The Taste Of Night

34

Hunter and I were allowed back in the sanctuary the next day. Tekla had cleared the way, explaining about our break-in at Valhalla, my deal with the Tulpa, how I’d saved Ian from the maze when it’d meant sacrificing myself…and how she had foreseen it all. We learned of all this secondhand from Gregor as he ferried us in the cab, through the boneyard wall at dusk…as it should be. Tekla, he’d explained, hadn’t been seen since her return, and refused to come out of her room, even for meals. I knew why, of course. There was a difference between merely killing an enemy agent and torturing him up until his dying breath. I could only imagine her self-struggle as she tried to reconcile what she believed-what she taught-with what she’d done.

Meanwhile, I’d set up an appointment with Ian to get my conduit back…and find out who knew what about the contents of my missing computer. Fortunately, Ian saw our meeting as a date, a second chance to get together with Olivia Archer, and was gushing about mazes and conduits. I humored him long enough to ascertain that Joaquin hadn’t shared the information about Ashlyn with Regan or the Tulpa, and that Ian-in a spurt of heroic behavior-had destroyed the hard drive as the contents revealed themselves. Then I got him drunk on Mai-Tais, ferried him out to the car under the relieved eye of the bartender, where Micah drove him away to mess with his memory. He woke the next morning thinking the past week’s events had all been a bad, blurry dream. My letters to Ben were gone for good, but I snuck back to my old house, hoping for an answer to the note I’d so hastily scribbled on the kitchen counter days before. Given the little he knew of me, my life, and my reasoning-and how much I knew it must have hurt him to wake alone again-I shouldn’t have been surprised to find only two words waiting for me in the mailbox: Fuck you. No wonder he’d turned to Regan.

But the antivirus was safely in Micah’s capable hands, and we were planning a fireworks display of our own, though Hunter and I would probably be fast asleep before then. And while Warren made a point to specifically take me aside and apologize in private, we still weren’t entirely comfortable with each other. But we were both willing to start over again, and with the Tulpa out there, gunning for blood, we’d need each other more than ever.

“I’m sorry you couldn’t get your sister’s computer back,” Hunter said, once we’d been debriefed and dismissed. We strode the familiar corridors of the sanctuary side by side, hands in our pockets, smiling at those we met along the way, but not stopping. “I know there was a lot of…her on that thing.”

There had been. But, degree by degree, I was learning to let Olivia go. “It’s probably better this way. That thing was a ticking bomb. Anybody could have accessed that information.”

“Information,” he said, holding a piece of paper out to me. “Like this?”

I halted, eyeing it warily. “What is that?”

“Her address.”

I took it and shoved it in my pocket before he could see my hand shake. “Thanks.”

“Aren’t you going to open it?”

I shook my head. I wasn’t ready. The idea of it-a daughter, Ben’s and mine-was still too foreign to me. Besides, there was one person out there who still knew my identity, and even if she was currently content to keep that information to herself, I knew she’d be watching.

Hunter and I reached his room, the rain room as I’d come to think of it, and our arrival coincided with a long silence. We shifted uncomfortably, two superheroes completely at a loss, not meeting each other’s eyes…until we finally did. “Hunter, I just want to say-”

“Don’t.” He put a finger to my lips, not hard, but not gently either. “Or I’ll have Micah erase your memory too.”

I smiled and let it go, willing to do whatever was easiest for him. God knew I’d asked enough, put him through enough already. “Okay, but what about…I mean, where do we go from here?”

“Forward, baby,” he said, and his smile was bittersweet. “Always forward.”

“Not ‘up, up, and away’?” I too decided to keep it light.

He winced and let out a long-suffering sigh. “You’re ruining the perfect moment.”

I laughed, then stopped when he abruptly bent toward me, his palm wide and warm on my neck as he pressed his lips against my forehead. I leaned into him, tears stinging my eyes. He left me after that single kiss, and the words I wanted to say died in my throat as he locked his door behind him. I swayed in the hallway, eyes shut, tingling from my forehead all the way to my toes.

Once I’d regained my sense of balance, I went to the locker room and slipped the piece of paper with Ashlyn’s address through one of the slats, figuring it’d come back to me when I was ready. And when I could figure out what to do about this child, this daughter of mine, who was now burning her way through her first life cycle.

For now it was enough that I was the Archer, still one of the Light, and after fulfilling the second sign of the Zodiac, that I was one step closer to fulfilling my legacy as the Kairos. And, I thought, no matter what the Tulpa said about switching allegiances, the third portent of the Zodiac, I knew myself. My vow to topple the Tulpa’s organization burned in me, strong as ever.

“Why don’t you try to open it?”

I’d thought myself alone and jumped, turning to find Tekla looking gaunt and tiny and fragile, staring at me from across the room. Careful not to meet her eye, I swallowed hard and turned immediately back to the locker. “Okay,” I said, thankful for something to do.

I didn’t have to work at it this time. All I did was press my hand to the palm plate at the side and lift the latch. The door swung open with unexpected force, and manual upon manual spilled out at my feet. It took a moment, but I gasped when I realized they were all Shadow.

“But how-? There must be dozens!” I bent, filling my arms with them, trying to shove them back in the locker, until one title caught my eye. Philly’s Penumbra, set in Pennsylvania. “Jesus! These are Joaquin’s!”

