“How?” His voice was a tad hoarse, and he cleared his throat, adding a sneer to his words. “How will someone like you survive? You have no skills, no real education, you’ve never even won a talent contest.”
I pressed my hands against his shiny desk, leaning forward to keep the bitch-slap with his name on it from knocking him off his feet. “And why is that, Daddy? Why have you always been hell-bent on keeping me in my place, a box marked, ‘Look, but don’t touch.’ A pretty one, but a box no less?” I straightened as his eyes widened. He was finally facing me fully. He was finally listening. “You never hear or see me. You refused to even consider I might have an opinion, and now look at me. I’m like a property you acquire, wealth you hoard, a company you collect because you can.”
“You’re becoming hysterical.”
I was acting like Olivia, but speaking for myself…and he’d never seen my kind of hysterical. I lifted my chin and returned his earlier sneer. “Mother would have never allowed you to do that to me.”
And that was said for both of us. Xavier was breathing hollowly now, much like when he’d been chanting, his movements measured as he returned to his desk and deliberately lowered himself into the soft leather chair.
“But she did allow it, Olivia,” he said, leaning back, eyeing me from the relaxed pose of an attentive tiger. “She allowed it by her absence. By abandoning her family. She left and never looked back. I wanted to make you into a better woman than she was, that’s all.”
So that’s the lie he told himself so he could sleep at night, I thought. One of them, anyway.
“You made me,” I said evenly, as Joanna, as myself, “into a shadow of what I could have been.”
Xavier didn’t even blink. “I’ve given you a place in this world. Is that really so bad? If your mother had been more like you—”
“—she wouldn’t have left you,” I finished for him, amazed it had taken me this long to see it. That was it. He’d smothered Olivia with money and baubles and coddling because he didn’t want to lose her. In some corner of that useless heart, he might even love her. It was nice to know…but for the fact that his involvement with the Tulpa made him indirectly responsible for her death. “She couldn’t have left you.”
He didn’t deny it. “I just want to keep you close.”
Inhaling deeply, I pretended to consider that. Though anger had me shaking inside, I was used to holding my tongue around Xavier, and as I angled around the desk to take his hands in mine—careful not to let him feel the unnatural smoothness of my printless fingertips, or the tensile strength in my palm—I smiled.
“And I want to be close to you as well.” Because you’re going to lead me to the Tulpa. And someday I’m going to see you pay for all your countless sins. “So where better to begin my career than at Valhalla? Surely your premier property isn’t below me? Plus you can keep an eye on me while I learn a skill. Surely there’s a way, Daddy, for us to both get what we want?”
He was silent for so long, even the house seemed to hold its breath around us. There was almost an audible exhalation when he finally said, “Tell me again why you want this?”
“Because I want to be like the parent who raised me. The one who stayed and stuck. I want to be like you.”
He rubbed a hand as large as a ball mitt over his face, and I knew I’d won. “I’ll think about it.”
“Thank you, Daddy,” I said, and exited his office before my eyelids caught in a permanent flutter. I had finally gotten him thinking, and that was the best I could hope for right now.
Or so I thought.
Chandra was back in the drawing room, seated awkwardly on the window seat, but she stood to fall wordlessly into stride with me as we exited. We skipped down the palatial white steps, hopped into my car, and I rolled the engine over, still silent. I glanced up to find Helen’s pinched face peering at us from the living room windows, though she drew back when I waved, retreating into the house that so completely defined her existence. The gates were already opening as I gunned down the drive, though I waited until we’d left the compound and had reached the first stoplight before turning to Chandra. “You look smug.”
“It’s all that goop you made me put on my face.”
“And?” Because there was more.
And she lifted the handbag I’d made her carry, opening it wide enough to reveal a blackened face stretched in a long, silent scream. The light changed. A car honked behind me. I looked from the mask in her purse back up into her face. And for the first time since we’d known each other, Chandra and I exchanged real smiles.
