The Taste Of Night

23

There were questions to answer in the days following Ian’s disappearance, though not from Warren or anyone associated with the paranormal community. The police had been called in by Valhalla’s security the night of the swingers’ ball-someone had died, after all-and a masked woman of my description had been seen fleeing the scene of the crime. Tapes of the party were reviewed, the woman’s moves tracked as she circled the ballroom, danced with an unidentified male, and followed another into a curtained-off area where the homicide had taken place. Witnesses-one Samantha Travis of Milwaukee, and twins by the names of Danni and Darci-claimed the woman had been identified as Olivia Archer, which was why I was currently being interrogated on the fifteenth floor of Valhalla in my mortal father’s plush high-rise office, the Las Vegas Strip sprawled out behind me in a picture window that overtook the entire northern wall.

I looked away from the view and blinked, letting an expression of innocence and confusion cross my face when the lead detective placed yet another steaming cup of my father’s imported coffee in front of me, and began asking me questions I’d already answered.

“I don’t know how else to tell you,” I said, ignoring the coffee and pitching my voice higher than a dog whistle. “I wasn’t at that party.”

“Well, we have three witnesses, videotape, and a registration chart that says you were.”

“No,” I said, pushing out my lower lip in a pout. “You have three drunken people who say this woman identified herself as Olivia Archer, and you have a tape that shows a blond woman in a mask. Not to mention wearing clothes I wouldn’t be caught dead in. Besides, wasn’t there a contradictory witness?”

Officer Solomon glanced at his pad, then nodded reluctantly. “Yes. A gossip columnist, who claims to know you and your family well, said there was no way the woman in the mask could have been you. She was, and I quote ‘too brazen, too lacking in personal morals, and too aggressive to be the sweet and refined real Olivia Archer.’”

“There you go,” I said, preparing to stand.

“You want us to take the word of one against three?” This from Solomon’s partner, Officer Carson, the younger and more tenacious of the two. “And the one a gossip columnist?”

“Who better to trust than Lon?” I said, tilting my head in his direction. “He knows everyone who is anyone and what they’re doing at all times.”

“Is that so?” Solomon retorted. “Maybe we should hire him on in the department then. We could use someone like that.”

“Good idea,” said Carson, playing along. “First thing we’ll do is get him to tell us what you were doing last Saturday night.”

“That’d be helpful.”

“This is ridiculous!”

We all looked at Xavier, seated behind a mahogany desk stretching almost the length of the glass wall. He’d insisted on being present for the questioning, and what Xavier Archer wanted, he got. Unfortunately, even his considerable powers extended only so far, and his demand that the whole matter be dropped had been politely ignored. This did nothing to improve his mood, transforming his already bullish features into a mad-cow sort of mien. He glared at the two officers, huffing dangerously as he rose from his chair.

“You are badgering an innocent woman about the death of some…some pervert who was literally caught with his pants down, when you should be out there chasing down the true culprit!”

Time to put on the public relations face, I thought wryly, watching Officer Solomon straighten, his expression carefully blank. “Mr. Archer, we’re not accusing your daughter of anything. We simply want to shut down all leads in effort to bring this case to a close as quickly as possible. The scandalous nature of this case has garnered a great deal of media attention.”

“Well, sex sells, doesn’t it?” Xavier answered, waving the stub of his cigar in the air. “I mean, why focus on a boring, old-fashioned plague killing off hundreds of people in Las Vegas when there’s a sex story to peddle?”

The older officer recovered first. “Your daughter’s name was on the guest list, sir.”

“So someone made it up! Are you surprised? Who knows what sort of immoral, conniving people attend those things-it was a swingers’ ball, for God’s sake!”

“That’s right, sir,” said Carson, who had less to lose and wasn’t as close to retirement as his partner. “And it was held in your hotel.”

Xavier’s mouth worked wordlessly for a few seconds, before he lifted his chin, drawing up taller. “My daughter wouldn’t be caught dead at one of those events.”

“But a man by the name of Lucas Liddell was,” Carson said, throwing a photo of a very much deceased Lucas down on Xavier’s desk. “And that’s why we’re here.”

