I leaned back and slapped Sloane across her bloodied face. She had a barbed leaf through her windpipe, so she didn’t have too much to say about it.
The Tulpa, however, laughed so loudly it again shook the car. He rocketed past us, skeletal smile wide as I ducked, but he ignored me to drop in front of all the destruction. Then, rabidly, he began pulling at Skamar’s body. Her screams were like scissors on silk, too breathless to hold any weight but telling of destruction. She was lanced through the stomach, so his formidable strength widened the already impressive hole.
The Shadows stilled, their pain nothing compared to Skamar’s agony. I froze, limbs gone numb, then shook my head and found my wits enough to will the Joshua tree gone. My emotions were nowhere near under control, and as I’d only discovered this ability the month before, it took some time. And I had to bolt as soon as the cactus dissolved; the Shadows stirred immediately. But it would take time for them to heal enough to give chase. I sprinted half a block, braced for the Tulpa’s pursuit, but when I glanced over my shoulder, he merely shot me a thumbs-up. With a now-freed and limp Skamar scuffed like a kitten in one claw, he shot into the air like a bottle rocket, screaming with wild glee, and after another moment, disappeared into the night.
I ran…and kept running. I ran until I’d left the city proper and was somewhere in the middle of the desert, panting hard, tears dried on my face. Glancing back, I saw Vegas glittering stubbornly beneath the bright hornet’s nest that was its sky, and I waited. I stood, slumped, waiting. I sat, and waited. But there were no storms or gales or howling winds that night. I sat for hours in the middle of a blackened void, and though the sky didn’t clear above the city, it also didn’t worsen. At one point I closed my eyes, bent my head, and sobbed for Skamar, cries slicing the air like razors, so the scorpions and snakes and lizards didn’t bother me, sensing the sharp pain. My sorrow was palpable, a heavy cloud marking my location. But the Tulpa didn’t come for me.
No one did.
The story spilled from me as soon as Warren answered his phone. My words tumbled over themselves like dice, cut up and spit out, but rolling up snake eyes anyway. With tears in my own I told him about how the Shadows had ambushed me and made a play for the boneyard, how Skamar had intercepted them, and how my created cactus had led to her capture.
“The Tulpa has her,” I sniffed. “I don’t know where.”
“Okay, calm down.” Warren’s voice was tight and wooden, but he wasn’t yelling. A part of me wished he would. I wiped at my nose and sniffed again. “Where are you now?”
Alone, was my first thought.
“I came back to the warehouse. To wait.” For anything. For anyone.
“So you and Hunter stay put. The rest of us will cross at dawn. Keep the alarms on until we get there.”
But I was still caught on the first thing he’d said. “Hunter?”
Warren paused. “Yes. Isn’t he with you?”
“No.”
Another beat of silence, then a soft curse. “I should have known this would happen.”
“What?” My heart skipped full beats before speeding up abnormally, and my knees actually buckled. Eyes wide, I looked around the outside of the building as if that would bring Hunter into view. Instead I saw visions of him bent over his drawing board, Hunter working, Hunter fighting…Hunter approaching me. “What happened?” I croaked, shaking off the images.
“Due to the lack of safe zones, I ordered the troop into the sanctuary as soon as I’d learned you left for Midheaven. I didn’t know when you’d be back,” he added, almost apologetically. “That’s why the Shadows attacked the boneyard. But Jasmine Chan went missing two days ago, and Hunter left the sanctuary right after that. I think he’s gone to find her.”
“So he’s missing too?”
“They both are.”
And now so was Skamar. “Oh my God.” This time my legs did buckle. The sky was still holding overhead, if barely, and yet my world was still falling apart. I sat hard on the asphalt, slumped against the warehouse wall.
“Just stay where you are, okay? Do you know how to get in?” He raised his voice when I didn’t answer. “Joanna?”
“Okay. Yes.” I lifted a hand and covered my eyes. “Yes, Hunter showed me.”
“Hm,” Warren said, and I knew what he was thinking. Hunter never showed anyone how to deactivate his complicated system of codes and alarms.
