“You look different,” she said, peering up at me as she picked up the large nail file. “Did you do something with your hair?”
I shook my head, and glanced toward the door. “He’s really going to leave the city without protection?”
“Warren?” She shrugged, looking down, and pressed a button I hadn’t noticed before. Five steel claws burst from one end of the bar. She began sharpening them with the large file. “That’s what he said.”
“But what about all the innocents? What about the city?”
“It’ll just have to survive without us.”
“It’s Las Vegas,” I said, drawing the words out.
“I know.” Vanessa rolled her eyes as she tossed her rag back into the locker. “Kinda makes you wish you were born in Kansas, huh?”
I forced thoughts of Warren, and trust, aside and tried to decide on the most logical next step. Unfortunately, I hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. “So what do we do now?”
“Nothing to do but wait,” she said, standing and moving a safe distance away. With a deft flick of her wrist the steel bar arched open, a yawning half smile followed by the curling claws. It was a fan, similar to the kind used in the Victorian era, but far more deadly. She fanned herself delicately and glanced at me from behind it. “My conduit. You like?”
“It’s beautiful,” I said, allowing the touch of jealousy I felt to tinge my words.
That stunning smile lit her soft, round face as she flipped it closed, pleased. Then she snuck another glance up at my face, and cleared her throat. “Listen, a few of us are meeting over in the cantina for drinks. Want to join us?”
I wrinkled my nose. “A cantina? You mean…like a superhuman kegger?”
She laughed at that, flipping her fan open and closed, slicing it through the air in a deadly dance of familiarity. “Yeah, I guess so.”
I hesitated. I certainly didn’t want to walk into a repeat of the day’s earlier performance, me against them…because even though I sensed mistrust swirling between them, they were still unified in their uncertainty about me. Then again, going would give me a chance to study each of them individually. Nobody knew about my note from Tekla…or about my session with Greta. Vanessa was right. Why wait for Warren?
“You did really well today,” she said, glancing over at me as I continued to remain silent. She put away the file in a large tool chest, and tucked the fan into the small of her back. “Not just against Chandra, but Hunter too. Most people find him too intimidating to effectively spar against.”
“He was intimidating,” I said, not adding: Right up until the moment he pissed me off.
“Well, you didn’t look intimidated,” she said, then paused. I could feel her choosing her words carefully. “You looked powerful. Frightening.”
And there it was, out in the open. She shut her locker door, turning to me, and unlike in Saturn’s Orchard, she met my eye. “Look, today, when we did nothing…I just want you to know we’re not like that. We protect our own. We stick up for one another. We were just reacting, or not reacting, to the Shadow in you. I’m sorry things got out of hand. We all are.”
I glanced at the double doors Chandra had just disappeared through and made a disbelieving sound.
Vanessa answered it with a sigh of her own. “Look, Chandra’s one lifelong ambition has always been to serve this troop as the Archer. Every child of the Zodiac grows up dreaming of what it’s like to be an agent of Light.” She touched my arm, willing me to understand. “Your arrival here was a big blow to her, but she’ll come around in time.”
I remained unmoved, refusing to look her in the eye as I said, “She wants to vote me out of this troop. She called me a…an independent.” A rogue agent.
Vanessa’s impatience got the best of her and she snapped, “Yeah, and in doing so revealed her greatest fear. Because if you’re this generation’s Archer, what does that make her?”
I opened my mouth, before closing it again. Vanessa was right. Chandra might have the trust I so coveted from the rest of the troop, but she’d never be the person she aspired to be as long as I was living. I knew what that was like, not getting to be who you truly wanted.
I looked down, finding I was unconsciously rubbing at my arm. The puncture marks from Hunter’s whip could still be seen there. Injuries from conduits, I remembered, always scarred. “I don’t know if I can handle too many more training sessions like that,” I said, letting a trace of my own vulnerability show through. It’d be interesting to see what Vanessa did with it. Interesting…and telling too.