Xavier looked like he was going to argue some more, but a bell tone caused him to glance down at his desk, and he picked up his BlackBerry instead. The other two men turned back to me…and missed the expression of relief passing over Xavier’s face.

“Your whereabouts, Miss Archer?”

“I was-”

“She was with me,” Xavier said, flipping his BlackBerry back on his desk and coming around to stand in front of it. “We had dinner in my steakhouse and then came up here for drinks afterward, so we could talk privately.”

Both officers looked at me. I nodded vigorously.

Solomon turned back to Xavier. “I trust there are tapes of you both entering the restaurant and the executive offices later?”

“Of course,” Xavier said, dismissively, and stubbed out his cigar. Whatever message had been relayed on that BlackBerry had certainly bolstered his confidence. “Anything else?”

“Not if you can provide tapes confirming your whereabouts, no,” Solomon said, flipping his notebook shut and standing. “We’ll want additional surveillance of all the exits and entrances for that evening, of course, but-”

“I have a question,” Carson interrupted, angling his head in Xavier’s direction. “What were you talking about?”

“What were we talking about?” Xavier repeated, unibrow drawing down as if he didn’t understand the question.

“Yes. When you came up here. For privacy,” he said, ignoring the way his partner cleared his throat. Ambitious, this one. “What was so important you had to leave the comfort of your public dining room, in your hotel…in a city most people say you own?”

“My sister’s death,” I said immediately. “It’s been over six months since my sister Joanna died, but we still mourn her. If that’s okay.”

Solomon looked at his partner like he was a total idiot. Xavier lifted his chin and folded his arms over his chest. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d pawed at the ground and charged.

“Of-of course.” Carson reddened over the starched collar of his blues, then cleared his throat and backed up a step. “Well, we’re very sorry to inconvenience you. Both of you.”

Solomon put a hand on his shoulder, ushering him to the door. “We’ll just wait for those tapes and then we’ll be on our way.”

Xavier nodded curtly. “They’re already waiting for you on my secretary’s desk. I trust you can find your own way out?”

“Yes. Thank you.” He bobbed his head again. “Miss Archer.”

The younger officer mumbled good-bye, but didn’t look at me. I breathed a sigh of relief as the door shut behind them. For a moment, neither Xavier nor I moved.

“What were you doing there?” he whispered next to me.

I pivoted to face him, not meeting his eye. “But Daddy, I wasn’t-”

“I saw the tapes of you and Cher entering the building,” he said, louder than necessary. I flinched, as I knew Olivia would. His voice softened, but remained clipped. “Now I’m going to ask you again, what were you doing there?”

“You saw the tapes?” I asked, looking into his face. Still ignoring the question.

“Don’t worry. Gonzales has doctored them.” And now the relief flooded his face. God, I thought, he truly loved Olivia. This emotion was real. What was next? Pigs flying? “A woman like you is seen entering alone. Cher and her mother are nowhere in sight.”

I sighed, relieved, then bit my lower lip, feigning regret. “I was just…slumming.”

He gave me a hard look, square jaw jerking high. “Slumming?”

I shrugged. Poor, silly, helpless me. “We thought it’d be fun to see what went on at those things. Sorry.”

“Olivia.” He drew the name out on a weary exhalation and rubbed a paw over his face. I tried hard not to gape because he almost looked human. “You have a reputation to maintain. A responsibility to the family name.”

And that kept me from going all soft and mushy. The name was what he cared about most. “I know, and I’m sorry.” The contriteness burned in my throat, but I managed to choke it out. “Cher was just trying to cheer me up. I was so down and she thought doing something crazy would keep my mind off of…you know.” I studied him for a reaction, annoyed that I still cared enough to seek it, but old habits died hard.

Xavier turned away to face the window. “You mean Joanna.”

Despite the censure in his voice, I joined him because I knew Olivia would. “Yes.”

“Over six months. It’s gone so fast,” he said, his voice a mere whisper. I watched his Adam’s apple bobble as he swallowed, but I quickly looked away when he glanced at me. “You miss her, don’t you?”

“Oh.” I sighed, taken aback by the directness of his gaze. He’d never looked at me that closely. Olivia, sure. But not me. “Terribly.”

