The Scent of Shadows sotz-1

by Vicki Pettersson

  “Not return it. Unbalance it. Hunt them down. Obliterate the enemy, destroy them all. Use my gifts to do it, but I don’t know how.”

  She ignored the rising question in my last remark. “And who is the enemy?”

  “Ajax. A man named Joaquin. The Tulpa. There are others. I’ve smelled them, but I don’t know them. And…”

  “And?”

  “The enemy is inside of me also.”

  “No, Olivia, it doesn’t—”

  “Yes, Greta. It does.” My voice deepened, like an instrument someone else was strumming. I stirred, jerking my head side to side. “I must destroy the Shadow within and without.”

  “Shh. Let’s take a step back now. Listen to my voice, and follow the words. Are you with me?” She paused for my sleepy nod. “Good. Now, think. What experience will most help you in unbalancing the Shadow? What will allow you the vengeance you spoke to me about? What will help you restore the agents of Light to the Zodiac?”

  “Krav Maga,” I answered without hesitation. “The skills I learned after Joaquin destroyed me the first time.”

  Again, that press of questioning silence, before she went on. “And what was that like?”

  I shivered, the memory sweeping through me. “Cold. So cold after, when the scorpions crawled over me, but didn’t sting. They knew I was dead. They scuttled away, legs mired in my blood.” I shivered again, then stilled. “But she found me and warmed me. She gave her own power and gifts over to me. So I would survive it. And avenge it.”

  “Who, Olivia?”

  “My mother.” I smiled. And I remembered. One day, when the time comes, you’ll understand I didn’t leave. I fled. “Ah, I see now. I understand.”

  “Focus, Olivia. Listen to my voice,” Greta commanded. “What gifts did she give you? What will allow you to battle the Shadow side?”

  I didn’t answer. Instead, I saw my mother’s face floating directly above me, her hair falling like golden-red curtains over her cheeks, eyes burning with hot, furious tears.

  “Olivia?” Greta questioned.

  My mother’s mouth moved, three words fired like shots over the bow. I love you.

  “Olivia!” Greta again, panicked now.

  “Love,” I answered simply, realizing I’d carried it with me all this time. “She gave me complete and unconditional love.”

  And the dam gave way. The memories I’d blocked so successfully for so long flooded my brain, the rush of them deafening in my ears, and I was borne on their tide back in time. Back to the hospital again; to the machines, tubes, painkillers, and stitches. Back with the bruises and the swelling, the torn fingernails and the rope burns still buried in my neck. Back to birth of my second life cycle. Back, I thought, when I was sixteen years old.

  I turned my head and she was there, next to me. Not just hair and haunted eyes, but the whole of my mother; body and essence, skin and aura. I stared, drinking in her features; the freckles standing out defiantly on a button nose, the pressing of delicate bones beneath too-pale skin, a scar I’d always meant to ask her about. She swept shiny fingertips across my face and gently smoothed back my hair.

  “Sleep,” she said, and somewhere in the back of my mind I knew my mouth had moved, the command and voice issuing from my throat, my memory. I settled deeper into myself, obeying her.

  “Olivia?” Greta’s voice was far off and wary, no longer authoritative or sure. She was right to be alarmed. My mother’s voice had taken over.

  “I’m going to show you who I am, who you are,” I said in my mother’s voice, as she had once said to me, “who you will be someday.”

  She leaned over me, hair swinging delicately over my bloodless cheeks, blue eyes boring into mine. “Because you will survive this. It has been foretold. You will fulfill the first sign of the Zodiac. You will rise again as our Kairos.”

  Then she put her soft lips to my chapped ones, and resuscitated my soul. Desert sage—blooms sagging, but stalks strong, as though wet with a summer monsoon—infiltrated my senses. The juice from a fig cacti, which kept knowledgeable predators alive in the desert, trickled down my throat, coating my belly. I breathed in a homey spice, like cinnamon but stronger, and it numbed my skin from the inside out so that every muscle in my body simultaneously relaxed.

