“Ladies, ladies,” Hunter said, sounding bored.
I slammed my head back against him, satisfied when I heard him grunt. Petty, but pleasing. And he let me go.
“I am finished apologizing for who I am,” I said, jerking away from him and whirling to face them all. Chandra wasn’t the only one who needed to know this. I was breathing hard, and I knew my aura had turned red with anger. “Your discomfort with me is your problem, not mine. Got it? I know who I am.”
And I did. I could be beautiful without being soft, and I could be tough without being bitter. Without becoming Olivia, without experiencing the world through her body and eyes, I would have never realized this on my own. I folded my arms across my chest and silently dared them all to speak.
“Finally,” Micah murmured from his corner, lifting his drink.
“Yeah.” My eyes flickered to meet his. “Finally.”
A gurgle sounded in my stomach. Then a rising of heat in my gorge. Suddenly, I shuddered, and my intestines seized. Pain wracked my body, and I screamed, collapsing and clutching my loins. A searing pain shot from my thighs to my chest, paralyzing my lower back, and I whipped forward. God, what was in that drink? The thought swam away as another series of slashing incisions, like hot pokers, scored my flesh. I felt singed and sliced as I curled into myself, my rasping cry dying out in breathless pain.
“What’s happening to her?”
I gave an uncontrollable twitch, then puked vodka, citrus, and blood.
“Jesus!”
“Olivia! What’s wrong?” Felix was there, but his outline blurred above me, tears and agony ruining my vision.
My organs felt skewered, like they’d been ripped out from inside me. I had to be dying, I thought. I hoped. “God,” I cried out, and this time arched backward as an invisible blade bumped along my spine.
“It’s inside. It’s my insides…” I looked at my hands, which had been clutching abdomen and thighs, expecting to see them drowning in blood, but there was nothing. Surprise had my mouth closing momentarily. The pain abated, no longer acute, but the spasms and heat lingered. A groan spiraled out of me, filling the cantina.
Micah had reached me at some point, and I regained my sense of self long enough to realize he was cradling my head in his lap, his physician’s hands searching, inspecting my ribs and stomach and legs, and finding nothing.
“It’s not me!” I doubled over again, a fresh wound cutting me open from sternum to pubic bone. It wasn’t me, of that much I was sure. This was a power outside myself, outside this room too. Still, waves of nausea built again in my stomach. I took a deep breath, but the air was metallic with the taste of blood. I groaned, writhed, and finally, near unconsciousness, lay still.
“It’s okay. Just stay where you are, take a minute.” Micah shifted, turning to the others, though I couldn’t see them. “Somebody go get Greta.” There were footsteps, then the report of the door.
“She’s not bleeding.” Hunter’s voice, laced with concern, which would’ve been gratifying if it didn’t scare the shit out of me.
“Maybe she drank too much.”
The pain had subsided, but the echo of it was still in my bones. I swallowed hard against the vomit souring my throat and the brighter scents of pain and fear.
“Maybe she’s allergic to the masking pheromones?”
“No, I tested the solution on a small patch of skin before I applied it. They’re a perfect match.”
It didn’t feel perfect, I wanted to say, but a tongue of swollen sandpaper inhabited my mouth. It was as if I’d been denied drink for a week instead of imbibing only minutes before.
Then the roil in my gut again, a tight coil of fear that wasn’t really mine. I couldn’t understand it. It was like the core of my body belonged to someone else. I managed to sit up with Micah’s help, his large palm warm and supporting on the small of my back.
“Maybe she—”
The door to the cantina swung open with a resounding bang. A figure was silhouetted in the shadows of the hall; a man of great bulk, middling height, and only one arm. The dim lights of the cantina made him appear a ghost, and bent at the waist, he wavered like one as well.
“Gregor!” Vanessa abandoned me for him. “God! What happened?”
