The Scent of Shadows sotz-1

by Vicki Pettersson

  The past six months had stripped her of her voice, and like a rewound tape, she began spouting all she’d seen while locked in her five-by-eight cell. It would take a while to catch up, but time was something we didn’t have.

  Warren’s voice had fallen quiet inside me, and I didn’t need a psychic to tell me that Ajax was behind the stillness. I felt it as clearly as if I possessed the Sight. He’d silenced Warren to try and keep us from tracking him further, but hadn’t killed him outright. No, that was still the carrot dangling on a stick.

  Which meant there was only one thing to do.

  “Find a way to get me up the chute without frying,” I told Hunter, “and I can find Warren.”

  A short argument ensued between those who thought I should stay put versus those who believed I shouldn’t, but ultimately what it came down to was this: the others were marked, and I wasn’t. I was linked to Warren, and they weren’t. And, finally, if I really was Warren’s beloved Kairos, I couldn’t be killed today, or anytime soon.

  But if he was wrong? I thought as I headed back to my mother’s room in the troop’s barracks. If I wasn’t the person they all thought I was? Well, then they’d need Warren far more than they needed me. He was the troop leader. He could train the next generation. He could find the true Kairos.

  But that didn’t mean I’d go down without a fight.

  Sliding open the closet doors, I decided my mother had the fiercest wardrobe ever. Literally. Arranged on evenly spaced hangers were tops, slacks, and single-piece stretch suits in varying weights of silk, spandex, and leather. The uniformity came in two colors only, black or charcoal gray, with a hand that shimmered at the touch. This material, Warren had explained, would not burn through at the flaring of a glyph.

  “Olivia would tremble with jealousy,” I murmured, running my fingers over the fine material. I wasn’t exactly steady myself, though that was probably nerves rather than reverence. After all, when my mother suited up, she at least had an idea of what she’d been about to face. I simply assumed I was facing the worst.

  With the thought that this ensemble would be featured on the next series of Light and Shadow comics, I picked a long-sleeved V-neck T-shirt and fitted cargoes. Though comfortable enough, they fit me like they’d been sprayed on. I didn’t recall my mother being quite as curvy as Olivia, but then I didn’t remember her ever wearing a leather bra either, and here it was.

  I dressed and looked at myself in the mirror. Other than my hair, which floated around me like a wavy bleached cloud, I looked like a shadow. A smudge on reality. Fitting, I thought, since that’s what I’d be.

  Standing before the small square mirror, I slicked back my hair and rolled it into a tight club. I found a pair of chopstick combs, similar to the ones the Chinese used to secure their own glossy locks but sharper and steel-tipped, more lethal. A most fashionable backup weapon, I thought, studying myself from the side. The street fighter in me approved.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said, pocketing my conduit. There was only one item missing from my supernatural arsenal. Unfortunately, I had to go to Greta’s holding cell to get it.

  You had to give it to her, I thought, peering through the cell’s window. For a woman facing imminent death, she was admirably composed. Though chained to a concrete floor, hands and feet bound in front of her, she sat with her back straight against the stone wall, head back, eyes closed. She even looked relieved. Like she’d been performing the same play over and over and had been longing for some new dialogue. With a crisp turn of the key in the lock, I entered the room, intending to give it to her.

  She didn’t look up.

  “How’s it feel, Greta?” I asked, closing the door behind me, my voice reporting hollowly off the stone walls. “To be helpless, locked up, wondering what’s to become of you?”

  “You should know.” She motioned with one hand, chains clanking as she indicated the entire sanctuary. “Your cell is just a little bigger.”

  I advanced upon her, showing her that even a confined place could shrink upon itself. She just leaned her head back and closed her eyes again. “Tell me, what was it like knowing you were sending Warren to his death?”

  “What, you’re the psychologist now?” She sneered. “Savior of the Zodiac didn’t fit quite right?”

  I shrugged. “Just wondering.”

  She pulled her knees into her chest. “Keep wondering.”

