City of Souls

by Vicki Pettersson

  It wasn’t until I spotted the tiny variable star winking above the side entrance of a tavern that I realized where Hunter was leading me. I stifled a groan, knowing it would only earn me an arch look. This tiny star marked a portal, an entrance into the washed-out flip side of reality. If you knew how to look, they could be found almost anywhere.

  But that didn’t mean I liked entering them. Sure, it reduced the chances of being spotted by both mortals and Shadows, but reality’s flip side reduced the landscape into a hazy black-and-white line drawing, and the molecules comprising air zinged in my mouth with every breath, snapping in my throat when I swallowed. Most disconcerting, though, was never knowing what lurked on the other side of these supernatural thoroughfares. The weather was capricious, the terrain more like something found on another planet than this one, and the basic universal rules—like time and space, and sometimes even gravity—were as bendable as straws.

  I followed Hunter through the dented metal door, eyes locked on the portal’s star for as long as possible, though I knew it wouldn’t wink out until the entry closed behind us. As soon as it had, the street sounds ceased, and we took a moment to acclimate ourselves to what looked like a street scene from some grainy gumshoe film set in the forties.

  “I mean to solve this crime, ya see, and you’re not going to like it, ya see.”

  I snorted, gratified that Hunter was thinking along the same lines, and we started off down Rainbow Boulevard

  , a good fifteen miles from where we’d entered. Entries and exits between the two sides never matched up.

  We walked on, easier without the threat of Shadows to contend with. In the past we’d found snow or rain or rainbows shaped like lucky horseshoes marring the landscape, but this time there was a knotty ball of power gathered in the sky. The clouds were dense around the center bulge, the layers extended in frayed wisps, which disappeared at the valley’s edges. It was as if the victim of a very large spider had been wrapped up tight. Every so often there was a flash, like sheet lightning was caught in that bulbous center. I gave thanks that the odd cloud bump was only on this side of the portals, and caught Hunter giving it a wary glance as well.

  Yet even given that, what really stood out in the achromatic gloom was the one thing that shouldn’t have been there at all.

  Us.

  In the smeared, dulled, monochromatic milieu, Hunter’s aura pooled around him like a full-body halo, a snapping gold that played off his burnished skin like light cutting on glass. It trailed behind him as he walked, a colorful cloak dissipating with the absence of heat from his body. I lifted my hand to run it through the trailing light when he wasn’t looking, sending sparks pinging from my skin in his wake.

  Which was how I noted my aura, or lack of it. Aura represented life force, and what had once fairly pulsed in a vibrant red band was now nothing more than a wispy cloud, barely colored at all.

  “Worse than the last time,” I said, ducking my head when I realized Hunter had heard. But it was. Thankfully, he said nothing, and we continued on in silence until we reached the Spring Valley Park, and the others. Six agents of Light were gathered under a green steel awning, and they greeted us with subdued nods. The two newest agents, Riddick and Jewell, were flanking Felix, who was only a little older but already a senior troop member. Tekla, mysterious and tiny, was an island unto herself as usual. Gregor was behind Micah, our troop’s physician, and was using his one good arm to unconsciously rub at the stump of the other as he watched Micah rifle in a trash bin. Hunter and I joined the first three agents and were quickly filled in.

  They’d found two more body parts. Micah was pushing aside soda bottles, empty fast food wrappers, and bags of chips, in search of a third body part that we all could readily smell. He finally found it—an ear—and added it with a sigh to his growing collection. He wouldn’t throw them away, I knew. No matter what happened to Vanessa, we would later burn them as relics, give our thanks for her sacrifice, and if needed send up prayers for her soul.

  I turned at a sound, and found my troop leader jogging toward us, though it took me a moment to recognize him. Warren Clarke had a multitude of covers meant to keep the Shadows from tracking him, though his favorite was that of a weary, timeworn indigent. His matted hair, crusted fingernails, and bloodshot eyes regularly sent people scurrying the other way, but the Shadows had recently put a new agent on patrol in the city’s homeless shelters, so Warren decided to take time off, appearing as a regular Joe instead.