“Ajax,” he managed, before bending over himself. My body froze, even my shuddering stopped for an instant, and my eyes darted to the hallway behind him, half expecting to see Ajax there, the tip of his flaming javelin already pointed at my heart. “He found me last night, just after dusk. I don’t know how…I didn’t do anything…I didn’t—”
“Shh,” Vanessa said, arm over his shoulders. “Of course you didn’t. Come sit down.”
“I can’t…” He looked up at us with as pained an expression as I’d ever seen on another human being. “I can’t keep them in.”
I glanced down, unprepared for what supernatural beings could do to another nonmortal. His guts spilled forward, bulging from the hollow of his body, pink coils of twisting organs snaking from the cavity. His one good arm was plastered with blood.
“Oh, my God!” Micah left me so quickly I wobbled, then puked again, this time with shock and revulsion.
“I’ll take care of you,” I heard Micah say over my retching. “Don’t worry about a thing.”
“Did you see Warren?” Hunter asked. He was the only one who appeared remotely calm. I wondered if he was still reclined in his seat, ankle crossed over his knee, a detached observer. I couldn’t look, though. My eyes—like everyone’s—were fastened on Gregor.
His face collapsed upon itself, and red-tinged saliva bubbled from his mouth. “They used me as bait. He tracked my pheromones.”
The room fell dead silent.
“And Warren wouldn’t listen.” He was sobbing now, mouth wide. “I tried to tell him no, not to do it, but he never listens.”
“What? What did he do?”
“He traded himself for me.” Stunned by this news, nobody moved. Another helpless sob escaped him. “They let me go, but I was followed. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t close off the entrance to the boneyard by myself. And there was nobody to close it behind me.”
I gathered it was no small thing for a Shadow agent to infiltrate the boneyard. Still, what did it matter? Any enemy who tried to enter the sanctuary would fry, right? I opened my mouth to say as much, but another fiery assault wracked my body. My eyes bulged painfully from their sockets, my throat stretched and burning in a soundless cry. And I no longer cared about the sanctuary.
“They’re torturing him,” Micah said, kneeling next to me. “He and Olivia are linked, remember? She must be experiencing the residual effects.”
If this was residual, I never wanted to feel the real thing. Another slice, and I squeezed my eyes so tight spots danced there. I came out of it in time to catch the end of Gregor’s words. “—because he knows her true identity. We have to hand her over at dawn—”
“Or they’ll kill Warren,” Hunter finished for him. This time I did turn, arching my neck to find him. He sat back in his chair, eyeing me dispassionately, sizing me up like I was a sow to be sold at the country fair. I closed my eyes, wondering how I had ever thought him handsome.
“We can’t send her up, even if we wanted to,” Vanessa said. “She’ll incinerate herself before she even breathes fresh air.”
“Wha…?” Gregor grimaced. Felix quickly filled him in, and Gregor dropped his head back, groaning. I doubled over again.
“Stop it!” I screamed, to the sky, to Warren, to the torturers, and to a God I didn’t even know existed. I screamed until my throat was raw, and when I finished, a chuckle whispered like a heavy, bouncing wind across the room. Then the torture stopped. We all stared at one another.
“Your voice,” Hunter said quietly, eyes narrowed on my face. “Ajax heard it.”
“They’re linked,” Micah repeated.
I thought of Warren, the way he’d left that afternoon; agitated, angry, afraid. I won’t lose another! And
I realized this must have been foretold. Of course, a man who believed the good of the troop came before that of the individual would do just that. He’d have known, and he’d have gone anyway.
“Oh, my God,” Micah said, realizing the same thing. He lowered his head into his hands, Gregor’s blood staining his temples and forehead and ears. “Ajax has been one step ahead of us the whole time.”
I conjured the image, my last, of Warren striding down the hall, trench coat billowing at his ankles, the need to do the right thing driving his limbs. My heart sank as I looked at everybody’s face. If this was a game, I thought, clutching my gut, we were one move away from losing it all.
23
Felix and Micah helped me back to my room, where Greta lit candles and some spicy incense to thicken the air, and gave me a pill to block the connection between Warren and me.
