The Taste Of Night

19

“…with reports of at least a half dozen other plague-related deaths at one area hospital, though officials have declined to officially comment on that number. Authorities are asking residents to refrain from drinking tap water, saying only bottled water should be consumed until local reserves, including Lake Mead, can be cleared as possible contaminants for the deadly outbreak…”

The television was on when I entered the cantina, and I shot the perfectly coiffed, disease-free anchorwoman a glare as she cheerfully segued into a piece on the secret lives of showgirls. Onscreen, the scene shifted to an explosion of color, brightening the room, playing over the walls so the cantina looked like a movie set. Then the scene shifted again, darker now, so that all the color was stripped from the deep velvet furniture. Music was also playing, clashing with the voice-over onscreen, probably forgotten by whoever had been watching their nightly ration of bad news.

The room was unlike any other in the sanctuary, plush rather than spartan, and similar to the über-lounges on the Strip that charged membership as well as admission before allowing you the privilege of buying a twenty-dollar drink in the confines of their swanky interiors. Velvet couches in cubes of midnight blue were parked around stainless steel tables, matching the appliances in the corner bar, while the table lanterns that could be ignited at a touch were currently off.

The constellations punctured the ceiling in a rendering of the night sky, and the hum of a fish tank, brimming with the exotic, represented the first of the four elements. The others-fire in the candles, air in the sky depicted above, and earth anytime someone clothed in mortal flesh entered the room-gave the room an enclosed feeling. Womblike and safe, it was a place to forget you even had troubles.

“We’re watching that,” someone said as I reached up to switch the television off. I whirled, and their scents hit me as I did, a heady combination of happiness and lust that grew thicker the farther one entered the room.

“Sorry.” I stepped back before I could stop myself, embarrassed for having come upon someone’s make-out session even though this was a patently public area. I wanted to tell the couple to get a room…but then I saw who it was.

“Hi, Olivia.” The voice was unnaturally high, even for a young woman’s, and infused with excitement, nerves, and a bit of womanly pride.

“Hey, Marlo,” I said, swallowing hard, before turning to her partner. “Hunter.”

He inclined his head, a closed, haughty expression on his face, watching me as he let his fingers play across Marlo’s knee. She giggled softly, curling closer into him, while I fought the urge to run from the room.

“I didn’t know anyone was here. I was just…getting a drink.” And I noted he was drinking again too. I refrained from offering him my version of a PSA. He didn’t look like he was interested.

“So. Get a drink,” Hunter said, neither expression nor voice altering as he lifted an ice-filled tumbler to his lips, sipping as he watched me over the rim. Marlo, apparently fascinated, watched him.

Okay, this was awkward. Not to mention obvious, I thought, crossing the room to duck behind the stainless steel bar as more giggles rose up behind me. Hunter was obviously still pissed at me for rejecting him, and probably smug about having to save my ass from Joaquin. Messing around with a beautiful initiate was just his way of getting back at me.

It’s not all about you, Jo, I chided myself, and bent for the ice scoop, loudly filling a glass shaker as whispers rose like gentle steam behind me. Hunter had moved on, as one might expect of a virile, gorgeous superhero in his prime. Marlo was an obvious choice. Young, beautiful, interested…and available.

The scent of lust-citrusy, peppery, and warm as mulled wine-washed over me again, and I swallowed hard to keep my own pheromones locked firmly inside, barely daring to breathe lest the emotion making my face burn hot and my heart squeeze tight be released into the air. Hunter would just love that.

When I thought I was suitably under control, I rose, heart burning like a coal, and grabbed a bottle, pouring the liquor in the tumbler blindly. My back was to the room, and I shook the mixture hard to drown out the sighs behind me. I focused on the television, a commercial now, and tried to breathe in the scent of the alcohol in the bottles around me, and not the spice in the densely packed air, but my hands faltered when I spotted movement through the bar’s mirrored back, and a small wisp from that banked coal inside me escaped.

