“I have three questions for you,” I said, my voice low but steady. “If I like the answers, I’ll go with you.”
A smile began to spread across his face, but I stalled it with a shake of my head. If I liked the answers.
“First, there was something Butch said to me right before midnight. Before the metamorphosis. He said I was hidden in plain sight.” I tilted my head. “What did he mean when he said ‘Xavier’s daughter, no less’?”
“Ah.” Warren spread his palms out on the table before him. “Well, he was right. Only someone as canny and talented as your mother could have pulled it off.” He leaned forward. “See, while superhuman in some areas, we still have to operate in the mortal realm. We’re bound by all the natural laws—gravity, time, place—so our job is to make other, more fluid boundaries appear normal. And we need mortals for that.”
“A front? Like when the mob used to run the casinos as a cover for money laundering?”
“Exactly! Spoken like a true Vegas girl,” he said, peering up at me in the growing light of dawn. “And in return for this guise, we give these human allies support. Sometimes it’s a transfer of power, convincing other mortals to give him or her an important place in society. Sometimes it’s a bit of physical strength where there was none before. I know of at least one mortal who won a gold medal in the last Olympics because of it. And then there are those who ask for—”
“Money,” I finished for him.
“Money,” he repeated, nodding. “Xavier is your true father’s chief contact in the mortal world. His pet, if you like. He provides a cover for the Shadow side, allowing them to exist and operate on the mortal plane, and in return he is provided all the wealth he could ever desire.”
“So by marrying Xavier, my mother was looking to infiltrate the wolf pack.”
“By marrying Xavier,” Warren corrected, “your mother was living in the wolf ’s den. And you? Everyone believed you were really Xavier’s daughter.”
It explained a lot. Xavier’s meteoric and unprecedented financial rise in the world of gaming. The pitfalls experienced by anyone who challenged his supremacy. It also explained the unmarked, unsigned note he’d received earlier in the week, and his complete unwillingness to question its origin. It came, after all, from his benefactor.
I shook my head slowly. That asshole had been a part of it all along. He’d sold his soul for money, and in doing so, contributed to his own daughter’s death.
“So, theoretically speaking,” I said, “if I did join your forces and the Zodiac troop become more powerful as a result, this would help bring Xavier down?”
“Definitely. In fact, anything with the enemy’s emblem would be open to ruin. In times of strength, like now, it’s a sign of victory. Otherwise, it’s a target.”
I frowned. “What’s his emblem?”
Warren looked amused. “He’s your mirror opposite in the astrological chart, Jo. The Shadow side of the Zodiac. Anything with the word Archer on it belongs to him.”
“So it’s like a brand?”
“It is. It warns, and it protects.” Which put Xavier under the protection of my enemy. Who knew it was possible to feel even more animosity toward the man? “What’s your second question?”
I glanced down at the photo on the table before meeting Warren’s eye. “Where is she?”
“Your mother?” He shrugged, though his shoulders had stiffened. “In hiding.”
“But she’s alive? You’re sure?” and when he nodded, I said, “But you can’t tell me where?”
“I don’t know where. Nobody does.” He paused, as if caught between two thoughts, but his expression quickly shuttered and he hurried on. “If the Shadow Archer knew where Zoe was, he’d be after her in a shot.”
“He hates her that much?”
“He hates us all, but yes,” he said softly, eyes filled with some memory. “He hates Zoe even more.”
I wanted to know why. What had she done to incur such long-held wrath? But more important right now was my third question. I took a deep breath. If Zoe had married Xavier to infiltrate the enemy’s key organization, then what had forced her to leave? I looked at the man in front of me—both crazed and sane, open and guarded, helpful and hard—and the only one who might know. Then I asked him the hardest question of all. “Was this man, my real father, responsible for the attack on me when I was sixteen?”
Warren opened his mouth, shut it again, then swallowed hard. “Yes.”
Even expecting it, the truth hit me like a lead bar. Squeezing my eyes shut, I pinched the bridge of my nose between forefinger and thumb and shook my head. My blood father had had me attacked. Raped. Left for dead.