We hung up and I let both my hands drop. My head lolled on the wall. Tears pricked my eyes again. Then after a long moment of silence, and before I went inside, I picked up my bag and ran my finger over the soul chips inside like they were a rosary. I revisited the first option I’d rejected when trapped in a cab surrounded by Shadows.
I prayed.
22
Exhaustion was a formidable opponent. As worried as I was, it pulled me into sleep again, even though I was slumped on the warehouse’s cold concrete floor. I watched peacefully as my mind played out my worries in a dream. Skamar was leading Jasmine away from me. I yelled for them to come back, but Skamar only lifted the young girl to her toes and began floating, faster, so that Jasmine had to run to keep up. Finally, the young girl put on a sudden burst, the speed provided by my swiped powers, and took the lead enough to turn back and look at me as she ran. The pink and white streaks in her dark hair flew around her face like zigzagging neon, and she shot me a sheepish smile before waving through the hole in Skamar’s stomach.
“It will still be okay,” she said, pivoting to jump through that gaping hole like a circus performer. She somersaulted and came to her feet with her hands in the air. “If you put me above yourself.”
I woke to a sharp pounding on the steel bay door. Jasmine’s sweet voice still lingered as I clamored to my feet. I checked three different peepholes to make sure there were no Shadows outside before turning off the alarms.
“You look like crap,” Vanessa told me with a weak smile. But despite the worry cutting lines around her eyes, she looked much better than the last time I’d seen her. She wore a black scarf around her head, pinned to one side with a silver broach. That was the only remaining sign of the Shadows’ handiwork. Her speech was perfect, her ear and thumb and nose regrown, unmarred. I looked down, and she wiggled her left foot. Good as new.
Nice to know someone could heal, I thought, rubbing at my eyes. “Where is everyone?”
“Warren doesn’t want to meet here anymore. It’s counterintuitive, I know, but this warehouse is our safest place on this side of reality. He wants to guard its location for as long as possible.”
So he thought the Shadows would find it eventually.
“Are you okay?” Vanessa asked as I sighed. She put a hand on my arm and I covered it with my own.
“Yeah, I just had a strange dream.”
She grunted. “Not surprised. Do you know how to lock this place up?”
I nodded. “Hold on.”
Deciding it would be safer to leave my bag and the soul chips in the warehouse, I tucked it in the bottom drawer of a standing toolbox, before running through the series of codes Hunter had shown me. I held my breath, hoping I remembered them correctly. Otherwise the whole place would blow. Vanessa and I backed a safe distance away, but nothing happened. I gave a quick prayer of thanks. I seemed to be praying a lot all of a sudden.
“What time is it?” I asked, knowing only that it was early morning. I never wore a watch. The kind Olivia Archer would wear would be a dead giveaway on the Kairos’s arm.
“Almost seven. Not that you’d know it by this weather.” Keeping half a step in front of me, she motioned me south. “Um…Happy Birthday, for what it’s worth.”
“Oh. Yeah.” I was twenty-six now, and a bit surprised at the fact. A part of me, it seemed, hadn’t expected to make it a year. And Ashlyn, my daughter, was now eleven. “Thanks.”
The sky was lumpy gravy, gray and badly stirred. Behind the shifting clouds, though, was a riot of flashing color, red and oranges battling with that strange liqui
d blue and green strain, like the most elaborate production show to hit town was being rehearsed on that side of the sooty curtain. I ducked my head as thunder ripped across the valley, like it was wired in surround sound. The grand finale, I thought worriedly, couldn’t be far off.
Vanessa saw me looking and followed the trail of thunder across the sky. “Warren’s concerned too.”
Finally, I thought, shaking my head. “So where are we meeting?”
“Shapiro’s Kitchen,” she said, talking about the latest celebrity chef to be lured to town. “It’s not open yet, so it’ll be private, and because it’s so new, no one could have tracked any of us there.”
It was a stand-alone restaurant, a risky business move in a town where the most successful restaurants were backed with the seemingly endless cash flow and street traffic from an attached casino or hotel. Word was, though, that Sam Shapiro’s name would be enough to draw a crowd. That’s not why I remembered it, though. “Wasn’t that supposed to be a safe zone?”