  Then there was the exotic and redolent scent of the womb where I’d once lived. It smelled like night-blooming flowers, and the wind across the bright side of the moon. I recognized it immediately, and inhaled deeply. She gave me more. As all great mothers do, she gave me all. “See? You can taste the Light in another person. Now store this power deep inside of you. Because he’ll come for you again.”

  “Olivia!”

  Greta’s voice had my mother looking up. She frowned, annoyed at the invisible interruption, before rising and heading toward the door. She looked back at me only once, one hand braced on the door frame, a petite and powerful figure eyeing me with fierce love and resigned determination. “Watch Olivia. She’ll show you how to survive.”

  And she was gone. Again.

  “Tell me your true identity,” Greta demanded, entering the hospital room through the portal she’d opened in my mind. Her outline snapped with power, like sparklers bursting to life along her skin, but I merely looked at her, words tumbling like dice through my mind. Goddess, bitch, whore, mother, daughter, sister, friend…

  I could be any and all of those things, but I picked out my titles like selecting fruit from a vendor’s stall. Enemy, I thought, picking it up, taking a bite, finding it sweet. Huntress, I thought, adding it to the other. Once the prey, now the predator. I pocketed that one, saving it for later.

  “Tell me who you are!”

  “Can’t you see?” I turned my head to face Greta, still lingering uncertainly by the doorway to my hospital room, and I smiled. I knew from her gasp that I wasn’t supposed to be asking the questions, but I suddenly had all the answers. Hearing footsteps in the hall, I leaned to peer around Greta. “Look, see how my aura precedes me? See the barbed texture of my soul? The vessel is fierce, is it not? My mind is bathed in crimson.”

  In a full panic now, the mind-Greta whirled, shifting so her back was to the wall. Her whisper wobbled. Her hands fumbled, doing something behind her back. “Tell me your name.”

  The answer was heavy in my mouth, numbing the tip of my tongue. I gasped with its weight, and my eyes burst open with my mouth. “I am the Archer!”

  And like an arrow loosed from a bow that’d been held too taut, too long, the woman I should have been winged past the last ten years like a fiery comet, plowing into me with all the knowledge I’d been born—and buried—with. The knowledge of the Archer, the Zodiac…and my place in it.

  A second pair of eyes opened up behind my own, blinked wonderingly, then crinkled as a smile lifted one side of my mouth. Alternate ears, with drums tunneling down into my soul, popped as if the pressure on them had finally been released. New taste buds exploded on my tongue, and every pore in my skin hummed to life, making me more attuned to the particles weighing down the air than I’d even been before. My sixth sense had returned. It had taken a decade, but I was finally healed.

  I rose.

  A crash, the sound of glass shattering on the floor, and Greta was backed up against the far wall of her room, a vial shattered at her feet. The transition from the hospital room I’d been imagining and Greta’s chamber was abrupt, but I was still my dream self, my real self, a predator haloed in red. I smiled as I turned my head to meet her eyes. She looked afraid, and I was sorry for that, but I wanted a mirror. I wanted to see for myself.

  “How did you do that?” Greta asked as I swiped a damp tendril of hair from my cheek. She nearly had her face under control again, a mild sort of worry pressing in on her delicate brow, but her voice was searching, and just sharp enough to cut through the thin webbing of resistance left by the hypnosis. “I put you under. You’re not supposed to be able to come out of it without my assistance.”

  “I’ve been under fo
r a long time, Greta.” I stretched, like awakening from a long nap, and studied my reflection in the dresser mirror across from me. The color was still there, not the vibrant crimson of my dreaming state, but a banked flame like a burner set to low. It was warm and steady, and this time I knew it would never go out. “It was long past time to wake up.”

  And I felt refreshed. My pores drank in the air, and the room appeared brighter. Greta was tinged in a sallow green, though; her fear, I guessed, and again I was sorry for that. I inhaled deeply, then jerked back, frowning. “What’s that smell?”

  “I—I couldn’t reach you. I was drawing a syringe to bring you out of the trance chemically.” She waved a hand at the glass littering the floor, one side of her mouth lifting wryly. “Turns out I didn’t need it after all.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “I can smell the enzymes in it. I can also smell your perfume without even inhaling. Isn’t that funny? It’s like I can breathe through my pores.” I turned from studying the glow of my aura in the mirror, and caught the fear in her eyes. Smiling, I went to her and took her face in my hands. “Don’t be afraid, Greta. I no longer am.”

