Cheat the Grave

10

I left the destroyed Bentley in Caine’s front lot. Let the scavengers drawn by Mackie’s cries take whatever remained. It was amazing how little value there was in something worth so much money. Because sometimes, I thought with a shudder, a person would simply rather be touched.

Mackie continued to wail behind me, his rage sailing like a disease through the night. When a second, agonized voice joined his, it set off a nearby car alarm, and had a woman in the apartments I was cutting through muttering, “What the fuck?” as she peered through her steel screen door. Hastening my steps, I hoped Caine’s restraints held.

I remained in the downtown area, mostly because I had no other safe place to go. That was okay, not all of it was bad. A revitalization project had been going on for years, more successful in some areas than others, depending on whether the locals got on board. I spotted an alcove next to a loading dock amidst a crosshatching of narrow streets, where young entrepreneurs competed for the title of hip-pest local bar. I’d appreciated the friendly rivalry in the past; it was always a novel thing to enter a place absent of the Vegas shuffle, but even those were too desensitizing and busy for my needs tonight. I wouldn’t be able to avoid propositions in there, never mind attacks.

So instead of burying myself in the rich scent of smoke and warring perfume, I camped out against a cold metal door, where spent fuel, dust, and the cracked blacktop ruled the night. Were it summer, the scents would be stronger and the ground would burn my ass and palms despite the deep night. The entire city soaked up the sun’s heat like it was hoarding it, but like any good desert rat, I preferred that to the cold. The only way I could get less comfortable on this winter night, I thought bleakly as a gust of wind whipped up the street, was to slip beneath the actual loading dock next to me.

Though it might not be such a bad place to hide if Mackie got away before the sun’s rise. I bent and peered underneath. There was a frantic scuffle at my approach, but the movement was too small to be a person. A cat, I realized, as it mustered courage to bolt. Watching it streak away-thinking of Luna-I tried not to take it personally. Though it was difficult not to imagine the hard flash I’d spotted in the feline eyes as somehow knowing. Like it sensed what happened to living beings when they got too close to me.

Yet somehow the damage done to Caine had calmed me. Nobody and nothing-not even an old, powerful Seer-could stand up to that blade. So while the reminder of Luna saddened me, I was no longer consumed with fear. In fact, I was getting pretty pissed off. I’d been driven from my home, was a fugitive in my own city, and anyone who aided me ended up dead.

I was also a tad distracted. Chalk it up to fatigue-mental relief that Mackie was, literally, tied up for the night-or just plain laziness. Whatever, when the man passed by my alcove the first time, I remained seated with my back to the steel door and didn’t really note it. My mind was spinning with deepening questions about Arun Brahma, mushrooming ones about Tekla, and flashing visuals of Caine’s raptur ous death. So when the man backed up, I dismissed it as drunkenness or forgetfulness, and closed my eyes. But when he came to a stop in front of me, so close the gravel under his boots pinged off mine, I sighed and opened them again.

He was burly, wide-legged, and bald. His pocketknife swung open with a resounding click. “Give me your pocketbook, bitch.”

I reached into my handbag and pulled out the heavy iron gun. “Give me yours.”

He backpedaled, tripping once, until he’d returned to the mouth of the intersection. I shot the wall to his right, spraying red brick just because I could. I probably shouldn’t have wasted the ammo, but his holler was gratifying as he disappeared in the same direction he’d come, footsteps fading like slap shots. Survival in the land of mortals, I thought, crossing my legs as I dropped the conduit to my lap. “Like a day at the spa,” I muttered, closing my eyes.

And that’s when something changed in me. It was like a caterpillar cocooning up in a self-made shell, or a woman’s gestating body. I didn’t move at all on the outside, but inside there were subtle shifts, excess cells altering to make room for something new. I realized then it wasn’t Warren or the troop or even the Tulpa I’d been struggling against. I was simply a woman who took up arms. Even before the Zodiac troop came along, I was someone who shoved back harder when pushed. I felt the pain of all the things taken so incrementally from me, and piled them like bricks to build my defenses in this world.

I wasn’t like Caine, that was for sure. I wasn’t so un-feeling that another person’s touch was a novelty, or that it made me seek out sensation in an abnormal manner. I was a city girl who’d been attacked at a young age, who survived it only to be caught up in more violence. Yet I’d survived that too.

Time to start acting like it.

No one else stopped by, but an hour later my phone trilled next to me. I pushed to my feet like I’d been wait ing for it all along, and maybe I had. Because even before I lifted the phone to my ear, I knew who it was. And the new me, the old me, the only me, answered back. “When and where?”

The “when” was immediately. The place? A plant nursery where overzealous residents used mulch and shovels and hard labor to fight the desert’s natural inclination to starve every resource from the soil. Climate be damned, we wanted our petunias.

