City of Souls

by Vicki Pettersson

  “It has to be because of the safe zones,” Zane was muttering, shaking his head like he was perplexed. “He’d never reveal its physical existence otherwise…”

  Yeah, what about that? I fisted my hands on my hips. “Why?”

  “Because it’d be better if it didn’t even exist,” he said in that eerily serious way that made me want to giggle and shiver at the same time. “Midheaven is a pocket of distended reality. It’s distorted, and a place for people—usually rogue agents—to hide. It serves as a way to escape detection as they made their way into the valley.”

  “Ahh…” Now it was making sense. Rogues were agents, either Light or Shadow, who’d been cast out of their home troops either due to personal infractions or political unrest. In other words, if their troop was disbanded or destroyed. If that happened, they were free to leave the city they’d formerly served and become independent agents. They officially became rogues when they entered another largely populated city, where another troop already resided. There could only be one star sign for each position on the Zodiac, so even entering a city with a full Zodiac was seen as a challenge. We had orders to slay them on sight. That’s why Regan was no longer a threat. No one on either side of the Zodiac would stand up for her now. “So Warren didn’t tell us about Midheaven because of the rogue agents.”

  “He didn’t tell you about it,” Zane said direly, “because it’s a twisted place, and it twists you in return. You go in one person, you come out another.”

  “Experience shapes people,” I countered.

  “Midheaven strips them.”

  Shaking my head, I decided this was already turning into an infinite circle. Find Skamar to find Jacks to fix Jas and restore our safe zones. Yet I needed a safe zone in order to find Skamar and Jacks, to fix Jasmine and restore those safe spaces. “What a clusterfuck.”

  I hopped to the ledge, already considering my next step—beyond the one that would have me leaping thirty feet to the alley floor—when Zane, still in zealot-geek mode, stopped me.

  “Don’t you want to hear the song?”

  I looked up at the bright, wide sky, wondering when the minutia of this world was going to stop bitch-slapping me. I stepped off the ledge and turned.

  “I love songs,” said Kade. Dylan hit him. Anxious to get on with the business of saving the world, I’d like to have done the same, but Zane was already clearing his throat, straightening formally, and widening his stance. Then he began crooning like he was headlining at the Sands with a half-full martini in one hand.

  Beneath the neon glowing bright here

  Lies a land of starry skies

  Look below dear, not in the middle

  But kill the rushlight in two tries.

  “Wow,” I said, and he shot me a rare smile. “Put on a button-down shirt and a few gold chains and you’d have yourself a career.”

  His face fell. “Shut up.”

  “No, seriously. You’re not half bad.”

  “It’s not funny!” He began pacing, fat face clouded and red. “You’ll memorize that if you know what’s good for you. That shit can save your life!”

  I thought of all the other shit that was supposed to be helping me too. “Let me see if I’ve got this right. I’ve got to find a tulpa, walk the ‘line,’ enter Midheaven, and find a Shadow agent…and the only clue is a badly written murder ballad?”

  He pursed his lips, then shrugged. “Pretty much.”

  I hit the ledge again. “Good-bye, Zane.”

  “Don’t come back here, Archer. Not unless you’ve fixed this.”

  Twisting, I cocked a fist on my hip, but my brows drew together when I saw what he was holding aloft. It was a beat-up photo of a freckle-faced boy, sandy-haired and lanky with youth. I’d never seen the kid before, but I knew who he was. Zane would only carry a worn photo of one kid with him at all times. “Jacks’ changeling.”

  “His name was Ricky,” he said, voice edged in granite. “And I don’t want to lose any more.”

  He meant changelings. Jaw clenched, I swallowed hard. “You haven’t lost this one yet.”

  And I was going to do everything in my power to make sure we didn’t. Even if it meant entering a fabled world armed with nothing but a song.

