Warren shook his head, looking a lot older than I’d ever seen him. “This isn’t a joke.”
“Wrong, Warren! This whole thing is a joke! A supernatural organization is protecting Las Vegas? Give me a break! Information passed on through comic books…and m-my goddamned chest lights up like a Christmas ornament when someone wants to kill me!” Now I just sounded panicked, frightened rather than frightening. “It’s all a fucking joke, and guess what? Me—my life!—is the fucking punch line!”
I felt laughter bubbling up in my throat, bitter as bile, and I held it back because I knew it’d come out in a scream, and I was afraid it would never stop. Swallowing hard, feeling light-headed, I said, “Don’t tell me what to think about what I’ve seen since you entered my life. Don’t tell me what to laugh at, or what’s funny and what’s not. I’ll fucking howl at the moon if I feel like it. And,” I added, pointing my finger at his chest, “don’t ever, ever tell me how to feel!”
And then I really did start laughing. I laughed and laughed until the manic sound soured and turned to tears. Then I cried and cried.
And then I cried some more.
16
The rest of the cab ride was spent in stony and uncomfortable silence, and as we sped up Industrial, heading under Flamingo Road, I dully watched the sun setting behind the Palms and felt the darkness rising, eyeing me from the east. Gridlock had set in on I-15, parallel to us, and I could see people singing and talking from behind their windshields, suspended on that strip of highway, momentarily delayed on the way to the rest of their lives.
Meanwhile, as the world went on revolving around me, I tried to answer Warren’s questions for myself. How had Ajax found me? Had I done something to call him to me? I tried to think back, but my memories were blighted by screams and pain, and Ajax’s particular scent had slithered beneath my skin to suck at my pores. The questions continued to pile up before me, and like those drivers on the freeway, I felt stuck in eternal gridlock.
And why would Warren ask if I’d murdered another person? Could he really believe I could do it? Did I, in some chipped and faulty corner of my heart, believe it of myself? I thought about the construction workers again, and how power-drunk I’d felt as I used my senses and words to blow holes into their worlds. I had tried to justify it in my mind, telling myself they’d deserved and asked for it; but the truth was, even though I hadn’t killed that man named Mark, or the other man who was sleeping with his wife, I had altered their lives in a horrible and irrevocable way. And wasn’t that a death of sorts? Wasn’t that a way to murder Mark’s hope, in his own fallible heart, that he was wrong in suspecting his best friend and wife?
I put a hand to my mouth and stared blindly out the window, deciding I didn’t want the answers to all my questions.
We pulled abruptly into a half-empty parking lot behind Tommy Rocker’s Cantina, a favorite hangout for locals who wanted to be near the Strip but not necessarily the tourists. Two men emerged from the bar, looking innocuous, just colleagues enjoying an after-hours drink before facing the drive home, but I recognized them as the men who’d chased Ajax. The shorter was dark and severe-looking, but the taller appeared happy and light, bouncing on his toes as he approached the cab. The paranormal world’s answer to Laurel and Hardy.
The doors opened for them. “Is it taken care of?” Warren asked as they slid in.
“Of course,” the first man said. He slouched low, not even glancing at me. “The place was absolutely stinking with her scent.”
“It’s fine,” the other man countered sharply, and they both fell silent.
The cab began moving again, but this time my view of the freeway was blurred by fresh tears. The “it” Warren referred to was really a “she.” I wondered what the headlines would read in tomorrow’s paper. Teen Dies In Botched Hold-Up. Or, Tragedy At Quik-Mart. One thing I was certain it wouldn’t read was Novice Superhero Destroys Yet Another Life. Warren and his friends would see to that.
I sniffled involuntarily at the thought, and the tall man—the one I’d seen leap to face Ajax across the aisle dividers—turned to me with a small, sympathetic smile.
“Here,” he said, holding out my duffel bag. I swallowed hard, took it, and clutched it to my chest. The first man had turned too, but there was no kindness in his face. He rolled his eyes at my tears and turned back around.
“And Ajax?”
