He tore his gaze from me long enough to join me studying the sky. A liquid cobalt haze, threaded through with a shock of violent green, had replaced the pewter gray that had been swirling when I left. Lightning flashed behind bulging clouds, infusing the vivid colors with a solid core of pure electricity. It would have been pretty if it hadn’t looked like it was going to fall down around the city’s shoulders.
“It’s the result of the tulpas’ battles,” Hunter explained. “All their expended energy is being released over the city, but as long as neither side wins, it has no place to go. It can’t hold for much longer.”
An electrical storm created directly above the most powerfully lit city on the planet. The atmosphere burning so violently it couldn’t help but cave in. Great.
“Jo?” He edged in to block my view of the sky. “Midheaven?”
“Yeah, okay.” I blew out a breath. Focusing on the facts would give me a mental foothold. I’d just have to come to terms with losing a week of my life step by step. “Ruled by women. Crazy ones.” I gestured at my body again, and blew at a strand of hair escaped from ribbon and braid.
“I don’t know. They seem all right to me.”
I smirked, but the humor settled me. I remembered everything; the pain of the passage over there, the daguerreotype and the wall of Most Wanted posters, the poker game and what it cost. Thirst and heat, and how they were used against you. The women drawn in watercolor, the men in charcoal. Yet when I opened my mouth, every one of those images snaked away. It was irritating how tangible everything was until I tried to voice it. As soon as I tried to speak, something would shift inside, and the words would slide away.
I shrugged, and shook my head. “It won’t let me.”
“What?”
I threw up my hands. “I mean, I remember everything, but I can’t tell you about it. Silence like that has to be some sort of…I don’t know, fail-safe.” And I wondered if Warren knew that too. Still, I’d been able to mention what I learned about Jacks to Hunter. I looked at him and pursed my lips.
“Jaden Jacks. Solange. Harlan Tripp.”
“What?”
I nodded to myself. So I couldn’t speak of what happened over there, but I could talk about the people there. Those were the only ones, though. Shen was only a wisp of a memory, Boyd was a lump in my throat. Mackie disappeared the fastest. “Wow, okay. So only people who came from this world.”
Hunter gave me the appropriate look for someone who’d taken to conversing with herself, and again took me by the arm. “Let’s go. You can try to recall more when we’re somewhere safe.”
I glanced up at the sky, fought the impulse to duck, and wondered exactly where that would be. Because I’d returned to a scarred world, an embattled troop, and a leader who—if my intuition was right—was turning out to be as ruthless as the enemies we fought.
Worst of all, I had an unwanted suspicion about what gaming chip Shen had stolen from my pile. Shaking my head, I followed Hunter out into the open night.
Forced to wait until dawn to cross back into the boneyard, we returned to the warehouse. Without our safe zones, it was still the most secure place on this side of reality. The Shadows could theoretically get to us there, but they’d have to go through a hell of a lot of artillery to do so. We were quiet on the drive over, Hunter still furtively studying my appearance from the corner of his eye, and me staring out the window like a moody teenager. Maybe it was psychosomatic—the shocking knowledge that I’d lost a week of my life to another world slowly sinking in—but Las Vegas was suddenly what appeared unreal. It was like returning to a childhood home. Though I had an intimate knowledge of the terrain, I no longer felt a part of it.
I glanced up when we whizzed past Valhalla, the fountains out front reflecting the eerie colors of the sky. It looked like I could stand atop the giant hotel and reach my hand straight through the swirling clouds to take hold of the bolts being flung from one side of the valley to the other. As disconcerting as that was, I had more pressing problems. So while Hunter pondered the tattoo on my belly, I turned my mind to the surprise subject of Regan’s new “friend.”
An agent of Light betraying one of their own. I shook my head and blew out a hard breath. It wouldn’t be the first time. When I first came to the Zodiac, the troop had unknowingly harbored a mole. But it was hard to see any of the current star signs—most of whom had endured that betrayal—doing what that traitor had, marking an ally and sending them out in the world toward certain death. And everyone knew someone who died before she’d been stopped.
