Cheat the Grave

4

“What are you doing here?”

Warren’s query, flat and suspicious, wasn’t at all what I’d practiced responding to in the mirror of my barbwitted dreams. Still, I did my best work on the fly.

“Shopping,” I said, turning my head to the wide-open door where eight agents of Light fanned out like a palm frond. Warren was centered like the sun, and the others were planets revolving around him. I gave them all a sweet smile from beneath my unyielding ties, then focused on my former leader. “What do you think, the pearl necklace or the choker?”

“Joanna.” His impatience, immediate and unearned, had my hands clenching at my sides. I studied the craggy, sun-scorched skin I knew so well, and the hardness in his eyes I was beginning to know better. He was dressed in his favorite cover guise, a vagrant in a trench so tattered only his demeanor was more frayed. The last time I’d seen him was at the entrance of a swiftly flooding tunnel. He’d just locked a fellow troop member in another world with a calm ruthlessness, and had been thinking of abandoning me to the Tulpa to save his own skin.

“I’m thinking pearls,” I continued, fighting the memory in order to keep my voice light. “Every high-powered female executive should own a set.”

I glared at each agent in turn, the men and women who had once feared me for my dual-sided nature, who’d overcome it to accept me as one of their own, and who now regarded me as distantly as if we’d never met. Studying each carefully blank gaze, I tried to figure out who had left me the warning not to go out tonight.

Perhaps Vanessa, I thought, staring at the subtly exotic woman. We’d been the closest. She looked both beautiful and strong in her long black silken scarf, worn since her hair had been shorn weeks earlier. She’d secured this one with an antique silver brooch, an iron bolt pinning the black silk to the side. Other than the hair, which was still growing out, she’d otherwise recovered fully from the attack that claimed digits and limbs from her flesh. A sharp corner of the glass cabinet dug into one of my calves, and my sarcasm reared. Good for her.

Maybe it’d been Micah. Healer wasn’t only his position in the troop, it was his calling. He might have an interest in preventing my injury…if he still cared. I found the seven-foot man standing to the left of Warren in shadows that so obscured his features I couldn’t read whether any concern for me lie on them. But Riddick was next to him, and with a jolt I realized Micah wasn’t in the shadows. They were in him. This time it was the physician who sported some kind of injury, a realization doubly shocking since agents always healed from attack unless struck by a conduit.

But how did a man as fair as Micah turn dark? Not black, no, because that was natural, and this was anything but. It was as if grit and soot strained at his pores, his skin acting as barrier, like a cement truck that had to keep moving so the ash or brick or burnt lime-whatever was inside of him-didn’t still and set.

My gaze lingered too long, and he inched back. I jerked my gaze away, automatically wanting to give him privacy and to cover for us both, and studied the others instead. Riddick was ginger-haired, tight-muscled, and driven, but had yet to gain the experience that would make him into a dangerously seasoned agent. Jewell, next to him, was the same age, and they’d grown up in the sanctuary together. While she was a second daughter and had never expected to inherit her star sign, she almost wore the responsibility better. Having it unexpectedly thrust upon a person often made them more vigilant and serious, as I well knew.

I couldn’t figure any of them keeping Warren out of the loop, though. If any knew about Mackie and his quest to kill me, if any cared- and I thought it likely there was at least that between us-they’d have told him. Unless one of them had opened the gateway to Midheaven, accidentally let the demon spawn out, and was too afraid of Warren to fess up. Though agents’ actions were regularly recorded in comic book form, thus a matter of public record, this wouldn’t be if it could upset the balance between Shadow and Light.

So had one of them planted the old conduits for me? Maybe…though wouldn’t it have been easier to show up on my doorstep, hand me my crossbow, and bid me good day? I thought again of the fury I’d once seen blanketing Warren’s face. Maybe not.

“Joanna.” Tekla now, their Seer. Though the smallest, staturewise, she was arguably the strongest of them all. She watched me as carefully as I’d studied the others, her odd, birdlike stillness making me nervous, as always. She read the stars and skies, and carried the Scorpion sign fiercely in memory of her son. A mother wasn’t supposed to outlive a child in any world, and since reclaiming the star sign, Tekla had been more daring and vigilant and aggressive than the others. Warren loved it, but I could have told him there was a fine line between nervy and nutty.