“The usual,” came the answer. “Smoke, mirrors, all that Shadow shit.”
The kind man was still watching me. I wanted to tell him to turn around, but right now he seemed to be the only friendly face in the cab. I tried to look nonthreatening. He held his hand out over the back of the seat. “I’m Felix.”
“Here we go,” the other one muttered.
Felix smiled. “So you’re the new Archer. We haven’t had an Archer in the Zodiac since your mother.”
I lifted my hand. “I’m Jo—”
“This is Olivia,” Warren interrupted, and I flushed, feeling his glare.
I dropped my hand back in my lap and turned away from them both. The other man in the front seat mumbled something I couldn’t quite hear, but I had the distinct feeling it wasn’t complimentary.
“Shut up,” the driver said, and we all did.
There was a sense of urgency to the way the cab maneuvered through traffic, around—and in one case over—barriers, and something about the way the light shone through the windshield really did make the city seem divided in two.
“Are we going to make it?”
“We’ll make it, but someone else is going to have to drive.”
“You’re staying on this side, Gregor?” Felix asked. The others also seemed surprised.
“Just until dawn. Someone has to watch the city. Besides, nothing interesting is going to happen with her,” he said, jerking his head in my direction, “before morning.”
“That’ll be a nice change,” I murmured to no one in particular, though Warren grunted.
“Be careful, Gregor. We don’t know if they have intel on you or not.”
“I think if they did they’d have gotten to me by now. I’m not exactly the strongest of the star signs.” Gregor held up his right arm for my benefit. It ended just above the elbow. “I found a lucky penny today, though, and I have my trusty rabbit’s foot. I’ll be fine.”
Warren turned to me. “Like I said on the phone, you can only make the crossing at the exact moment where light and dark are divided evenly in the air. Something to remember if it’s midnight and you’ve been tracked. You’ll have to survive for six more hours before seeking sanctuary.”
“Gawd,” the man up front crossed his arms and mumbled, “she doesn’t even know that?”
I shot forward in my seat, feeling the anger rise in me again. So far I was a complete failure as a superhero, and had a pretty dubious self-image as a human being, but I still had a grasp on my pride, if a tenuous one. “Look, mister, I don’t know who you are or what you’ve got against me, but I’ve never seen you or any of your Kryptonite-fearing buddies before Warren over here jumped in front of my car—”
“Was run down, technically.”
Felix turned to Gregor. “I don’t fear Kryptonite. Do you?”
“So let’s get something stick straight between us. I didn’t ask for this. I’d be more than happy to never know anything about crossings or metamorphoses or any of this other weirdo, paranormal bullshit, but here I am. So get over it. Apparently I have to.”
The man had turned in his seat and watched me through slitted eyes. There was something odd about the texture of his anger; odd, and familiar at the same time. I felt like I should recognize him, or one of the components that made him him, but I didn’t.
At the end of the long silence that followed, Gregor eased the car over to the side of the road, shifted to neutral, and swiveled in his seat to face me. “Olivia, this is Chandra. She’s one of our best blenders in the chemistry lab. She made your new signature scent for you.”
Sh
e.
I felt the anger drain from my face and body, along with the color. I did a mental head slap, thinking the familiar thread in Chandra’s genetic makeup was her sex. Female. Hello.
It was definitely one of those days.
“I’ll drive.” Chandra flung open the door.
“Well, that was the wrong thing to say,” Warren muttered as she stalked around the cab.
“Chandra hates being mistaken for a man,” Gregor explained as he opened the driver’s side door, but his eyes were laughing again. And at least I knew I wasn’t the first to have done so. Unfortunately I also knew women. They rarely forgave a slight like this, and Chandra didn’t seem terribly forgiving in the first place.
“Don’t wait up for me, kids,” Gregor said, exiting the car.
“Call if you’re gonna be late,” Warren said.
“Nag, nag, nag.”
The doors shut behind Chandra, and she slammed the car into gear.
“Shit,” I heard Felix mutter.