All but Kimber, I thought grimly. She was from our sister troop in Arizona, where we sent our initiates for fostering prior to metamorphosis, when they were still free to leave the city. Despite our allied status, Kimber had disliked me from the moment she arrived, but she had greater reason to hate me now that I’d cost her power. Warren had shunted her aside since then, rarely inviting her out of the sanctuary. She blamed me for that too. Never mind that it’d been an accident, I thought grimly. Or that I’d saved her life. So if I had to take bets, my money would have been on her as the one to betray me to Regan.
But what about Chandra? My emergence a year ago had usurped her place within the troop. She’d backed off from the more overt hostility—and seemingly accepted her auxiliary role in the troop, since we’d worked so well together in October—but was her reluctant acceptance actually a front? Could it be her way—a devious, better way—of dealing with me? Did she have it in her to work with a Shadow agent, a rogue agent even, in order to set up my fall?
I pondered it a bit longer before dismissing the possibility. My capture and death would certainly free up the Archer sign for her, but it would also weaken the troop, possibly annihilating it altogether. Her feelings toward me might be ambivalent, but she was committed to the agents of Light with every cell of her being.
Besides, Regan might have been lying. If the Tulpa thought she had a source that would lead him to me, he’d be likelier to reinstate her in his troop. No, I couldn’t peg any of my allies—my friends—as betrayers, unless something drastic had happened in the week I’d been gone. So I’d report the conversation to Warren and let him figure out a way to deal with it. We’d figure it out together.
But will you tell him about Ashlyn?
I let out a sigh, running a hand over my face.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
I let my head loll Hunter’s way. “I’m hennaed, pierced, and just found out I lost an entire week of my life. What do you think?”
“Ah, but your sparkling personality is still intact.”
“Lucky for you,” I muttered. He snorted, and turned his attention back to the road. I searched his face a moment longer before saying, “Listen, thank you for not saying anything to Warren about a possible mole just yet. Something isn’t adding up. It’s like he knows things but isn’t sharing them with us.”
“Warren does what he thinks is right for the troop.” Meaning it wasn’t for us to know those reasons, just to obey them.
I shook my head and turned back to the window. “He’s ruthless.”
“We’re all ruthless, Joanna.” He said it like it disgusted him.
I looked back at his silhouette etched against the night, wondering what he meant. Then I pushed the wonder away, refocusing on Warren. “I think he locked people over there, Hunter. I don’t care if they were Shadows or rogues or the devil incarnate. He knew what that world was even if he didn’t know exactly what it did.” Maybe he’d even been there, and returned. Little would surprise me about Warren’s machinations anymore. “And, knowing it, he still sent me over there.”
As Hunter said, Warren did what he thought best for the troop. But how was it best to send me to a place he knew would steal time from my life? My powers? My soul? “And why wouldn’t he tell us that Jaden Jacks was Light?”
Hunter looked upset by that too, but raised his brows to erase the worry. “Also in our best interests?”
“Dev
il’s advocate,” I spat, annoyed with his automatic need to defend Warren. “Jaden killed that changeling. I saw proof enough of that…and I bet Warren knows it.”
Hunter’s breath stuttered from him. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I said, pleased he was finally listening to me. “So don’t argue just for the sake of arguing.”
“I’m not.” He gripped the steering wheel more tightly. “But if we’re going to go to Warren with accusations of moles in our troop and secrets kept from us all, then we’d better have thought it through.”
His use of the word “we” pacified me, and I blew out a breath. I waited until he’d relaxed, then said more calmly, “Do you know what it would take for our entire troop to be unaware that Jacks was Light? I mean, how could we not know one of our own? By my calculations, Jaden is only a few years older than me. That means Felix and Jewell and Vanessa should know him. It means you should.”
