So everything Zoe had done—both accomplishments and defeats—was recorded in either the Shadow manuals or the Light, depending on the sensitivity of the information there. Any knowledge that could give one side dominance over the other, thus unbalancing the Zodiac, was omitted. That’s why Zoe’s pregnancies hadn’t been recorded on either side, and why neither the Tulpa nor Warren knew where she’d gone when she disappeared.
Thus, every agent had secrets they knew lay solely in their own minds, and even the most senior troop members couldn’t help but wonder about their allies’ lives as well as their enemies. What wasn’t being revealed?
So what exactly were the manuals omitting about Zoe and her relationship with the angry, stubborn man on the other side of that door?
Well, it wasn’t the part about the bond they’d forged growing up as teens in the paranormal safe house known as the sanctuary. The bloom of their subsequent love affair, around the time she was nineteen and he twenty-four, was also well-documented—much to their embarrassment at the time—as was the bloody coup that’d led to Warren’s meteoric rise in rank to become the youngest troop leader ever. Zoe had been pictured firmly by his side.
No, the omissions began after all that, when Zoe herself had taken up her star sign and began to hunt the Tulpa, a task that would make her famous for her bravery, single-mindedness, and willingness to give up personal happiness in return for their enemy’s blood. Maybe what angered Warren most wasn’t that she turned her back on him in order to fulfill these duties, but that the original assignment had been his idea. He’d ordered her into the Tulpa’s lair and life—and bed—with his blessing. And in time it became his curse.
Because the manuals did record how good she was at her job. They showed in exacting detail how clearly the Tulpa, and later Xavier, fell for her ruse. Soon, every small, helpful, important detail she brought back about the Shadows’ plans and machinations was met by her troop leader’s knowing and bitter sneer. Eventually Zoe stopped coming back at all.
So the wedge between the two former lovers grew with time, expanding with secrets until the girth that lay between them was too wide for either of them to attempt crossing. And when Zoe disappeared this final time—after the daughter Warren knew nothing about had been brutalized by the Shadow Aquarian—she hadn’t even considered telling him why she was leaving, where she was going, or what she intended to do. She didn’t want to argue, and besides, she barely knew the answers herself.
All that mattered now was that Joanna and Olivia were safe. She’d given up her chi and her place in the troop to ensure it. And now she would hunker in close by, watchful, as she’d failed to be the first time, and wait for the moment when Joanna would rise up and stake her claim in the Zodiac. Because Zoe’s greatest secret wasn’t merely omitted from the manuals, it was the one the Seer had told her never to utter, not to Warren, not even aloud to herself.
Her eldest daughter was both Shadow and Light, and when she was ready and had overcome the tragedy that would shape her future, she would be mightier than all of them put together.
So Warren and Zoe didn’t have a love story that began with “Once upon a time.” And, inevitably, it wouldn’t end with “happily ever after” either. But Zoe had a job to do, and she was still enough of a heroine to see it through to the end.
“Are you ready to listen?” Zoe began, moving across Warren’s dim motel room. He’d stiffened as he sensed her presence, but hadn’t looked up from the paper he was pretending to read.
“I’m ready to hear you.”
Touché, thought Zoe, with a wry smile. She crossed the dingy room to stand in front of his chair. Hearing was a start.
“You need to let me do this.”
“Why?”
“Because I can. Because I’m the only one who can. The holiday doesn’t just give me an excuse, it’s a powerful time. The holy days join the old world beliefs with the new. The possibilities that opens up are endless.”
He lifted one shoulder, unwilling to admit she was right. “Christmas is coming up. The troop can figure something out by then.”
But Zoe had to get Ashlyn out of there now. “Let me do this. I’m already on the outside. Why risk the life of an active star sign when you have me ready to go in willingly?”
“Why do you care so much about this one mortal child?”
“Because I’m mortal!” She pounded her chest, then clenched her fist at her side. “It’s all I have, don’t you see? This life, this skin, the breath in my lungs, it’s all that separates me from death.”