“It’s not just you, okay?” Vanessa glanced at the door to make sure Chandra had really left and no one else had arrived. “Things have been boiling over for weeks, months now. It’s never been like this before, we were all raised together, and we keep putting on a front like everything’s okay, but it’s not. It’s just…not.”
“Because Tekla said there was a traitor?”
She hesitated before nodding. “And no matter how much Warren denies it…well, look around.”
She gestured at the dormant glyphs, and the feeling of emptiness reached out to snag my attention again.
“Look, just come to the cantina,” she said, voice soft and imploring. “Let us start over.”
I’d have liked to have just said yes, but I had to wonder why she was being so open and friendly. I’d probably have jumped at the chance if only there wasn’t one big question mark surrounding her. Could she be the traitor?
Only one way to find out, I thought, and because of that I gave her a nod that had her smiling as she led me from the locker room.
“What are you guys celebrating, anyway?” I asked, our heels clicking in tandem against the stone floors.
“We’re not,” she said. One hand on the frosted double doors, she sighed, and turned her head to stare past me, back into the cavernous room. Her gaze landed on the dead Scorpionic glyph, so dark her eyes were almost smudged. “We’re remembering. It’s been six months to the day since Stryker was killed.” And she pushed open the door and disappeared.
The cantina was probably the most surprising room in the sanctuary so far, with couches in cubes of midnight velvet clustered around silver tables, the silver accenting echoed in the corner bar. As Vanessa made herself at home behind it, I looked up to find a ceiling glowing with stars, and shapes in the form of constellations—the Big Dipper, the Little, and others I recognized but couldn’t name.
There was a fish tank spanning the length of one wall, its occupants floating around in colorful, blissful ignorance. The opposite wall held a flat screen television. Sting was crooning softly about watching every step I took, and I smiled as the steel candles on each table shot to life as Vanessa pushed a button. It was more ultralounge than cantina, I thought, sinking into a velvet chair and the feeling of being enveloped in a futuristic womb.
“The four elements,” Vanessa said, gesturing around the room. “Fire, earth, water, air.”
I frowned. I saw the air amid the stars above, fire in the slim candles, and water, obviously, represented by the fish tank. But earth? I looked to Vanessa.
She smiled wryly. “From dust to dust.”
Us, I thought. We represented the earth, and the passing of all beings from it. Well, it certainly lent poignancy to the occasion.
“Maybe I shouldn’t be here,” I said, watching Vanessa stir one of two pitchers she’d filled with vodka, some sort of syrupy schnapps, and at least three other juices. The liquid was turning a disturbing shade of brown, like overbrewed ice tea, though Vanessa didn’t seem worried.
“You’re one of us now.” Taking in my skeptical expression, she tapped the spoon on the side of the sink and set it down. “I mean it. You just have to let the others get used to it…uh, you. That can’t happen if you seclude yourself away.”
I knew that, of course. But somewhere from the locker room to here all my I-am-the-Archer-hear-me-roar power had trickled away, and the thought of sitting in this intimate little encl
ave with five people who needed to “get used to me” was less than inviting. “I don’t want to intrude. I didn’t know him.”
“Well, I did, and he’d have liked you. Not just your looks, but your spirit.” She placed one pitcher in the stainless steel refrigerator to chill, and brought the other, along with two tumblers, over to me. “Stryker said we reinvented ourselves every time we stepped outside the sanctuary. Your effort, he would say, just your intention in being here, should be met with respect for what you left behind. He’d want you here.”
Her words settled me, so when she poured me a cup and held it out to me, I accepted it and sipped, tentatively. I took a larger swallow when I found it fruity and bright on the tongue, and it left my palate to settle gently in my belly with a low, glowing warmth. I’d stay. I’d watch. For a while anyway.
Then the door swung open and Chandra strode in, her brows burrowing down when she saw me. “What is she doing here?”
I didn’t snap back because what Vanessa had told me about Chandra had softened me a bit…and the drink was slowing my tongue anyway.
“Looks like she’s drinking,” Felix said, following her in. He flashed me his boyish smile, but I could see the worry lingering beneath it. Worry over the occasion? Or, like Vanessa earlier, worried about me, frightened of me? I couldn’t tell.