  6

  Though finding a way to bring the fourth sign of the Zodiac to life was currently my greatest worry, it wasn’t my only one. Despite my rebirth last November as Olivia, and as a twenty-first century superheroine, what was really surprising were the things that hadn’t changed. For example, the Tulpa still sported a hard-on for my mother’s death, my mother continued to elude him, and I was still forced to interact with the enigmatic, powerful—and recently reclusive—Xavier Archer.

  An anonymous note this time last year—one I now knew had been sent by the Shadows—had relieved us both of the notion that Xavier was my real father. Of course, the note failed to mention that my real father was the Tulpa, but that was because the Tulpa hadn’t known of my existence either.

  Was there anything, I thought wryly, that my mother couldn’t make disappear?

  So I wheeled down Las Vegas’s most famous sun-baked street and returned to the site of Suzanne’s opulent bridal shower the night before. Valhalla was Xavier’s premiere hotel, and though ironic, I had to put in an appearance here just so I could safely disappear later. I needed the Olivia identity, and I couldn’t risk drawing anyone’s attention by switching up my routine without notice.

  So despite my newfound power, status, and knowledge, I still had to kowtow to a mortal man I hated. There was a silver lining, though. Everything belonging to Xavier also belonged to the Tulpa. My real father was my fake father’s benefactor. In return for money, Xavier fronted the Tulpa’s many businesses. My ultimate goal? Bring them both down…but in order to do that, I had to stick close to a man I’d despised for years. Xavier.

  So that’s one of the reasons why Olivia Archer—casino heiress and social debutante—regularly worked an eight-hour shift where she’d earn less than she’d spend on a bottle of wine. It was another way to get inside Valhalla’s hallowed walls, which we believed was the headquarters for the Tulpa’s organization. Xavier had initially refused me, and then, when he realized I wouldn’t be swayed, started me in the gift shop, hoping that would cure this inexplicable whim to actually work for a living. It hadn’t—I wanted more than spending money; I wanted retribution—and so the news that he wanted to see me at his home office before my shift even began had me holding back a smile…and had Ginny, my small-minded boss, grinding her teeth.

  “Maybe he wants to give me a raise,” I told her with false excitement. More likely he was going to move me to a new, more socially appropriate department now that I’d proven I wasn’t giving up. Ginny huffed and turned away while my coworker, Janet, gave me a hopeful thumbs-up. I hoofed it down to Uniforms, used the adjacent locker room to change into a more Oliviaesque outfit, and handed in my work clothes for a fresh set that I might or might not need the next day. I locked these away in my appointed locker—I couldn’t be caught ferrying around a Valhalla uniform if a Shadow did happen to track me—then headed to my car in the employee lot, where I was both surprised, and not, to find Felix waiting.

  “You my babysitter?” I asked, purposely keeping my tone light. Anything heavy looked like it would knock him over. He was dressed in his usual jeans, with a faded gray T-shirt, untucked, and hair streaked with caramel highlights, deliberately unbrushed. But the expression on his face wasn’t one I’d ever seen on him before. He’d aged a decade since the night before.

  “Yes, and you’ve been naughty,” he tried, but his grin slipped from his new face. “Come here and let me give you a spanking.”

  “My daddy would kick your ass if you tried,” I said softly.

  “Your daddy wants to kick my ass anyway.” He snorted. “And yours, for that matter.”

  I put a hand to his arm, steadying us both for my question. “Vanessa?”

  “Micah’s taking care of her.
” Tears welled so quickly, they’d clearly been lurking beneath the surface. “It’s going to take time, though.”

  I nodded because there was nothing to say. Normally we healed in an instant from mortal wounds. But there was nothing normal about what the Shadows had done to Vanessa. “I’m so sorry, Felix.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  I shook my head. “They were angling for me, and I broke the safe zones, plus—”

  “Jo!” His voice must have come out even more loudly than he intended, because even he jumped. “They’re Shadows. They’d have done it anyway.”

  I hesitated, biting my lip. “I saw you, Felix. When Warren told us they wanted to make a trade, Vanessa for me…” I didn’t look away when he flushed because I wanted him to know I’d seen…and I understood.

