The Taste Of Night

17

With no conduit, no leverage against his superior physical position, and having received a few sharp blows from Joaquin against my face and kidney-warning shots; he wasn’t trying to hurt me yet-I was easily subdued. I quickly found myself in the center of the room, trussed up to a sturdy, high-backed chair, which Joaquin happily assured me was an original Louis the Fourteenth. Oh goody. I’d hate to die bound to something from IKEA.

I looked around for something I could use as a weapon, but I was tied up so tightly, I might as well have been wearing a straitjacket. There was nothing I could do but wait for an opening and hope Joaquin released me, or made a great mistake. Like the one I’d made.

For now, he was simply scrutinizing me. He hadn’t removed my mask-I think my identity was yet another treasure to be mulled over later-but gone was the lascivious smirk he usually wore-I’d long ago become more to him than a mere conquest-and in its place was a thoughtful gaze, like I was a puzzle he’d yet to solve. Of course, when he saw me watching, his demeanor shifted, and a cagey gleam returned to his eye.

“Still looking for buried treasure, Archer?”

“You seem to have plenty,” I said, indicating the room with my eyes, as everything else, including my neck, was too tightly fastened to move. The ropes dug in uncomfortably, and the glyph on my chest was beginning to feel like a severe case of heartburn, though I tried to let none of this show. It irked me that his glyph was significantly less pronounced, the smoke rising from his chest in scant tendrils, like incense recently burned out.

“Oh, this?” he said lightly, looking about as if seeing his cavern for the first time. “This isn’t treasure. It’s…creature comforts, that’s all.”

“And the mini-cathedral you’ve built next door?”

“Ah, yes. I was wondering how you liked that. You spent enough time in there,” he said, and I could see it bothered him. “I almost left my hidey-hole to find out what you were up to, though I could see where my reference room would be of interest to you. Perhaps you’d like to borrow a few manuals, do some light reading of your own…though I’d have to insist you return everything back to its proper place. It took me ages to organize.”

“No, thanks,” I said dryly. “You know why I’m here.”

“Yes. Hunting me,” he said, eyes widening dramatically. He laughed then, and I couldn’t blame him. I’d have done the same were our positions reversed. Sometimes irony sucked. “You’ve done so well too. Without Regan’s help I doubt you’d ever have found me.”

I bristled at that. “Maybe not here. Not now. But I’d have found you.”

“Oh sure,” he said, crossing his ankles as he leaned against a pine farm table crowded with Civil War-era dust catchers. “After your entire troop was massacred by disease. After the valley’s population was decimated, though that could be any day now.” He leaned close to me, so close my eyes nearly crossed, his soiled breath warming my cheeks. “By the way, whatever damage was done to my dear pets upstairs will be done to you, tenfold.”

The thought of screwdrivers made me swallow hard, and picking up the emotion, Joaquin inhaled theatrically. I smiled back and let my Shadow side flare, sending up the scent of fresh ash to mingle with the cloying scent of burned honey and rotting fruit. Joaquin jerked back at the reminder of just whose daughter I was, and for the first time, looked as if his back was against the wall.

Perhaps I did have a weapon after all. “My father-”

I was going to say, My father has ordered me not to be killed, hasn’t he? but Joaquin didn’t give me the chance. His expression hardened into stubborn lines, and it was even more frightening in this gilded, infested room than it’d been on a moonlit desert night a decade earlier. I snapped my mouth shut, knowing I’d pressed too hard, but it was too late.

“Fuck it.”

He came at me like a bull, fists clenched, and I tried to push away, but ol’ Louis had made some seriously fine furniture. Joaquin was on me instantly, my hair clenched so tightly in one fist that tears watered up in my eyes, nails from his other hand digging into my shoulder as he pressed me back so the wood of the chair sent arrows up my spine. Then his lips were on mine, thin and slimy and demanding as his tongue fought entrance past my teeth, an intrusion that reminded me of the lizards wriggling above us, the worms writhing in delicate peril, the serpents sliding through earthen roots and sun-baked grit. I gagged on a combination of panic and revulsion as juices from his mouth entered mine, his death stench seeping down the soft lining of my throat.