I continued on like I hadn’t heard her. “Of course, there’s high-powered like me, and then there’s high-powered like you. There’s a difference between mortal power and those who allow it, isn’t there?” I struggled with the restraints any one of them could have broken through, and had the satisfaction of hearing someone moan. It sparked something dormant and dark inside of me.

“Riddick, untie her. Joanna, this isn’t about you.”

“Of course not.” Gritting my teeth, I wondered what my anger smelled like. “If it was, you wouldn’t be here.”

Riddick, coming close, looked like he was holding his breath. It pissed me off even more. “Hello, ‘friend.’

How’s life treating you?”

He didn’t respond or look me in the eye, but his strong fingers fumbled at my ties. I snorted.

Warren cleared his throat. “Gregor, Jewell. Check the rest of the building.”

“Harlan’s not here, asshole.” I added the insult because it would get his attention. “Don’t you think I’d have said so first thing?”

“But he was,” he said so accusingly it was as if I’d invited the attack on my life. “We can smell him.”

That’s the part I focused on. “Can you?” I replied sweetly. “How interesting. I can’t.”

And I didn’t realize how furious I still was about that loss-about all of them-until the sharp words were out of my mouth. I’d been finely ground under Warren’s ambitious heel, and I was as bitter as a glass of Campari.

“And you don’t know where he went?”

I stared, buying time by taking in his scruffy hair-longer than when I’d last seen him-and the trench he’d abandoned a few months earlier, but had apparently reclaimed. Security blanket, I thought snidely. But I also tempered my emotions, knowing he’d scent out a lie as fast as I could tell it. So I scrounged up my annoyance as a cover. “I know where he was. On a party bus filled with mortals, including my best friends.”

Warren’s opportunity to turn a barbed phrase. “Your best friends?”

“Oh, that’s right,” I said, pretending to muse over Cher’s relationship to Olivia, not me. Never mind that I’d been forced to care for them and see to their safety over the past year. Someone here should have since taken up that slack, but in their efforts to avoid me, no one had. The memory of Cher’s soft arm falling to the ground was what finally put me over the edge.

“What I meant to say was”-and here I yelled, muscles straining as I rose against my bindings-“he attacked the only friends who stuck by me after I lost everything!”

My voice was scratchy from the strangling, but louder than I’d raised it in weeks. And it felt good, using the only power left to me. It also surprised the so-called superheroes surrounding me. Even I had no idea this much raw anger simmered so close to the surface. Sure, I was resentful that every fresh morning brought with it a wave of renewed rejection, but this was the kind of fury that had once had my eyes burning black in my skull, my breath coming from me in waves of noxious hate.

It was my father’s anger, and that, at least, I harbored still.

Felix’s face was taut and drawn into the middle, as were Micah’s mottled, sooty features. Tekla’s remained unreadable, though she too had fallen superstill. Riddick’s powerful hands briefly fell to his sides, and Jewell had begun crying, though she wiped away the tears before Warren whirled to see. Vanessa didn’t bother. Though Warren gave her a warning under his breath, she defiantly continued to stare at me. I stared back as relentlessly, but didn’t soften anything. Sense my pain and your betrayal as I did. Scent it like a chalk outline stamping the air. Feel its abrasion erupting behind your eyelids at night.

“Enough!”

I sucked in a deep breath, the air cool against my heated anger, and turned that hard stare back on Warren. “I don’t take orders from you, old man.”

He damned near hissed. “All mortals are subject to my whim.”

I raised my brows so high they probably disappeared into my hairline. “So we owe you fealty, is that it? For your protection?”

He sniffed, regaining his composure. “Something like that.”

“Then where the fuck were you tonight?”

His lips pinched reflexively and I knew he wanted to punch something.

My arms were still bound, but by now my legs were finally freed, so I decided to take my one-woman guilt trip on the road, slipping off the countertop, but staggering as pins and needles crawled up my limbs. I leaned against the glass case, refusing to fall in front of them as I hissed, “Where the fuck have any of you been?”

“We’re not going to risk-”

“Shut up!” I fired back, because I’d heard the official statement, and wasn’t buying it. “It was rhetorical. Riddick, are you fucking done yet?”

He mumbled what could have been an apology as the last of my bindings fell loose. I pushed from the counter to stand, and realized that my dizziness wasn’t due to the change in positions. I was flush with the power of someone in full control of another’s guilt. In this case, many others. And not just people. Superheroes.