Micah wasn’t far behind, and he beelined for me, bending over to check again that his handiwork had survived the afternoon, his own worries about me apparently resolved. But after a moment he cupped my chin, eyeing me curiously. “You look different somehow. Can’t put my finger on it, though. Are you feeling okay?”
“Actually, I feel great. Like I just woke up from a long nap.”
“Sounds auspicious,” he said warily. I went ahead and watched him back. After a moment he blinked, then shrugged as he lowered himself into a seat, the bulk of him barely fitting between the armrests.
“If you believe in fairy tales.” Chandra dropped her weight into a chair across from me, but I was saved from having to think of an Oliviaesque reply by Hunter’s sudden appearance. He too paused when he saw me, and colors around him shifted from black to silver to gold as the energy spiked between us. I had no idea what that meant.
He settled himself next to Chandra, and I had a moment to think he’d be a joy to photograph. He was so composed in the flesh that a still shot wouldn’t have made much of a difference from what I was seeing then, but at least I could study him at length—searching for what exactly ran beneath that still facade—without him knowing I was doing it. If, that was, I ever had the nerve to point my camera his way. “So. We’re all here.”
All save Warren and Gregor. And Tekla, came the unbidden thought, even though she wasn’t supposed to count. I took another sip of Vanessa’s concoction, and looked around at what was left of Zodiac troop 175, paranormal division, Las Vegas.
“What do you all do?” I asked, suddenly curious. I wasn’t just trying to ferret information out either. I really wanted to know. “On the outside, I mean?”
Warren was a bum, Gregor a cab driver. Olivia had been a socialite—I supposed that’s what I was now—so it seemed the point was to plant Zodiac agents within the entire social spectrum of the Las Vegas valley; matched, I was sure, by the Shadow agents in one form or another. So what about everyone else? “I know Micah’s a physician, but what about the rest of you? Who are you when you’re not being…you?”
“College student,” Felix offered, saluting. “UNLV.”
“Yeah,” scoffed Chandra. “For the past eight years.”
“Hey, it’s not my fault! Warren keeps making me change my major.” He turned back to me and winked slyly. With his tousled hair and ready laugh, I could imagine him as the most popular guy on campus. “I keep an eye on our initiates, those close enough to metamorphosis to give off strong olfactory signals. I’m also on the lookout for the Shadow initiates. Fraternities, parties, clubs, that’s where the young ones are most likely to be.”
“Stryker was a crime scene analyst with Metro,” Vanessa offered, lifting her cup, reminding us all why we were there. Cups were lifted all around. We drank to his memory, and Vanessa refilled the cups. “It was the perfect way to gain access to fresh kill spots.”
Nobody spoke for a moment, and I knew they were remembering the warehouse where Stryker had been ambushed. A kill spot. I drank some more.
“Well,” Micah finally said, shattering the silence. “We’re not the only ones who’ve lost star signs this year. Chandra alone is responsible for two Shadow kills.”
“Not me,” she retorted, tipping her cup back. “I’m not a star sign, remember.”
“You identified the suspects,” Vanessa soothed.
“But Hunter took them out.”
“We partner well together,” he replied modestly. “Most fire signs do.”
Spotting my confused expression, Micah expounded further. “Chandra works at Sky-Chem, the largest chemical lab in the state. She can use DNA to identify the Shadows or initiates who go searching for a job.”
Chandra’s lips pursed as her eyes went from Micah to me; she was fighting the urge to tell the story herself—doing so meant she’d have to speak to me—but pride ultimately won out. “I found the first one, their Capricorn star sign, through a urine sample when he applied as a bouncer at a strip club. It was easy for Hunter to go in after that, pretend he was there for the girls. The other was a hair test, the Shadow Virgo.”
Hunter saluted her with his cup, a look passing between them, and as much as I disliked Chandra, I had to admit it was a brilliant cover. Every hotel in town sent their employees—and there were thousands—for mandatory drug testing; as did the government agencies, the police department, and the entertainment venues. Still, I wasn’t ready to compliment her. I turned to Vanessa.