He finally pulled back, a curious mix of triumph and fear twisting his features into an uncertain blaze, all wiped away with a frown as he watched me hack and spit. His sewer-water saliva was fouling my mouth, and noxious fumes rose to burn the membrane lining my nose. I needed a glass of water, pronto. No, I needed a tetanus shot. Better yet, a shot of pure alcohol to cleanse my senses…and something to cool the ember on my chest where my glyph was scorching through my shirt. Fuck, but it hurt! I focused on that, and used the pain to anchor me.

“What?” I demanded, as Joaquin continued looking at me expectantly. I spit again.

His eyes narrowed, and he leaned forward slightly, but his mouth only twitched, holding the words back as he waited for…something.

He’s waiting for you to die.

I stilled, before letting a curious, cautious look sweep over my face. I exaggerated it since he couldn’t make out most of my features beneath my mask, then started gagging and choking, alternating back and forth…just for good effect. Joaquin did lean forward then, hungrily taking in every spastic twitch of my body, the saliva pooling at one side of my mouth, and the way my eyes rolled back into my head, showing only white as I let my head loll forward. I heard a choked sound coming from him, though not one of regret or sympathy, but one of climax, like he just came and was reveling in the aftershocks…or was just about to.

I straightened. And smiled. “I’m such a tease.”

Every feature on his face sharpened into angles and points, his nostrils flared, and the ripe scent of anger and embarrassment flooded me. His recovery wasn’t as quick this time. His glyph was smoking again, and I saw his right hand shaking as he backed up, trying for nonchalance as he reordered his thoughts to take in this unanticipated development. Regan might’ve told him I was coming for him, but she’d forgotten to mention my immunity to the virus.

“See the obits lately?” he asked conversationally, leaning back again. Picking up an antique letter opener, he began to clean beneath his nails. My eyes darted to my conduit lying next to him, my own fingers twitching behind my back with the need to curl about it. I jerked my eyes away too late, and Joaquin’s full smile returned, though he pretended not to notice. “Fascinating reading, really,” he went on. “Couples, young and old. Lovers, gay and straight, black and white. We’ve created the great equalizer in this virus. The greatest, even, as mortals and superhumans alike are susceptible to this strain.”

“But not you.”

“No, not me. Nor you, it seems.” He raised a brow, inviting me to expound on that. Why not, I figured. Talking might keep him from other activities. Torture, rape, and murder came immediately to mind.

“Regan kissed me,” I said, without emotion.

“That whore.” Joaquin shook his head, almost sadly. “You know, Regan won’t tell me who you are behind that mask. She wanted to keep that little nugget of information to herself.” His eyes lingered on my face, though he didn’t try to remove it right now. He was going to save that for later, I knew, when it counted. When it would best serve to make my humiliation complete. And, of course, he had all the time in the world for that.

I swallowed hard, but managed to keep my voice even. “Yes, she seems to keep all her bases covered.”

“She’s a devious bitch. Manipulative. Conniving. A perfect Shadow-in-training.” He pursed his lips, like a proud father bemused by his offspring’s latest antics. “Yet you have something extremely interesting in common with her.”

If he expected me to prompt him as to what that was, I was happy to disappoint. I’d been taken in by Regan’s act hook, line, and sinker, and didn’t particularly want to hear about our similarities. Which Joaquin also knew.

“You’re both puppets,” he went on, tapping the letter opener against his thigh as he approached me again, slowly this time. “And neither of you know it. Of course, that just makes it more fascinating to watch. A tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. Or is it a comedy?”

He straddled my legs and sat, nestling in close, not bothering to lessen his weight on my behalf. Shit. He was going to start.

I can survive this. I did before and could again. Even if he got inside me physically-which seemed probable at the moment-he wouldn’t get inside my mind. Not this time. So I clenched my teeth, and even though my stomach knotted at the thought of his scent and rot invading my body, I kept my chin lifted high.

“Miss me?” he whispered, giving me the once-over, eyes lingering on my chest. My heart skipped a beat. My glyph pulsed painfully.

“Like a urinary tract infection,” I said, through gritted teeth.

He drove the letter opener into my wounded arm. When my screaming stopped he said, “Of course you didn’t miss me. How could you? After all, I’m always there, aren’t I? In your mind, behind the lens of your eye when you look in the mirror. Your first thought when you wake in the morning…the last when you go to sleep at night.”