  He jerked his head in the direction he’d just come and we followed without a word. Colorful auras trailed behind the others, reminding me again of my faded red hue. I didn’t have time to regret it much beyond that, though. Two hundred yards away we found a big toe with shiny silver polish. Micah’s giant shoulders drooped. Tekla bent to pick it up.

  They weren’t trying to kill Vanessa. Not yet. No, these were just tokens. Teasers. Her tongue left in the middle of the street, her right ear in the trash. They’d severed a thumb, and left it hanging like an ornament on a tree. Very creative. We also found her hair, which didn’t technically count as a body part, but it was the one thing that took the same amount of time to grow on us as it would on a mortal, so the shearing was symbolic. I looked at the mass of shining dark curls and couldn’t help my tears.

  As the body parts were too small to attract mortal attention, we found each one through Vanessa’s blood and unique scent, all of us attuned to the macabre signage pointing us in her direction.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Jewell said when we came across Vanessa’s perfect, petite, and now severed nose. It was as if they were chopping off every available appendage, severing all the bits that came together to identify her as a whole.

  “Don’t you dare!” Felix whirled, and his tears rolled from their tracks, disappeared into the night. He wiped a hand over his face, leaving a smear of dirt. “She has to endure this. It shouldn’t be so hard for you.”

  Felix, normally engaging and easygoing, fisted his hand in his already tousled hair like he wanted to pull it out. It wasn’t just that he’d grown up with Vanessa in the underground sanctuary that housed the agents of Light and their children, their world. The two junior agents had quietly become an item in the last year, and he was having a hard time keeping his emotions from burning like acid in the air.

  Tekla, our troop’s Seer, wise woman, and senior troop member, placed a hand on his shoulder. “She didn’t mean that, Felix. She didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “She is not just parts…” He shook off Tekla, but kept on shaking. “She’s not…”

  Hunter and I looked at each other, then he jerked his head and we silently followed.

  We followed the body parts all the way into Chinatown.

  “This can’t be right,” Riddick said as we turned onto Spring Mountain Road

  . “All of Chinatown is a safe zone.”

  Safe zones were places where neither side of the Zodiac could touch the other, and were built in around the entire city. Even an agent’s paranormal weapon, their personal conduit, was useless in such a place.

  Gregor squinted at the faux Imperial skyline. “You sure it’s not residual? Has Vanessa been here before?”

  “It’s fresh blood,” Micah said, voice strained. Felix winced.

  “So why would they lead us somewhere they can’t touch us?”

  “I know why.” It was the first time Warren had spoken since Hunter and I joined them, and the timing was telling. It was only recently that I’d begun to realize his quietude was much like his indigent cover, designed to make us overlook him…and that he had such a great stake in our lives. Meanwhile the wheels were turning behind that sturdy frame, his mind ever-working, and all to an end that he’d already pinpointed at his personal destination. “They want to make a trade.”

  I swallowed hard. There was only one person they’d be willing to trade the life of a full-fledged agent of Light for—only one thing we had that they wanted. Our world’s ch
osen one. The Kairos. Me.

  They were torturing Vanessa because of me.

  I was careful not to let Felix see my face as my stomach roiled.

  “No trade.”

  “Of course not.”

  Felix frowned and bit his lip, and he didn’t look at me.

  I took a breath. “Wait. There has—”

  Tekla stayed a hand on my arm, but spoke loudly enough for Felix to hear. “No, Jo. We’ll get her back without risking you. Now put on your mask. And start searching for a portal. We can’t enter a safe zone on this side of reality.”

  We found one, and we entered it as a team, as one.

  3

  At one time only three people knew I was masquerading as my sister, the socialite and casino heiress Olivia Archer. It had been a month since the other agents of Light found out I was Joanna Archer beneath all this Stepford perfection, but other than Regan DuPree—now an outcast and rogue agent—the entire Shadow Zodiac was still clueless about my cover identity. Everyone in the mortal world believed Joanna Archer had died a year ago in a fall from a high-rise building, and it was out of this destruction of my old identity that my true life was birthed. In order to keep that life, it was imperative the Shadows never discover my Olivia Archer identity.