Hunter’s arm snaked around Marlo’s shoulders, fingers coming to rest just below her earlobe to linger against the sensitive skin on her neck. He pushed the chestnut curls away from her face, and I froze, mesmerized by the sight of that strong hand doing something so gentle and intimate I could practically feel the memory playing across my skin.

Like in the boneyard, I thought, before shaking myself from the memory. Yeah, that oh-so-romantic moment you shared right before you shot him in the ass.

I resumed shaking my drink, telling myself I didn’t care, but I couldn’t tear my eyes from the mirror as Marlo slid her fingers over Hunter’s chest, pressing against the hard contours outlined in his black T-shirt before curling to grasp his neck. The subtle scent of ground anise wafted over to me, smooth like soft licorice melting on the tongue, and Hunter’s eyes flashed my way. I quickly looked away, fumbling for a glass to pour the now pulverized contents from the shaker inside.

I was done here. I could leave now. Yet my limbs wouldn’t respond. My eyes seemed to lift of their own will from the icy glass in my hand to the mirrored scene playing out behind me. I don’t know who reached for whom first-they seemed to draw together simultaneously as all well-matched couples do-and my own mouth parted as their lips met, a sigh like a caressing breeze escaping Marlo, her eyes closing as if going into prayer.

Hunter’s eyes never left mine. I saw the play of his tongue over her mouth, I saw her bite his top lip, the seduction extending into a full-mouth kiss so passionate the air burned around them. I swallowed hard, realizing too late I’d released some of the jealous bile giving me heartburn; I smelled the soured emotion and knew Hunter would too.

I wasn’t going to care about this, I told myself as I brought my drink to my lips, only to find it too strong and harsh and bitter. I drank it anyway. And over the rim of my glass Hunter pulled Marlo against him, his hands and lips demanding on hers, eyes fastened equally hard on mine. A wisp of smoke rose between me and the mirror, my jealousy and the Shadow side of me playing together to lay open my feelings, and Hunter saw it. He kissed Marlo harder, eyes victorious, and-unable to stand it any longer-I whirled away from the mirror to leave.

But the smoke was still there.

“Hunter! Stop!”

He thought it was my jealousy protesting. His other arm snaked around Marlo’s waist, pulling her into his lap, but perhaps it was her weight that told him there was something wrong. She slid over too lightly, too limply. Or maybe my glass shattering on the marble floor was what finally brought him around. “Stop!” I screamed.

He pulled away, confusion and alarm settling in his normally stoic features as Marlo’s head lolled back, and she hung limp in his arms, like she’d never giggled, smiled, or kissed in her life. She looked like a life-sized doll, broken, but with smoke rising like steam from her mouth. I flew across the room in seconds that passed like days, and lifted Marlo’s head, shaking her as though she were only in a swoon. Passing out, however, didn’t cause blood vessels and capillaries to break around the eyes. It didn’t make the soft flesh around your mouth blacken and start to shrivel back from your teeth.

Hunter put a hand to his mouth, wiping it with the back of his palm, eyes as wide as coins as we laid Marlo flat. I slid a pillow under her head, and as I did she momentarily came around, uttering one strangled, questioning word. “Hunter?”

Hunter covered his mouth fully then, hands shaking, eyes tearing up above them, and I wanted to tell him it would be okay, but I caught sight of my own horrified face in the mirrored wall behind him, pale and desperate and horrorstruck, and knew that was a lie. None of this was ever going to be okay again.

By the time we woke Micah and moved Marlo to the sick ward, it was too late. She was still breathing, but it was a shallow, halting exhalation, the kind I’d once seen in a puppy that had developed parvo and lay limply in my palm before expiring. I didn’t even have to look at Micah’s blighted expression to know Marlo would soon do the same. I wanted to leave the ward and go back to my room, alone, so I could shower away the scents of anise and burned flesh, and try to make sense of the equally scorched thoughts bubbling in my head.