He put his arm around my shoulder then, and I stiffened reflexively, before relaxing into him. I knew the tenderness wasn’t meant for me, but I couldn’t help reacting to it. I’d sought his approval for so long, the impulse to pretend, just for the moment, was too great.

“I was too hard on her,” he said, surprising me with how close he’d come to my thoughts, and I immediately wondered why he hadn’t said this when he thought I was alive. I glanced up at him, but he continued to stare out over the city he ruled. “I wish-”

“Yes?” I prodded, heart thumping in my chest.

But he shook off the thought, removing his arm so quickly I swayed. “It doesn’t matter.” I looked down at my feet to hide the disappointment in my face. Meanwhile he opened the top drawer of his desk and cut a cigar, lighting it before speaking again. “All that matters is that you’re protected. Even if it must be from yourself.”

“Yes, Daddy,” I said meekly, without turning around. I lifted a hand to the cool pane of the window and traced the image I saw there. My fingertips, of course, left no marks.

Having regained his composure, Xavier shook his head, puffing on his cigar. I saw his reflection in the window. I could kill you, I found myself thinking. I could kill him because he was a prick and because he was the Tulpa’s lackey, but also just because. I could kill him. I had that power.

Snuffing out a life is power amplified.

I shook off Joaquin’s voice and turned from the glass wall to find Xavier closer than I thought. “Just think from now on, Olivia. Use your head. You can’t do things other people do. Maybe…maybe ask yourself what Joanna would do. You know, if she were in your position. It might…help.”

It was the first compliment he’d ever paid me. He’d never before acknowledged that I had any qualities he’d found admirable. I just nodded, swallowing hard, unsure how I felt about it. Xavier needed to remain as he was, one of the bad guys, the man who made my young adulthood hell, the one I’d sworn would pay for it with every crooked dime he’d ever made. I couldn’t open up my heart to him now just because he recognized a strength in me after he thought me dead. Not when he had never spared me a kind word in life.

And not because he looked tired and almost…old. I hardened myself to the thought, kissed his rough cheek, and quickly left the room. That wasn’t my problem. Being a pawn used by the most evil being ever created would do that to you.

In the days that followed, I wandered in and out of realities like revolving doors, searching for Ian. For Joaquin. For anyone. The paranormal world was a ghost town. With all the agents of Light in seclusion, and all the Shadows content to pull the strings from behind the scenes, there were no Technicolor streaks to light up the gritty, one-dimensional terrain.

The mortal reality wasn’t much better. I walked from the Stratosphere past Mandalay Bay to Valhalla, without once getting jostled or having to veer from my path. I retraced my steps on the other side of the Boulevard, and found myself alone on the sky tram, a recorded voice telling nonexistent passengers to watch their step as they exited equally deserted platforms.

I took a calculated risk driving by Joaquin’s house again, and though it looked abandoned, I wasn’t about to risk another run-in with his paranormal pooches. After that, all my leads dried up. If the Shadows had still been active in some way I could have busied myself tracking one of them down, picking a fight, getting answers. But they’d left me with nothing to rail against, and that was when I was at my worst. Without an opponent, it was all too easy to turn on myself.

How could I have put Ian in such danger? What if it had been Cher who’d come after me? How could I have so stupidly allowed Joaquin to get a hand on my conduit, the one thing sure to annihilate me from existence in both these forsaken worlds?

How could I have let him get away?

Grasping at straws, I finally made a trip to Master Comics, hoping my ability to read both the Light and Shadow manuals would allow me to piece together enough clues to anticipate the Shadow troop’s next move…or at least discover what Joaquin had done with Ian. But Zane’s creative well, it seemed, had run dry. The latest manuals were backdated a week, and both told the same story of the swingers’ ball, but nothing further. That’s because nothing further had happened, Zane told me, and he looked at me with a crazed weariness, like he’d been kept awake in a cell for days by shouting guardsmen, flashing strobes, and Metallica.

“Don’t mind him,” Carl told me, once we’d retreated to the back room. “He gets like this when he’s blocked. The psychic energy builds up because it has no outlet, and messes with his mind.”

“He looks like he blames me for it.”