  So I made one last check of my mask before we collectively slipped under the turned-up eaves of a strip mall impersonating a Chinese temple. The red tile rooftops appeared black in the moonless night, and we stole past the crowded restaurants on the lower levels, where menus I couldn’t read were pressed against the windows and the people inside were munching contentedly on dim sum and pot stickers. Ignoring the scent of steamed food, we instead followed that of fresh blood and rotting flesh, heading one by one up a wide concrete staircase to the empty furniture stores above.

  Antiques shops comprised most of the retail space, Buddhas and dragons and Shaolin warriors all peering out from the window displays in wary dismay, but we kept going, the macabre scents intensifying as we neared a Chinese bakery. The Shadows weren’t even trying to conceal their location.

  Warren, sotto voce. “Make a net.”

  We put some distance between us, so the splitting of ranks would appear natural, though we were running short a couple of agents. Chandra, whom I’d displaced, was now serving the troop in an auxiliary role only, and Kimber was no longer strong enough to run with us. As she blamed me for that lack, I didn’t exactly mourn her absence. Yet it was at the moment that everyone pulled out their conduits that I felt most vulnerable. That now-rogue agent, Regan, had stolen mine after being expelled from the Shadow troop. I had to settle for a mortal weapon until Hunter could make me a new one. The Micro Uzi was a poor substitute for a conduit, but you took what you could get.

  The bakery was abnormally large, with giant plate-glass windows sporting tiered wedding cakes that overlooked the ornamental patio and the lights of passing traffic on Spring Mountain Road

  beyond. There was no way to sneak up unseen, but we didn’t need to in a safe zone. So we walked single file through the sole glass door, propped open to let the scent of Shadows—and Vanessa—waft outside.

  The table and chair clusters had been cleared from the room’s center, and bakery cases lined the opposite wall, while red paper lanterns set on a low glow shot an eerie light through the cavernous shop’s middle. There were coffee and tea stations, and a curtained doorway leading into a kitchen, but the Shadows were clustered at one side of the elongated room, tilting our attention that way. It was like they were baiting us. But for what?

  And then, as they parted ranks, I decided they’d been luring us in for a close-up of the carnage they’d wreaked upon Vanessa’s once pristine body. She was trussed to a chair like a victim in a gangster movie, except the ropes wrapped only around her core, leaving limbs and remaining appendages free for further attack. But they’d dispensed with the toying games now. In addition to her shorn hair and missing nose, and the ear and digits we’d already found, there was a foot lying beneath her chair.

  They had done this because of me.

  It was all I could do to hold back a wail.

  Felix didn’t. His cry rose out of him like a siren, but guttural and borne from his belly. He strained forward, but Gregor and Micah were already flanking him in anticipation. They held him until he stopped struggling, but his voice had awoken something in Vanessa. She lifted her head, which had been lolling, and though it took her a moment to focus, seeing us brought her to life. She shook her head from side to side, gurgling as she strained against her bonds, eyes bulging, the movement making the blood flow free in her mouth again. After all she’d been through, it was a testament to her will that she could still move at all.

  Other than the man securing her, the Shadows fanned out, and we each gravitated almost unconsciously to our opposite on the Zodiac. Felix dutifully followed Sloane, the Shadow Capricorn, who fucked with him by arching the farthest away from Vanessa. Though I didn’t will it, I found myself bisecting the room to stand directly in front of our captured Leo. My opposite, the Sagittarian Shadow and their troop leader, was missing.

  “So what now?” Warren finally asked. I could tell by the tightness constricting his voice that it rubbed him to ask, but right now the Shadows were firmly in control.

  “We wait,” said the man securing Vanessa, the man—I could tell from scent—who’d defiled our Zodiac’s Leo. This was the first time I’d met him, but I recognized him from the Shadow manuals. Harrison Lamb was Micah’s opposite, the Shadow side’s new Virgo. I’d killed his uncle Ajax nine months earlier, and because of Ajax’s prowess and brutality, Harrison hadn’t been expected to succeed Ajax until later in life.