Warren, however, made Hunter and me return with him to the cantina, and had us walk through the scene over and over again, though now the lights were on high, and the music and television off. It still smelled like scorched spices, though, and Hunter shuddered as the scent washed over him. I reached out to touch him, but he jerked away and wouldn’t look at me. We spent the next hour exhausting Warren’s questions, but came no closer to finding out how Marlo had been infected. She’d never left the sanctuary, so the most frightening thought was that others could be walking around with this poison in their bodies, ticking bombs that would explode without warning, and-as we found out at four A.M.-eventual death.

Later, in my room, after I’d run water as hot as lava over my body and my skin was bright red, I lay back on my bed and let the thoughts, tangled like twine, unravel in my brain. Fatigue had me following each thread only so far until I drifted off, only to awaken abruptly, my heart momentarily picking up pace with a new bone to gnaw. Finally, sometime around six in the morning, an idea rose in my mind. My body went numb as the idea crystallized, growing hard as a stalactite, the sharp tip pointing down, directly into my gut. I opened my eyes slowly, blinked twice, and rose in a single smooth motion to dress.

Weaving through hallways too sterile and quiet, I shot up to the boneyard, where I knew I would be alone. I climbed down the ladder affixed to the heel of the Silver Slipper and ducked under a fiberglass champagne flute, just in case some industrious employee showed up early. Then I dialed the number stored under “Received Calls” on my cell phone. This time, now that it was too late to do anything, Regan answered.

“Yes?” she said, oh-so-sweetly. She didn’t sound sleepy at all.

“You bitch,” I said, voice rasping from my chest. “You wanted me watching the fireworks. You knew I’d breathe in that virus, and the curse of the second sign, and take it back into the sanctuary.”

“Uh-uh-uh,” she said, and I could envision her blond ponytail swaying. “If you recall, I told you not to return to your sanctuary.”

Which was a surefire way to make sure that I did. “Bitch,” I repeated, closing my eyes.

Regan laughed that tinkling laugh of hers, and it rang out over the line like cracked bells. It was a sound I was beginning to hate. “Have an eventful night, did we? I can just imagine the panic in that place right now. I mean, what happens when your sanctuary becomes a battlefield?” The question was rhetorical, and I didn’t even attempt to answer, but her next words snagged my attention like cotton caught on a thorn. “You won’t stop this, Joanna. It’s futile to even try. This virus is going to spread throughout the valley like a brushfire, and nothing can change that.”

And we didn’t have a cure. I closed my eyes, leaning my head against the giant champagne flute. “And what are the Shadows going to do while that happens?”

“Take a page from the agents of Light,” she said, the smile evident in her voice. “We sit back and do nothing.”

The dig hit home, and my knees buckled beneath me. I glanced around like there was someone in the boneyard I could turn to for help, but in the morning light the retired signs showed their age, rust stains and naked bulb holes stark under an already unrelenting sun. It looked like an abandoned carnival, all the patrons fleeing once the illusion broke with daylight. “I’ll find you, you know,” I said to Regan, hunched over my knees. “I’ll find you, and this time I’ll kill you for what you’ve done.”

She scoffed, and her mocking voice fell flat. “Give it a rest, Joanna. Your whole vengeance-till-death bit has gotten old. You haven’t killed Joaquin and you bartered away your two chances with me. Besides, I could pass right under your nose two weeks from now and you wouldn’t even recognize me.”

“Your metamorphosis,” I said, my veins icing over once again. They could turn her into a man if they wanted to. He could ask me out on a date and I wouldn’t even know it was him. Her.

“That’s right. Happy Birthday to me,” she said, and laughed again.

“It just makes you fair game,” I told her, needing to believe it myself. “Remember, I’m inoculated to this virus as well. When you finally do come out, I’ll be waiting.”

“Oh, no, I’ll be the one waiting.” She laughed again, and before I could find a reply, the line went dead.