City of Souls

by Vicki Pettersson

  “Don’t be Joanna,” I muttered, flipping my mask atop my head like an oversized headband. I loosened my low knot and tried not to be offended by Warren’s parting remark—or the skid marks on my ass—and shook out my hair. It was fine, really. I impersonated Olivia the majority of time anyway. And subtracting my real name from the equation did nothing to diminish my status in the troop: the Archer of the Zodiac, the Kairos, and the chosen one of our entire world.

  Right?

  Sighing, I climbed from the fountain and kept walking. Like I knew. Spotting a hedge of struggling boxwoods lining the glossy, stamped sidewalk, I trailed my hand idly above them as I passed. A gentle pulse from my mind, then a moment where I could almost feel green in my fingertips, which throbbed as I forced energy downward. Bright leaves unfurled beneath my palm and the trunks wobbled then stilled, their roots strengthening. Birthing plant life from nothing—it was a skill, and mark, of Light.

  “See?” I muttered, mollified by the show of power. I wasn’t a hindrance to my troop. I could control my temper. I could thrive as a superhero. I could help…at least when I wasn’t screwing up. I sighed again.

  Besides, others could call me what they wanted—Joanna, Olivia, Kairos, Archer—what really mattered was how I saw myself. “Warrior.”

  That word was the only thing that’d enabled me to keep moving through a world after the attack on my life as a teen, and in a world where much of the population had been larger and stronger and faster than me. It let me maximize the strength I did have, and had me honing abilities other women—and even men—never considered necessary. It’d taken years of intense martial training, but after a time I’d turned my weaknesses into weapons.

  And that was before I became a superhero.

  As for the Kairos designation, well that’s where things got a little more complicated. Being the underworld’s “chosen one” sounded wonderfully auspicious…until you realized it was all a big mistake. My mother, an agent of Light, had been sleeping with the Tulpa—getting in close, looking for a way to kill him—when a quick trip to the drugstore confirmed she was the proud new owner of a pregnancy stick sporting two pink lines. She was lucky I hadn’t popped out with fangs and claws.

  For reasons known only to her, she then kept my existence from both sides of the Zodiac, so my metamorphosis into an agent a year ago had completely shaken up the landscape of Las Vegas’s paranormal war. Sure, I was reportedly destined to bring ultimate victory to whatever side I fought for, but that was tied to bringing certain signs, or portents, to life. So far I’d managed the first three through trial, and mostly error. The fourth one, though? I’d fumbled that completely.

  As Drake had taunted, I’d inadvertently injured a changeling, Jasmine Chan, who was absolutely essential to our continued existence. Changelings were mortals who lived and died as any other, except for their childhood years, when imagination and belief extended to things unseen. Each side, Shadow and Light, had changelings who kept the secrets of the Zodiac, and passed them on to the next generation, while making sure mortal kids knew and believed in us as well. Those little minds were like fuel cells providing our troops with extra energy to fight the opposing side. Obviously the ability to suspend disbelief—to believe in superheroes—generally passed along with youth, which was why even the changelings eventually had to forget us entirely.

  It was now time for Jasmine to do this; in short, it was time for her to grow up, but she couldn’t—or simply wouldn’t—which had effectively put the brakes on any flexible new minds reading and believing in our stories. The fear was that if I didn’t figure out how to fix Jasmine soon, our troop would gradually weaken. Our alternate realities would fade away, our portals would close, and we would cease to exist altogether.

  But now, finding the elusive Skamar, and getting her to tell me how to “walk the line,” would supposedly help with that. I wondered why Warren wouldn’t instruct her to help me prior to this, or why it took the loss of our safe zones to light some sort of fire under his ass. Meanwhile I waved my hand over a cluster of star jasmine, which bloomed so fully, so immediately, that the air was honeysuckle sweet in seconds. I smiled.

  See? I hadn’t broken everything. And over the past year I’d gotten used to the “superhero” designation too. It was my job and calling, and despite its dangers, and my repeated screw-ups, and the sacrifices required of me, it was one I’d begun to love.

  Any warrior would.