Carl scoffed, waving the worry away. “He’ll be fine once the images come rolling in again.”

“What about the rest of them?” I asked, glancing toward the twins, who regarded me warily from behind cupped hands, and Sebastian-the little bastard-who’d smirked in my direction, making a point to display his copy of the latest Shadow manual. Only Jasmine looked happy to see me.

“Oh, them?” Carl said, gesturing back into the store. “Yeah. They totally blame you.”

I sighed, thanked him, and left.

There was no next step, no place to go that was forward, and so I took a step back, and returned to canvassing Vegas’s empty streets as I always did when I needed to think. And somehow I found myself in that same filthy alley I’d chased a human predator into the night I killed Liam. It seemed like years ago, not weeks, that Regan had set me up, but nothing had changed here. I headed past broken-down boxes and splintered crates, neither sensing nor smelling anything out of the ordinary…until I did.

He was slumped beneath a pile of broken crates, the clothes on his chest and the wood above him charred black with what appeared to be someone’s failed attempt to burn the entire mess. Not that the man would have minded. Even with bloat and rot distending his face, and the maggots wriggling in his eye sockets to make the corpse look possessed, I could see the burn marks around his mouth. If I were inclined to investigate further-which I wasn’t-I was sure I’d find his private parts equally seared by disease. He’d been dead before someone left him to this alley grave, tossed here like the rest of the refuse, the halfhearted attempt to burn his remains only dehumanizing him further.

I looked at the shredded skin and diseased flesh and moldering bloat that used to be a human, and my head swam with the same unhinged fury that’d had me driving a stiletto up between Joaquin’s thighs. Those fucking Shadows had decided to play God, and someone who’d once cradled dreams was now splayed on the ground like he’d never mattered.

And someone else, who’d tried to protect me in what was probably the first bold and chivalrous act in his life, was now captive to Joaquin; a fate, I could attest, that was even more terrifying than this.

And a third someone-young, hopeful, and vibrant-had died while tasting what had probably been her first kiss, the one that should have been the sweetest. Instead it had taken her life before it’d truly begun.

All this destruction, and here I was, skulking in the alleys of my ravaged city, feeling ashamed of what I had done? While I was caught in limbo, neither belonging in the world I’d grown up in, nor yet the heroine the manuals prophesied I was to be, Joaquin and Regan and the Tulpa were stamping out lives for no other reason than to make a point. You can’t protect them all. You can’t even protect yourself.

My head was suddenly buzzing as I tasted decay, the darkness on the stifled alley air, playing the part they’d chosen for me. I punched the wall beside me, sending shards of plaster and brick crumbling to the ground. Pull this string, and the Archer acts this way. It was stupid, fruitless, but I punched again. Pull this one, and she’ll jump as you please. They were able to do this-not just with me, but with all the agents of Light-because we held fast to a moral code that said killing was wrong, protecting human life was our highest duty, and we did it on a level playing field. But we weren’t even playing the same game. And that’s all it was to the Shadows.

I closed my eyes, let the rot of another human I’d failed to protect seep into my pores, and extinguished the Light inside me like a snuffed-out taper. I let all the anger and pain and helplessness I’d been feeling since Marlo’s death pour out of me in a piercing shriek, a cry so raw the rats went scurrying back into hiding. The wind ceased to breathe. Shadows arched over me.

Strings snapped inside me.

How dare they make me feel like I had to hide-any of them! How dare they treat me like a rogue agent! And how dare I think the only solace I could find would be in these shadowy alleys, like I should be ashamed…or at least more ashamed than all those who chose not to act. Who knowingly put themselves before the innocents. All this time Warren had insinuated-and I’d believed-that I’d have to choose one side over the other, I thought, breathing hard. When really, all I needed to do was be.

I thought about the Tulpa, how only after he’d cut the ties between himself and his creator had he truly come into his own power. I had that ability inside me. I had self-will. And now that my ties had been cut with the troop, I had a place to start.

And so, as I slipped from the alley, I walked off the map I was supposed to follow, and strode into a void as vast and unknowable as the midnight desert. A cursed battlefield it might be, but I was done warring with myself.

And, I thought, striding down the center of the abandoned street, I was no longer anyone’s puppet.