“My mother slept with this guy?” My voice cracked.
“He didn’t know you were his daughter. He still doesn’t. It…it’s complicated,” Warren said, in what was, perhaps, the understatement of the year. “And it’s not my story to tell.”
I stared at him for a long while, then nodded and returned my attention to the table. “Okay, just one more question, then. What’s the worst that can happen? To you, I mean. What would happen if these…Shadows won? If they succeeded in wiping out your troop?”
Warren’s Adam’s apple bobbed at the thought, and the other man shifted uncomfortably on the bed. They shared a look, a whole conversation passing between them in that short glance before Warren turned back to me. “Chaos, Joanna. Sodom and Gomorrah stuff. What do you think happened there? What happens whenever all lusts and baser evils go unchecked? Every man for himself. Society disintegrates, mortals become enslaved to their baser emotions. And the Shadows? They are their captors.”
I stood still and silent for another good minute before saying anything. At last I returned to the photo I’d thrown down in front of him and pointed to Zoe, the woman I’d once thought lost to me forever. “This man, this Archer, has cost me my mother.
“My sister,” I continued, moving my finger to Olivia, who really was.
“And my innocence.” I pointed to myself, then picked up the photo and handed it to him. “This city is all I have left.”
Warren looked at it for a moment before glancing up. “You realize you’d be entering a whole new realm, don’t you? A different reality. More than one, actually.”
“My reality’s already different.”
“We kill these people, these Shadows, Joanna. That’s what you’d be signing up for.”
People like Butch and Ajax. People who sent madmen after little girls in the desert. “I got it, Warren.”
“And do you think you could kill your own father if given the chance?” I nodded once. “In cold blood?”
“I’ve trained my whole life for it,” I said, and even though I’d always told myself my training had been for defense, this was the truth.
Finally, after what seemed like forever, Warren nodded. “I can give you that chance.”
“And so the hunter becomes the hunted.” I smiled wryly as I threw his own words back at him, and held out a hand to shake. “You’ve got yourself a heroine.”
Warren ignored the hand. Instead, with tears suddenly springing into his eyes, he leapt from his chair and plowed full force into my arms. I staggered backward, and the other man, silent all this time, caught my eye over Warren’s shoulder and shrugged.
“Okay, okay,” I said, pulling away. “Sheesh.”
“Did you hear? The first sign has come to pass,” Warren said, turning to the other man. “She’ll do it. She’ll join us.”
The man simply nodded. He was beefy, but not in the hard way that Butch had been. More like Santa Claus, I supposed, if Santa had lived in Vegas.
Warren turned back to face me. “This is our witness from the troop’s council. He’s just here to make sure you’re joining us of your own free will, and haven’t been coerced in any way.”
I looked at him blankly. “You’re joking, right?”
“Under any direct duress from me, I mean.” He smiled self-consciously, wringing his h
ands. “I didn’t twist your arm or knock you around or anything, did I?”
“No.” I turned to the man. “He didn’t.”
“Good enough for you?” Warren asked impatiently. The man nodded and rose. Ah, there was the difference between him and Santa. He was nearly seven feet tall. “Oh, but where are my manners? Micah, this is Joanna. Jo, Micah.”
How did I know he wouldn’t have a nice, normal name like Bob or Joe? “Nice to meet you,” I said, holding out a hand.
Micah, the behemoth, finally spoke. “I hope you still feel that way when you wake up.”
“Wake up?”
The blow came from the side, and caught me on the back of my neck. My legs folded neatly beneath me, and as my eyes rolled into my head I saw Micah looming above me with a steel baton in his hand. I had only a second to think he was faster than he looked before Warren caught me beneath the arms, his lips close to my ear.
“Remember,” I heard him say, “we all become who we need to in order to survive.”
Then his voice, his image, and his scent all swam away on a final wave of incoherence and mercifully dulling pain.