9
The derring-do of both sides of the Zodiac was recorded in comic book form. While that might seem imprudent, there were fail-safes in place to keep information from one side leaking to the other. For instance, the Shadow agents couldn’t read the manuals of Light, and vice versa, thereby eliminating the possibility of one side gaining dominance over the other that way. This prohibition didn’t apply to me since I was both Shadow and Light, but I’d recently taken the opportunity to compare the manuals written after my arrival with those written before, and noted a lot more detail being left out these days, or delivered in more obscure terms than in the time prior to my arrival on the paranormal scene.
Of course, agents on both sides of the Zodiac had attempted to glean knowledge from people known to follow one series of comics or the other, but all had found that those mortals inevitably gave out misinformation, enthusiastically relating the wider worldview of the Zodiac to a competing agent—information they already knew—while blithely forgetting the specifics of the latest manual. It was our micro-universe’s way of keeping the battle between Light and Shadow squared and properly balanced.
The kids who frequented Master Comics, however, weren’t just any mortals. They knew the stories and characters they were following were real, and were willing partners in our paranormal battle. They thought and spoke and dreamed of us, picked sides, and taught the other younger children the mythology of the Zodiac. As they grew up, leaving the energy and belief of their youth behind, our legacy then continued in the minds of the next generation. However, if they failed to pass this knowledge on before maturation, we wouldn’t merely be in jeopardy of losing the battle against our enemies, we’d actually cease to exist.
All the mortal children who knew of our world gathered at a comic book shop called Master Comics. Therefore it wasn’t only a natural place to look for back issues containing clues that might lead to the Tulpa’s demise, it was also a hotbed of exuberant fandom. Chandra and I swung into the store prepared for a preadolescent pop quiz. Instead we were met with dead silence.
“Smells like geek central,” Chandra said, glancing around. “Looks like geek central. But where are all the geeks?”
The comic and manga titles were ordered obsessively on floor-to-ceiling shelves, with a DVD section on the back left wall, a gamers’ paradise on the right. But the store was otherwise eerily empty. “I’m getting ghost-town vibes.”
Chandra was still standing just inside the door, looking ready to bolt if she had to. But Master Comics was a safe zone for all agents, neutral territory, so I moved farther into the shop, albeit warily. “Maybe they’re out buying Halloween costumes,” she said.
Except every day was Halloween in Master Comics. I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Carl’s already had his costume for six months.”
She glanced over at me. “What’s he dressing as?”
“All he’d say was it would be totally unexpected and out of character for him. My guess is he’s going as a normal kid.”
Chandra snorted. “Well, maybe they’re all at school.”
“Shut your mouth,” I scoffed, picking up an independent comic. “Besides, what about Zane?”
Zane was the owner of Master Comics, a loner in his late twenties who still hung with kids, but who was the creator of the Zodiac’s manuals as well. Anything going on in Las Vegas’s paranormal underworld would end up on the shelves within
two weeks, depending on how quickly Zane could process and translate the storyline. The aforementioned boy-who-would-be-normal, Carl, was the series penciler.
“What the hell do you want?”
I jerked so quickly I dropped my comic, and frowned less at the sudden appearance of the kid who’d addressed us than at his tone.
“Excuse me?” I asked, bending to pick up the comic as I took in a beanpole body, wild hair, and fists hinged on bony hips. He was looking me up and down like I was rabid, and Chandra snorted again behind me.
“I said what are you doing here?”
“Well, I wasn’t looking for a dressing-down by a twelve-year-old,” I said, straightening.
“You must be the Archer,” the boy sneered, eyes cataloging me again. “Smart mouth, wall-to-wall tits—” Chandra snickered beside me and he whipped his gaze to hers. “And you’re the pretender. You probably followed her to a safe zone so you could take her out without anyone reading about it later. Crazy bitch.”
I’d have laughed but the little fucker was already on my nerves. “And you are?”
