Each woman sat on cloud formations shaped like settees, thought the soft tendrils wrapped around their draping limbs, allowing them to nestle in deep. But where was Solange?
My gaze darted back Hunter’s way, but his face was as blank as the dark clouds behind him. Then Nicola, a woman so severe in stature and physicality that a cut of her eyes felt like a slash to the skin, shifted.
“You look confused, dear Joanna,” she said, and I jumped. That wasn’t her deep, sultry voice. It was Solange’s.
“Things have changed a bit around here.” This time Trish’s mouth moved, but again, Solange was speaking through her.
“I’m clearly doing a bit of spring cleaning,” she added, the words coming from Diana’s mouth, causing me to whirl. She was the woman I knew best. She still looked calculated, draped across the cloud cover that was both a part of her and not, and all of them wore their beloved silks and jewels and makeup. Yet there was something lacking from their expressions. Joy? Spirit? Life? I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
More alarming was Solange’s calm voice. Although I’d figured out that she was watching, her demeanor—at least as presented through these women—was the exact opposite of the last time I’d heard her. She’d raged, I’d attacked, and then she screamed. Her placidity now meant she felt in control, a disconcerting thought even if her voice wasn’t coming from other people’s mouths. Controlling them. Maybe pointing out that she always had.
“In any case, it’s nice of you to visit,” she said through Trish. Her enunciated cadence looked strange coming through lips that had always produced breathless thoughts. “And after sending such a lovely gift. Soul slivers are so much more personal than, say, flowers.”
Well, that put to rest the question as to whether Carlos had arrived. Damn.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I answered as blandly as I could manage.
Solange ignored that, her voice jumping back to Diana. “I have to say, we’ve received quite an influx of fresh meat ever since you revealed to your world that Midheaven was more than myth. I mean, the last three agents were the usual fare,” she said, meaning Shadows. Her voice skipped to Nicola. “But this one is delicious. It’s been so long since I tasted pure Light.”
I held my breath, choking back alarm, hoping she’d take my stillness for nothing more than self-preservation. It would be worse for Carlos if she knew I cared. Still, I could feel her gaze upon me from each side. The three women—or their bodies, at least—were positioned around me like security cameras. Solange was using them to view me from every angle, save Hunter’s, of course. I glanced at him, but he remained unnaturally still.
“Well, Midheaven’s not exactly hidden,” I said, managing to keep my voice even and conversational. “It’s merely underground.”
“The perfect condition for a goddess culture to grow and thrive,” she answered, again through Trish, her tone gone wry. Again, it looked all wrong. The lips were moving, but her eyes—or what was behind them—remained marble still. Possessed? In a trance?
Dead?
“Practically the only way for a woman’s world to exist at all,” she continued, causing my gaze to dart to Nicola. That’s when I saw it. Maybe it was because Nicola was the strongest, most antagonistic, of the three women. But the absence was more pronounced in her than Trish. She might be a woman in a woman’s world, still breathing, lips moving, but the predatory look she’d always worn was gone. It was only in its absence that I realize it had been her greatest adornment.
What the fuck was going on here?
Nervously, I shifted from one foot to the other on air that was more a part of me than not. How had Solange neutered these women of their power? And more importantly, could she do the same with me?
She wasn’t attacking. Not outright. Probably because I was wearing my protective kundans in plain sight. Still, that didn’t mean she couldn’t injure me enough that I wished I were dead. Glancing back at Hunter, I decided it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have my own weapons at hand, and I slid one hand into my pocket for the matches, the other drawing out my magical, deadly quirley.
“Try that trick again and the new puppy will fry.” Now her temper was up, and I cringed as each word slapped at me from another side.
“Let me see who it is.” I straightened as if I didn’t care, but let my hands fall to my sides. My arrival just after Carlos’s had raised her suspicions. After maiming her with smoke, I should have been reluctant to return here for any reason at all.
“He’s downstairs,” she said plainly, voice hijacking Diana’s throat. “You’re welcome to go see him, though. You just have to imagine a solid door into existence.”
“What?”
“You’re the daughter of a tulpa. It should be natural to you. In fact, I know it is,” she said slyly, voice once again slithering across my skin like a satin ribbon. It tugged at me, turning me back to Hunter.
I panicked for a moment, thinking the sound might invade him too—wondering how I could stop it—but then a speck appeared behind him, suspended in the air, and lit like a bright coin. I squinted, my depth perception blown off course by the cloud layers. But the thing was illuminated as if a firefly dwelled inside, and after another suspended moment, it swayed drunkenly and began floating my way.
“It won’t bite,” Solange said as Trish shifted. The sphere stopped in front of me. I hesitated, then reached out to snag it from the air, surprised to find it warm, almost scalding, in my palm. It cooled as I flipped it over and ran my finger over the symbol embossed on the other side. It was either a cross with two lines bisecting it at opposing angles, or a very simple star.
