The Scent of Shadows sotz-1

by Vicki Pettersson

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.” Warren folded his arms across his chest. “You can’t.”

  “You said I had to be willing,” I argued.

  He inclined his head. “There have been those, though rare, who’ve chosen not to fight. They knew the facts, they’d grown up in the Zodiac, and decided to leave it while they could. There’s a procedure that’s somewhat painful and has minor side effects—no worse than Paxil, really—but it will clear your mind forever of any paranormal knowledge or powers.”

  “I want that.”

  “Jo—”

  “I want it! Now!” I did. I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do next, but I knew I didn’t want any part of a world of conduits, enemies, and astrological superheroes.

  “Jo, all those operations were performed premetamorphosis.” He shook his head. “It’s too late for you.”

  Too late by one day. I stood, needing to pace, to think; needing air and time, and someone to make sense of this all. I felt trapped inside a foreign world where the rules had been upended on top of me. I didn’t speak this language of star signs and Shadow agents, and I didn’t want to. “Look, I don’t want to be a superhero freak like you, okay, Warren? I don’t want to fight crime, and I don’t want to smell pheromones or kill bad guys. I just want to go home! I want…I want my fucking life back!”

  He motioned to the door. “So leave.”

  “I will,” I shot back, heading that way.

  “Fine.”

  “Fine!”

  He lobbed his parting blow. “Just know if you walk out of here now you’ll be labeled a murderer.”

  “It was self-defense!” I said, whirling back. “He attacked me and murdered my sister!”

  Warren blinked. “I’m not talking about Butch, Joanna.”

  I shook my head but it came out in a jerky motion. I opened my mouth but no words fell from it. The room faded and I felt my knees buckle. I leaned against the wall, taking long, deep breaths, and waited until I could stand again. I’d been wrong, I thought, to believe this guy had any characteristics resembling sanity. He was as crazy as I first thought.

  “They’ll frame you for Olivia’s death,” the psycho was saying. “Your true father, and all his henchmen. They’ll set up all the physical evidence, and there won’t be a thing you can do about it. Then, after the trial, when you’re in jail and awaiting injection on death row, they’ll find you by your scent—by then a soured mixture of bitterness and hate—and they’ll kill you cold.”

  “But I didn’t do it,” I said breathlessly.

  “Your car is at the scene of the crime.”

  “You told me to leave it there!”

  He shrugged. “Your prints are all over the place—on your martini glass, and I’d imagine on your sister’s body as well. They’re especially dense in the bedroom where she was murdered.”

  “And so are yours!” I shot back. “And Ajax’s and Butch’s!”

  He looked at me blankly. My eyes widened and I sucked in a quick breath, remembering Butch’s impossibly smooth fingertips. “Give me your hand,” I said in a whisper.

  Warren held it out, palm up. Though his palms were rough and callused, the tips of his fingers were smooth and opalescent, almost pearlescent as they gleamed up at me. I ran a finger over the pad of his thumb, rubbing lightly. It was like touching a marble.

  “None of us has fingerprints, Jo.”

  I looked up into his face. “I do.”

  “You’re different. You’re—”

  “Don’t say ‘innocent,’” I said through gritted teeth. I’d never felt less so in my life.

  “I wasn’t going to,” he said quietly. “I was going to say you’re a latecomer to all this.”

  I couldn’t believe this. I had to get out of there. There had to be a way. “Well, what about motive? Anyone who knows me—us—knows Olivia and I love each other. I’d never harm her.”

  “Not for anything?”

  “No!”

  “Not for money?”

  “Why would I? I have money of my own.”

  “But she has more.”

  “She has—” I stopped, and felt my face drain of color.

  “You lost your inheritance today, did you not?” I knew he was just playing devil’s advocate. I knew it, and still I could see his point; how it would look to the rest of the world.

  “How did you know that?” I asked, my voice small.