“You need your rest,” she told me as I swallowed it, feeling both relief and guilt as I did so. “Concentrate on building a mental wall between Warren and yourself. Protect your thoughts and feelings from those who are probing at him to get to you. That’s more important even than blocking the pain.”
Easy for you to say, I thought, eyes following her from the room. But the smoke from the incense interceded after that, floating between the synapses in my brain, taking the edge from my worries.
“Warren would want that,” Rena added, and I glanced over to where she sat in the corner, rocking in a chair she’d brought in from her own room. “You can bet he’s doing the same.”
The destroyed craters where her eyes should have been had turned to black pools in the candlelight. All her other charges were tucked in bed for the night, and she’d offered to tend to me while what remained of the troop convened in the briefing room. I knew what they were doing; talking about me, around me, but—once again—not to me. I wondered hazily which of them would cast the deciding vote…and how soon before I was kicked out of the sanctuary. Sacrificed for the sake of their leader.
“You should be meditating,” Rena said, as if that would solve everything as she leaned back in her chair.
“The meditation exercises aren’t working,” I told her, managing to work up a snarl, but paid for it when my intestines filled with fire.
“That’s because you’re not doing them,” she said lightly as I pressed back into my pillows, writhing until the burning subsided.
When it finally felt like all I had was a mean case of heartburn, I glanced back at her with watery eyes. “They’re going to vote me out, aren’t they? They hold me responsible for Warren’s capture.”
She shook her head, but it was a defeated rather than reassuring gesture. “No, Olivia. The Shadows orchestrated this, just as they’ve orchestrated every heartbreak we’ve ever had to endure.” She dropped her head back, seeming to deflate where she sat, before adding, “And Warren did this too. He always does.”
This last bit was said with a sort of long-standing resignation, and I’d have tried to read her aura, but I was too tired, groggy with the smoke rising in the air between us, and too afraid it would cause me more needless pain. I also wanted to ask what she meant, but was afraid I’d get more mumbling about Warren’s secrets—as Micah had done—or protestations that it wasn’t her story to tell, as Greta had claimed. So, instead, I asked a different question.
“How’d Warren get his limp?”
Her rocker creaked to a halt. I swallowed hard, but didn’t fill the silence lengthening between us. Rena had seen Warren through his first life cycle; if anyone knew about him and his past, it was she. And though there were larger questions than this niggling at me, this one seemed innocuous enough to start with, so I waited silently for her to tell me what she would.
“His father gave it to him.”
I’d jolted, causing fire to light along my spine. It reminded me that sudden movements were a bad idea, but I’d been expecting anything but that. “But…but only…”
“Conduits can leave lasting disfigurement, yes.” She grimaced, rocking harder. It didn’t look comforting. “Have you noticed Warren doesn’t carry a personal weapon?”
She went on, though she couldn’t see my nod.
“He wouldn’t touch the Taurean conduit after his father used it against him…and after he, in turn, used it against his father.”
And what she told me next was more than I’d ever have guessed about the man who was so absurd one moment, so serious the next.
Samson Clarke hadn’t been the first choice for his generation’s Taurus. Another agent, a woman named Mia, had possessed that star sign, though Samson gained it after the Shadows ambushed her in a drainage tunnel leading to the Las Vegas wash. He avenged Mia’s death over the next few years, taking out two of the Shadows who’d trapped her in that tunnel, and helping his peers kill a third. Meanwhile, he’d taken up with the younger sister of the Arien Light, and Warren was born shortly thereafter.
The birth of a son, rather than a daughter, had been a disappointing blow to Samson, one he never hid from the scrawny child growing up, literally, in his father’s shadow. Never one to let a little thing like monogamy stop him, Samson cast Warren’s mother aside and set his sights on someone who’d already proven herself capable of producing a daughter. The leader’s mate. When she rejected him outright, rather than deciding it had anything to do with him, or her distaste for the way he’d so faithlessly treated Warren’s mother, he decided it was because he wasn’t powerful enough for her. Yet.
Rena sighed, and if she had eyes, they’d have been unfocused, looking through the present and the smoke from the incense filling up the room, while vividly reliving the distant past. “So he tried to take the position of troop leader for himself.”