“And you?”
She leaned back, crossing her long legs. “Reporter for the Las Vegas Sentinel. Crime beat. See, Stryker would be first on a scene, analyze the evidence, and if it looked like a paranormal hit, he’d call me. He’d cover the case, search and bag all the otherworldly evidence, and I’d write it up in a palatable version for the mortals. So ‘Agent of Light Takes Out the Shadows’ Twelfth House’ becomes ‘West Las Vegas Man Hangs Himself in Garage.’ That was one of my better ones.” She toasted herself, draining her cup.
“I see,” I said slowly, swirling my drink, watching as a small whirlpool formed there. I stilled the cup and glanced up at Vanessa. “Or ‘Shadow Agents Track New Archer’ turns into ‘Heiress’s Sister Plummets to Death.’”
The laughter immediately died from Vanessa’s eyes. Shoulders slumping, she touched my arm, and I could see the others noting her acceptance. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be joking. But it’s all for the greater good, you see.”
I nodded finally. It wasn’t her fault, after all. I was just being overly sensitive, sentimental, and probably getting a little drunk. I needed to slow down and focus. “Well, it’s a dirty job, but—”
“Yeah, something like that.” We tapped our cups together. Chandra scowled, dipping her face in her own cup. The others also seemed well on their way to being truly shit-faced, but my own drink seemed to be turning on me, the sweetness now cloying in my mouth. I pushed my cup away and turned to Hunter. He was the only one not drinking. He was also the only one who hadn’t answered yet. I raised a brow.
“Director of Security,” and before I could ask, he added, “Valhalla.”
I gaped at him, and now my mouth went dry. “You’re trying to infiltrate the Archer organization? Like my mother did?”
The drink might have been making me a little slow, but I immediately recognized how easy it’d be to act as a liaison between the Light and Shadow sides if he literally worked for the Tulpa’s organization.
“Not trying,” he said, steepling his fingers. “I’m doing it.”
And I didn’t know if that was a jab at my mother or at me. He tossed me a half smile, also unreadable, but was clearly pleased a
t my obvious confusion.
“Someone has to,” Chandra said.
“Chandra,” Micah said in a warning voice. I sighed inwardly, but was careful not to let my fatigue show. I was getting better at hiding my emotions too.
Chandra’s mouth quirked slightly at one side, but she gave no other sign of having heard him, and unlike Hunter and me, she wasn’t trying to hide anything. Her eyes were swimming with drink, but that wasn’t all. Deep pockets of hatred and resentment covered her entire psyche. I didn’t even have to probe to see the mossy plum color radiating sickly around her. In her eyes I hadn’t just usurped her place in the Zodiac, I’d stolen it out from under her. And her dreams of becoming this troop’s Archer floated, dead and bloated, on the surface of her gaze whenever it lit upon me.
I caught Vanessa, her own silent gaze imploring me to let it go, so I stood, ostensibly to retrieve the other pitcher of alcohol, and with the half-drunken hope that when I returned with it, Chandra would do the same, or at least have found something more interesting to look at. But she was still there, sneering as women had sneered at Olivia so often before. Judging as they had. She held out her cup for me to serve her, then had the nerve to say, “Your mother failed us all when she deserted her star sign. And look who she deserted it for. What a waste.”
The contents of the pitcher I was holding—fruit bits, sweet and sticky, citrus-infused alcohol, ice chips—were poured over her head. It was my turn to sneer, but she was standing and had slapped the satisfaction off my face before I even saw her move.
“Girl fight,” I heard Felix say.
“Superhero girl fight,” I corrected, and wheeling back, steered an elbow into her temple. The force of my action turned me around on myself, so I followed it up with a backward elbow to the nose. Chandra staggered, as surprised at this as I’d been at the slap, but she didn’t fall, and the drunken brawl was on.
She lunged, but Felix was quicker, intercepting her just as neatly as Hunter stalled my own forward motion. Chandra and I both struggled and cursed, continuing a bit just for form’s sake, though neither of us had a chance of getting loose.
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