“Got your belt on?” Warren asked. The car revved, tires squealing and spinning over gravel before finding purchase and jolting forward. I was thrown back into my seat, my gaze fixed straight ahead, but from the corner of my eye I saw Gregor’s diminishing bulk in the sideview mirror. However, the solid concrete wall standing twelve feet before us seemed a more pressing issue.
“Women drivers…” Warren said, sounding weary.
Perhaps the car could fly, I thought as the wall loomed closer. Or maybe the wall moved or disintegrated or we’d disappear right through it like it wasn’t even there. But then Warren braced himself beside me, and I knew that wall wasn’t going anywhere.
We struck it going at least sixty-five miles an hour. The impact propelled me into the seat in front of me, and the angry screech of metal kissing concrete married burning rubber and dust-filled air. Bricks scraped against the sides of the car, slamming atop the roof before we came to a halt as violently and abruptly as any normal car would. When I opened my eyes, however, I saw the shell of the cab was undamaged.
“I hate that part,” Warren muttered, unbuckling.
I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth and came away with fresh blood. “What the hell was that?”
“What?” he said, raising a brow. “You thought crossing over to an alternate reality would be easy?”
“You’ll get used to it,” Felix said, smiling as the doors swung open. “Helps if you have a cocktail first.”
“You mean I’ll have to do that again?”
Chandra smirked at me through the rearview mirror. “Welcome to our world,” she said, and got out of the cab.
Bitch, I thought, watching her stalk away through debris.
“Come on,” Warren said, waving me along. I sighed, shook my head, and went ahead and followed him into his world.
I stepped from that cab in the same way other adventurous humans once stepped onto the moon. A small step here, another tentative one there; gravel and cinder block and glass crunching beneath my boots. It seemed we were in a dusty, debris-scattered courtyard, with oddly shaped sheet metal stacked and leaning at every angle and high walls ribboned with whorls of cyclone wire. Glancing back, I tried to see Gregor through the breach in the wall, but all the dust stirred by our vehicle’s impact had wafted toward that opening like smoke to a chimney flue, and it was congealing there somehow, as thick and unyielding as cinder itself, swirling like concrete being poured through air.
The others were in front of me, walking single file, Warren’s gimpy gait even more pronounced as he picked his way around the sheet metal. As I rushed to catch up with him I realized the steel pieces in the yard weren’t scraps of metal at all, but signs sporting words like Normandie, Photo Shop, and Le Café. There was a life-sized cactus with chipped green paint and holes where bald and broken bulbs protruded like thorns, and a six-foot martini glass outlined by clear glass tubes. There were acres more of shattered incandescent lamps, fluorescent paint, and the historic signage that had dotted the Vegas skyline when Italian men were still running the city and flashing neon drenched the streets from dusk to dawn.
“Where are we?” I asked, glancing at scripted individual letters someone had lined up to spell Casino.
“Neon Boneyard,” Warren shot over his shoulder, picking his way past the Landmark and Dunes signs. Each letter was larger than he.
“Where the lights go to die,” Chandra said, smirking as she twirled to face me.
“Where the Light goes to rest,” Felix corrected, suddenly appearing beside me. He smiled again, and I was gratified. “It’s as close to home as you’re ever going to get again.”
We followed Warren past the Aladdin’s original genie’s lamp, and took a left at a sign that said Thunderbird in script. About an acre in we stopped in front of the largest, gaudiest piece in the yard, still magnificent, even with all its lights busted and burnt out. “Here,” Warren said.
I gazed upward, nonplussed. “The Silver Slipper?” Next to the Foxy’s Firehouse and the hundred-foot clown still standing in front of Circus Circus, the Silver Slipper had been my favorite neon landmark as a kid. As I got closer, I saw the bulbs that had once studded the bright evening shoe were long gone, their threads rusted, maintenance halted after the property was demolished. I was surprised to see it was only fifteen feet high—it had always seemed larger looming above the property on its rotating axis—but it looked to weigh at least two tons, and I watched as the others crossed to the back of the giant shoe and began to climb a rusted staircase attached to the heel.