10
The dreams a person has while unconscious are not the same as when they’re asleep. They’re more like something from a Bradbury novel, a carnival ride with ominous portents and sinister beings waiting to take siege of your soul. My dreams were like that now, shadowy, one slithering into another, carrying snatches of oblique conversations I’d never had and images of faces I’d never seen.
“More to the left,” I heard someone say urgently. “That’s not how it is in the picture, see? It has to be perfect.”
A masked face loomed over me, eyes concerned and considering, before it drew back and fluorescent lights blinded me again. “She will be perfect.”
No less unnerving were the tattered flashes of things I had seen, but combined in new scenes and settings, like a horror film saddled with an alternate ending.
There was Olivia, eyes shooting open to pierce me from her deathbed on the ground nine stories below me. Her skin was bleached white, and all of her blood had pooled in a heart-shaped lake around her broken body. Her gaze wide and imploring, she posed the one question I couldn’t answer.
“Why am I dead?” I struggled to reach out to her, but was whisked away, her parting words ringing in my ears. “Why me and not you?”
Xavier caught me from above. His grip was steel around my biceps, and as much as I thrashed I couldn’t escape him. He dragged me to him, opening his mouth wide to swallow me whole. “Zoe left you too.”
Then I was running, fighting for air as I fled through a dark desert night. I felt the sharp sting of tumbleweeds against my shins, my ankles turning over on themselves as I ran blindly into boulders and stones, barely keeping out of reach of an unseen fleet-footed pursuer. He—and it was a he—didn’t speak at all. Instead his voice invaded my brain by other means, slithering inside, not so much a snake’s hiss as the rattle of its tail. “I should have killed you the first time…”
I woke with a start, breathing hard. The room was dim, though not completely dark, and daylight peered at me through long slats in the window shades. I spied a lumpy outline in the corner of the room, and felt my mouth twitch. Warren, I thought woodenly. I was going to kick his ass.
“You know, you’re not funny,” I said, causing him to jump. He straightened in his chair, rubbing a long hand over his eyes, and stretched loudly. “You think you’re funny, but you’re not.”
He held up a hand as he rose. “Don’t hate.”
“Too late.” Yawning widely, I lifted a hand to rub over my eyes, but discovered it was too heavy, too far from my face, and too much trouble to complete the movement. Which was odd. Yet having had the distinct displeasure of a lengthy hospital visit once before, I recognized the lethargy as being chemically induced, some sort of painkiller probably. The question was, why had they drugged me? “What am I doing here?”
“Recovering,” Warren answered, standing at my side. “And hiding.”
“Are they after me?” My heart fluttered beneath my breastbone. “Can you smell me again?”
“Shh, don’t worry. You’re in isolation. Nobody outside this room can sense your pheromones. It’s like…you don’t even exist.”
I took a tentative whiff. All I smelled was hospital; drugs, antiseptic, and the type of cleanliness that erases not only bad odors, but good alike. It was a clean I’d hoped to never experience again. I looked at Warren. “There’s nothing. I can’t smell me at all.”
“I can.” He smiled, perching himself bedside. He’d taken off the long duster that made him look like some demented cowboy, wore a simple khaki T-shirt and fatigues, and his hair was pulled back, the matting tightly bound to his head. Each time I saw him, he looked a bit more reputable. Scary.
Closing his eyes, he inhaled deeply, like he was bending over a rose instead of a body. “You, but more so. The unscented thread now blends in with the rest of your genetic makeup. It’s beautiful, really. Lit up like some life-saving beacon…if you’ll excuse the visual analogy.”
I closed my eyes and breathed, casting my thoughts downward, inward. Nothing. After several seconds I looked at him again. “So it’s like an identifying trait? Like, I don’t know, permanent perfume?”
“More like the vein that runs through a particularly strong wedge of blue cheese.”
“Thanks a lot.” Just when I started liking the guy. “So, when do I get to go home?”