Clinging to the power like a barnacle on a hull, I limped forward. “If you’re done here, I’m going to find a clinic and get cleaned up.”

Micah, ever the physician, stepped forward, sad eyes tucked into the smoky skin, voice strained with pain. “I can-”

“No!” Warren and I yelled in unison.

To ward him off, to keep anyone else from touching me, I swallowed back the lump in my throat and tried on a sneer I only partly felt. “It looks like you can’t even help yourself.”

Jewell gasped, as did Felix, but Micah just stepped back-which I took as a symbolic return to his betrayal of me-and Warren and I again locked gazes. I knew I’d hurt the big softhearted man, but I worked better with anger than pity, which was what I needed to get through this.

Warren made a growling noise in his throat. “Tripp did that to him, and if you know where he is, you need to tell us.”

“I don’t expect to meet up with Harlan Tripp again.” A white almost-lie.

“But you might. And just in case…” He fished in his pocket, then held a cell phone out to me. “Use this if you see him, or hear of any other rogues hiding in my city. It’s an untraceable number, you won’t talk to a person, but you can leave a brief message. We’ll only contact you if we must.”

I fondled the phone, a one-way channel into my past. Why was everything with Warren always so one-way?

“Believe me,” he said, mistaking my silence for acquiescence as I placed the phone on the counter beside me.

“You don’t want rogues leaking from Midheaven. They’ll all be worse for their time there, even the Light.”

Yes, he’d already told me. A twisted place that twists people in return.

“Even Hunter?” I asked coldly.

If I was a sore spot with the troop, Hunter was an open wound. Pain bloomed on every face, and Riddick even staggered. No one in the troop had experienced Midheaven the way Tripp and I had, but no doubt they’d each done their research into the world since discovering it really existed, a fact Warren had only recently and reluctantly clued them in on. I didn’t know if they’d researched it with his now-blessing or furtively, on their own and behind his back-probably both-but from the collective look on the faces around me, they were actively imagining the horror their former troop mate and ally was enduring in a world meant to separate a man from his soul. Good.

Not that their imaginations could ever do the place justice.

An unreasonable pang struck me at their reaction-they should feel more for their lifelong troop mate than a woman they’d only known a year-but it was blunted by how clear it was that no one had forgotten. Not my sacrifice, not Hunter’s banishment, not the way Warren had locked his Aries of Light in a world where men were used as batteries. They remembered all, no matter how much Warren willed it otherwise.

Meanwhile, Warren had closed his eyes, falling immobile. I fought not to step back, but after another moment he only strode to the room’s center, gait powerful despite a pronounced limp. “The point is, it would unbalance everything. It wouldn’t be good for you or us.”

He just couldn’t resist differentiating me, disparaging me, in front of them.

“I’m curious, Warren,” I said, mimicking his indifference, right down to the placement of my hands on my hips.

“Did you feel this sort of disdain for my mother too? After all, she was an agent who also became mortal by giving up her powers.”

In a way, I’d simply expanded on the premise. She’d only done it for one person-me. Warren’s gaze darkened, a look that said my mother’s sacrifice hadn’t been worth it. “Your mother never attempted to re-engage in our world after leaving it.”

“I didn’t re-engage! I was kidnapped!”

“By a rogue, right?”

His single-mindedness made me want to scream. “Don’t ask me shit when you already know the answer! Harlan Tripp did this, and you’d better watch your ass because he’s after you next!”

I said it for Harlan’s benefit, to let him know that though I wasn’t handing him over to Warren, I wasn’t anywhere near on his side. If he thought I’d align myself with him against the agents of Light-that I was going to “re-engage” with this world at all-I’d disabuse him of that now. Getting a dig in at Warren’s expense was just a bonus. “All the rogues in Midheaven would be after you if they knew what you’d done.”

Warren lifted his chin, pulling the skin along his jaw tight. “Then don’t open the gateway to Midheaven again.”

“I didn’t do it this time. Mortals can’t. It hurts too much.” Warren’s gaze sharpened and I clarified, in case they’d forgotten: “The child I gave my life for in those fetid tunnels learned that the hard way!”