“Recognize it?” Nicola again, and since the words were soured with cruel humor, it actually sounded like her. Of course I did. This was the currency of Midheaven. Personal energies, emotions, abilities, and powers—were the building blocks of a viable life-form, thus the very things that could be turned into fuel to create any world these woman desired. I’d been forced to give over this very chip in a hand of soul poker to a Shadow agent who’d then bartered it to Solange.
But what was it? The ability to imagine objects into existence? A power I’d once possessed because I was the daughter of a tulpa, an imagined being? I flipped it in my palm again. And if so, why the hell would she give it back?
“I can’t just imagine something out of nothing,” I said, because if Solange was trying to get me to do it, odds were I shouldn’t. Yet the chip pulsed against my fingertips like it wanted to push through my skin, and as the reverberations thrilled up my arm, another thought rushed through me. I’d lost four chips over here in total.
Four powers that hadn’t been drained from me when I sacrificed all the others back home.
The question must have blazed like a wildfire across my face because Solange’s chuckle beckoned slyly. “Yes, dear. There’s a way to get them back.”
Four chips.
I couldn’t help myself. “How?”
“You have to take action, of course.” The shrug was in her voice. “After all, you get nowhere if you just dream of a thing.”
“You mean walk the line.” She wanted me to return to Midheaven physically, through the tunnels—exactly what the grays and I had been trying and failing to do. It figures, I thought, palming the chip. I couldn’t enter Midheaven corporeally without my powers, but I couldn’t get my powers without entering Midheaven. “I don’t believe you.”
“But you want to.”
I did. In Midheaven even I could make out the thick, honeyed scent of my hope.
“Your friend here tells me you call yourself a gray now.”
I whirled toward Diana before I could help it. Her mouth lifted in response, but again, it was the only thing on her that looked alive. Shit, if Carlos had relayed that much, he’d been here longer than I’d thought. Again, time moved differently in Midheaven than it did in the real world. “He said that you were night crawlers. That much like us, you must burrow underground.�
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I grimaced. It wasn’t my favorite analogy. “Your point?”
“Only that I understand having to burrow deep.” It was the free-form voice again, moving clouds, crawling across me toward Hunter, and I turned to follow. “That there’s some work that must be done out of sight of the world above.”
Another chip appeared, suspended in the same place as the first, and began to saunter my way. “But did you know that night crawlers have the ability to regenerate? It’s true. You can actually grow two whole worms from a properly bisected specimen, each capable of viable life. Two halves become two wholes.”
I squinted at the new chip. “You’re saying my powers exist over here, independently of me.”
The chip came to a halt before me, but when I reached out this time, it vanished.
Laughter replaced it, and clouds scattered. “I’m saying you’re not as broken as you think you are.”
I ran my fingers around the single, rare chip she’d given me. “Are you helping me?”
“Of course not,” she said, as cloud cover moved to veil the other three women. I wondered if it would be the last time I saw them. “I’m helping me. But if I can thwart your world’s Shadow and Light in the process? So much the better.”
Liar. She was giving me this power so I could taste, feel, and remember those I’d lost. And so I’d “walk the line” below Las Vegas’s streets, and return to her physically.
“Start with imagining light, since Light is how you identify. You’ll see. It’ll be simple for you to create it out of nothing. After all, things appear brightest when it’s dark. The rest will come easily after that.”
And the rest was what she wanted. She was providing a power she intended to take back for herself, because once I crossed over physically—for Hunter, for Carlos, for the rogues and my powers—she intended to strip away the last third of my soul.
Yet I still couldn’t help but squeeze my hand around the chip, and it throbbed in response, like it was sentient and wanted to be a part of me again too.
“That story earlier,” she said suddenly, voice far away like she’d been leaving but had suddenly changed her mind. “Why’d you tell it if you knew I was here?”
“You want me to know you can reach out and touch Hunter at any time. That’s why he’s in this room.” And because I now knew she wanted more than what she could take from me here, I smiled. “I simply wanted you to know the same.”
And because I was also as much a fighter as when Hunter and I met, I whirled and kissed him hard. He jerked, more in surprise than any effort to pull away. He really hadn’t thought I could touch him—neither had Solange, else I don’t think she’d have allowed us so close—but I knew different. We were connected. He lived, via his child, inside me. And after a second more of my lips demanding an answer from his, I got it. He kissed me back—a fervent kiss, a last one—before a bolt of lightning wracked the ceiling.
I jerked away to find black clouds roiling, angry edges tinged in green. The classic hue of an impending storm. Wind whipped my hair into a frenzy, cutting at my body, and a cloud curtain enveloped Hunter. I reached out . . . but he was gone.
I squealed as another bolt singed me, the sound raking my eardrums, and mentally reached for Io. The responding tug was immediate.
“When I come back,” I yelled, “it won’t only be for my powers.”
Somehow she heard me. “Jaden will always belong to me!”
Her use of Hunter’s old, discarded name wasn’t lost on me, but I’d broken her façade of control, and I just smiled as Io pulled me away.
“You can’t compete romantically with a goddess!” Solange screeched loudly, quickly, like she needed me to hear it before I was gone.
“Fortunately you’re also a crazy, homicidal bitch,” I said. “It levels the playing field a bit.”
