All of a sudden, in a world of near immortals, the tiniest thing could kill me.
16
The panic room was entirely different than the last time I’d seen it. Obviously Vanessa was long gone, but the tank with the healing gel was also absent, along with all the hospital equipment. Pushing the door open, I blinked against the bright light, and at the weighty silence. I’d been too preoccupied by the chinks in my paranormal armor to note the hissing murmurs that’d accompanied my careful climb down the crow’s nest ladder—to be honest, I was on the verge of tears—and I wiped my eyes, pretending to rub sleep from them and acclimate to the fluorescent light. I knew the moment Warren and Hunter scented my mood. I couldn’t contain it fully. My grief at this lost power, the stolen ability to heal, was felt as keenly as if someone had died.
I silently admonished myself to pull it together, and studied my surroundings—not looking at the men—hoping that would ground me. The small, sterile room was suddenly depressing in its austerity, and though not normally claustrophobic, I knew that if I were trapped in here, I’d be begging for someone to kill me within days. The cure that was worse than the proverbial disease.
There were rations tucked away, additional sources of heat and light, although sieges meant something different to Zodiac agents than they did to even a mortal paramilitary troop. Those could last weeks, not mere days. Back in the late nineties, New York’s agents of Light had endured one lasting longer than the time it took to conceive, gestate, and birth a squalling child. Learning from that, our troop had installed a side bathroom with a small shower while constructing this one.
Hunter’s memory, which the aureole gifted me with earlier, had shown scattered papers, and there were indeed two maps lying side by side over the centered drawing tables. I tucked my hair behind my ear and bent over them, rubbing my arms, aware that Warren and Hunter were still eyeing me. The maps turned out to be identical, the original pristine but its twin copy marked up in a completely nonsensical fashion. What the maps detailed, however, was clear.
“The flood system?” I said as Hunter came to stand at my side. I heard his deep inhalation as he tried to ferret out my mood. I held my own breath and didn’t look at him. Instead I wondered how long he’d been studying this. Multicolored markings zigzagged and crosshatched the second drawing like an enthusiastic toddler’s art project.
“This is it in full.” I did look up then. His hair was disheveled, and bare-chested, he looked warm, but his eyes were shadowed. Not at all the sinking softness he’d turned on me hours before. I couldn’t tell if it was in reaction to my shuttered mood or in response to whatever he and Warren had been discussing. “Joanna was helping me chart her path into Midheaven.”
Warren gave him a look that said he knew exactly what I’d been helping him with, and we both shifted our gazes to the floor like teens caught after curfew.
“Where the hell did you get it?”
“The Flood Control District.”
Warren quirked a wiry brow. “They just handed you a map of the entire underground system?”
“I told them I was doing a story on the homeless living in the tunnels. Do you know that floodwaters can rise in there at the rate of a foot per minute?” When Warren only stared, Hunter shrugged and went to sit on a corner stool. “What? Your undercover identity is what gave me the idea.”
The strained silence between the men elongated, and I glanced back at the maps.
He’s already mapped the place out.
This was what I’d seen him working on in the shared aureole. The emotion accompanying it had been exhaustion and determination. But exactly what was he doing? The bright intersecting lines gave no clue.
Warren took Hunter’s place at my side, using a fingernail to trace the entrance I’d emerged from all the way to its intersecting point. All lines, I noted, met in the middle. So there really was only one entrance to Midheaven. “Did you make sure everything was as you found it?” Warren asked me.
“Sure,” I said sarcastically. “I even dusted. Right after I lost my powers and before being ambushed by Regan and the Tulpa.”
Warren’s head slowly swiveled my way. “Powers?”
I scrambled to think, before deciding to turn the blame on him. “Well, something was jerked from me upon entry, and it felt pretty powerful. What else could it be?”
I stared at him, daring him to tell me he knew he was sending me to a place that would strip my soul in three tries.