  He looked me in the eye then, so serious it was like I didn’t know him. I didn’t know him, I realized in the next moment. Vanessa’s torture had changed him. He looked more like Hunter now; something had touched him in a way that he would always bear a scar. I too had the same sort of scar. “No. Warren was right. No matter what they did to Vanessa, we wouldn’t have made a trade. Not even a lateral one, agent for agent. And certainly not for…”

  The Kairos. I cringed. The title didn’t make me feel special…and it certainly didn’t make me feel like the savior of the supernatural underworld. Instead it made me feel like a thing rather than a person. Again, all I could say was “I’m sorry.”

  He looked down, and the warrior-look disappeared in the slump of his shoulders.

  “Warren doesn’t know I’m here,” he said, blurting the confession out like it was burning his tongue. “He told us about Midheaven after you left. That he’d always known it existed, that he’d kept it from us for our own good.”

  I wasn’t surprised. “Did anyone ask about the Shadow side?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, did they know about Midheaven even while we didn’t?”

  Felix’s brows drew down like he didn’t understand why that was important, so I knew that no one had thought to bring it up. It was significant, though, because if the Shadows knew of it, and Jacks had disappeared with his changelings all those years ago, then he could have found the perfect way around our restriction upon leaving the valley. Jacks, and the kid, could be in Midheaven. So I bet that’s what Warren had been referring to when he said the answer to fixing Jas—fixing our world—was in that one.

  I was so taken by the thought that I almost missed Felix’s whisper. “I think I hate him.”

  I looked at him sharply, taken aback. “Who? Warren?”

  Jaw set, he nodded. I swallowed hard, then nodded back in return. I don’t think Felix meant it, but he thought he did. I’d known, or at least suspected for a while, that Warren kept secrets from us. He so often wanted things his way, no questions asked, no explanation given. No wonder Felix was pissed. How often had Warren gotten what he wanted by omission? There was an entire world out there, sidled up next to our own, yet it had taken the destruction of our safe zones for him to even mention it.

  Which meant he was probably hiding even more.

  Not wanting to fuel an already volatile anger, I veered course a bit. “He didn’t happen to tell you how to get to Midheaven, did he?”

  Felix cursed under his breath. “You know Warren.”

  Yes. He wouldn’t tell them anything he didn’t think they needed to know. And here was Felix, powerless to do anything to help heal the one person he loved above all others, his impotence palpable. What he needed was an outlet for all that pent-up anger. He needed to feel like he could help her, even if after the fact. I’d seen the same look on my boyfriend’s face years ago, right after I was assaulted, but in a way it was worse for Felix. After all, he was a superhero.

  I bit my lip and considered him. His cover identity as perpetual college student and playboy fit him perfectly. I remembered Vanessa once telling me that Felix had Neptune in his Eleventh House, which supposedly meant he was dreamy and irresponsible, basically the complete opposite of a normal Capricorn. At the time, though, she’d been on a rant about him forcing her to track a possible Shadow alone while he danced the night away at a new technobar. Never mind that he’d found the Shadow at the same club.

  “He’s impulsive, unreliable, and can’t be depended upon to even tie his shoes!” Vanessa had fumed, not entirely wrong. He often left his shoes untied. “He has no work ethic beyond seducing coeds out of their clothing, and you would think that with the goat as his glyph he’d have some sort of ability to see things through, but nooo!”

  While all her accusations were undeniably true, Felix also had a laugh as lithe as his body and mind, and he could sense—and even alter—the mood of a room with his playful energy. I suspected his much maligned mischievous nature, like the frat-boy persona, was exactly what had attracted the serious-minded Vanessa in the first place.

  And it might come in handy at Xavier’s. My view of the place was, after all, colored by familiarity and loathing. My energy would also be divided by having to hide that, so I could probably use an extra pair of eyes. Perhaps Felix would see something I could not.