  5

  Setting out to find Skamar and actually doing so were two different things. She’d been at war with the Tulpa essentially from the moment she’d been “birthed” or fully realized in this world, so she didn’t have a home, any contact information, or even the ubiquitous cell phone. Still, randomly wandering the city was the least effective way of finding someone in short order. So the next morning, under an unseasonably warm sky, I headed to the one place I knew I could leave word that I was looking for her.

  The parking lot of the pink-stuccoed strip mall where Master Comics was housed was only half full when I drove by, but I parked a few blocks away at a day spa Cher had once dragged me to, and walked back.

  Although none of the Shadows knew about my Olivia Archer cover identity, I still felt exposed just waltzing up to the building in the middle of the day. Perhaps I should have taken the added precaution of approaching via a portal. It wouldn’t necessarily have kept me from being spotted by an observant Shadow, but the black and white camouflage might get me past the inattentive.

  “Too late now,” I muttered, reaching the storefront. I visually tagged two portal entrances—one alongside a sewer grate, and another above the passenger side of an abandoned car—options if I had to flee, priceless in a world where I suddenly found myself with too few.

  Oddly, I also found the entrance locked. I glanced around, but the OPEN sign was bright orange against the glass front, and the hours of operation hadn’t changed. I gave the door another tug, and when it didn’t budge, found a sliver of space between a Green Lantern poster and the ever-popular Spider-Man and peeked inside. The shop was teeming with children. I saw Kylee and Kade, two of the newest changelings, and Douglas, the little shit who used his body to shield the Shadows from harm when they were in the shop, but none of them looked my way. Even when I rapped on the glass, they just continued perusing comics and playing games too complicated for the mind of someone as simple as me.

  “Excuse me.”

  I glanced over to find a skinny kid staring up at me, arms so straight at his sides I wanted to tell him to fall at ease. He was watching me open-mouthed, as if mesmerized by a movie screen. As if, I thought with a degree of annoyance, he was watching a horror flick. Unwilling to continue with the absurd stare-down, I stepped aside, and he pressed his back against the glass, inching toward the door. I got a whiff of adrenaline and fear, but before I could grab the handle he slipped inside, cowbells jangled…and the door rocketed shut behind him. I stepped back, looked around, and tried to follow. It might as well have been a handle attached to a cement wall for all the good it did.

  What was going on?

  Squinting between Spider-Man’s legs, I saw the kid who’d slipped inside point to me, and a man’s head popped into view. I waved…with my middle finger.

  Zane Silver scowled in reply. He was the shop’s owner…and though he looked like a nerd who got off on things like freeze-dried ice cream and collectible sock monkeys, he was really a seventy-three-year-old man trapped in time. It was that whole “great power requires great responsibility” maxim at work. He had the ability to mentally watch the events of our world and record them in comic book form—a gift, sure—but ever since he’d accepted the position of record keeper, he couldn’t resign until someone else took over the duty. Nobody’d been willing to in a good half century, so a retirement including bridge games and gumming his food was a long way off.

  Drawing back, Zane then reappeared outside of what I’d begun thinking of as his command center, circling the counter grump
ily to head my way. I rolled my eyes, straightened, and waited for him to let me in.

  “What the hell—” I began as soon as the door swung open.

  “Go away!” he snarled, and began pulling the door shut again. I barely got my foot wedged between the door and frame.

  “Let me in, Zane! It’s dangerous out here.”

  “That’s because you’re out there. Now go away.”

  And with that, he stomped on my foot, kicked my leg out of the way, and pulled the door shut.

  “Evil, psychotic, geriatric Martian…!” I hopped on one foot while cradling the other, and decided to stop complimenting him. He couldn’t hear me anyway. Fine. If the old coot wasn’t going to let me in this way, I’d break in via the rooftop skylight. That’s what I’d done last time.

  Bound to the building as surely as he was bound to his service, Zane worked on the lower floor and lived on the upper, with groceries, mail, take-out food, and dry-cleaning—for all his valuable T-shirts—delivered to his door. If he even attempted to leave—and he hadn’t in the time I’d known him—then the voices in his head that helped transcribe our world’s events would turn on him and drive him into madness.