Vanessa shrugged, but the stiffness of worry was caught in the movement. “In another life.”
We trudged on in silence after that, stuck with this one.
The places we were safe in this city—this world—had shrunk shockingly fast. Since Shapiro’s Kitchen was supposed to have been a designated safe zone, meeting there was a calculated risk because the Shadows knew about it. Yet Warren obviously felt comfortable with the plan, and because of that, I tried to push my own worry away. Something about it didn’t feel right, but I was exhausted, and needed to trust that his judgment was better than mine. So Vanessa and I stuck to the surface streets, burying ourselves in pockets of darkness whenever a lone car would pass, until we finally reached the sleek round building. Not until then did I realize how worried she’d been as well. At Shapiro’s Kitchen she melted into Felix’s arms and he buried her in his embrace. I swallowed hard, thinking that should be me with Hunter. Yet because I’d screwed up so badly, he was caught out somewhere beneath a threatening sky, searching for a girl I had broken.
I didn’t have much time to give in to regret. Warren met me at the hostess podium. “You’re okay?”
“For now,” I muttered, but his gaze was flat and disinterested, and he was already turning away. I tried to tell myself that he was preoccupied with thoughts of saving the world, but I couldn’t help a final glance back at Vanessa and Felix, dissolving as one into the alcove of a coat check, whispering so softly that even I couldn’t hear.
I sighed and followed Warren through a mahogany paneled hallway and into the main dining room. The tables were already spaced, the floor laid out the way it would be on opening night. Stacks of linens threatened to topple in one corner, and a cart of glassware was totally out of place on the opulent floor, but you could already see that the dining room was going to be magnificent. The focal point, however, was the glass-encased kitchen, where—for the viewing pleasure of a gastronomically appreciative audience—Sam Shapiro himself would direct his crew like he was conducting an orchestra.
It was in this fragile interior that the troop was huddled, and they were battered. Not physically, not like me. But Iraqi War battered, like they’d been fighting for years and there was still no end in sight. Battered like they sometimes lost sight of what they were fighting for but kept on doing it anyway. Battered like people who had to keep taking orders, because left to their own devices, they might float away.
They greeted me when I entered, but the curiosity and enthusiasm that had met me after my first return from Midheaven wasn’t there. They knew I couldn’t tell them anything about the place, and the loss of Hunter and Jasmine—and now Skamar—weighed heavily upon them.
It was in that weighty silence that my eyes fell on the object in the middle of the stainless steel table. I blinked. “What’s that?”
“We got you cake.”
I felt my brows wing up to my hairline. “Cake?”
“For your birthday,” Warren said, coming to stand at my side. He was the only one who sounded even remotely enthused about it. “You didn’t think we were going to let our Kairos’s big day pass without notice, did you?”
“Cake,” I repeated dumbly, thinking I might puke if I tried to take a bite.
“You can say thank you,” he muttered, pushing past me. I watched him go, frowning, then met Micah’s eyes. He rolled his. Good to know I wasn’t the only one who didn’t feel like celebrating.
“Thank you,” I muttered, following him around the table to join Gregor on the other side. Gregor put his good arm around me and kissed the top of my head. I felt a little better after that.
But almost immediately Vanessa appeared in the doorway, eyes wide, and face ghost white. Though her mouth worked open and shut, nothing came out. Warren quirked his head and took a step forward. “Van—”
“Vanessa! Get in there!”
A whimper escaped her throat and her fear hit us all with the full force of a cyclone. Felix yelled again behind her and I drew back at the strain in it, so different than the reunion I’d witnessed only moments before.
Warren headed that way. “Felix? What is it?”
Felix came into the room so slowly it looked like he was freeze-framed. Vanessa whimpered again. A gurgling laugh sounded somewhere behind him.
“Um, Warren?” Felix inched to the side once he’d breached the glass threshold to reveal my conduit shoved into the small of his back. Behind it was Regan DuPree. And behind that, I thought, mouth going dry, shuffled Hunter Lorenzo, wrapped tight in his own whip.