“And there aren’t dozens, but hundreds,” Tekla said, stepping forward, careful not to touch any of the manuals.

“Do you think my mother left them for me?”

She shook her head, gazing down. “She can’t touch them. But someone did, which means you have a responsibility to find out why.”

“The original manual,” I said, more to myself than her. Perhaps even Joaquin himself had left them to me. He had to know that nobody else would search as diligently and ceaselessly for the original manual as me. I could well imagine him reasoning it all out. If he were to die, he’d still want his work to live on. “These are filled with clues that will lead me to it.”

And to the answer my mother sought her entire life. How to kill the Tulpa.

“So you’ve a new quest, it seems,” Tekla said, angling her head. “Now that Joaquin’s gone, I mean.”

I looked at her, surprised she had mentioned his name first. She shifted under the weight of my stare, but ultimately returned my gaze. And I saw the pain living inside her. “You stepped up, Tekla. Stryker would be proud.”

She lifted her chin and studied the glowing glyph on his locker, now her own. “I must seem like such a hypocrite to you. All my ramblings about intention and clarity of mind…but when it got down to the wire, you were the one who was in control. You put aside the need for revenge, a need that’d driven you through a lifetime. And I…I wasn’t any of the things I teach out there.”

“No,” I agreed, and she sucked in a sharp breath. I put a hand on her arm. “You were just a mother who had lost a son.”

She stared at her hands, studying them for a long time, before looking back up at me. “It cost you to give Joaquin to me.”

“It would’ve cost me more had I taken the shot,” I said, before asking, “Are you sorry?”

She nailed me with her gaze. “Should I be?”

“Why don’t you open your locker and find out?” I asked, and her eyes flew from my face, her face lowering to hide her expression. “That’s why you’re here, right?”

She said nothing.

“Come on, Tekla,” I urged softly. Then I used Hunter’s words. “We have to move forward.”

She pressed her hands against her cheeks, then squared her shoulders, and turned. I stepped back, giving her space and privacy as she slipped across the room and lifted her hand. She’d barely touched the Scorpio palm plate when the locker swung open, seemingly of its own accord. In fingers that shook, she lifted out a photo taped to its back. I leaned closer. It was a boy with bright eyes and a body just sprouting the strength of a man. He was tall and lanky in his youth, and had a smile brighter than all the bulbs in the boneyard. I put my hand on her shoulder, and stared with her at the boy who was strong and good and hers…and gone. Stryker, in his boyhood, had been the perfect initiate of Light.

“No,” I whispered, when her shoulders had stopped shaking so much, and her sobs had quieted into intermittent sniffles. “I don’t think you should feel sorry for what you did at all.”

And Tekla cried again, with as much relief as grief, and after she’d cried herself out on my shoulder, I left her alone in the locker room with all that remained of her son.

Two nights later I had a clear shot at Regan as she and Ben dined al fresco, sitting on a bistro patio in the cooling breeze of an early fall, watching tourists weave among themselves on the Las Vegas Strip. Ben looked happy, or at least content, and I watched him with concentrated longing all the way up until he excused himself before dessert.

Regan looked content as well, like a cream-filled cat sunning herself in the late afternoon rays. She also still looked like me. But because her company seemed to satisfy Ben, I didn’t kill her as soon as he’d walked away. With all that had happened to him over the past few months-hell, with what I alone had put him through-I figured he was entitled to a few moments of cheer, no matter how hollow, false, or fleeting they might be.

I did, however, pin a note to the shaft of an arrow I’d honed myself, and when the waiters and foot traffic and cars had all cleared, lifted my conduit and sent that note spinning through the air, whistling all the way until it buried itself in the wooden tabletop, half an inch from Regan’s pinky finger.

She ducked for cover, then returned to her seat under the curious glances of the other diners once she realized she’d already be dead if I’d wished it. Picking up the note, her fingers trembled; and watching her lips move, I read along with her.

No matter what you think, you don’t know me. You can’t predict how I’m going to act. In fact, I’ve left everything you find predictable behind me-the broken young girl you studied before becoming me, the vengeful woman you saw searching for Joaquin, the Tulpa’s daughter-it’s all scattered on the feckless wind like the rubbish it always was. What drives me now is love.

And you’ve got mine.

So ask yourself, as I already have, what’s the worst thing that can happen to Joanna Archer by telling you this?

Then ask yourself again…what’s the worst thing that can happen to Regan DuPree?

She folded the letter away and looked up. I stepped from behind the palm tree planted on the median as the fountains from the Bellagio soared up behind me, hidden speakers pumping Bocelli into the air as he sang about the sun in a language not his own. Regan swallowed hard, then squared her jaw and raised her wineglass my way, a forced smile playing on her new lips.

I smiled back and raised a wall of glass in front of her, my thoughts forcing her reflection back on itself, before I let it dissolve into smoke, like the mist drifting from the lake behind me. And while she was still considering who had whom boxed in, Ben returned. I watched him lean toward her, ask what was wrong. And before he could turn to see what had her so riveted, I walked away, and left him sitting with my enemy, who was still trembling.

Trembling in skin that was supposed to be mine.