  And I left the room after that, with Greta gaping as I trailed confidence and knowledge and power like a silken red cloak behind me.

  22

  Doors that won’t open, elevators that won’t come when you call…they’ll come now.

  Intending to test this theory, I entered a locker room almost oppressive in its silence, my heels clicking sharply on the cement floor. The lockers fanned around me like sentinels guarding the perimeter of the circular room, and there was the faint hum of energy coursing through the illuminated emblems. My eyes went immediately to the centaur, glowing steadily and reassuring in a soft green neon.

  I tried to ignore the five dormant signs, but Warren’s admission kept sneaking up on me—ten agents, not five, had been murdered in the past few months—and the unlit glyphs belonging to those agents looked like bullet holes to me. Soundless, colorless, empty voids where no light could penetrate as long as their deaths remained unavenged.

  Dragged from the recesses of a broken mind, the true memory of my mother made me believe that I could do that. Avenge them. I turned my attention back to my locker. Whatever was inside this steel trash bin was going to help me be the woman she’d given her life for me to be. It would teach me how to be the Archer. It would help me create a safe place for myself in this world again.

  So forgetting about the empty eyes of the fallen star signs bowing around me, I put my hand to the palm plate. The button in the middle lit up in a red, inviting square.

  “Just so you know,” I said, whispering into the locker’s horizontal slats, “the answer to my own life’s mysteries aren’t inside of you. They’re inside of me.” I pressed the button, a bittersweet smile touching my face. “My name is Joanna. I’m the Archer of Light.”

  And as easy as that, a click, and the latch released. I shook my head. All I’d had to do was take a trip down into myself…and come back as a different person.

  The photo Warren had shoved in the day before wasn’t lying at the bottom of the locker as expected, but was taped to the inside of the door, along with three others, and my breath caught as I viewed the four together.

  The first was of my family as I once knew it. My mother, bent forward, one arm around Olivia, another around me. We were all wearing matching smiles, and it looked like we were at Disneyland. Xavier was in the picture too, but he was relegated to the background, arms folded resolutely across his chest, studying the domestic scene as if wondering who those people were. His impatience with the moment was set in his shoulders, though I couldn’t read his expression. His face had been cut from the photo.

  The second was of my mother alone, obviously taken at the sanctuary. She wore a black bodysuit that clung to the muscles of her able body, her bright hair gathered high atop her head, arms stretched forward as she aimed some sort of weapon at an invisible enemy. Her face wore an expression I’d never seen before—determination, hatred, strength—and I smiled looking at it.

  Then Ben’s picture, a smile lifting one side of his mouth as he slept, dreaming of a future that would never be. I traced his jaw in the photo, remembered how it’d felt beneath my fingertips. This photo would also serve as a reminder that some loved ones had to stay tucked safely away. My mother had taught me that much.

  Finally, Zoe with another woman. Their arms were thrown about one another’s shoulders, and they were laughing into the camera, looking impossibly young. It meant nothing to me, but it obviously had to her, so it would remain.

  The only remaining item was nestled in the corner on the floor, a small package wrapped in brown postal paper, secured with aging twine, with a note tucked between the folds of the paper. I weighed it in my hand. Sturdy and small—the length and width of one palm—it was weighty for its size. Removing the note for later, I ripped open the packaging.

  “Ha!” I laughed in triumph. My mother’s conduit. I glanced back up at the photo, compared the two weapons, and mimicked her stance. My conduit. Thumb-sized arrows were lined in a chamber much like a gun’s, waiting to be cocked. Flat-headed, the bowstring was made of some shiny and supple wire, while the body of the weapon shone like onyx stone. Anxious to see what she’d said, I fumbled with the accompanying note, addressed to: The Archer.

  They’re coming for me. I’ve foreseen it. To keep me from speaking truth they’ll take away my voice. Help me. My eyes for your voice? Speak, and I’ll show you the way to redemption. To the outside world. To the traitor.