  I shifted to lean against the wall, crossing my legs at the ankles. “You should tell someone, don’t you think? I mean, otherwise your deeds won’t get written down. You’ll be just one more stiff in the body count at the end of a comic book.”

  She glanced up at me with disdain. Her chignon had fallen loose, and her skin was smudged beneath overly dark eyes. The Shadow sat on her features like a defiant child. “You think that’s why I did this? To gain recognition for infiltrating the Zodiac troop when I was fated to be nothing more than a talented mortal? A mere half-breed?”

  The detail in her answer told me that was exactly why she’d done it. “You tell me.”

  She was silent for nearly a minute. “No. I don’t think I will.”

  “You’d better,” I sang the words softly.

  That got her attention. She studied me carefully for a moment, then snickered. “Or what? You’re going to kill me?” She tightened her arms around her knees. “That doesn’t frighten me.”

  “Death doesn’t frighten you?” She pursed her lips, but otherwise ignored me. “But insignificance did. It frightened you enough for you to betray your father’s people.”

  “Oh God, don’t try that psychological shit on me! You’re no good at it.” She shifted irritably, chains rattling like pennies in a glass jar. “That’s not why I did it.”

  “Then why?”

  “You know why!” she bellowed suddenly, and I could see in her fevered gaze she really believed it. “You told me yourself this afternoon.”

  I thought back. Then began to nod slowly. “Ah.”

  “Yes, ahhh,” she said mockingly. Madness danced in her once kind eyes. “Power. Having it. Using it. Controlling others with it. I was more powerful than the most powerful. More powerful than all of you.”

  I raised a brow, taunting her without words.

  “I’d have cracked you eventually too,” she said quickly, too loudly. It made me smile, and she went on in a rush. “I’d have found out who you really were and used that knowledge to plant the mark so deep no one would ever find it.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  “I did it to everyone, even Tekla, the so-called Seer. And me, a half-mortal.” I looked at the pride on her face: there wasn’t even a trace of regret for the lives she had cost.

  “No,” I said in a low voice, “you’re not even half that.”

  Her eyes narrowed to black pinpoints and she studied me, looking up my body and back down again. A slow smile began to thread from one side of her face to the other.

  “You’re going after him. You think the mark Micah planted will lead you to him.”

  “It will,” I said flatly, “and I’ll bring him back safely.”

  Abruptly, she howled with laughter, throwing her head back like a wolf to the moon. When she was done, finally, she wiped the tears from her cheeks. “You are your mother’s daughter. Always thinking you can do the impossible. Always wanting to be the hero. Always doomed to fail.”

  “I won’t fail,” I said, tucking my hands into my cargo pockets, finding what I needed in the right-hand side. “You’re going to ensure that.”

  She hooted again. “Don’t count on it.”

  I slipped an ugly smile over my pretty face. Her malicious grin wavered, then fell.

  “Have I ever told you about my sister?” I asked, pushing off from the wall to stand in the middle of the room. Greta didn’t answer, giving a good imitation of a person at ease. “She was similar to you in that she was half Light, half mortal, though I always thought of her as being entirely good. All innocence.
Completely pure of heart.”

  “Not like you, then,” Greta murmured, taunting me with what she knew.

  “Not like you either.”

  There must have been something jagged in my voice, something I couldn’t hold back, because she did look at me then. She studied me for a moment, then shrugged and fixed a petulant expression on her face. “She sounds like a bore.”

  I didn’t rise to the bait. My love for Olivia had lain plain on my face, hanging like ripened fruit to be plucked. It was an easy target for Greta, and I couldn’t be angry she’d taken it. Besides, I was hoarding my anger, letting it build inside me until later, when I’d call upon it. When it’d be most needed.

  I closed my eyes and conjured up the clearest picture of Olivia possible. I wanted Greta to be able to see. “She was anything but boring. She was beautiful. When she walked into a room, people used to stop just to watch the magic in her movement. She was so blond the sun could have taken lessons in shining from her. So voluptuous the mountains around this valley shook with envy. ‘Too much woman,’ I used to think. Too much hair and flesh, too many curves and softness. It was overwhelming.”