In the morning hours the corner adjacent the nursery was occupied by day laborers, mostly Mexican, willing to work for cash with a landscaper or resident in search of someone strong and willing to haul colored rock into pretty formations. Xeriscape was environmentally responsible, but the installation was a bitch.

But in these hours before morning, the street front was empty, the silence broken only by a car whizzing by on the interstate. I had a cab drop me across the street at a modest shopping center housing a hopeful independent coffee shop, a doomed independent bookstore, and a thriving nail salon. After the cab left, I crossed the street, circled the building once out of habit, then tried the giant iron gate at the nursery’s back. The green paint was peeling from the cold bars in strips, and though the gate was closed and chained, its padlock hung free. I unwrapped the chain, dropped it to the ground, and entered.

The bulk of the nursery sat in darkness and shadows, the damp and greenery making it even cooler than the surrounding night air. I didn’t try to hide-an agent’s hearing was as good as their sight-and it would have been hard to slip in unnoticed anyway. Gravel crunched like beetle backs with every step. Yet it was still a good place to meet. The rioting scents of competing flowers and fauna masked errant emotions, and the green netting draped above like an oversized mosquito net held it all in.

I followed the main trail to the front of the building where the cashier’s stand and dark office were locked tight. Squinting, and whirling around myself, I then took a smaller path through the annuals, the section putting on a bright, brave face despite the scarce winter showing. Then, from a nearby stand of Italian cypress…

“A bit petite, isn’t she?”

A second cypress answered. “I thought she’d be larger than life.”

“Nah. Just in the manuals.”

The cypress shifted. “How can you look taller in a comic book?”

I leaned closer. “Hello?”

“It’s because she’s not a real superhero,” the first cypress explained. “She just plays one on TV.”

Snickers rose, and I crossed my arms. “Can you guys please stop talking about me like I’m not here?”

There was silence, then shuffling, before two men appeared. The first was bald, and had eyes like black opals and skin to match. He was the more wiry of the two, and his partner was as bright as he was dark. So blond, in fact, he damned near glowed next to his counterpart. Together, they were an eclipse.

“Sorry,” said opal eyes. “We thought you’d be taller.”

It was the same thing Caine had said. I glanced down at the cleavage busting from my business suit. “Yeah, it’s my height that people usually comment on first.”

“Heard you were a smartass.”

I shrugged. Better than a dumb one.

“I don’t care what she looks like,” announced cypress, the bright. “Or if she’s smart. I can still smell it on her.”

“Leave her be.” Tripp emerged then, an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips, hat drawn low.

I resisted the urge to smell myself, and angled toward him. “Well, it’s been a long day and I had to wait for your call under a loading dock.”

“It took time to secure this place first,” Tripp explained, but the second cypress was still inching my way.

“Not that,” he said, his voice deep, but oddly warbling. “The Light.”

He said it like I had leprosy.

“Fletcher is right. You still smell like one of them.”

I looked at Tripp meaningfully. “You’re all Shadows?”

“Former,” he said, knowing exactly how I felt about that. “This is Fletcher. That’s Milo.”

Milo raised his chin. “Like you’re a former agent of Light.”

“Discards, then.” I glanced at the two men, not a bit like each other…but not like me either. And not like Caine, born independent. These men had been raised in a Shadow troop, and if Las Vegas’s, then they were old enough to have once worked for the Tulpa.

Shaking my head, I turned back to the gate.

Tripp caught up, closing the expanse between us in one step. “Where ya think you’re going?”

“I don’t know.” But I wasn’t bedding down with Shadows. I kept walking.

“Ain’t nowhere Mackie can’t find you.”

I said nothing.

“And Warren won’t help.” He pulled the strange cigarette from his lips, licked them, replaced it. I shuddered, remembering how the smoke felt pressed against my pores. “If he even knew you were talking with us, he’d kill you himself. That’s truth.”

Hastening my pace, I reached into my pocket for the phone Warren had given me. I had a brief, insane urge to dial his number to ask him. Hey, Warren. If I took up with a splinter group of rogue agents, would you slay me on sight? Oh, they’re all Shadows too, but they told me that no longer counts. I laughed, humorlessly, imagining his response.

“So would the Tulpa,” Tripp continued, easily keeping pace.

“And Mackie and Helen-and still every Shadow agent in this city.” I halted and pointed back at the ones watching me. They’d held back, but I knew they could hear my every word. “So many ways and people to kill me. Why should I give them the pleasure?”

“They’re not the ones swingin’ at you.”

I angled a hard glare at Fletcher and Milo, then glanced at the mesh roof obscuring the winter sky. I felt like one of the plants trapped beneath that net, caught someplace unnatural, and likely to wind up in the hands of someone who would treat me carelessly.

“Skamar said she’d help,” I said, but the promise sounded hollow even to me. At some point Mackie would be too close to me, she’d be too far, and by the time she finished her death-dealings with the Tulpa, it would be too late.