Hunter gave me the most unamused smile I’d ever seen. “Rewiring.”
I shook my head. “Would Warren do that to all of you?”
“I told you. He’d do anything if he thought it right for the troop.”
So, again, why? I tilted my head, looked again at the pressurized webbing of the sky threatening to spill its contents all over the city. “Maybe he’s protecting Jaden?”
Hunter scowled at me. “Protecting a guy who killed a changeling?”
“Well, I don’t know! You come up with a better idea.”
He studied the road, then finally shook his head. “I can’t.”
And that was the problem. No one could say exactly what Warren was doing and thinking, or why. As I thought about that, the pocket of night untouched by the neon or the strange night sky seemed to reach into the car and deepen. I shifted my eyes to Hunter’s face and set my jaw. “I’m not telling him about Ashlyn. It’s not that I don’t trust him. It’s just that…”
Hunter finally finished the sentence for me. “You don’t trust him.”
I didn’t say anything. The silence was so elongated, I thought it was going to snap.
Finally, Hunter said, “I didn’t tell him about Lola either.”
I breathed a sigh of relief.
Because what we both knew about Warren, and had no need to say, was that while he continued to do what he thought best for the troop, he ignored the implication of those actions on the individual troop members. I didn’t know what Hunter had endured at his hands, or exactly why he didn’t want Warren knowing about his own daughter, but Warren’s past actions made him a bit of a ticking bomb. He’d known, for instance, about Skamar long before I did, that the doppelgänger was an evolutionary precursor to a tulpa, and that my mother had been the one creating her. He hadn’t told me any of that, making me instead discover it on my own. He’d then admitted he would have taken Ben from me, deleting me from the mortal’s mind and life, except for fear it would interfere with my focus. With his plans. What had Warren said at the time?
I didn’t want you distracted.
“He always knows more than he lets on.”
“His right as troop leader,” Hunter muttered, and I could practically hear the addendum. Or so he thinks.
I angled myself toward Hunter then, chaps squeaking against the seat. He would have made a smart remark about that except he caught sight of my face first. “You’re wrong. I do trust Warren. I trust him to do what he wants regardless of what it means to us. I trust him to run my emotions down if it’s the most direct path to his goals. I trust him to take what he wants without asking, without care, and without guilt.”
Hunter ran a hand along the hair at his temple. “Oh, he’ll ask.”
“Then demand that I agree.”
He said nothing, which told me everything. I relaxed…until his next question. “Is that why you let go of Ben?”
He was studiously not looking at me.
And that was the sign I’d been waiting for. I didn’t need five fingers to count the number of times in the year I’d known Hunter that he’d begun a revealing, personal conversation. I wasn’t sure exactly why he was doing so now, but the vulnerability it exposed was so raw I both wanted to protect it and look away at the same time. And I had to tread softly, I knew, or he’d turn away.
“You know why I did that,” I said softly.
“Because Ben chose wrongly.”
“Partly.” And I wouldn’t apologize. Ben should have known he was bedding down with Regan, not mistaken her for me. Sure, I understood she’d tricked him. And that life was complicated…I think I got it more acutely than most. But that was precisely why I wanted my most intimate relationship to be simple. I opened my mouth to say that, but we were already pulling into the workshop bay, and Hunter shoved the gear into park. He told me to wait in the car while he disengaged the alarms.
I sighed at the slamming of his door. I’d waited too long to speak. Other than a few intermittent beeps from within the warehouse, complete silence enveloped me. Hunter disappeared inside. The bay door lowered to encase me in darkness.
I leaned back my head, closed my eyes, and sighed again.
15
While Hunter busied himself putting space between us, I again cursed the timing of our return to the warehouse. He’d opened up to me for a moment there, like the dappled edging of the sun through the trees, the first real opportunity at intimacy since I’d left his bed in this very warehouse more than a month earlier. I knew even before stepping from the car that the precious sliver of vulnerability, like the sun, would be clouded over again by the time I joined him inside. Again I wondered why it couldn’t be simple.