  I could sense Greta’s interest despite herself. “So she looked like you. So what?”

  I opened my eyes and smiled. “Yes. She looked exactly like me. Exactly.”

  Greta’s brows furrowed, then rose in twin surprise, eyes going wide as realization dawned. “You’re the sister! You’re her, the one who died!”

  “What? Didn’t you do your homework, Greta?” I asked, head tilted. “Don’t you even know my name?”

  She looked at me, her face bleeding one emotion into another—fear, amazement, doubt, surprise—eyes zipping around my face like furious flies, never landing. “But you’re her! I studied Olivia, and you’re her!”

  “I studied her too. And, remember, I had a lifetime to do so.” She had no response to that. “You want to know what I learned in becoming someone else? Something you apparently never picked up?”

  She flinched at the insult.

  “I learned it doesn’t matter what mannerisms you pick up, or what clothes you wear,” I said, sweeping my left hand down my body, “or what mask you try to hide behind…be it beauty or psychology. The shadows inside you can’t stay hidden forever.”

  We both knew I was talking about her, but she jerked her head at me. “You remember that when what you’ve tried to keep hidden becomes unearthed like a rotted corpse.”

  “That’s the difference between us,” I said. “I’m not trying to hide my shadows anymore.”

  And I pulled back the curtain on my one-woman play, just enough to let her glimpse what lay beneath—anger and pain over Olivia’s death; hatred for the Tulpa, Ajax, and anyone aiding their side; disgust over the wasted lives of people meant to be super…and the inherited and shadowed urge to take it all out on her.

  “I’m not afraid of you,” Greta said, voice shaking.

  I didn’t answer, but turned instead toward the door like I was ready to leave.

  “You never told me your real name,” she said quickly, thinking I’d leave and she might never know. “Who you really are.”

  “I did,” I said, not turning. My hands were busy in front of me. “When you tried to hypnotize me. I told you it depended on who was looking.”

  She scoffed, annoyed with the answer. “So who are you right now?”

  How to answer that? All the qualities I’d mentioned while under hypnosis still existed inside of me—the bitch, the goddess, the daughter, the sister, the friend, the enemy, the huntress, the predator, the Archer—and needed only to be called upon. But I wanted to give her the truest answer of all. I owed her, and all of us, that much.

  So as I slowly turned to face her, one of her slim needles, pumped and primed, spiking from my hand, I slid open the curtain, revealing to her the whole of the shadows inside of me. “Right now, Greta? I’m my father’s daughter.”

  And Greta screamed, finally afraid.

  26

  I met the others at the launch pad near dawn, approaching by stealth, testing myself…and the weapon Greta had given me, albeit unwillingly.

  “Jesus!” Felix jumped as my hand landed on his shoulder.

  “Olivia!” Vanessa whirled next to him. “I didn’t hear you arrive.”

  “Neither did I,” Hunter said, narrowing his eyes suspiciously. I tried out Olivia’s most innocent smile as they all looked at me.

  “Are you all right?” Micah asked, brows drawn, studying me.

  “Peachy,” I said, my blood still whirlpooling in my veins, power still screaming through my ears. I didn’t try to read anyone’s aura. I didn’t need to now. “Though you guys seem a bit wound up.”

  “You look different.”

  “Brushed my hair,” I said smartly.

  “Not physically,” Felix said, beginning to circle me. “Different beneath that. Under the skin.” He ran a finger along my nape and I stiffened visibly. I was strung drum-tight. “Feel different too.” After a moment he let his hand fall and, though it was almost imperceptible, backed away.

  “We were just discussing tactics,” Gregor said, oblivious. All of his energies were focused on healing, but the others felt it. They’d begun to circle the wagons, so to speak, and were standing shoulder-to-shoulder across from me, a half-moon to my lone star.

  “I’ll be staying behind for obvious reasons,” he continued, managing a wry smile from where he sat in a wheelchair. “Chandra will remain as well.”