Oh God, how had I gotten here? After all my training, my preparation-my metamorphosis into something super, for God’s sake!-I’d still ended up back where I’d been a decade earlier. Pinned beneath all this evil. Helpless. Again.

No! I told myself, fear worming itself into my thoughts. I’m not a victim! And no matter what he did to me, I wouldn’t be made to feel like one.

So why did I suddenly wish I was dead?

A whimper escaped me at the thought.

Joaquin heard it and bent to me, pausing for a long moment before licking my face, starting below my jaw and ending on my cheek just below my mask. His tongue toyed with the edges of it briefly, as if seeking entrance.

It was all I could do not to scream. Not again! Not again! Not again!

He pulled back, but there was no reprieve as he pushed his groin against mine. I’d already known he’d be hard. “Tell me,” he said, almost lovingly, “in those deepest, darkest hours, when nobody’s watching, and there’s only you and the singular, compelling thought of me…” He paused until I looked at him. “Do you touch yourself?”

I jerked away, giving him the reaction he was looking for, and his laughter washed over me like a violent summer storm, beating against my skin, and me with nowhere to take cover. Oh God, I thought. I should have listened to Warren. I shouldn’t have left the sanctuary. I should never have tried this on my own. I’d wanted vengeance at any cost…but now that it was too late, I realized the price was too dear.

“I do love it when you’re predictable, Joanna,” Joaquin said, still chuckling as he caressed my arms with his fingertips. They felt like worms and snakes, and all the crawling things that lived in this underground grotto. Despite myself, I started to shake. “The predictable ones are so much fun. Less challenging, true, but then I was never one to do something simply for the challenge.”

No, he’d done it for the joy he derived in seeing his victim beg and scream and cry, and especially for the humiliation. If I hadn’t known that before, I knew it now by the way he worded his thoughts, singling me out, then lumping me in with the rest of his victims, like I was nothing special to him. Just another body, another tooth in the jar.

One thing he was right about, though. I was predictable. And that’s what Warren and the others had been saying, what Regan had capitalized on, and the hubris that, even for a heroine, could only lead to one place. Capture.

So I concentrated on not crying or screaming or begging…and ignored the question: why couldn’t I have realized all this five minutes earlier?

“The Tulpa will kill you,” I whispered, mouth as dry and parched as the desert ceiling above as I played the only card I had left. I closed my eyes when I said it because I’d never thought I’d have to use it. I didn’t want to admit it now. But it was true, and Joaquin knew it.

There was no response. Unnerved by the silence, I opened my eyes again, and found Joaquin staring at me ruefully. “My life,” he finally said, “is about finding out exactly what hurts people most. And when I find it, that one thing that’ll break the human soul, I use it to make those people beg me to hurt them. It’s like a giant chessboard, really. You position yourself just so, bide your time, wait until your opponent has committed, and then watch the surprise bloom on their face when they realize they’ve ended up in exactly the place they claimed they wanted to avoid.”

He ground against me in demonstration, a slow and sensuous dry hump, taking something meant to be beautiful and turning it inside out. But it was his words that had my breath quickening. Dammit, Jo, don’t let him in! But it wasn’t an order anymore. It was a plea.

“Your Tulpa is no different,” he said, continuing. “He knows who I am, what I am, and what I’d do if I got my hands, my cock, on you.” He ran his fingers over my hair, pausing at my mask, caressing my face. “His precious Kairos.”

He paused here, stilling to hold up a finger. “Let me clarify. He doesn’t just know this, he expects it. That’s why he’s kept me in his organization all these years. That’s why he didn’t kill me as soon as he discovered the girl I’d attacked all those years ago was his daughter. In a way, he wants me to finish what I started. That way he’s absolved, you see?”

A tear slipped from the corner of my eye.

“And then there’s you. That beaten and broken little girl who grew up to be a woman with a chip on her shoulder that spans the Strip. You may not have known it before now, but you sought this out. You want me to hurt you. You expect it. And you’d be disappointed if I didn’t.”