His gaze lingered on my face, and then he ran a hand over his spiky hair. “Well, it won’t be as bad the second time.”
I look at him like he was stoned.
He gave me the same once-over.
“Uh-uh.” I shook my head and backed up until I was leaning into Hunter’s knees. He opened them, giving me harbor in between, and I nestled in tight. Warren’s eyes flickered at the intimacy, but he said nothing. Both things gave me courage. “Not me. No way. That place is evil. The passage alone felt like it was going to kill me.”
“But it didn’t, and that which doesn’t kill you…”
It took all my self-control not to roll my eyes. I’d collected quotes as a teen, mental touchstones, wise words in an unpredictable world. But I hated clichés, and I certainly wasn’t going to spout empty bravado. I nestled in more tightly to the pocket Hunter created for me. I wasn’t feeling particularly brave. “Makes you weaker?”
“Leaves loose ends,” Hunter muttered, his voice stirring my hair. Despite my worry, it stirred other things as well. Sick, I thought, shaking my head slightly, but every bruise had been worth it.
Warren scowled, crossing his arms as his eyes darted between the two of us. “Might be a second chance at redemption.”
Something niggled at me, like a secret whispered in the dark. Someone had just told me something, but who? I leaned against Hunter and remembered his silhouette in sleep. I looked at Warren and the whisper echoed faintly.
“Why would I go back?”
Warren glanced at the maps beside him, then back at Hunter. There was something vaguely threatening in the action. “Hunter, would you mind leaving the two of us alone?” It wasn’t a question.
Hunter remained where he was for about a year under Warren’s direct gaze, before gently easing me forward to stand. A light brush of his fingertips trailed my belly as he crossed in front of me, and then he was gone. Warren and I said nothing for a long time; he allowing no indication of what he thought of this new development, and me making it clear I didn’t care either way.
Finally he leaned back on his elbows, crossing tattered boots at the ankles. “Hunter caught me up on what happened to you in Midheaven. As much as he could, that is. Is it true that it felt like you were gone only hours?”
While a week had passed here. Nodding, I pushed myself up on the stool. I recounted the conversation I’d overheard in the pipeline, that though still broken, Regan was once again back in the Tulpa’s good graces. That she’d been hiding in the pipeline, she still had my conduit, and that she was going to try to bring me to the Shadow leader alive. “She’s been following me everywhere, in both my daily life as Olivia and as the Archer. I know she followed me to Master Comics.”
He watched me with dull eyes, looking less surprised by this knowledge than I thought it warranted. How about this, then, Warren…
“She also claims to be tracking me with the help of someone in the troop. An agent of Light.”
“A bluff.” Warren shrugged, immediately dismissing the claim. “Not possible.”
He let that, and the surety with which he said it, sink in. His tone said he was in charge and I should be glad that he was. He must have realized how imperious it was because he shrugged one shoulder and smiled. “Tell me what you can about Midheaven.”
What I could. He knew, then, that I couldn’t tell him everything. But I frowned anyway, wanting to accommodate him. I saw a skeleton with a bowler hat. I saw inky masculine shapes and bright feminine ones. Images zipped by, a very
few lingering like mental balloons in my frontal lobe, but when I opened my mouth, they slid away, leaving me with nothing but a fleeting sensory reminder. I shook my head apologetically.
“It’s okay,” Warren said, like he’d been expecting it. “You only remember the people and things linked to your own time and place. Like the man and woman you mentioned to Hunter. Harlan Tripp and Solange?”
I’d figured that out for myself, but I still shook my head. “I remember more than just them. I remember it all. But trying to verbalize it is like trying to tell a story without a subject or object or any linking verbiage.” I sighed. “But you already knew that too, didn’t you?”
He shrugged again. There were worlds to interpret in that one movement. “Midheaven’s vibration doesn’t register over here. It’s why the place is considered myth and why Zane can’t write about it in manuals. It’s a place that becomes known to you only when it’s time for you to know it.”