  I kinda felt sorry for the guy, even as I removed a skylight pane for my break-in. After all, I’d probably be cranky too if World of Warcraft action figures were the highlight of my existence. Then pain splintered my limbs like slivers of glass were being inserted via my nail beds. Sizzling sounded nearby, and I found myself on my back, staring up at a blank, blue sky. I blew a tendril of burnt hair from my eyes, wondering if my appendages were missing from my body. Because I couldn’t feel any of them.

  “Wow! That was great! It was like she was yanked backward on a fisherman’s hook!”

  “Awesome.”

  “Do it again!” The first voice said, and I felt a light thump on the rooftop as someone hopped up and down. “Zane! Zane! Make her do it again!”

  I grunted in objection and pushed myself to a sitting position, having to squint to focus. Two blurred silhouettes sharpened, but blurred again when they shifted. A rat’s nest of shit-brown hair appeared behind them at the half-open skylight, followed by chunky cheeks and a body that had to be wedged through carefully to access the roof. Zane joined the two nimble preteens already there, a remote control in his hand. I looked at it balefully.

  “About time, Archer. I’ve been dying to try out my new toy.” Zane put his hands on his hips, belly jutting from below his T-shirt as he inspected me for damage. He, and the changelings, knew exactly who I was, what I looked like, and what I was trying to do. They weren’t allowed to say, just as they couldn’t tip the balance the other way and reveal those selfsame details to us about the Shadows.

  “Let me guess,” I said, wiggling my toes. All still there. “You’ve got cameras up here?”

  “Sensors, man!” The first kid, whom I now recognized as Dylan, was so excited he had to draw heavily on his inhaler. Shoving it back into his pocket, he pointed. “Under that wadded up newspaper…inside that Coke can over there too.”

  “Awesome, huh?” said the other kid again. Kade. He had a habit of turning every statement into a question.

  The high-pitched excitement did nothing to help the buzzing in my head. “Please, please, piss off.”

  “My mother would be mad if she heard you talk to me like that.”

  “She can—”

  Dylan knew what I was going to say. “Don’t talk about my mother!”

  “Yeah, because politics, religion, and mothers are off limits,” I muttered, clamoring to my feet. The jolt had been a thankfully short, if powerful, shock.

  Zane was looking at me with a down-turned mouth. “You really shouldn’t talk to kids that way.”

  “They’re not going to remember it anyway,” I said. All memory of this time in their lives would be erased upon onset of puberty. Just as it should have been for Jasmine, I thought, reminding myself why I was there. “Besides, they shouldn’t go around electrocuting people.”

  “Zap this bitch again, Zane!” Dylan was still pissed about his mother.

  I held out my hands as Zane cocked his thumb above the red button. “Look, I just need some help.”

  “You’re dangerous, Archer. You could get us all killed. Just look at Jasmine.”

  “I didn’t touch her!”

  “You did. You touched her inside. You displaced part of her chi with your own. You’ve split her soul in half.”

  Accidentally split it in half. I sighed. “Okay, but I’m trying to figure out how to fix her. The manual detailing how to do that would be a big help.”

  Because such a thing had been done before. An agent named Jaden Jacks had displaced a changeling’s aura, and the details of how he’d ultimately fixed the kid were somewhere in the Shadow manuals. It was just a matter of finding it, impossible without spending months in the effort…and if Zane wouldn’t let me in.

  As expected, he shook his head. “As record keeper, I can’t reveal anything that might unbalance the equilibrium of the Zodiac. I work for both sides.”

  Shadow agents couldn’t read the manuals of Light, and vice versa. It kept a sort of cosmic balance between the two sides. But I could read both sides, I thought irritably, because I was both. This had caused the Shadow manuals to be altered somewhere—there were fewer thought bubbles detailing what a featured Shadow agent was planning; more once they’d already acted—so I didn’t see why Zane couldn’t just throw me a bone.

  “I’m trying to bring it back in to balance,” I said.

  He shrugged. “You fucked up and now karma is weighing down the scales in the Shadows’ favor. You’ll have to find it yourself.”