“And yet you’re so willing to give it up,” Warren said, watching her now. “Because that’s what you’re asking to do. One foot on the Tulpa’s doorstep, and he’ll slay you where you stand.”
“Because I betrayed his love?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You haven’t killed me,” she pointed out.
Because her betrayal of him—their betrayal of each other—had been greater and deeper than any ruse concocted to topple their enemies.
Warren swallowed hard. “I’ve wished you dead.”
“And I, you,” she said matter-of-factly, stepping closer. Warren opened his mouth, but she put a finger to his lips and held it there. “It’s not the same thing, and I’m willing to bet my life that the Tulpa feels the same.”
His face crumpled in on itself and he shook off her touch. “You would compare me to him?”
“I didn’t mean that—”
“You said it. Which means you were thinking it. And we both know it’s the thought that counts, don’t we?”
That’s what they’d told one another when she had returned to his arms, his bed. It was the thought that counted most. It was the most powerful thing in the universe.
“Warren …” she began to protest, but stopped.
“What?” he said shortly.
“You’re right,” Zoe said, and the surprise that flashed across his face must have mirrored her own. She laughed mirthlessly. “Maybe I am toxic. But I had to stop feeling anything for anyone in the time I was with the Tulpa. I couldn’t just turn it back on when I returned to the sanctuary. I had to close down because I needed to save a small place inside of me that was mine alone.” She’d been a possession, she remembered with a shudder, she’d belonged entirely to the Tulpa. “Sometimes I even forgot why I was there—that I was even, or ever had been, super.”
She backed up and sank to the edge of the bed, realizing for the first time that it was true. She’d disappeared into her role as the Tulpa’s woman and instead of remembering that she had chosen to be there—that she could choose to leave— she’d begun to feel small and weak, like a shell with only the pretty memory of something vital living inside. As for her idea of love, well, the Tulpa had twisted that as well. She’d had to stop feeling real love at all just to survive it.
Zoe looked up when she felt Warren’s weight drop down beside her. “Whatever he took from you, Zoe, you gave willingly. You had to have seen and felt it happening.”
“So did you,” she said sharply, wiping at her eyes.
“And what was I supposed to do?” he shifted, putting distance between them without really moving. “I couldn’t contact you, and even if I did I couldn’t order your withdrawal, nullifying all the years you’d put in up to that point. Do you realize you’ve spent more accumulated years outside of the sanctuary than in it? You grew up there, but it’s not your home. Your home is your will and desire, and what you want. It’s all that matters. It’s all that ever mattered.”
She turned toward him, and after a long moment, lifted her tear-streaked face to his. “You mattered.”
It wasn’t what he’d expected, and he jerked back before he could stop himself. She stayed him with a hand on his arm, and when he didn’t shake it off—just swallowed hard as he saw her intent—she shifted closer. Ran her hand up his shoulder to curl around his neck. Used the same smooth, liquid motion she had before she was reduced to mortality to pinion around, abo
ve, and upon him; the weak cradling the strong as a tear raced down his moonlit cheek.
“You mattered,” she whispered again, and wrapped her limbs around him so she wouldn’t have to see it, put her head on his chest and shut her eyes, resting there until his arms finally came up to encircle her.
This, she thought, was home.
She sucked in a deep breath, and scented only what her mortal nose would allow: the menthol rub he used on his bad leg, the fainter scent of his soap, and beneath it all, the warm, earthy wisp of the man she loved. She tilted her head, pressing her lips against the first available patch of bare flesh that offered itself to her, his biceps.
“I missed this so,” she murmured, voice muffled.
“My arm?” His voice was softly teasing, as it used to be. She’d missed that, too, she realized with a smile. Pulling away to peer into his face, dry now, doe-brown eyes deep pools of softness in the moonlit room, she knew that no place—sanctuary, safe house, mansion or motel—was more linked in her mind with home than his arms. She straightened her spine and pressed into him so that he sucked in a needy breath. They were fused at hips, her small breasts pressed against his wider chest, and he tilted his jaw up to find her lips. The need in that first kiss illuminated all the hard words between them, showing them for what they really were … smoke. Camouflage to protect the emotion they couldn’t put into words; the “I love yous” and “I miss yous” and mostly “I can’t … not without you.”