He rose from the bed. I narrowed my eyes. It looked like he was putting distance between himself and me. “There’s no easy way to tell you this, Joanna, so I’m just going to say it.” My heart did that little flutter again as he took a deep breath. “You’re dead. You’ve been dead for just over a week.”
“Dead-dead?” I asked hollowly. “Really dead?”
“Well, obviously you’re here, but as far as the mortal world is concerned, yes,” Warren said. “Your funeral is tomorrow. I’ve saved you the newspaper clippings from the last week.”
He motioned to the papers stacked on the bedside tray, and I glanced over to see my face staring up from the top copy, with the headline heiress joanna archer plummets to death. The byline, dated four days ago, posed the question of whether it’d been foul play or if I’d leapt from the midtown apartment. I dropped my head back, unwilling to read any more.
I was dead, I thought numbly. I no longer existed. And I felt strangely well for the experience.
“If I’m dead,” I finally said, “then who am I?”
I motioned down the length of my body, wincing when my hand brushed against my chest. Gasping with as much surprise as pain, I looked down, gasped again, and clutched both breasts in my hands—what I could fit into them, anyway. They were extraordinarily sore, with a tenderness that had less to do with the natural flux of the moon than a surgeon’s steel and, apparently, some huge creative license. The drugs had kept me from feeling the ache before, but I sure felt it now.
“What have you done?” I cried, holding them tenderly. I don’t think I’d ever heard my own voice so breathy and panicked. Then, brain cells and synapses firing rapidly, another thought occurred. I hadn’t actually ever heard my voice this high-pitched before either. I tried it again. “La, la, la, la…mother fucker!”
Horrified, I glared at Warren. “You’ve changed my voice!”
“And your breasts,” he said, pointing out the obvious with what I considered a great deal of misplaced pride. I glared, and he took another step backward. Just then Micah entered the room, halting inside the doorway. I lowered my chin and narrowed my eyes.
“You knocked me out,” I said accusingly, before turning on Warren again. “And you let him!”
“Well, we couldn’t have a dead woman walking about town, could we?” Warren said, like that was a reasonable argument.
“You told me you would take care of it! You said you’d clean up and make sure I wasn’t in trouble.”
“And we
did,” Warren argued, crossing his arms. “You can’t be charged with a crime, because the only one dead is you.”
“But I don’t want to be dead!” I screeched in some other person’s voice. What was I supposed to do now? Only come out at night? Suck blood or haunt the living?
Warren looked insulted. “Sorry, but it was the only thing I could come up with on the spur of the moment. We had to do something to keep you out of jail, not to mention alive, so we brought you here.”
I looked around. Where was here? It looked like a normal hospital room; uncomfortable bed, machines that made beeping noises. Really bad wallpaper.
“You’re in a private facility just outside of town,” Micah said, confirming my thoughts. “I work here.”
“You’re a doctor?” I asked, eyeing his sausage-fingers and substantial girth. He looked more like a pit bull in a lab coat.
“Micah takes all the cases that might send up red flags among the mortal physicians,” Warren said. “He’s an absolute genius with the scalpel.”
Why did I have the feeling the line between genius and mad scientist was frighteningly thin here?
I shut my eyes and dropped my head back onto the pillow. Maybe this was one of those dreams I’d been having. Any moment now I was going to wake up and be myself, and Warren would still be a bum, and Micah some bartender pulling the caps off bottles of Bud. Because I really could use a beer about now.
“That’s right,” Micah said, causing the dream to implode upon itself. I felt him palm my chin, turning it side to side. “I performed all the work on you myself, and did a bang-up job if I do say so myself.”
“Why are you touching my face?” My eyes flew open. “Why is he touching my face?”
Warren looked chagrined. Micah looked surprised. He too glanced at Warren. “You mean you haven’t told her yet?”
“Told me what?”
Warren chuckled lightly, a sound tinged with nerves, and had me jerking my head sharply in his direction. “Actually, I was just getting around to it.”
“Aw, shit,” I said in my foreign voice to no one in particular. “Do I dare look in a mirror?”
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