went out to him. He’d been left anxious for so damned long.
However, I was surprised to find myself suffering from an unexpected bout of shyness. I’d been so focused on moving forward, taking aggressive action, and not stopping until Hunter was free, that I hadn’t even thought what we’d do, or say—how it would be—after. To keep busy, I tucked my hands in my pockets, and jolted when my fingertips brushed the item I’d practically turned into a talisman.
“Oh, here,” I said, holding out the gem on which I’d pinned superstitious hope that it would ferry me back to him. Now he was here and it was his, I thought, as he strode forward to take it, his touch lingering. The question was, would he consider the same of me?
“Thank you.” He looked down at it, wincing slightly, probably remembering how I’d gotten it.
“I’m happy to see that, well . . .” I pointed at his eye, as clear and honey-hued as ever, as if Solange had never used her index finger to pluck it from his socket. “You know.”
“That I can see?” he asked wryly, before shaking his head. “That little torture session was for your benefit, Jo. It was just an illusion.”
“That time.”
He ducked his head, conceding that Solange had indeed tortured him. But he also squared his shoulders and straightened. “Well, I didn’t use my soul to pass into Midheaven, remember? So her control of me was limited. Or at least blunted. I was luckier than most.”
“Excuse me if I don’t excuse her,” I muttered, crossing my arms. “She was probably just being pragmatic.”
It was hard to be impregnated by a shrunken head.
“Well, she wouldn’t be able to lure you back if I were already dead,” he said. Then, perhaps realizing he’d intimated I’d returned only for him, he quickly added, “She wanted you back from the moment she discovered you were the Kairos. She was obsessed with you.”
I decided to alleviate his discomfort and conquer my shyness at the same time. “And she knew I was obsessed with you.”
Hunter froze, and for a moment I thought I’d miscalculated. But what else was there to do but leave it all out there for him to take or leave as he pleased? I was about to tell him I was carrying his child. If there was one thing I didn’t want, it was for that to color his reaction to me, or us.
Besides, Hunter and I had both shared rejection at each other’s hands. Having felt it, and having dealt it, it was now time to leave it behind, part of the skin we had both shed, along with our old lives.
How odd, I had the sudden thought, to think that of all the things I once was and still could be—Kairos, superhero, mother, Archer—the one that mattered most right now was disturbingly mundane: woman.
And every woman, as Vanessa had said, had at her core a need to be chosen.
I shifted closer, and he stilled even more, like he was a statue in the Hall of the Slain, or a vessel with something secured tightly inside. I reached out and touched him anyway. It was just an index finger lain along his cheek, a gentle rub over the stubble I’d imagined caressing in my silent midnight hours. But I traced his strong jawline like it was an etching, and his eyes closed a fraction, and then finally, thankfully, he leaned into my touch.
I smiled. It was a start. “I have to tell you something,” I said, determined that nothing lay between us. One way or another—either starting our journey or ending it here—this child in my belly would be the last secret we ever had between us.
I was thoroughly tired of secrets.
“No.” He shook his head.
I drew back at the odd, and unexpected, response. “It’s important.”
His eyes flickered, a shadow of impatience racing behind his irises. “And whatever it is just made the smile disappear from your face and worry cloud over your eyes. So I don’t want to hear it.”
“But you need—”
He pressed a finger to my lips, firmly enough that it might as well have been his entire palm. I had half a mind to bite the damned thing, but then he palmed the back of my head with his other hand and pulled my body close.
“What I need,” he said, lessening the pressure on my mouth to trace my lower lip with his finger instead, “is a few moments of peace with the woman who kept me alive while I was frying in that subterranean hellhole, and who risked her own too precious life to ensure I stayed that way.”
“Oh.”
It was then my turn to still as his thumb worked a slow whorl along my top lip, and I felt something in my belly unclench. It seemed I hadn’t miscalculated after all. Relief softened me further, and I slumped a bit, allowing him to mold my frame closer to his.
“Leaving you for that world was like stepping into the grave,” he whispered, stroking my face. I slid my arms around his neck, opening to him, letting myself go—letting all of it go . . . Midheaven, Solange, the grief I felt over Vanessa and Felix and everyone needlessly lost to us, and the rest of the world. Over the losses of the past, and even those yet to come.
Release wasn’t as hard as I’d thought, maybe because Hunter’s touch was there to replace the worries; something good and fine and strong enough to displace, if only momentarily, all the pain and strife, the conflict and the loss. His sand dune eyes drank me in as his head made a slow dip toward mine. Months after he’d last touched me, disappearing to chase down, not after, another woman, his warm, full lips found mine, and pressed home.
Sensation flooded me. His fingers were soft lace, playing lightly on my neck and face. His breath was bright with hope, and intertwined with mine it shifted into a silk tapestry that wrapped around us both. Colors bloomed on the backs of my eyelids, one pastel emotion layered atop another, layered again with each shift of his mouth, my tongue, the subtle hues dissipating and reappearing, intensifying, when I did the same.
My hearing fell away. An insistent buzzing filled my eardrums before settling in the solid breaststroke of a beating heart. I only knew I was breathing because my chest rubbed against his. I only knew I stood because his arms were still wrapped around my frame. This was what it was to be lost in another person. This was care for nothing and no one else but the man and the moment.
This was choice, and being chosen.
He finally pulled back, slowly, and each sense, starting with sight, sluggishly returned. I exhaled hard, licked the taste of him from my lips—which caused my eyelids to flutter again—before I gingerly tested the strength in my legs. I pulled back fractionally when I thought I could do so without swaying so I could focus on the whole of him, feeling oddly like I was looking at him with brand-new eyes. He smiled back, the first true smile he’d worn in a long time, and it was the most stunning thing I’d ever seen.
I shook my head. The onslaught of my senses felt like a sensual attack
. I swayed, then shivered as his fingers trailed from my shoulders to my elbows. Relentless, he bent again to whisper in my mouth. “Stop me now or you’ll have to fight your way out of my bed.”
“Maybe I like to fight.” But I swayed again, causing him to chuckle.
“I’m sure that’s part of it.” He stroked my hair, cupped my neck, my shoulders, gaze tracing it all as if committing it to memory.
Oh, fuck it, I thought, running my hands up his chest. Unless the Tulpa busted into the honeymoon suite with coyotes made of sand, I was done fighting for now.
“I’m but a lowly mortal,” I told Hunter, with a solemn, resigned shrug. “True escape is beyond me.” But there was no escaping this man. Not for me, and I’d long known it. We both smiled. Hunter knew it too.
Which didn’t mean I was helpless. Instead of waiting for him to lift me in his arms in some overly romantic gesture, I put my hand in his, and led him to my bed. There was no way I would let him escape again either.
Somewhere, outside of Valhalla, the stars were pinned up for the night. Often in the springtime, winds would gust through the valley like heralds announcing summer’s fast approach. But the air itself was gentle in the desert, as if trying to atone for the relentless heat the months ahead would bring. People lingered in the open in this kind of weather. They breathed in deeply, filling their lungs with fresh air and kind light, while children’s laughter lingered in long notes on the air, even after the children were gone.
Hunter and I were aware of none of this. We made love in the pure silence of an elevated cocoon. What had once felt like my prison while my stepfather was alive was now the site of my greatest pleasure. Because even more satisfying than Hunter’s raw physicality was the way his gaze confirmed what I already knew—that he was seeing, wanting, only me, that I was exactly where I belonged, with whom I belonged.
That I’d finally caught the tail of my destiny, I thought, inhaling deeply, if only for these scant fleeting moments.
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