Warren hasn’t told you anything, has he?
I couldn’t shake Solange’s taunt from my head. He hadn’t. And I’d lost a third of my soul, power, time, and nearly my life. For what? To learn things he already knew? To feel like I was going crazy in my own mind? Or crazier?
Since I was having trouble voicing my own thoughts, I decided to pry out his. “Let’s play a little game, Warren. I’m going to start a sentence, and since I can’t finish any thought that contains knowledge gleaned in Midheaven, you’re going to finish it for me.”
Before he could protest, I started.
“Jaden Jacks is…”
“In Midheaven.”
The answer I was looking for was Light. I shook my head. “Jaden Jacks is…”
“A rogue agent like Harlan Tripp, who has also been gone a very long time.”
“Jaden Jacks is…”
Warren sighed. “Watch your temper—”
“Jaden Jacks is!” I pounded the wall so hard I felt the reverberation through my fist. Shit. I was going to have to relearn how to walk through this world as a mortal. I closed my eyes, fought not to rub my hand or wince, and calmed myself.
When I opened my eyes, Warren was watching me like I was crazy. “I should have known this would happen.”
“What, Warren? That I’d come back with a tattoo of the sun hennaed on my belly?” I asked bitingly, coming off my stool, pissed because he could have prevented all my losses. And because they’d been for absolutely nothing. “Or that I’d return with more questions about Jaden Jacks, agent of…”
I didn’t complete the sentence, I refused, but its start let him know exactly what I was driving at. Light.
“Jaden Jacks is in Midheaven,” he repeated. “And Harlan Tripp can help you find him.”
“That’s not what I hear.”
“Then someone is lying to you.” He straightened at my arch look. “And, no, it’s not me. Because I’m the one who put him there.”
I shuddered involuntarily at that, both at the way he said it and the thought of being forced through that passage. Of having to remain in that heat with Boyd and Bill and Mackie and a drink that slowed your senses to an impossible crawl. All because Jacks had broken a changeling?
I had broken a changeling.
I shook the thought free. Jacks had knowingly killed one. “You put a lock on the entrance, didn’t you?”
That indeterminable shrug again. He’d known that changeling was dead and he’d sent me in anyway!
“Goddamn it, Warren—”
“I do not have to explain myself to you!” he roared with such force that it rocked from the small room, and I imagined it ping-ponging off the warehouse walls. “Do you understand me? You may be the Kairos, but I am the leader of this troop!”
I swallowed hard, clenching my jaw. “Nothing short of death will make me go back there.”
“We need to heal our changeling. Our troop. Our world.”
There was hope in his eyes when I searched their dark depths again, a rabid hope that I’d do this thing without arguing, and the manuals would be written, Jasmine would move on, Li would be whole. Like my disappearance was a magic wand waved over the landscape of all these lives, making everything all right.
“Jacks killed that kid.”
“By choice. Which means he knows an alternative.”
“Then you go.” I sighed again, not caring if fear and exhaustion perfumed the room like the fields of Grasse.
Warren’s scuffed boots appeared in my sightline, and I raised my head. His deep brown eyes bore into mine. “How do you feel now?”
“Fine,” I said through clenched teeth.
“Jo.”
“It feels like there’s a piece of me missing here,” I put a hand over the sweatshirt, the hennaed sun beneath and what a more metaphysically inclined person would call my sacrum. My other hand, just my fingertips, went to my head, touching gently like it was an open wound. I didn’t know why—it didn’t make sense—but I softly added, “And here.”
“But do you feel lighter? Like something has been yanked up by the root?”
I swallowed hard. “How do you know that?”
One side of his mouth lifted. “Your scent, Jo. You smell lighter. There’s less Shadow there. That’s all it took from you, don’t you see? Your Shadow side.”
Is that what Solange had meant by me being armored, then? Was my Light side somehow being protected? But she’d talked about my soul…
“I don’t want to go.” Even if he was right.