“That’s not true,” I said, but my voice was barely a whisper, like I had no conviction left inside me. Like I didn’t even know who I was anymore. Or had never known myself at all. Oh, God…

“It is.” He smiled serenely and rocked into me again. “That’s why you’re here now. You need to feel the pain because beneath all this peroxide and silicone and shit,” he said, flipping a blond curl from my shoulder with disgust, “pain forces you to remember who you really are. It lets you know why you exist, why you wake every dawn and retire each dusk. I anchor you to this existence, Joanna. I give your days meaning and purpose.”

I tried to shake my head, but the bindings held me fast, and the invisible ones-the ones he was talking about-held my tongue. Don’t let him be right, I pleaded silently. I don’t see myself as a victim. I never have.

Had I?

“When I hurt you, Joanna,” he said, his soft whisper at odds with the hand that had lifted to twist my nipple between ironclad fingers, “when you think of me hurting you, it puts you in your place beneath me…and that, my dear, is where you feel most safe.”

I cried out, unable to stop myself, eyes tearing with the pain of both his actions and his words, and cried out again when I realized I was pissed at myself for doing so. Like it was my fault, and the blame for his actions lay solely with me. And anything was better than that. So I wished for unconsciousness, I wished for death…I wished, as he wanted, that I’d never survived this the first time.

Those wishes rose like noxious fumes escaping the earth…only they’d been stewing deep inside my core all these years, rich, like emotional deposits lain down one atop the other, waiting for the right person to come along and mine the vein.

This, I suddenly knew, was the real me. Me, giving Joaquin exactly what he wanted.

As he scented it all, his throaty laugh rose in tandem with my voice, and he twisted harder, his amusement reverberating through his body, joy in every noxious breath.

I shut my eyes, the only movement I had left to me, and there was a gusting boom, like a cannon going off. I looked up to find spiders and worms and vermin and rats and reptiles all slamming to the floor in a explosion of dust, followed by five bodies dropping to the ground like precision-guided bombs, chests glowing like beacons.

Goddamn, I thought, choking on a cry of relief as Joaquin’s weight disappeared. I loved having superhero friends.

Joaquin made the only offensive move he could, lunging for my conduit still lying on the pine table. Hunter’s whip flicked out, the tail knocking the conduit from reach, sending a stinging barb into the soft tissue of Joaquin’s palm. He yelled in rage and pain, and I was gratified to see his glyph now puffing away like a teepee’s smoke hole. Hunter yanked back on his whip, but the barb had only caught the fleshy part of Joaquin’s hand, no bone, and it ripped away, freeing Joaquin again.

Vanessa rolled beneath the table, flicking her steel fan open as she came to her knees, the barbed claws on the end swiping through the air at Joaquin’s ankles. He jumped, avoiding the strike, but she caught him on his way down, as she lifted to a crouch, while he simultaneously darted from the path of Felix’s double-edged boomerang. Joaquin yelped as one of his Achilles tendons was torn, and I did too, as Felix’s boomerang came precariously close to shearing my skull on its return flight.

“Watch it!” I yelled, struggling against my ropes. Felix scowled, leaped on an ornate credenza, and came up behind me.

“Hold still,” he said, and with a flick of his wrist cut through the ropes at my neck with the boomerang, before working his way down. I wriggled free, bindings falling from me to mingle with the reptiles now slithering across the floor, and Warren handed me my conduit as I stood. I cocked it, looking for Joaquin.

“Where’d he go?”

“That way,” Vanessa said, pointing in the direction of the reference room. I bolted forward, though the others had already beaten me there, skidding to a halt before a thick steel door. The black curtain had been rent aside.

“No!” I pushed past them all, pounding on the door, then pushing against it with my good shoulder. I wasn’t going to lose him now. I wasn’t going to let him get away with saying, or making me feel, all those things. “No!”

“Shit!” I heard Vanessa say.

“We gotta go!”

“Olivia!” Warren yanked at me, as I continued to pound at the door. “The ceiling’s caving in!”

I looked up to see sun streaking in through the crumbling hillside, then back at the door, where I knew Joaquin was breathing and alive and safe on the other side.