And I was loosened from the world, the whipping tornado dropping away like a door was slammed on it, and I floated free, safe, and carrying a chip containing one of my four remaining powers.
Yet Solange’s words chased me still.
“Mi casa es su casa,” she said, I assumed in honor of Carlos. But I didn’t need fluency in another language to interpret the subtext. Translated directly into bitch-speak it meant Solange wouldn’t just be anticipating my return . . . she’d be looking forward to it.
She’d be lying in wait.
Having a supernatural power ripped from your body is like being cold-cocked from behind. The first time I’d fled Midheaven, forced to leave powers behind, there’d been a wave of dizziness, followed by a bolt that tingled simultaneously through all my limbs. Numbness then whisked through me, and my lost powers were ripped away like teeth from the root. As with any extraction, there was a latent soreness and temporary sensitivity, but I returned to my world unharmed . . . if a thoroughly different person than when I’d left.
Having a power returned in that veiled passageway between worlds wasn’t much better. The old spot where this ability had once lived in me had long healed over, and suddenly it was being assailed again, though this time without the benefit of numbness to assist me through the trauma. The now-foreign power was a gut punch, though I couldn’t gasp because there was no air between worlds. I didn’t know how I looked, but I felt like a landed trout, mouth and lungs wide, straining for air that would never come.
But worse than the pain was the shock at the invasive burrowing, like a centipede with a tiny torpedo nose was pushing aside flesh as it wormed into some organ I couldn’t name. It finally disappeared inside after a final shake of its relentless, barbed tail, but a shudder broke out along my spine when tiny teeth attached themselves to my sacrum, belly up.
Something brushed against the life growing inside me, and there was an aggressive jostling, like a territorial battle was being played out in my own body. A gut churn of nausea I hadn’t experienced since the first weeks of my pregnancy rose to my throat, but then everything stilled, and my breath returned in a harsh wheeze. I opened my eyes to find Io staring at me.
While her black skin could never go pale, it was as ashen as I’d ever seen it. If possible, her discus eyes were wider than normal, and her mouth was O-shaped, frozen, forming an unspoken word.
But her strong arms caught me as I heaved and rolled off the table, facedown on the floor where a single gaming chip dropped from my clutched palms. I watched it roll across the floor and come to rest against Buttersnap’s left paw. The giant hound sniffed at it, and tilted her head questioningly at me. Then she shuffled backward when I, in response, began to puke.
Io got me back onto the table, hindered in no small part by Buttersnap, who, despite her abnormal size and supernatural strength, still acted like any other dog when faced with vomit. After shuttling the whining beast from the room, Io returned to my side to probe gently at my middle, careful not to do anything to induce more vomiting. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. She could maim with her index finger, kill with her pinky.
“Lordy. This can’t be.” She gazed wonderingly up at my face. “You have your ether back.”
“Awesome.” I hadn’t even known it was missing. “What’s an ether?”
“Ether.” At my elongated blank stare, she shook her head, whistling in disbelief. “Your quintessence.”
I broke the word down. Quin-tessence. Quinta essentia. Five, or fifth essence. That was as far as I got. My Latin sucked.
But Io obviously knew. “ ‘Let there be light, said God; and forthwith light ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure, sprung from the deep.’ ”
I looked at her in surprise. “That’s friggin’ Milton.”
“You know him?”
“I studied the classics as an undergrad.” I used to collect quotes, lovely little bits of language and wisdom that’d helped me through the angst of my teen years . . . though that seemed like a long time ago now. I squinted at Io suspiciously. “But how do you know him?”
Her wide-eyed awe shifted into a knowing smile.
“Hard to tell from the text, isn’t it?” she said, one dark brow quirking.
“Wow. Milton.” I shook my head, momentarily distracted. “So what does it mean?”
“Well, let’s see if your understanding of the elemental world is as strong as your classical education. Name the four basic elements.”
“Air, fire, earth, water.” Same as the rooms occupied by the women in Midheaven. Why was I not surprised there was a connection here?
“And ether is the fifth.” Having recovered somewhat, she gave me a solemn nod. “The Pythagoreans were the first to name it. Said it was the essence that flew upward at creation to comprise the stars.”
“So my ether is somehow related to the stars?”
“Every life and death is.” Thus every person was tied into the Universe too. What I needed to know was what the fifth element—ether, essence, stardust, what-the-fuck-ever—was doing attached to my spine. “So what does it mean to me?”
“Ether is distilled spirit, the purest and highest concentration of energy in both the heavenly bodies and in every living being under those skies. We’re interconnected with each other and all the Universe.”
“So when I lost it, I lost touch with the Universe?”
She shook her head. “You lost touch with yourself. Ether makes you patently you. It’s your individual power, the element that indisputably trumps all the others. Scent, taste, touch, sound, and sight . . . ether is the sense that, well . . . makes sense of it all.”
“But how is it a power?” I meant how could I use it to take the battle to Solange.
“You locate it in yourself, harness it, and use it to get what you want out of life.”
The Neon Graveyard Page 10