  “Why don’t you just kill Jasmine?” Kade said snottily.

  I took a threatening step toward him instead.

  Wide-eyed, he backed straight into Dylan, who landed flat on his butt. I smirked. His voice cracked as he yelled. “What? Like you haven’t thought of it. You’re half Shadow! You live for that shit, right?”

  “If your mother could hear you now,” I muttered, because I hadn’t thought of it. It would have never occurred to me…but now it was in my mind. I turned back to Zane, who was watching me closely. “Is he serious?”

  “See! She’s interested!”

  “Shut up, Dylan.” I glared over my shoulder. He fumbled his inhaler. “I’m…curious.”

  “It’s simple, Archer. Jasmine’s like a leech, sucking your power from you in long, slow pulses. If you want to reunite your split aura in your body, along with all the powers she’s been siphoning off, then she’s gotta die.”

  It wasn’t the first time these kids had said that. They knew of Jaden Jacks and the changeling he’d injured, though the report of the child’s death was more of an assumption. The kid and Jacks hadn’t been seen since, not even in a manual, and that was odd. Full-fledged troop members couldn’t leave the valley. It was one of the maxims that ruled our existence.

  “Jas knows it, too,” said Dylan. “That’s why she doesn’t come around here anymore. Well, that…and because she’s spending time with Li.”

  Li. I swallowed hard. Li, who was eight years old, and clamoring to take over Jasmine’s position. Li, who’d somehow been injured when the Tulpa had attacked me. Li, who was deteriorating by the day because of that injury, and would continue to do so until I figured out a way to fix her sister.

  And that’s when the manuals had stopped being written. That’s what was keeping the fourth sign of the Zodiac from coming to pass.

  “Look, I don’t want to kill Jas.” Or her little sister. “I want to find the manual that shows how Jacks healed his changeling, or find Jacks himself. Barring that, I need to find Skamar so she can tell me how to ‘walk the line.’”

  I muttered this last bit, rolling Warren’s words over in my mind, still having no idea exactly what they meant.

  “What did you say?” Zane asked sharply.

  “I said I need to find Skamar. If I leave a message
with you, can I be sure she’ll get it?”

  “Skamar’s in hiding. She needs safe zones to recover from her battles with the Tulpa, and you’ve done away with those.” I opened my mouth to object, but he was already waving that subject away. “But go back to the part after that. About walking the line. Who told you that?”

  I tilted my head, caught by his sudden interest, and his seriousness. “My troop leader.”

  He lifted a brow. “Warren Clarke?”

  “No. Jabba the Hutt. He also said to tell you he needs an octogenarian to help round out his criminal empire. You may have a future yet.”

  Zane scowled. I was about to write off his question, but then I remembered how anything that happened in Las Vegas’s underworld ended up in a manual within two weeks. I continued staring at him until the silence elongated uncomfortably between us. From the expression blanketing his face, I knew what he’d say even before the question was out of my mouth. “You know about Midheaven too, don’t you?”

  “Of course. I know everything relevant to our world.”

  I’d asked him once before if he thought Midheaven was a myth. At the time, though, I hadn’t had Warren’s permission to do so.

  “Let me guess. You can’t tell me anything about that world, right? Some sort of cosmic checks-and-balances, right?” That would be right in keeping with the same powerful law that prevented the changelings from telling their favored troop members about the opposing side’s actions. The same reason the little sickos who favored the Shadows knew, but couldn’t tell, of my Olivia Archer cover identity.

  “I can’t tell you,” he confirmed, with a shrug, “but not because it’s forbidden. Midheaven’s energy doesn’t register over here. That’s why it’s not in any manual. It’s another world entirely.”

  “But one Warren now wants me to enter.” Because he knew, or at least thought, that Jaden Jacks was over there? Or that Jacks could tell me how to fix Jasmine? It would make sense. Zane clearly didn’t know what had happened to the kid, and as he’d said, he knew everything that happened in this world. But how was I going to get to Midheaven if I couldn’t find Skamar in order to learn how to walk this “line”?