“Then Li will die.”
“Don’t lay that on me!” I yelled, even knowing that it was true, and that was my fault. “There has to be another way.”
“And we’ll be working to find it while you’re there.” He was composed again; my rising emotion seemed to calm him. He put a hand on my bruised shoulder. “Do it for your troop.”
I shook it off. “Your troop,” I muttered, because that much was clear.
Warren looked away, sighed, then paced to the door. Did he deem me a lost cause? Not quite yet. He turned, hope still alive in his eyes. “We still have a little time. Keep thinking and you’ll see I’m right. For now, it’s good to have you back. Chandra has been working in your stead. Kimber has been trying…not that she can do much.” He shook his head, almost in disgust. “I’d send her back to her family if I could. She’s miserable, and we need someone stronger.”
Of course Kimber was miserable. Warren was horrible at hiding his feelings. He wanted to throw her away because of her weaknesses, get someone else to fill her sign. I self-consciously tugged Hunter’s sweatshirt over my bruised wrists.
“Meanwhile, stay away from Regan. No matter what she’s told the Tulpa, she may kill you out of spite.”
I sighed in relief. So he wasn’t going to push me into Midheaven, and he wouldn’t lock me in the sanctuary either. Giving me a choice might be an obvious ploy at slowly gaining my acquiescence, but it was the least of all evils. Still, he’d admitted to locking Jacks in Midheaven, and he’d sent me in as well, knowing what the passage would demand of me. He had his reasons—he was the troop leader; he was Light—but both decisions tasted of pure, uncut ruthlessness. So was it true that he believed I’d given up nothing but my Shadow side? Again, how could I tell? How could he?
“Who else have you seen since your return?”
“Just Hunter.”
He bit his bottom lip, mind working like a calculator. I could practically hear it clicking away.
I raised a brow. “Is that a problem?”
“Of course not.”
I nodded, then looked at the ground. “Look, about this…about Hunter—”
He held up a hand. “Please. The less I know, the better.”
My thoughts exactly.
“As for the others…” He just shrugged. “They probably won’t be as…incurious.”
I wanted to tell him that the others didn’t need to know of my relationship with Hunter yet, if ever, but then a shout sounded throughout the warehouse, Felix’s unmis
takable whoop as he scented out the where, who, and most of the what of the previous night’s events. I closed my eyes with a low groan. When I opened them again, Warren was wearing an ill-concealed smile.
“You might want to put on something a little more appropriate,” he said, taking in Hunter’s crumpled sweats. I couldn’t really see the point as I could still hear Felix, now grilling Hunter in a playful tone. Even Warren rolled his eyes as he turned away. “Besides, it’s time to train.”
I wavered on my feet, and had to brace myself against the wall. I couldn’t train with these people! They’d kill me just deflecting one of my blows! But Warren left the room before I could think of an excuse, and almost immediately, Hunter stood in the doorway, looking more hesitant than I was used to.
I straightened, rubbing a hand over my face as I shot him a distant smile.
“What did he say?” He asked.
“He wants me to go back to Midheaven. He says Harlan Tripp can tell me how to find Jaden Jacks.”
Hunter stiffened as he eased toward me.
“I told him no.”
Surprise froze on his face. “And he was okay with that?”
I tried for bravado, hoping the effort would actually lend me some. “What’s he going to do, force me to give up pieces of my soul?”
“Good for you, Joanna.” But as he reached for me, I could tell what he meant was, Good for us. I’d told Hunter I wouldn’t leave again, and though I’d meant emotionally, I decided now that it would hold true for this world too. And I definitely wasn’t going to tell Warren about Ashlyn now. Even if the Tulpa did know of her. Don’t ask me why, but it somehow seemed the lesser danger. How messed up was that?
“Hunt, about these maps…” I pulled back, wanting to ask what he was doing or planning, and what he so clearly didn’t want Warren to know. What they were arguing about. Why?
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