  I glanced at Chandra, who didn’t meet my eye. She couldn’t go, I knew, because as long as I was alive she couldn’t be a real and active member of the Zodiac.

  “I’m staying too, because if you—” Micah cut himself off, clearing his throat. “I mean when the rest of you return I may be needed in a medical capacity. We’ve deemed that more important than my offensive skills.”

  He meant he expected most of us to come back wounded. If we came back at all.

  “So here’s the plan,” Hunter said, stalking over to me, his movements once again reminding me of a cat. A very large, very patient cat. “Felix will flank your left side and Vanessa your right.”

  “Provided I can get out of here, you mean.”

  His mouth quirked as he pulled his arm from behind his back, holding out an answer to my challenge.

  “What is it?” Felix said, inching forward.

  “A helmet?” I asked, taking it. I flipped it over in my hand. It was pliable, made of distressed leather on the outside, but with a strange crisscrossing of wires woven tightly beneath. It was designed to cover the eyes—twin mirrors shot my reflection back at me—and arched across the temples and over the soft tissue behind the ears. A leather toggle secured it around the base of my skull, or beneath a low bun like the one I was wearing now.

  “A mask?” Micah said.

  “No,” I said. Not a mask, though it would probably be drawn that way in Zane’s comics. My eyes lifted. “It’s a shield.”

  Hunter inclined his head. “Try it on.”

  Securing it over the bridge of my nose first, I slid it along my skull and fastened it below the bun. I shook my head side to side.

  “How does it feel?” Vanessa asked.

  “Like it was made for me,” I answered, thinking Warren would approve. Not only would it shield my eyes from the lights within the chute, but it would conceal my identity for as long as I wore it.

  Spotting a full-length mirror to the left of the launch pad, I stood in front of it and studied the reflection. It smiled. For the first time since taking over Olivia’s identity, I recognized myself. “It’s perfect.”

  “Of course,” Hunter said with his usual arrogance. You can also use it to freely enter and leave the sanctuary in the future, just like the rest of us.”

  “Good thinking,” Vanessa said.

  I inclined my head, giving him his due credit, and because I was grateful. Now I could hide my Shadow side, at least in this one small way.

&nbs
p; “I just don’t get it!” Felix exclaimed, and began circling me again. “It’s like there’s a wall around you. I can see you, but I sure didn’t hear you come in, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t scent you, even though you’re only two feet from me.”

  “Doesn’t bode well for tracking down Shadow signs, does it?” Vanessa said.

  Felix gave her a steely look.

  Hunter stepped closer. He leaned in as he had in the dojo, crowding my space, taking up all the room. I unlaced the shield and lowered it from my eyes as he scratched his chin.

  “Figure it out yet?” I asked in a low voice, gaze steady on his.

  Vanessa gasped just as understanding dawned, widening Hunter’s hooded eyes. There was an uncomfortable shifting in the room, like wind lifting suddenly in a tree.

  “Greta?” Hunter asked, face unreadable.

  I smiled.

  “Oh, my God! You possess the aureole again!” Micah said, up to speed now. “The needles?”

  “You used her own weapon against her,” Hunter said, his voice considering. “Like you did with Butch. So you could walk the mortal world like a ghost. That’s why none of us sensed you.”

  “God,” Felix breathed from behind me. He had backed away.

  “You killed Greta?” Vanessa asked, her voice small. “In cold blood?”

  “No. I was still pretty pissed when I did it.” Then I held out a hand to stave off any more comment. “The point is, I have the ability to walk around completely undetected for the next twelve hours.”

  “All night,” Gregor said, and excitement lined his words.

  “No, the point is she murdered someone who was half Light in order to gain power!” Vanessa pointed at me, and I was surprised to see her hand shaking.

  “You’ve got it wrong, Vanessa,” I said, turning on her. She swallowed hard but didn’t back away. “What I did was take the power from someone who used to be half Light, and now I’m going to use that to battle the Shadow side. See the difference?”