And the other agents of Light? The ones I once counted as friends? Tekla had some sort of dealings with Caine, the Seer who’d just sacrificed himself for me, for relevance. She’d appeared in my dream, saying not everyone had abandoned me. But that was just a dream. It remained to be seen if she’d lift a finger for me in real life.

And what would Vanessa and Felix do, the couple that’d gradually become my closest new friends? Or Micah, who’d healed me more times than I could count? How about Gregor, who had a warden like Luna that was as protective of him as he was of her? Would their indifference to my mortality turn into aggression, just on Warren’s say-so?

Feeling unsteady, I leaned against a giant green machine called the Mulch Master. “You said before I could leave the city.” Maybe it was still an option.

Tripp said, “And go where? You got paranormal contacts elsewhere? Someone who knows how to deal with ol’

Sleepy Mac?”

“Do you?” I snapped back.

“Yup.” He spat something black and nasty into the green bin. I imagined it working like cement, binding the mulch together. “Why do you think we’re here?”

“You lie, Shadow.”

“I’m rogue,” Tripp corrected. “A free agent, though I still know a brethren Shadow when I see one.”

“I’m Light.”

“Goodness and Light,” Tripp taunted, scattering ash.

I ignored his sarcasm. So he was here on someone else’s orders. Not to save the petite mortal girl from a magical blade. Fucking Shadows.

“Did you tell this someone about Mackie?” I asked. “His quest?” His blade.

Tripp nodded.

“And he’s still willing to side with me?”

“He’s been waiting to do so for years.”

Options bounced around my skull like superballs. Slowly, dreamlike, I pulled Warren’s phone from my pocket and stared at it, trying to anticipate a conversation that had me explaining about Sleepy Mac and asking for sanctuary. That was the one place, I knew, the man from Midheaven couldn’t go. Hidden underground, protected by a security system even the strongest of Shadows couldn’t breach, and located on the other side of reality, it was home to the agents of Light.

And inaccessible to mortals, I thought, sighing. I couldn’t enter even if he did relent.

Which was what Warren would argue without even trying to find another way. I sighed. He’d then probe me for everything I knew about Mackie and Tripp, but what then? Would he have a sudden change of heart? Offer the troop’s protection if I agreed to work as a mortal beard or spy for the troop? Or would he kill me, as Tripp suggested?

“Sleepy Mac killed my warden,” I told Tripp, tilting my head, watching carefully for his response. “He killed a Seer too, a man as powerful as any I’d ever seen.”

Tripp only removed that strange cigarette again and slowly licked his lips. “Do you want to live?”

Was it wrong that I had to think about that for so long? Fletcher grumbled as he plucked leaves from a topiary, but Tripp shot him a silencing look over his shoulder.

If I wanted to live.

I glanced again at the phone Warren had given me, remembering how afraid I’d been before of losing it. Of losing, I now knew, anything else.

Losses aren’t bad things in themselves. Not as long as you remain open to new sensation.

Irritated, I huffed. Like working with Shadows?

Then again, Caine had been of the Shadows. Maybe he’d been born “free,” as he put it, but his lineage was stamped on his disposition as clearly as postage. And yet he’d sacrificed himself to Sleepy Mac’s blade for my sake.

Maybe, while I wasn’t looking-while I was getting reaccustomed to my mortal skin-my old defenses had become my prison. With the agents of Light turning their backs, and the sanctuary closed to me, the city I’d always found refuge in did suddenly resemble more of a tomb. But what had me pushing upright and turning to the mulch machine was that unanswered question, and the full comprehension of a niggling I’d already sensed. My T-Rex brain, I thought with a small laugh. Sparking to life.

Because though I didn’t know what Warren would do to me, I knew I didn’t trust him to protect me, not as I once had. Mortal or not, I no longer counted in his world-view, and he’d like nothing more than for me to disappear, become part of the woodwork…at most a bit of scaffolding on which to build his own idea of the way the world should be. To him, I was just someone to run down with his ambition.

Once you decide a person has no control over you…they no longer do.

And Warren’s mind didn’t create my reality. I would not be overrun because, all-powerful leader of Light or not, I mattered. I counted. And would as long as I lived.

“Your days are numbered, old man.” It was my T-Rex brain talking, pitching my voice low, my lips barely moving. No matter that he wasn’t there to hear it. Tripp heard, and one corner of his mouth lifted as I tossed the phone over the side of the mulcher, waited to hear it clank on the steel bottom, then laid my palm against the red button on the panel to my right. “You’ll go down so hard the earth will quake.”

The mulcher started up with a screeching roar, blades battering my only remaining connection to those I’d once counted as allies in the paranormal realm. Now, like Olivia said, I could live my dreams-or at least what remained of my life-my way. So I left the mulcher running, ensuring that if found, Warren would know exactly what I thought of his treatment of me. Then I nodded and left the nursery the way I came, through the back gate, under the cover of night.

But flanked by Shadows.