  I gasped. This couldn’t have been written by my mother. I started over, noticing this time the crispness of the paper before my eyes fell to the signature, an initial only, the letter T. It was followed by a postscript.

  Look behind you.

  A hand fell on my shoulder. I yelped and whirled around, automatically tucking the conduit behind me.

  “You got it open,” Vanessa said, jerking her head at the locker. Chandra, to her left, said nothing, but her jaw clenched convulsively.

  I shifted to stand in front of her, and she stiffened when I shot her a knowing look. “Well, someone delivered a little package to my room earlier, and it kept me from sleeping. So I thought I’d come up and give this a try again. Funny, isn’t it? That something meant to hurt me led me to this?”

  Chandra’s cheek twitched. “Congratulations,” she said, but I could tell by the dark violet hue ringing her body that she didn’t mean it.

  Vanessa cleared her throat and pointed at the note clutched in front of me. “What’s that?”

  “Just a note from my mother,” I lied, turning away to tuck it back into the wrapping with the conduit. I settled the package in the locker and was swinging the door shut when Chandra stopped me.

  “Hey! It’s Tekla!” She pointed to the photo of my mother and her friend, which answered the question as to who the other woman in the photo was. And, I thought, might answer who the note was from as well. Who else but a woman with the Sight would speak of lending me her eyes?

  In exchange for my voice, I corrected mentally, as Chandra and Vanessa crowded in closer. But what was I supposed to say on her behalf? And to whom? The knowledge was emerging inside me, I could feel it like the stirring of bees in a hive, but it was deep still, too remote to be understood. But…

  There’s a traitor among us.

  I swallowed hard. That wasn’t just the babbling of a madwoman, I thought. Tekla had known this was coming, and wanted my help.

  “Your mother was beautiful,” Vanessa said, turning to me. “I’ve always loved that photo.”

  My brows lifted before I could stop them. “You’ve seen it before?”

  “Oh, sure. That’s one of her trading cards.” She shrugged, and tucked a loose curl behind her ear. “I guess she liked it as well.”

  “It seems so,” I agreed, while nervousness grew inside me. I didn’t really know either of these women, and since I was still trying to figure out
what was so important about the items in this container, their studied gazes made me feel exposed. As if they were looking inside of me as well.

  A traitor. Among us.

  “What’s that?” Chandra asked, pointing at the package, providing the opening I needed. With a flick of my wrist I slammed the locker shut.

  “Nothing,” I said coolly, and leaned against the door. It was nicely symbolic, if I did say so myself. “What’re you guys doing up here?”

  “Nothing,” Chandra said, her voice like arctic ice.

  “You guys,” Vanessa sighed wearily, and left to open her own locker.

  “I don’t have time for this,” Chandra muttered, heading back to the exit. “Meet you down there, okay, V?”

  Vanessa nodded and rummaged around in her locker. “Tell the others. Just because Warren’s gone doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.”

  “You got it.” Chandra left, and now I was staring at Vanessa.

  “What do you mean he’s gone?” I asked, coming closer.

  Vanessa shot me an irritated glance, and waved me out of her light. She’d sunk to the floor and was holding a rag in one hand and a can of oil in the other, alternately polishing and squirting at a steel club the width and length of my forearm. There was another piece of metal at her side that looked like nothing so much as a large nail file, but I didn’t know for sure. More superhuman toys, and I’d had my fill for a while.

  “I mean, he left an hour ago to retrieve Gregor,” she said, bending close to her work. “If he’s made the crossing, they’ll be back soon. Otherwise they’ll wait for dawn.”

  I bit my bottom lip, wishing I’d gotten to see Warren one more time before he’d left. I could’ve shown him this note. And with us linked the way we were, he’d have known what happened to me in Greta’s office as soon as he saw me. With just a look, one sniff, he’d know I was someone he could trust. We could have figured this out together.

  Instead, I stood in frustrated impotence before Vanessa, all the newly acquired power and energy swirling in my bloodstream, flowing in my bones, straightening my spine…and with nothing to do with it. I sighed, attracting Vanessa’s attention.