“No,” I whispered, choking on dust-filled air, as I raised my conduit and fired into the steel door. I’d rather die than let him live. An arm curled around mine and yanked me back, causing a misfire, but my indignation was cut short by a solid crack against my skull. My vision fled immediately, and I felt myself falling as if in slow motion. A set of arms curled about me, softening my landing, then everything drowned in black.

I wasn’t awake. I was floating in memory, drifting along echoes of forgotten sound. Like the emotions Joaquin had laid bare, I was buried deep in my past, and even though I recognized it as a dream, I felt and saw and smelled all the things that’d assailed me after that first attack. And like the first time, I couldn’t escape any of it.

Beeps and readings from complicated machinery surrounded me, and voices intermittently spewed from an intercom in the hall with words I’d long stopped hearing. I was lying on a bed, body aching because I’d been there for weeks. I looked down, past crisp white sheets, and tried to count on my fingers just how long I’d been in the hospital. But I couldn’t concentrate. I was distracted by the brace on my right hand, holding my fingers straight and aligned, like the Boy Scouts’ three-fingered salute. My eyes wandered, drawn to the blackened nail beds poking from beneath the dingy gauze, where the jagged fingernails had only now begun to lengthen, finally long enough to cover the tender flesh beneath. Proof that I was healing. That my body was fighting even as I remained not moving, not speaking, trying not even to think.

I wriggled my fingers, then tentatively twisted my wrist when that provoked no real pang or ache. I lifted my entire arm shoulder height, and frowned when there was no smarting response. I repeated the action with my other arm, the one sealed tightly in a cast. There. A sliver of white-hot pain shot through me, and I dropped it again, letting the ache wash over me, ringing through my core before it ebbed and faded away. I closed my eyes, and rested.

When I opened them again, it was dark. The streetlights outside my window had come on, and I could see the headlights of passing cars as they sped down Flamingo Road, each in a hurry to reach a separate destination, all unknown to me. All unimportant.

What time was it? I wondered, my mouth dry as sandpaper. For that matter, what day was it? I glanced at the wall across from me with a giant number twenty-five emblazoned, black on white. That couldn’t be right. That meant it’d been only one day. Twenty-four hours since the doctor had sat next to my bedside, face solemn and concerned, voice soothing and low, tanned hands patting my own as he told me I wasn’t merely healing. I was growing life.

But he was wrong. They were all wrong. Because I was broken. You couldn’t go five inches up or down my body without running into something that was fractured, shattered, or bruised. Me and Humpty Dumpty, I thought, biting my lip till it bled. Never to be put back together again.

I licked the blood away, surprised at the metallic taste, then frowned as I thought, That’s not right. Bleeding means the vessels were working, and the heart was pumping, doing its job like nothing ever happened, like it hadn’t been stomped on and bruised and stopped. So why did the fucker keep on ticking? I felt my betraying heart skip a beat, before it started slamming against my chest, faster and harder with each progressive beat, and my head grew dizzy and light. I opened my mouth to suck in a lungful of air-because that’s all I had left, one lung-and still the panic attack snuck up on me, an A-bomb detonating right in the middle of my chest.

I wish.

I swallowed hard and tried to slow my breathing, ignoring the button beside me that would call the nurse who would provide the drugs that would numb me to the world. I fumbled for the remote, pushing it behind me, deep beneath the extra pillows I’d been given, before fishing out another hidden treasure. My own call button. My own form of medicinal relief. I was my own nurse.

The razor had come from the guy in the bed next to me. They’d let him shave before he left the hospital, and he’d tossed it in the bin between our beds, and left without saying good-bye. The adventure from my bed to the trash can three feet away had been my first since fleeing across the desert night, and I’d almost ruined it by sitting up too fast. I passed out and flipped the wrong way on my bed, but luckily the nurses had been in the middle of a shift change, and never noticed a thing.

Now I curled my fingers around the razor I’d nicknamed Tonto after the Lone Ranger’s loyal sidekick, and lifted the bedsheets to reveal the pale, freckled length of my good thigh. The marks from the day before were already scabbed, healing. And that just wouldn’t do.

“You’ll get better, Joanna,” my mother had said, smoothing her hand over my face, drying my tears after the doctor had gone away. “You’ll see. You’re going to heal, the pain will stop, and you’ll go on to live a happy, full life. I promise you. You will survive this.”