“Your worst nightmare.”
“Sweetie,” I said in my most condescending voice, “you clearly haven’t read about my nightmares.”
He feigned shaking with fear. I thought about throwing him over my knee and giving him the spanking he fully deserved, but knew how the episode would be depicted in the manuals. We may have violence, crime, and gore, but it was still primarily an American adolescent audience. Gruesome death was fine. Sex, verboten. “Where’s Zane?”
A new voice bloomed from the back of the shop. “I was giving a tour to the new changelings.”
Zane lumbered from the tunnel leading to the storeroom that doubled as his personal library. His apartment was located above the store, and between those three crucial amenities he never had to leave Master Comics. If his social skills were any indication, I thought as he passed by me with a grunt, he probably never did.
“New changelings?” Chandra asked, sidling up to the register. “Is it time already?”
He stared at her until she removed her hand from the glass case, then rubbed a rag over the whole thing. “It flies when you’re waiting to take over a star sign, doesn’t it?”
“What is it, asshole hour in here today?” Chandra asked, turning to me.
“Two-for-one special, apparently.”
Zane made a face, but before he could reply, a handful of children tumbled from the tunnel and into the shop. I didn’t recognize any of them, but they had no such problem, and they crowded around us like superhero groupies, firing questions as they grabbed at our clothing. How old were you when you learned to fly? When did you get super strength? What’s harder to break, a chair back or a spine? I glanced over at Chandra, panic mounting until I saw Carl saunter from the storeroom. He was dressed in unrelieved black, hair dyed to match and plastered to his head. Matching black eyeliner was meant, I was sure, to drive his parents nuts.
“Hey, Archer,” he said, pushing the younger kids aside, and smiling at my obvious relief. “Didn’t know you cared.”
Neither had I. But even though he was a hopeless mess socially and fashion-wise, he was both knowledgeable and helpful, and had been a good friend to me. “New changelings?”
“’Fraid so. Nobody older than nine.”
I looked around for a couple of bald heads. “The twins?”
“Lost to the horrors of puberty,” he said dramatically. “Their voices started cracking and they shot up an inch in one month. A week later it was as if they’d never known us. These five are the next batch, preordained to continue serving the Zodiac by spreading the legacy among others of their kind!” He grinned when I rolled my eyes at his rhetoric, and pointed out each of the children. “This is Dylan, Sara, Kylee, and Kade. That’s Douglas over there.”
Chandra and I nodded at each of the kids, who’d finally calmed, though Dylan was sucking hard on an inhaler, eyes wide. Beyond keeping the secrets of the Zodiac, changelings held a special place in our mythos. If agents from opposite sides of the Zodiac happened to appear in the shop at the same time, they turned into peacekeepers, using the ability to physically morph into a living shield—and the clever use of fangs—to deter the opposing sides.
But even they eventually stopped believing. I noted the absence of Sebastian, the changeling who’d acted as protector of the Shadow agents, and glanced again at Douglas, still sneering at me from the far corner of the room. “Sebastian’s replacement?”
“Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, huh?” Carl grinned, but I dismissed the kid now that I knew he was naturally antagonistic to the Light, and began searching for a little girl whose adoration of me bordered on idolatry, and whose natural inclination to help the Light, and me in particular, had proven priceless. I was already regretting not getting to say good-bye when she suddenly sauntered in from the hallway. I took in her crisp schoolgirl uniform, stumpy black pigtails, and smiled in relief. “Jasmine. You’re still here.”
She was followed by a smaller version of herself, a round-faced, glossy-haired, pixielike child who perked up as soon as she saw me.
“Yeah,” Carl said, nervously looking over at Zane. “We were going to talk to you about that.”
I motioned for him to hush and waved the two girls over.
“What’s up, Jas? How’ve you been?”
She looked up at me from beneath dark lashes. “Do I know you?”