  Plus he was cute, a necessity for any of Olivia’s romantic interests…or conquests. Riddick would’ve been a better match—his cover as a successful dentist satisfied Xavier’s standards of suitability as a match for his beloved daughter—but Felix was the one standing in front of me. Xavier would probably just think Olivia was slumming again, the boy nothing more than another trivial pursuit.

  Besides, it would be a good way for Felix to expel some of that pent-up fury.

  “You’ll do,” I finally said, motioning him to the passenger side.

  “Thanks,” he said flatly as he angled around the nose of the car. “I’ll do what?”

  “I have to pay a visit to my other daddy. Or Olivia’s, that is. You’re going to come along as my plaything.”

  He said nothing, but his sigh was long and drawn, his mutterings incoherent. Clearly it wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind. I shot him a sweet smile as I settled in next to him. “Oh, and we’ll go ahead and kill one of the Tulpa’s most loyal Shadow agents while we’re there.”

  Felix’s head shot up then, and for the first time he looked like his old self.

  I filled Felix in on the Archer household as we drove to the compound—the personnel, the layout…the strange little room shaped like a Tibetan burial mound.

  He nodded impatiently before asking, “And Lindy Maguire? How do we get to her?”

  Ah, Lindy. The woman who once massacred an ally’s entire family just because her leader said to. The Shadow so in love with the Tulpa that any woman seen as a threat met an inexplicable, early demise. If she’d known who I really was, she’d have killed me in my sleep years ago, and not just because I was one of the Light. Lindy Maguire and my mother had a well-documented, decades-old feud due to Lindy’s infatuation with the Tulpa. I’d long wanted Lindy taken out because of this, among other things, but Warren’s cooler head had prevailed.

  “If we kill Lindy,” he’d said, “the Tulpa might send someone more attentive to watch over Xavier and his assets. And ‘Helen,’” he said, referencing her alter ego in the Archer household, “has never looked at Olivia as anything more than a dizzy airhead.”

  No, like Xavier, she’d always saved her pointed criticism for me, Joanna. If Xavier had made my young life a living hell, Lindy/Helen had aided and abetted. I obviously hadn’t known then that she was an agent monitoring Xavier for the Tulpa, but I did now. And I was going to use that information to help bring down her beloved Tulpa.

  But I’d go ahead and give the pleasure of killing her over to Felix.

  “Age hasn’t made her any less dangerous,” I told Felix now. Shadows were scary enough when acting out of duty, or because they simply liked wreaking havoc, but Lindy was even more brutal because of her obsession. “But we have the advantage here, so just keep your eye out, your emotions
dampened, and your hands hidden.”

  Felix glanced down at the shiny, smooth surface of his fingertips, where his prints were missing. “The biggest ‘tell’ in our paranormal identities, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said with a wry smile. “And Lindy, ‘Helen,’ will be looking.”

  Once admitted through the guard gate, I cruised up the serpentine drive, kicking gravel as I skidded to a stop between the mansion and an eternally running fountain. Excess, I thought, staring up at a matching marble staircase, was a word Xavier Archer defined. And why not? He’d literally sold his soul to attain all this. He should make the most of it.

  It was surprisingly windy as we climbed from the car, reminding me of the powerful gusts that held the valley captive every spring. They bit into the flesh now that it was winter, and we rushed up the white marble steps, ducking beneath a portico to ring a bell that chimed for miles. I rubbed my arms through my T-shirt and gave Felix a closed-mouth smile, knowing he was wondering what it was like to be raised with all this space and falsely winking splendor.

  It’d been an emotional haunted house.

  How appropriate, then, that the door swung wide to reveal the woman of the hour…and one of the primary people who’d made it that way.

  “Pulling butler duty now too, Helen?” I stepped inside quickly, hiding the way Felix stiffened beside me. Neither of us had expected the Shadow to open the door. “Where’s Deluca?”

  My voice bounced back from the ornate vaulted ceiling. It was important that I act as breezy and unaffected by my surroundings as Olivia always had. “Helen” caught and catalogued every action. At least now I knew why.