But Samson Clarke talked in his sleep. Warren, who’d been charged with straightening his father’s room and tidying his belongings at the end of each day—including sharpening his conduit—discovered the details of his plot over a period of several days. His fear of his father’s wrath, plus a desire to please him despite the years of neglect Samson had shown him, kept him from saying anything to the other star signs. But on the night his father attacked the troop leader, Warren suddenly discovered the courage to stand up to Samson…and nearly had his legs cleaved out from under him for the effort.
“The leg wound is a reminder of the night he killed his father,” Rena told me, her voice carefully absent of emotion, “and, though he doesn’t ever say it, it’s also a reminder that he failed to save the real troop leader.”
And yet the others still rewarded him with the Taurean star sign, and later with the troop leadership, ironically giving Warren what his father had been so desperate to possess.
I laid where I was, mind still hazy from the incense, but more numb from the telling. Warren’s own father had betrayed him. After a moment more I found my voice, though my mouth was sandpaper dry. “Why couldn’t Samson just have worked for the title of troop leader? He was obviously a good agent. Couldn’t he have made it there, eventually, on his own?”
“He wasn’t lineally qualified,” Rena said, her chair squeaking beneath her as she rocked. “He was born an independent.”
“A rogue agent?” I blurted before I could stop myself. “I mean—”
She smiled wryly and waved off my stuttering. “He absolutely personified the term.”
Because though the Shadows had technically killed Mia, Samson Clarke was the one who’d pointed them her way.
“Ah, Olivia,” Rena sighed, when my horrified gasp filled the room. “Just because agents of Light are…super, other, more, if you will, doesn’t mean we don’t have the same shortcomings as the humans we protect. Warren’s father was abnormally ambitious for an agent of Light. Being stronger than mortals—than most agents on either side of the Zodiac, even—wasn’t enough for him. He’d ascended from nothing into the position of the Taurean star sign, but he wanted more.”
And he’d wanted it enough to go from merely wishing for leadership to maiming his own son.
I thought of the way Warren nearly snarled each time someone mentioned the independents. “It’s why he couldn’t trust me fully, even though he wanted to.”
Rena made a sound of agreement, before adding, “And it’s why every death he fails to stop is a sign in his eyes that he doesn’t deserve to be leader. That his lineage—the son of a vicious rogue agent—means he’s a failure before he’s even started.”
No wonder he was so willing to sacrifice himself for Gregor. For us all.
“What about the rest of them, then?” I asked. “What are they going to do now?”
“What they were born to do, of course,” Rena answered, folding her hands and leaning back. “They’re going to save him.”
“But the Shadow agents are waiting for them in the boneyard.” My eyes roved over her face. Surely there was a better plan than that. Even I could see that turning me over to the Shadows was a far better alternative. “They said themselves that the entire Zodiac will be completely wiped out.”
“Without Warren, it is anyway,” she said, a sigh floating from her. She patted her hair, an unconscious, nerve-filled gesture, since not a strand was out of place.
I frowned, because a woman so protective of her children shouldn’t sound this defeated. “And what do we do?”
“We hope. Pray. If that’s not enough, we wait until the next batch of initiates is ready.” Her voice was soft, almost drowsy, but the scent of nightmares accompanied it, not dreams. “Not long, half a decade at most. Then we rise again.”
“But they’ll die!” I said, catching myself before I sat up.
“Yes.” And her own head fell. “They’ll all die.”
And now I did shoot up in bed. My diaphragm burned and the heat rose like smoke to my gorge, but it was bearable. “How can you sit there so calmly and just let them go?”
Stiffening, Rena’s rocking abruptly stopped, and I swear if she had eyes she’d have been glaring holes through me. “It kills me to think of Warren out there now, suffering. He’s a favorite of mine. Always was. But there’s nothing I can do save discipline and train the next batch to be stronger and better and smarter than the last. To teach them where this group went wrong…and where I went wrong with them.”
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