So they abandoned words for the tangible, and Zoe found she’d been missing a lot more than just his arms.
Warren lifted her and Zoe didn’t rail at him for manhandling her like she would have with anyone else. She didn’t fight to assert her own control over this lovemaking just to prove she could. She just let herself be swept up and away, because the weakening of her knees, her limbs, the numbing of her mind and thoughts, had nothing to do with his otherworldly strength versus her much-hated humanity. It was just Warren loving Zoe as he always had. Loving her, she thought numbly as his mouth found hers, and not what she could do … what she had done, and would do yet. No, this night was all about being cradled and cherished by the only man she’d ever taken into her with no ulterior motive outside of giving as good as she got.
Which is what she did now.
Humanity hadn’t stolen her agility, and when he swung her to her back, her legs whipped up and around his waist. His response, to grind against her, was automatic, as was the moan coaxed from his throat and into hers. Problem was, she was still clothed—they both were—so many of the soft growls and needy whimpers that escaped them both in the next few seconds were driven in part by frustration. The rest were spawned by sudden sensations—a palm cupped just there when her simple cotton shirt was finally lost, a hunger emphasized by the bite above the breast, a surprised laugh at the responding pinch. And a slow melt into the heat of each other’s flesh as the rest of their clothes fell away.
Zoe had dreamed of this moment and these sensations for too long to rush. She arched against him whenever she got the chance, but kept it light and unhurried, just a caress of thighs, a skimming of skin, a slow glide from her belly to her thighs to show him she was already wet and ready for him. That she’d been ready for years now, waiting even as duty had kept her away.
One didn’t need supersenses to quantify need, and Zoe felt Warren, too, straining to stay himself. He slowed his hands to a languid caress even as the need to race along her sides made him shudder. He tasted her with breathy and heated lips—not just sampling, but drinking her in like her skin was a sweet liquid and vital to his very existence.
This was what she missed most, Zoe thought as she eased over him, blanketing him with her core, lacing his limbs with hers. It wasn’t her lost strength or the vitality leached from her world with the stripping of her extrasensory abilities. It was the union of mind, body, and spirit with the man who’d known her so long, understood her so well, and frustrated her so completely.
Zoe eased up, Warren shifted, skimming hips, and smiled as he slid home. Zoe swallowed hard. She could swim in this liquid motion, just let herself drift away as a body both outside and inside herself determined the beat of her steadfast heart. She rocked, feeling like she was mere driftwood on a vast open sea, and the only thing keeping her from floating away entirely was the knowledge that their time together was finite—that the sun would rise and their bodies would part, leaving behind slick thighs and a hollowness where he once resided.
Zoe wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand on her way to caressing Warren’s cheek, pulling him closer and deeper as she pushed the thoughts away. She didn’t want to swim in these feelings, anyway. She wanted to drown in them. And that wasn’t allowed.
“Zoe—”
She pressed a finger to his lips, knowing he sensed her pain. She recalled the ability, and the way emotions burned on the air. He wanted to console her, but words weren’t going to fix it, and besides, he felt the same way. She saw it in his eyes, felt it in his tensing fingers and the way he pulsed inside of her.
And that was comfort enough.
She smiled, being as brave as the moment would allow, and his image blurred beneath her. The first tear fell as she refitted her body against his, opening to him further, and inviting the hard and the soft, the warm and the wet. And when they came together, the tendons in his neck straining as he cried out below her, Zoe knew she wasn’t just sating him, she was completing him. Because duty aside, Zoe Archer and Warren Clarke were simply made for one another. And when she collapsed atop him, the long smooth length of him still filling her, warming her, she knew that Warren had come home as well.