At first I just stood there, craning my neck upward, gazing from the ground as three superheroes became silhouetted in the waning evening light. Chandra was first. She didn’t look at me or anyone else as she reached the top, but sat down unceremoniously and slid down the great, bulb-stamped pump. Just before she slid off the front of the curved toe, a light flashed and she disappeared.
“Come on,” Felix yelled down to me. “You’ll fall behind.”
Which was the last thing I wanted. Slinging my duffel over my shoulder, I scurried to the staircase and began to climb. I arrived just in time to see a path light up, much like a landing strip for an airplane.
“What do we do?” I asked, though Felix was already kneeling for his slide, which meant I was about to find out.
He smiled at me over his shoulder. “Just follow the light. It’ll lead the way.” And he let himself go, sliding down the giant slipper until—flash!—he disappeared into the toe.
“It’s like anything else,” Warren said, stepping onto the narrow platform. He extended his bad leg out in front of him first, then the good. “You take the first step with the faith you’ll end up where you want to be.” Without waiting for a reply, he too disappeared.
“Where I want to be,” I repeated, though there was no one left to hear. I was no longer sure exactly where that was…though I was relatively certain it wasn’t a hole in the ground beneath the Silver Slipper in the Neon Boneyard where discarded Las Vegas signage went to die.
Just take the first step. I did, and a preternatural landing strip lit up before me. That had to be a good sign, I thought, eyeing the beacon at the end. I took another step. Suddenly the Slipper exploded with light, the small landing strip disappearing into a void so bright I had to shield my eyes, locking them tight. If anything, the light grew brighter.
I stepped back, trying to feel my way off the platform. I was afraid I’d fall but I couldn’t take my hands from my eyes long enough to look because they were tearing up in defense. I heard a sizzling sound and smelled burning. Then I tasted it, hot and cloying at the back of my throat, and realized it was coming from me.
Agony jigsawed through my skull, drilling at my temples, and I cried out and rushed forward blindly. I had no choice but to move. I was incinerating on that platform, like I was shut in a microwave, organs heating within me, roasting from the inside out.
I stepped, slipped, and slid into oblivion. The incline was like a grea
sed luge run, and me without a sled, I thought hysterically. And while the drop into the toe was not unexpected, my breath was sucked away. Light, brilliant but miasmic, streamed past me, surrounded me…and instead of illuminating me, infected me.
I choked on the white-hot heat as it rolled like lava into my mouth, rising into the soft tissue of my brain as I fell. I was being vacuumed down into a trough of invisible flame, fire biting at my cheeks and ears, sinking in like pokers behind my eyes. I screamed, but the sound was wrenched from my mouth.
“What’s taking her so long?”
The sweltering words slid past me as I continued to fall. More heat invaded me, radiation now; attacking my fevered flesh, piercing my veins, seeking bone.
“She’s coming now. Hear that?”
Hurry, I thought, knowing I was near to blacking out. Charred. I grew dizzy and my lungs felt close to imploding. Only when I landed with a hard thud did I realize there was any air left in my chest to lose. I crumbled, but sucked in air like I was Nessie coming up from the bottom of the loch.
“That was graceless,” I heard Chandra say.
I rolled onto my hands and knees, facedown, gulping down air, thinking I’d never breathed in anything so crisp, cool, balmy, or sweet in my life. It set the sores in my mouth to drying, and they crackled as I winced. They were on my lungs too, where they remained wet and aching.
“Olivia?” Hands on my shoulders. I whimpered and jerked away, and not just because my flesh sizzled at the contact. I was pissed off and feeling vulnerable; exposed and lost, dizzy and disoriented, and betrayed by the very people who were supposed to be protecting me.
And I was so very fucking hot.
Why hadn’t anyone told me what to expect? Or what to do? Why had they just left me up there, alone and burning? I couldn’t get the question out, though; not past the air I was trying to suck in. I started shaking, an improvement over the stinging paralysis, but not by much.
“What’s wrong with her?” Felix this time, voice hesitant and low.
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