  “I told you. You’re being watched.” He moved aside as I sank beside him on the bed. “By instruction of an unsigned note Olivia was handed the entire Archer legacy. Some people would see that as reason enough to kill.”

  “But I wouldn’t.”

  “You’re a fighter,” he pointed out. “Aggressive. A loose screw.”

  “So is half the fucking population, Warren! It doesn’t make me a killer!” I thought of Butch. “It doesn’t make me her killer.”

  “But you had motive. And you were there.”

  “So was Butch!”

  “You can’t prove it. You won’t prove it,” he corrected, before I could speak. “Our blood is like water. It soaks into the ground, it feeds the earth, but leaves no trace of ever having been shed. That’s why there won’t be a trace of Butch’s blood in your sister’s home. There won’t even be yours by now. Just Olivia’s. And your fingerprints.”

  I swallowed hard. “I thought you were going to help me.”

  “I am helping you. I’m telling you how it’s going to play out. By tomorrow morning this is going to be all over the television, in all of the newspapers. ‘Heiress Daughter Killed by Jealous Sister.’ Your face will be plastered in every newspaper in the country. You’ll be infamous.”

  I’d have been better off dead.

  “Or…”

  I glanced up at him sharply. “Or?”

  “Or I can take care of it for you. We can take care of it,” he corrected.

  “Can you bring her back?”

  “No.” His voice and expression gentled and the kindness softening his doe brown eyes almost killed me. I looked away. “But we can make sure the world doesn’t find out about what happened tonight. That’s our job. To protect the people of this city from those who would hurt them as Butch hurt Olivia. To make supernatural events appear normal. Ever hear the saying, ‘What you don’t know won’t hurt you’?”

  “I’ve never believed that.”

  He gave a slight shrug. “That’s because you didn’t know any different.”

  I stood gingerly, testing my legs, and returned to the dresser to study the woman I saw there. If she’d looked unfamiliar before, she looked downright foreign now.

  “They were setting me up,” I finally said, gazing at Warren through the mirror.

  He nodded. “That’s what they do.”

  “And what about you? Is that what you do?”

  “We work to counteract their acts, yes. Usually we’re a bit more successful than this.”

  A bitter laugh escaped me. I closed my eyes.

  “Look, I know it’s a lot to take in. Shit, it’s a lot even if you’ve been raised in this lifestyle, and there’s more yet”—he held up a hand when my lids flicked open—“but you have a decision to make, and you have to make it quickly. We need you, we want you in our organization, but you have to come willingly.”

  A superhero, I thought numbly. Good versus evil. Shadow agents. Paranormal battles. “I don’t know.”

  “Okay.” He blew out a long breath, and for the first time I saw the signs of fatigue weighing on his browned face and sunken shoulders. “Okay,” he repeated, “there is one thing I can do for you.”

  I stared at him through the mirror.

  “You have twelve hours before your scent returns. One thing about turning a conduit on its owner, it’s such strong magic that you can wander this earth like a ghost. That’s called the aureole. Neither mortals nor agents will be able to discern your presence unless you’re standing right in front of
them. It’s a gift. Like you don’t even exist.

  “My team can hold off until just after dawn. That’ll give you time to make a decision. Use it. Think about what I’ve said. You can refuse the offer, but once you do there’s nothing we can do to help you.”

  I nodded at last. “Thank you.”

  “I’ll wait here. Come back to me with your answer, or consider coming back to me as your answer. Otherwise…” He shrugged, and looked truly sorry. “You’re on your own.”

  9

  Even as a girl Olivia had a way of moving—through a room and through life—without settling very long in any one place, or at least never long enough to allow anything to really touch her. Some people thought her distracted, others called her flighty, but from a young age, watching her, I had named her Magic.

  Wasn’t it magic when a woman could maintain her childlike innocence long after her childhood was over? Or believe that tragedy was an anomaly and the world really was a good place? Or that all people, despite past deeds, were essentially good, and could be redeemed? No, no matter what happened—to me, to her, to our family—the hope in her eyes had never dimmed, and the surety in her smile never faltered.