No, not simple, I silently clarified, but true. Undivided. Decisive. A woman wants to be chosen, after all, the one deemed precious above all others. The thought made me think of Hunter’s eyes fixed on the road as he asked about Ben. Could that be what he wanted as well?
“Wow. I’m always leaving, aren’t I?” I laughed, a small, unamused puff trapped in the cab of the car. How ironic that I could do so much leaving while trapped in Vegas, in this body, in this life. How ironic also that my return from another world was what emphasized all those little departures.
Before I could think, or back out of it, I went inside and said that same thing to Hunter.
“What are you talking about?” He was occupied at his drawing board, shuffling papers and tossing foam pieces into an open bin. He looked like he wanted to shrug off my words but couldn’t quite. He knew exactly what I was talking about.
I just smiled. “I mean, I left Ben…actually, I left him a note. In a mailbox.” I shook my head at the stupidity of thinking that was somehow acceptable. “Then I left you for him…then him again. But you helped me return from Midheaven, do you know that?”
He swallowed hard and shrugged. His actions were jerky, not at all his usual lithe, catlike movements.
I leaned against the table, toward him. He turned, disappearing behind the clouded plastic screen separating the workshop from the shooting range. I raised my voice. “You did. I was…trapped there. It would have been easy just to…” Give up. Die. The words slipped away. “Anyway, it would have been easy. But I remembered you once talking about my strength, how you thought it was beautiful, and that memory made me want to fight.”
It’d been in this very workshop, the sole time we’d made love. I’d left him then too. I edged around the hanging plastic sheet to find him standing before it, unseeing, motionless. He licked his lip, still not looking at me. “Not now,” he whispered. “Please.”
I didn’t know what he meant by that.
“You also said it was okay to change, to want something new. To admit you made a mistake and then make a new choice. For a new person. In a moment.”
I thought of what Solange had said as we were spinning in her planetarium, that I doubted my place in the world.
But I didn’t doubt this.
Sure, I wasn’t Solange, with her confidence and authenticity—her powers—but I was certainly the best m
e I’d ever been. I put my hand on his arm, hoping he’d choose this moment too. That he’d choose this new me. Hunter lowered his head for a moment.
Then he turned away.
It hurt. I closed my eyes. Yet I still wanted him. I opened them again.
And when he strode off to clear the target, I followed. A firing range, I thought. How appropriate.
“What are you doing?” he said, stopping in front of the first bull’s-eye, feeling me behind him.
Keeping my expression pleasant, I inched closer. “Sticking,” I said shortly, slipping my smile into the word.
“No, you’re being obnoxious.” He yanked on the old bull’s-eye, crumpling it in his hands. “Not to mention aggressive.”
“I know.” I rolled my eyes. “It’s so unattractive.”
He loved my strength. He loved my stubbornness. I stepped closer.
Hunter moved away, not looking at me. “We tried this before.”
His resolve was so firm it made me ache to shatter it. I smiled. “And we’re going to do it again.”
He whirled. “No.”
“Yes.” I snorted. He was right. It was obnoxious. “What, hero? Nobody and nothing touches you just because you’re bulletproof?”
He lifted his chin. “That’s right.”
I tilted my shoulder and batted my lashes. “C’mere, Bulletproof.”
His mouth actually twitched at that.
“See. You’re going to start liking this.” I let my glance fall to his mouth. “I promise.”
He swallowed hard, serious again. “Stop.”
Maybe I would have. If his gaze hadn’t slid over my halter top, lingered on the belly ring, caught on the zipper of my chaps. My smile widened, he took another step back…and I picked him up.
“What the—”
I threw him into the sidewall ten feet away, hard enough to knock some sense into him without causing injury. He was a big boy. He could tell the difference.
He was already on his feet as I advanced again, looking at me like my body had been taken over by aliens while I’d been visiting another world.
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