“Okay.” It was a grudging murmur, but sympathy was on my side, so there wasn’t much more he could say. And so as abruptly as he arrived, he turned back to the door, motioning to the others.

“Asshole,” I muttered, and he paused mid-limp.

I winced. Of course he couldn’t let it go, not with the whole troop watching. Pride was his personal Achilles’ heel. I forced my gaze from the floor because now wasn’t the time to back down, but when he turned, a rare flush colored his cheeks. “Remember your place, Joanna,” he said softly.

“You never let me forget.”

“But I can. With one command I can make you forget who you were, or that you were ever superhuman.” He spun on his heel and spat his rejoinder at the same time. “Remember that too.”

Survival instinct kept me quiet, but what stunned me into stillness was how the others followed without complaint, how Vanessa no longer met my gaze, and how not one of them said good-bye. Again. It’s okay, I thought, biting my lip when the door finally swung shut. I didn’t need to say anything. Let their shame speak for me. Let their guilt scream. Because after sacrificing my every power for their troop, I’d never be entirely absent from their lives. Not as long as I lived.

“You really got no power?”

I was slumped against the counter in sudden and complete exhaustion, but hastily wiped the tears from my face as Tripp drew closer. It was a pointless action. He could smell my every emotion. Besides, what did it matter if Tripp saw?

“I still play a mean game of tennis.” The aftermath of the confrontation had my stomach twisting on itself, but I bit back the bile threatening to overtake my throat. I wouldn’t allow them to turn my own body against me too.

“But you’ll have to find a different doubles partner for what you have in mind.”

Tripp tilted his head and frowned. “So they kicked you out?”

I massaged my arms where the bindings had chafed. “I’m no use to them.”

Which meant he now knew me as useless too. My greatest secret, my greatest weakness, in the hands of a Shadow. I glanced up at the clock on the wall, wondering exactly how many seconds I had left to live.

But Tripp remained where he was, faced off across from me like we were going to have a shoot-out. He nodded once. “So that’s why you got no aura. I thought it was my eyes. They just ain’t right over here.”

He rubbed at them like that might change, but made no move yet to kill me. “How did it happen?”

I told him about Jasmine, the child I’d given over my powers to save, and how doing so had restored balance to the Zodiac at a time when the Tulpa had been on the verge of gaining it all. “I had to give her everything-my powers, my aura, all but the last third of my soul.” I’d used the rest of it as payment to enter Midheaven twice. I sometimes wondered how I was still alive, never mind animate and able to stand upright. Wasn’t the loss of your soul like removing your aetheric spine? What was left of me but a mind and shell? And was that enough to keep me moving through the world? “But it saved her, her younger sister, the city. And my tr-the agents of Light.”

Squinting at me, he shifted on his feet. I braced for a blow, but he only said, “Like your mother did with you.”

“You know that story?” He’d been stuck in Midheaven for eighteen years, and my mother had given over her powers to save my life when I was sixteen, only a decade before. But Midheaven’s newest resident seemed to be angling for Mackie’s position-trading in other people’s stories for his own personal gain.

Yet I couldn’t think about Hunter’s abandonment right now. For some silly, stupid, girly reason it made me want to ask for that killing blow.

Tripp rubbed at his chin. “That’s fuckin’ crazy.”

“Says the man who just went up against Death’s blade.” And he’d done it to keep Mackie from slaying me. I took a tentative step forward. “Warren doesn’t know Mackie is here, does he?”

Because the leader of Light had spoken as if Tripp were this world’s greatest threat.

Tripp leaned back against the glass case, favoring his injured leg. “Don’t look like it’d matter if he did.”

I hunched my shoulders because he was right. “So why is he…here?” Why’d he cross worlds to kill me? “I mean, I know I pissed him off by escaping Midheaven…” By knocking that soul blade from his homicidal grasp, I remembered, swallowing hard. “But that was the first time I escaped. He didn’t even notice me the second.”

“Ha!” Tripp shook his head, like I was the village idiot. “Ol’ Sleepy Mac notices everything. He files it away. The knowledge lurks in his smile when he comes to kill a man later, like it’s been carved on his teeth.”

Carved like a marionette’s toy, I thought, remembering the way Mackie moved; seated and slumped one moment, pulled straight and erect the next. Pouncing in a full lunge after that, the leather of his skin shifting over his skull in lieu of any real expression. It was like the cross section of an old oak renumbering its rings. There was nothing natural about it.