  Of course, Olivia knew the effect she had on others. On men, in particular. I think she believed if it made someone happy to look at her, her job was to give them something fabulous to look at. Despite my disagreement, I was proud of her, and proud to be related to her. She was a pure light. A beacon as bright and compelling to others as a flame was to a bunch of flimsy-winged moths.

  Only one other person had burned that brightly in my life. But for reasons I never understood, Ben Traina had preferred the dark.

  I stumbled through the grid of familiar side streets, my eyes swollen and sandpaper dry, images of Olivia flailing in death caught like debris beneath my lids. My fatigue was so great it felt like a bowling ball was weighted on my shoulders. All the years of sweat and training and preparation had boiled down to this: I’d been useless under pressure. I’d been helpless, ineffective, deficient…and, as a consequence, Olivia was dead. Olivia was dead.

  Olivia was dead.

  Veering away from the Strip and the garish, flashing lights canvassing the sky, I crossed into the shadows, where apartments could be rented by the week, trash bins overflowed onto the sidewalks, and alleyways were tagged with scrawling obscenities. I noticed a vagrant asleep on some folded boxes and, thinking of Warren, stopped and leaned over him. I knew he was awake by the shallowness of his breath and by the way he shivered with the cold. I could even smell the dirty blade clutched in the fist he used as a pillow. But the man didn’t stir. He had no idea I was there, and the thought made me want to cry. Even here, among the darkest shadows in the city, I couldn’t hide from the person I’d become.

  That was when I knew. No matter how long or far I walked, there was no escaping this new reality. The scents of both the living and dead would continue to reach out to me, and meanwhile I would leave nothing of myself behind.

  Spotting a cab idling beneath a lamp post on Spencer Street, I crossed to it at an intersection where the night was deep enough to hide the condition of my clothing and the smudges of fatigue stamped beneath my eyes.

  “You on duty?” I asked, bending to address the driver through the open window. He jumped like a catfish yanked from the water.

  “Shit, lady! You scared the bejesus out of me!”

  “Sorry.”

  He nodded once, gruffly, swallowed to regain his composure, then stretched to see around me. “You alone?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, you look harmless enough.” He jerked his head toward the backseat. “Where you goin’?”

  I climbed in, read him the address from the back of the card Ben had given me earlier—God, had that only been this evening?—and tried to continue looking harmless. The driver glanced back at me every once in a while, as if to reassure himself I was still there, but he didn’t try to talk, and the silence stretched between us, like the lights that elongated and snapped through the windows as we skimmed along the surface streets.

  I wondered how harmless he’d consider me if I told him I knew he’d just finished a cigarette, and that less than an hour before he’d eaten a hot dog, with relish and mustard, along with a Diet Coke. Prior to dressing for work, he’d also had a quick, nonsweaty bout of sex, presumably with the woman whose ring he wore on his left hand. I looked at the dashboard and the license holding his name and photo. Ted Harris had a dog, but no children. He also had a gun tucked beneath his seat.

  I could smell all of it on him.

  “I think this is it,” I said. He jerked at my voice.

  We pulled up to the house and I paid him with bills Warren had pressed on me before I left the motel. A homeless man with a wad of twenties in his pocket, I thought, shaking my head. Only in Vegas.

  “Can you wait? Just in case no one’s home?” I asked, handing him the money through the open window. He took it gingerly, careful not to touch my fingers.

  “Sure, lady,” he said, but I didn’t need to see the way his eyes flickered to tell it was a lie. I could smell the perspiration trailing down his neck. Sure enough, as soon as I started up the driveway, the wheels of the cab screeched from the curb and I was left in a cloud of burning rubber and exhaust.

  I tried not to take it personally.

  The house was not one of the newer tract homes, with their pastel stuccoed exteriors and five feet of space between one neighbor and the next. Ben couldn’t have lived that close to another family, I don’t think. He wasn’t even that close to his own family.