  Yet despite his sudden rise in rank, he was surprisingly self-possessed. He moved with grace, wore his paranoia with an ease that said he’d rather be wrong than dead, and hardly made any effort to withhold the smell—or in the Shadows’ case, the stench—that rose with emotion, giving him away to his enemies. I took in a good whiff, committing the scent to memory: Gucci cologne laid over an ashy sack of skin laid over a marinating stew of organs laid over decaying bone.

  In short? Shadow.

  Harrison stretched and yawned, bloodied fingers splayed to the ceiling like he was completely unconcerned that a six-foot, seven-inch agent of Light was creeping up on him. In contrast to his current posturing, Micah was a gentle soul where his troop was concerned, using a sweet disposition and his surgeon’s skill to attend to our health. Though his fury sat atop his emotions like oil upon water, I could already see him calculating how to put Vanessa back together, how to reattach and regrow and erase all the damage the Shadows had done.

  Harrison saw it too. “Don’t worry, Micah. We used mortal knives to cut away the fat. They all regenerate…eventually.”

  But it would be an excruciating process. We couldn’t die from the strike of man-made weaponry, but we felt the pain just as acutely.

  Micah’s jaw clenched and he took an involuntary step forward. Harrison unsheathed a barbed poker from the holder behind his back, immediately stilling the advance. The unspoken message was clear. If Micah kept moving, Harrison would instead drag Vanessa outside the safe zone and use his personal weapon upon her…and then she’d never heal.

  So what are we waiting for?” I asked. For us to give in? For my allies to turn me over? To allow Vanessa to go to her tortuous death without a fight? I narrowed my eyes on Harrison’s responding grin, thinking if that were the case, it was going to be a long wait.

  Vanessa’s renewed struggle drew every eye. She was wild, almost fierce now, gagging on the blood her movement caused to seep from her mouth and nose. Harrison leaned down like he was concerned, then looked in turn at each of us, dark humor giving life to his eyes. He continued this cruel pantomime, glancing back and forth in exaggerated concern, before letting all expression drop from his face as his gaze arrowed in on Felix. Lifting one side of his mouth, his skeleton momentarily flashed, as if revealed on an X ray. Then his smile
was back, and he was slipping a hand over Vanessa’s mouth and nose. She began suffocating immediately.

  When I was younger I didn’t fully understand why it was so distressing to see a woman specifically brutalized by a man. As a victim, I’d identified with anyone who’d ever been forcibly overcome by another. Violence was impervious to gender, and it didn’t always come in physical form either.

  It was only as I grew older, and especially once I’d gained strength no mortal woman or man could know, that I realized why this was such an abomination. Yes, using a physical force on someone smaller than you was immoral. But an attack on a woman was an additional insult—it was an attack on life itself. Every strong man—down to the worst rapist and murderer—had once been nurtured, if only for a small while, by the softness and solace of a woman’s body. To turn upon that was a desecration, and in our world—a matriarchal society where power was passed through the woman’s bloodline—it was absolute blasphemy.

  And Felix—as good and strong a man as any—still took his solace in Vanessa. He reveled in her wit and smile, her laugh and, yes, her body. She was his soft spot. So, despite it being a safe zone, he lunged.

  The Shadow conduits still didn’t appear. Their power was useless in a safe zone, but what could be done—what I didn’t know how to do the first time I was attacked in a safe zone—was to turn the attacking agent’s power against them. It was a more dangerous sort of power because, as any soldier knew, it was easier to defeat an enemy if they were already at war with themselves. It would have been enough for Harrison to face down Felix alone, but the Shadow troop timed their defense so perfectly it was clear they’d anticipated this response. When Felix was no more than five feet from Harrison, they all held up a hand, ringing him in silent negation.

  He didn’t freeze, as I’d thought would happen to an agent trapped in a cloud of their own power. Instead he thrashed as he was lifted from the ground, fighting invisible bindings, like he was being pulled from every side at once. One hand clutched at his throat when he hit the ground, the other at his chest, and he flopped like a fish on a dry bank. This eventually dropped off into random twitches, pitching the Shadows’ laughter even higher.