“Oh, Jasmine,” her miniature replica said, voice trembling with excitement. “This is the Archer, esteemed member of troop 175, paranormal division, anti-evil, and preordained savior of the Zodiac!”
Jasmine whirled around and smacked the smaller girl upside her head. “I swear, if you don’t stop with that superhero shit I’m going to beat it out of you.”
The younger girl rubbed her head, fat tears welling in eyes as big as moons. “But, Jas, you’re the one who told me about the legacy of the Kairos and how the portents signaling her chosen side’s ascendancy over their enemies were already under way.”
“Yeah, I also told you the tooth fairy was real. Sucks to be eight.” She raised her hand to smack the girl again, and I grabbed her wrist, spinning her toward me. I let her jerk away, and she crossed her arms over her chest and proceeded to glare at me with unconcealed disdain.
“Jasmine. What’s happened to you?”
Zane cleared his throat behind me. “Why don’t you read the manual she’s featured in and find out?”
A changeling featured in the manuals?
I turned in time to catch the comic he’d flung at me, fumbling it against my body before drawing it away to study it. My picture was on the front, drawn in black and white against a livid red background, and I scowled at Carl—he’d drawn me top-heavy again—before flipping to the last page. Why read it? I’d lived it. It was just a question of where this issue ended.
Yet the last page was blank, as was the one before that. I skipped back until I finally found some text, Carl’s bright panels coming to life a third of the way into the issue. The new changelings oohed and aahed as they realized they were standing in the room where I’d first confronted my then arch-nemesis, Joaquin, but the panels ended abruptly, right as Jasmine was seen taking on her changeling form. I closed the manual and waved it at Zane. “How about finishing it first?”
“It is finished.”
Alarm skirted through me, and I scented a fresh wave of it springing from Chandra as well. “You’re not going to write the series anymore?”
Surely I’d misheard. That would mean disaster for my troop, and Zane would probably be drooling and babbling incoherently by week’s end. I’d seen what happened when he was blocked before. It wasn’t pretty.
“Of course I’m going to write them.” He held his hand out, motioning for me to return the manual. “Why should my head explode because you refuse to make amends?”
Power-hungry asshole, I thought, rolling it up and slapping it back into his pal
m. Was that what this was about? I’d asked Jasmine to use her shielding abilities to help me outside the confines of the shop last month, something Zane instructed the changelings never to do. “So you’re going to keep the kids from reading the manuals just because you’re holding a grudge?”
“I’m not the one keeping them from reading them,” he said, and tossed me a second comic. “You are.”
I snatched it out of the air, and the kids crowded closer, necks craning. But I looked down to find this one entirely blank. It was bound like a traditional comic, but even the cover was a glossy white sheet. “What’s this?”
“That’s the latest manual of Light. See where you’re confronting the Shadow Cancer in a classic honky-tonk bar?”
I flipped through the blank pages. “No.”
“Well I wrote it. It’s not my problem if it isn’t there.” And he went back to polishing the glass top, whistling as he worked.
“Let me see that.” Chandra yanked the not-manual from my hands. “Olivia, what did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said, wracking my brain. Had I?
“Actually,” Carl began, and I whirled on him. He shrugged sheepishly and spit it out. “You fucked up the evolutionary chi when you took off with Jasmine’s aura. It’s time for her to hand her post over to Li and move on like the twins, but she’s unable to mature without the whole of her aura. We told you not to wear it for too long.”
“We told her not to leave the shop with it,” Zane corrected from across the room. His head was still bent, but I could tell his teeth were clenched.
“You said not to wear her aura for over twelve hours. I gave it back well before then, undamaged.” The changelings’ ability to shield an agent from harm was due to the tractability of their aura. They could release their aura to us, allowing it to mold itself to our bodies so our true identities were seen, while our corporeal bodies remained protected. That’s why I’d borrowed her aura. It’d enabled me to appear to Ben as myself—looking and feeling exactly the same as he remembered me—so I could give him a kiss that’d probably saved his life.
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