  No, this was one of the boxy wood-paneled homes that’d gone up in the seventies, before land was so valuable the builders halved it, then halved it again, and Ben’s sprawling lawn and towering pines were a testament to that more generous era. Though paint could be seen peeling from the faux wood shutters, the window boxes were full of perennials, bright despite the winter chill, and the smell of fresh mulch—clean and damp and musky—reached out to me as I passed colorful pots of bronze and orange mums, dual sentries standing guard at the bottom of the concrete porch.

  I paused when I got to the front door, wondering what I was really doing here. Sex was the last thing on my mind. What I truly wanted was sleep; to drift away on a tide of dreams, and wake to find that this night had been a nightmare. One that could be chalked up to something simple, like eating too close to bedtime. Reality, however, was that I had five hours left to decide whether I wanted to be some sort of twenty-first-century heroine—fighting crime on a paranormal plane against other superhuman beings, for God’s sake—or if I could somehow prevent being convicted of killing my own sister.

  Tough fucking choice.

  So, I raised my hand to knock, paused again, and tried the handle instead. It gave easily, with a soft snitch of the latch, and I was admitted into the womb of Ben’s home. Come, he had said. And then he’d left the door open so I could. Once inside, I was careful to lock the door behind me.

  If I’d found Ben intoxicating before—the scent of him, the taste and the touch—my new enhanced senses sent my mind to whirling as soon as I entered his house. He was everywhere, and for a moment I grew so dizzy I had to lean against a wall to catch my breath. God, but he spoke to me. Ben Traina was so wound up in my soul, so intertwined with my past and the young girl I’d started out as—full of hope and innocence—that I think a part of me was expecting to find her here, as well as him. As I looked around his house, at his things, I knew that’s why I’d come. Ben was the only person left who knew me as I was really meant to be.

  I did nothing to disturb the silence of the house, moving quietly through the dining room and kitchen, knowing Ben was here, somewhere, sleeping. I couldn’t help but try to scent out another woman’s presence, even if it were just a whiff of perfume long gone stale as weeks, and hopefully months, had rolled by. There was none. Just Ben, and the verdant scent from the small jungle of houseplants shooting leafy shadows at me i
n the dim half-light. A relieved sigh escaped me as I slipped into the living room. Halfway through, however, I stopped.

  Ben, it seemed, had been doing a little reminiscing. By the gray light filtering in through a large picture window, I saw an empty bottle of Corona sitting on the coffee table, and an empty glass beside it, which still smelled of yeast and—if I inhaled deeply enough—Ben’s mouth. Next to these lay an open photo album, and I skirted the table to the other side and tilted my head, leaning in for a closer look.

  There were twelve pictures in all, both sides of the open album filled. They’d been taken at different times and places, with different cameras, including the one Ben had given me for my fourteenth birthday, the one that had begun my passion for photography. The first photo taken with that camera lay on the page in front of me, a frozen moment that captured the girl I had once been.

  “I knew you’d be here,” I whispered to her.

  Of the others, only one drew my full attention, and I slipped it from its sleeve, hands trembling slightly, and made my way over to the window for better light. This had been taken with the same camera, though the subject was three women instead of one. Three Archers.

  Olivia was barely a teen, captured with a blinding smile, the baby fat still high on her smooth cheeks, though the woman she would soon become could already be seen peering out from behind shining eyes. I was next to Olivia, and my image was such a stark contrast to the mirrored one I’d faced earlier that night that I immediately turned my attention to the third woman, staring up at me through the glow of the streetlight.

  Zoe Archer was an amalgamation of Olivia and I. Dimples that flashed, Olivia’s; a watchful expression, mine. A wide and easy smile. Olivia’s. An attentiveness bordering on paranoia. Mine. Her red hair was all her own, though, and sunlight flashed golden in the strands, while the freckles dotting her nose made her look impish. Despite, I thought, the flint in her eyes.