“But that don’t mean he’s here of his own volition.” Tripp lit another cigarette, though this one seemed normal. My skin didn’t tingle, the smoke didn’t press against my pores. Thinking of Micah, I couldn’t help my relieved sigh. “No, ma’am. Mackie don’t have enough of his own willpower left to make them sort of choices. That’s what makes him so dangerous.”

I shrugged. “And?”

Tripp huffed, a trail of smoke zinging from the side of his mouth. “It’s Miss Sola wants you dead, girl.”

“Solange?” I almost choked on the name.

“She ain’t talked about nothin’ else since you left.”

Solange. The most powerful woman in that realm, and one who’d once dismantled everything inside of me-all the bits that made me “me”-without ever touching my body. I cringed, remembering the way my spirit had jigsawed free of my physical body before being thrown down a flight of stairs. Sure, it’d come back together at the bottom of the staircase, but had it been a physical repiecing, my thighbone would have been connected to my neck bone. I didn’t know if I’d recovered or just gotten used to the feeling, but I did know that of everything I experienced in my year as an agent of Light, I’d never been so thoroughly frightened as I was by Solange’s soft, gorgeous rage.

“Why?”

“’Cause when them divas and goddesses and matriarchs discovered they done released the woman with lineage divided equally between the two warring sides of the Zodiac, the uproar was cataclysmic. Even in that world, you’re legend. The Kairos, both Shadow and Light, the Zodiac’s ‘chosen one.’ It’s a great loss for the females who care only for power.”

I shook my head, but it didn’t stop my mind from spinning. Sure, I was still technically equal parts Shadow and Light. Believe me, if I could change my parentage, I’d have done so long ago. But why would Solange want me dead? I was no longer the Kairos. The woman who could bring to life the portents that would have one side of the Zodiac asserting dominance over the other.

But you once were, I thought, trying to remain reasonable. And only one person could have told Solange all that.

My God, Hunter. Will your betrayals never stop?

Tripp studied the air around me, trying to match it up to the emotions unraveling from me like a knot. He gave up, gaze landing back on my face, implacable. “I don’t know why Miss Sola hates you so much. I ain’t seen her so riled up ’bout a person before. Not that I envy you the distinction. But if you help me, Joanna, I’ll keep you from Sleepy Mac.” He paused, his next words sounding near a vow. “And anyone else who moves to harm you.”

I thought about it, automatically repulsed at the idea of working with a Shadow. Even if he was the only person with a hand extended to me now.

Except for the one who sent you that note.

Yeah, I thought, biting my lip. That anonymous dogooder had been a huge help tonight.

Angling my head, I gave him a quick once-over. “You’re really trying to kill the Tulpa?” He nodded, and I immediately shook my head. “Helping you will put a bull’s-eye on my chest, Tripp. From both the Shadows and the Light.”

He shrugged. “Don’t make you different from any other rogue agent.”

“Except for the whole mortality issue,” I said, but he shrugged again. Near fuming, I ticked some of my shortcomings off finger by finger. Maybe I should drawl ’em. “I can’t fight with you, protect you, or travel the world as you do anymore. I’m not fast. I’ve no strength. I have nothing to offer you.”

“You can give me your blood.” He waved his cigarette in the air. “I mean your bloodline.”

I shook my head, swallowing hard. “What does that mean?”

“The Tulpa doesn’t know you’re mortal yet, right?”

“Right.”

“So we use you as a lure. Ask him for a meeting, then fake anger over Warren treating that ex-boyfriend of yours-”

“He wasn’t my boyfriend,” I interrupted, giving the phone Warren had left me a hard glance. Hunter and I hadn’t gotten that far before our mutual pasts had reared up to trample the present. As for Warren? I wouldn’t have to fake anything when it came to him. Though, in a move as inexplicable as a woman who went back to an abusive husband, I pocketed the phone.

“Whatever. But we get him to meet you alone, which will probably take more than one conversation. He’ll be willin’ to, though, ’cause you’re his daughter and the Kairos…”

The Tulpa cared only about the latter. Outside of his initial shock in learning of my existence, he’d never given a shit that I was his daughter-but I didn’t interrupt Tripp again. He couldn’t see past his need for vengeance to converse about this intelligently or see anything other than his own bloodred obsession.