Later, when he was as bone-weary with the need for sleep as she, Warren wrapped his arms around her from behind, spooning her body with his own.
“You’re wrong,” he finally whispered, and she knew he would let her go.
Zoe smiled bittersweetly as his hands warmed her breasts, nuzzling back, cocooning herself further. Safe for now. “If I am you won’t need to ask me to relinquish my star sign again. It’ll be someone else’s for the taking.”
A sigh hollowed out his body.
She turned in his arms because it felt like there were suddenly acres and canyons and miles between them, and quickly drew close again. “But I’m not wrong. I have prophesies and legacies and adventures left to fulfill.”
She had a daughter, a destiny … and at the end of it all? Maybe she still had this man to come home to.
So she wouldn’t fail. She promised him that, then pressed her lips to his, trying to kiss away the worry that had returned to furrow his brow.
“And if you do?”
It was too practical a question for her liking. She rose, straddled him, and he immediately fell silent, while she shrugged the question away. It didn’t matter either way. Death was preferable to a life without meaning, and for the first time since leaving the troop she had a purpose again. That alone was worth giving thanks for.
So she held back the words he wanted to hear—I won’t go—once again putting away any chance at personal happiness, and merely smiled as dawn rose on a beautiful Thanksgiving morning.
“We’ll see,” she told him, flipping her hair back, dropping her palms to his chest. “We’ll see who’s giving thanks by the day’s end.”
Chapter 5
White was the symbol of holiness and purity in Tibetan Buddhism. It represented prosperity, too, so it was no accident that the Tulpa’s home was achromatic from rooftop to doorstep, a blank slate against the sea of pastels and dusty stuccoes that otherwise dotted the valley floor.
It wasn’t, however, an ivory tower. The Tulpa was reluctant to remove himself from the source of all his energy and strength. Human emotion, particularly negative, fueled him, though most mortals steered clear of the soaring pale home without even knowing they were doing so. Even Shadow agents didn’t darken the doorway without invitation. Zoe had been the only agent of Light to even get close enough to peer in a window
, and since her infiltration sixteen years earlier, paranormal sensors and precautions had been added to further secure the place.
But, as Warren drove her to the drop point a block away, she didn’t worry about those. She was mortal, and the only monitor that would pick her up was attached to the security camera tucked high above the entrance’s alcove.
On the surface of it, Warren was right. She hadn’t seen the Tulpa in sixteen years, plenty of time for bitterness to crust over any soft feelings he’d once held for her, and she had no doubt his hatred had further cemented the emotion. But no sense in worrying about that now. Instead, her lips moved in an almost rhythmic chant as her fingers nimbly played over the cornucopia she’d woven.
An observer might have thought she was praying, but Zoe Archer knew too much of other worlds to put stock in any one deity, and let her whispers spiral out into the universe as affirmation instead. She had, at one time, been a fervent student of Tibetan culture and lore, studying the transitional realities called bardos, learning the self-control and discipline needed to succeed with tantric work, including hours of meditative practices, prostration, and mantra recitation. Because that’s what a man named Wyatt Neelson had done, devoting fifteen years of his life to visualization in order to create a being so vivid, real, and evil that the thought form eventually morphed into reality and became the Tulpa.
It was this being’s arrival on the paranormal scene that upset the valley’s metaphysical balance. The Tulpa sought influence over the mortal realm—to control their thoughts and actions and dreams—and absolute dominance over the paranormal one. The agents of Light fought, of course, but they’d never faced a created adversary before, and suddenly balance became a secondary concern. Survival was all-consuming.
The Tulpa didn’t age. He couldn’t be killed—not even by the conduits that were so deadly to the agents on both sides of the Zodiac—and he assumed the physical form of whatever the person looking at him expected to see. It was this that most worried Zoe. God forbid he look in a mirror while standing next to her and see the demonic monstrosity that still came for her in her dreams. Then he’d know she was misleading him again and he’d skin and flay and bury her with her bones outside her body, heart still beating atop a living pile of flesh. He knew how. She’d seen him do it before.
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