Regan pushed Felix through the doorway, and Vanessa jolted like she was going to leap forward, but she held herself, knowing an arrow would pierce either her or Felix before she could take a single step.
Regan looked much the way she had the last time I’d seen her, skin unraveled in vertical strips from head to toe, blackened at the edges, revealing bone. She was wrapped in dirty gauze from neck to ankle, thrift shop clothing donned atop that, but neither concealed the thinning of her ribboned skin. The flesh had corroded, and the stink I’d been tracking all over this city was worse. In the confines of the kitchen, it made bile stick in my throat.
She gave us all a tattered smile, her mouth winging upward in jigsawed pieces to reveal spaces of gum, oozing and receding from the bone. She knew how macabre she was, how grotesque, and she played it up under the full glare of the fluorescent lights. “And what are the agents of Light celebrating tonight, huh? I mean, what could you all possibly have to celebrate?”
Nobody answered or moved. She was dead, the knowledge of her inability to escape this room now that she was in it drawn across her gaze like a toddler’s scrawl, but she was suicide-bomber dead. The question was, who did she intend to take with her?
That scribbled gaze fell on me.
“Just tell us what you want,” Hunter said, again showing why—though he was the one closest to death—he was the one everyone looked up to. Warren might be troop leader, but it was Hunter who acted when the rest of us wouldn’t. He spoke while everyone else remained mute. He’d been out there canvassing the city for Jasmine while we huddled in safety.
And what did he get for his troubles? A mummy-worthy wrapping in his own conduit, barbed spears from the whip burrowing into his flesh.
Regan’s head swiveled unsteadily on her neck as she turned to look at him, her smile opening up, red-tinted pus oozing to stain her lips.
“Oh, I believe I want the same thing you do, my friend. Some good, old sat-is-fac-tion.” She drew out the word, like in the song, and pushed Felix with the tip of my crossbow. He backed away slowly because she still had Hunter, and she pulled him along behind her as she sauntered into the center of the room. Crossbow still aimed at Felix’s heart, finger on the trigger, her gaze fell down. “Mmm. Cake.”
“How did you—”
The weapon swung Riddick’s way, so close it crossed his eyes and his mouth fell shut.
“Shh,” Regan said, reaching forward. “I like cake.”
<
br /> Felix took a step back, toward Vanessa. Regan sensed the movement—the tiniest breeze probably felt like a sandstorm when you’d been skinned—and directed the bow back his way.
Warren held up his hands. “Everyone hold still.”
Keeping her hands steady, Regan leaned down. Her tongue was divided in four separate slices, but each found a bit of birthday cake, and though the white frosting disappeared in her mouth, I was able to follow its journey down her throat.
“Mmm,” she hummed, straightening. “See, now that’s satisfying.” It was unclear whether she meant the cake or having the entire troop at her mercy. She turned back to Hunter. “Have you tried this yet, my friend?”
Why did she keep calling him that? My friend. It was the exact phrase she’d used in the pipeline with the Tulpa…
My new friend.
My sharp inhalation brought Regan’s gaze back my way. “Ah,” she said, sounding satisfied. “And now you see.”
She was the person he’d been meeting with in the Shadow manuals, the hidden contact lurking in the dark. The one he’d been talking to weeks ago when he said everyone should be allowed their greatest desire.
And her desire, her satisfaction, was in seeing me realize it. Me, also, on a hook. Betrayed. Brokenhearted. All of the above. Regan was only satisfied when destroying other people’s loves, their futures, their possibilities. Her mother had done this with her father, turning him into the worst sort of criminal. Regan had tried to do the same with Ben.
And she had apparently succeeded with Hunter.
Suddenly, little incongruities began to add up: how Regan had slipped past Hunter during the chase in the pipeline. How, in her current state, she’d ever managed to get her hands on him now.
Oh my God, I thought, the realization hitting me afresh. He’d been working with my greatest personal enemy for weeks! And he still made love to me. I let him lay his head on my shoulder, find rest in my arms. We were lovers, and friends…and now enemies too.
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