“And once he lets down his guard…bam! I’ll be there. We’ll make sure you’re out of harm’s way, of course. Then I’ll paint the walls with his blood.” He puffed out his chest, drawing heavily on his cigarette.

And despite myself, despite the danger in playing chicken against a being who could kill me with a look alone, my heart skipped in my chest. Sensing it, Tripp almost smiled. I saved him from cracking his face with a brisk shake of my head. “No.”

His eyes narrowed and he licked his lips, then ran his tongue along his top teeth before slowly nodding. “Okay.”

I drew back in surprise.

Shrugging his broad shoulders, he flicked his cigarette to the floor. “I’ll let you think on it.”

“Listen, Tripp-”

“No, Archer, you listen!” And he was suddenly inches from my face, his wide with fury and animate with hate. He jabbed his finger into my chest and I stumbled backward. The smoke of both cigarettes was on his breath, the first one trying to lasso me back. “I aim to kill that motherfucker, understand? Him and Lindy Maguire and every other Shadow agent who helped kill my family. I’m going to pull their veins from their limbs like straws, then suck ’em dry. I’ll hang their muscles in jerky strips, and if you stand in my way, I’ll fucking kill you too.”

He was breathing hard, and I glanced back at the closed door, my own heart racing. Any agent within a fivemile radius would be able to scent the sudden rise in his emotions, and they’d follow it right back here, to me. I didn’t know what was preferable. The Shadows, the Light, or Tripp. But he caught my worried glance and calmed himself, his will tugging hot rage back into his physical shell. If I could still see auras, I bet he’d have been rimmed in black tar. But I saw nothing.

Which rather underscored my point.

“Look, you saved me from Mackie, so I won’t tell the agents of Light of your quest.” It was the best any reasonable person could expect from me under the circumstances, though it remained to be seen if Tripp was reasonable. “But I can’t get involved. You’re a rogue agent, Tripp. That means you’re free to flee the city. You can get away from Warren and the Tulpa and anyone who might know of your story and past. You can start a new life elsewhere. Don’t underestimate the power of a new beginning.”

Tripp’s anger evaporated so quickly it was like clearing an Etch-A-Sketch. “Well, I’ll take that under consideration just as soon as you do, Archer.”

That wasn’t the same at all, and I put a hand on Tripp’s chest to push him back. Annoyed when I couldn’t budge him, I ducked around his frame and peered into a tabletop mirror to fluff my hair. “Las Vegas is my home. I’m not going to let them take that from me.” I’d been stripped of enough.

Tripp loomed behind me, gaze lost beneath the brim of his Stetson. “I might not be able to save you next time.”

I glanced at his leg, already festering with pus, though he’d just cleaned and cauterized it.

Which settled things pretty handily for me. I wasn’t going anywhere near the underworld. If Tripp kept my identity to himself, and the agents of Light continued ignoring my existence, I could live in peace, in my city, as casino magnate Olivia Archer. I’d use the phone Warren had given me to tell them when Mackie showed up, and then they’d do what I couldn’t…and what I seriously doubted of this lone rogue agent.

I’d also avoid the damned party buses.

“There won’t be a next time.”

Tripp snorted loudly. “Girly, I’ve seen some scary shit in both the worlds I’ve lived in, but Mackie’s willpower has been fired in Midheaven’s kiln. His mind will not, cannot, be changed. And don’t forget that knife. It’s imbued with his soul so it damned near does his will all by its lonesome.” He pursed his lips in worry, clearly thinking of his leg, though he didn’t glance at it again. Instead he eyed me. “So the ‘next time’ you’re trying so hard not to think on is just a matter of time.”

Tilting his hat my way, he then limped back to his hiding place at the back of the store. It was another few seconds before I realized he was leaving.

“Wait!”

He turned, smirking like I’d confirmed our partnership by calling out. You can give me your blood.

“I mean, you heard Warren.” I cleared my throat. “There’s no place for you now.”

“There’s the cell.” He grinned widely at my returned frown, but didn’t elaborate. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Don’t bother,” I said petulantly, causing Tripp to snort as he disappeared into shadows.

“So easy to say, ain’t it? I mean, when Mackie is already gone.”

No, I thought, shivering once I was alone. Because Mackie was still out there. So it wasn’t easy to say at all.