I sliced, once, twice, and her voice receded. She finally shut up. I shut her up. I shut the doctor up. And the screams and cries in my head, the ones that woke me up in a cold sweat each night, the ones that caused these sudden attacks of panic, finally shut up, too.

I sliced again, watching the blood well, a thin black line in the dim light. Cars continued to race by outside, but it didn’t matter where they were headed. My thighs burned. The pain anchored me. It gave my life in this bed meaning and purpose.

When I was in pain, I felt safe.

I came to in a place very similar to the one I’d left in my dreams. Curled on my side, I first saw the machines, all turned off and silent in the corner as there was no real emergency here. Not on the surface anyway.

“He got away, didn’t he?”

I didn’t turn or look around, but I knew someone was there. I could smell them in the corner. I inhaled deeply and caught something close to brewer’s yeast and Axe after-shave. Felix.

“He did. Who’s Tonto?”

I did turn my head at that. “What?”

“You were talking in your sleep. Who’s Tonto?”

I dropped my head back on my hands, facing the wall again. “An old friend,” I whispered, and touched the bandage on my left arm, wondering, as a reassuring flash of pain shot through me, what else I’d said. “How’d you find me?”

“Your glyph,” he said, coming around the side of the bed so I could see him. He looked odd without a smile touching his face or eyes. I looked away, touching my chest. The ache was gone now, the fire doused, but the tenderness was still there. “Light finds Light.”

“A tracking device?” I asked, lifting my head.

Felix mistook my awe for annoyance, and crossed his arms over his chest. “You’re lucky Joaquin likes to keep his victims conscious while he toys with them. If you’d been unconscious, or dead, it would’ve been impossible to locate you down there.”

Because the glyph would have gone dead as well.

I turned away from his accusing eyes and sat up, realizing I was in the same room I’d recovered in after Micah had turned me into Olivia. It was a hospital just outside Vegas that served as the troop’s cover for medical emergencies and recovery. Since it was after dawn-both too late and too early to return to the sanctuary-I gathered we were biding our time until the next crossing.

I knew why Felix was here, of course, just as I knew someone else was stationed outside the door. The rest had probably gathered in one of the conference rooms to discuss me, and while it rubbed to be the topic of conversation again, they had just collectively saved my life. Besides, the thought that I’d failed them all once again shamed me, adding to the misery brought on by my capture. And my dream.

So instead I turned my thoughts to Felix’s words, how he thought me lucky to have been conscious while under Joaquin’s thumb. Toyed was such a benign word for what he’d done. He’d revived shattered memories knowing that’s what had driven me all these years, through my young adulthood, into superherodom, and ultimately into that dank and infested hillside. Just the way he’d wanted, I thought, sighing. Just as he’d intended.

“Why do you have to make it so hard on yourself?” Felix asked, and I drew my gaze up to his in surprise, then found I couldn’t hold it, the sympathy in his eyes too much to bear. I turned away, but knew as soon as he moved to my side, his breath stirring my rumpled hair, his body warming my bare shoulder as if his hand were hovering just there. I curled back up on the bed and closed my eyes, a sigh lifting from behind me as I did it. “Every time you act alone you make it harder to trust you. It’s like you go out of your way to remind us that you’re not really Olivia Archer…”

That I was someone they really didn’t know.

“And still we help you. It’d be nice, for a change, if you’d do the same.”

But I couldn’t even help myself.

Felix sighed, as if I’d spoken aloud. “You can start by working with us, as a team. That’s what a troop is, you know.” He hesitated-I heard the catch in his voice-but plunged ahead when I remained unmoving. “You want so badly to exact your revenge that you’re going to get us all killed.”

I half whirled at that. “You didn’t have to come after me!”

Felix’s eyes narrowed as he began shaking his head. “Haven’t you heard a word I said? Yes, we did.”

Because we were a troop. I swallowed hard, but couldn’t form a reply, and when he realized there’d be no tantrum or argument, he huffed and turned his back on me, probably thinking me a lost cause.

Probably thinking they should’ve left me underground.

I’m sure it was against direct order, but he left the room after that, locking the door behind him. I was glad. The stagnant scent of his disgust made me want to hide my face.