Cheat the Grave

11

The supernatural community at large could move around in ways mortals couldn’t, but we just took a cab. Yet when Tripp directed the driver to an address on Main, I couldn’t hide my surprise.

“El Sombrero? Seriously?”

He shrugged, indicating it wasn’t his first choice. Of course, he’d spent the last eighteen years living in an environment about as comfortable as a deep fryer. A momand-pop shop with tonsil-dissolving salsa was probably well behind his vote for Ben & Jerry’s. However, Milo and Fletcher were already debating the merits of a verde relleno versus a red enchilada, while the cab driver-also a fan-put in his vote for the menudo. I just wondered what a handful of rogue agents were doing at the oldest Mexican restaurant in town.

We hopped out on Main Street, and I stared at the neon green and red sign. El Sombrero Café was a hole-in-thewall if ever there was one, in the best possible sense of the word. It’d been in the same location since the fifties, and the interior was as dated as the exterior, both adding to its charm.

“You sure it’s open?”

“Well there’s open,” Tripp replied, as I gave the door a fruitless tug, “and then there’s open.” He pulled on the steel handle, and the entrance swung fluid and wide.

“Show-off.”

“You should see me two-step.”

The Big Hat was definitely closed. Every surface wiped down and reset for the next day’s crowd, the kitchen quiet and dark, the scent of rice and beans faint as a memory. Yet a sole man sat in the room’s center, as if stranded there. Posters of matadors and raging bulls surrounded him, and giant hats were pegged indiscriminately to each of the four walls. Tripp motioned me forward with a jerk of his head, though he remained behind with Fletcher and Milo, making like the mafia of old. It helped me feel at home as I wove my way to the center table.

“José. Mescal por mi amiga. ” The man lifted only his voice, the rest of him utterly still and fixed on me, as if he was a lizard I’d surprised in Red Rock Canyon. Or, I thought as I sat, a rattler. “Unless you’re a margarita girl?”

I was. Rocks and salt, but when in little Baja…“Tequila is fine.”

José, obviously the owner, brought the bottle. I studied his fingertips as he filled my shot glass, and he smiled- either missing the direction of my gaze or pretending to-and replied in soft Spanish at my nod of thanks. I waited until he’d disappeared to wince at the fat pink worm floating along the bottle’s bottom.

Glancing back at Carlos, I lifted my brow, an invitation to explain why a mortal would be serving a rogue. His lips were a soft heart beneath a thin, Errol Flynn mustache, and he licked them before giving me another answer entirely.

“My name is Carlos Fernandez. I became a rogue at age fifteen by entering the city of neon with my mother, an agent of Light in La Ciudad de Mexico until the Shadows overtook it in the nineties.”

I remembered, though obviously not in the same way Carlos did. World events and paranormal activity were invariably intertwined. Victory by the agents of Light or Shadow made its mark on the mortal population, though all the humans knew was that in ’ninety-four the peso had plummeted, sending the country into despair. The chasm between the haves and have-nots widened like the grandest of canyons, and things had only worsened since then. I’d be surprised to hear if there was even one agent of Light left in any major Mexican city.

Carlos spun his shot glass in his hand, making no move to drink as he watched me from across the table. His dark hair was cropped close, but you could still see a bit of a Caesarean curl. His eyes were light brown, the simple tabletop tea light catching deeper flecks of color like grains trapped in amber. Though darker, with long sable lashes, his gaze put me in mind of Hunter. The same patience lurked there.

Or maybe it was the same calculating spark.

“My father, determined to fight the enemies of Light to the last, sent us ahead without him. He was forced out a year later, finally leaving that dangerous place to travel to us, and this safe one.” Another slow slide of his tongue over his bottom lip, like he was trying to seduce me, before he blinked. “He lost his life in the weedy meadows after which this city is named. Almost immediately.”

I froze, unsure what to say. I sensed a drama involving me, but like a person wrongly accused, wasn’t yet sure how. Carlos, still reclined, pulled a card from his shirt front pocket as he spoke and slid it toward me. I leaned forward, frowning as I recognized the small square format. It was a trading card so old the stock paper was thinned and frayed at the edges, and worn so finely in one spot I could almost see the grain of the paper.

The black and white photo showed a man wearing tight jeans and an unstructured blazer winging open to reveal a mesh tank top as he leaped through air. Very eighties. His conduit was some sort of mallet, and his name, troop number, and city were scrawled in Spanish across the card’s bottom. His vital stats were on the back, similar to a ballplayer’s, and identical to the cards featuring superheroes sold in comic book shops all over the world. Gently, I handed the card back.

Carlos took it between two fingers and tucked it back in his pocket. It was probably the last of his father’s trading cards in existence.

I glanced back up into his face, noting the resemblance now, especially those darkly expressive eyes. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

He inclined his head, and lifted his shot glass from the table, allowing the edge to kiss his lips. I echoed the movement as he said, “Your mother had him killed the day after he arrived.”

I sputtered homemade tequila over the glossy tabletop. Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I bent my head and cleared my throat of its burn before letting out a huge sigh.

“I guess here’s where I say I’m sorry, and while I have no control over my mother’s actions now, never mind back then, I’m sure none of that matters. You’ve clearly been planning your vengeance for a long time. I expect you’ll kill me in the same way she murdered your father. You latinos have deep poetic leanings.”

“We do?”

“Yeah. Ever the closet romantics.” I shrugged. “So what will it be? Decapitation? Pull out my guts? Boring ol’ slice of the arteries?”

His amusement vanished and I was sorry I’d asked. The reminder of his father’s death was obviously still painful, and it only occurred to me belatedly that it might be better not to know how I was going to die. “He was ambushed while seeking sanctuary in the Strip-front cathedral.”

“The Guardian Angel?” I’d heard it’d once served as a place for rogues to connect with one another, but that was long before I’d come along. Warren had made sure of that.

“That’s right.” Carlos drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “She could have warned him not to enter, but she didn’t. Two agents of Light chased him out. They ambushed him in the brush surrounding the springs. Let his blood run where the natural streams once had.”

I swallowed hard. He made the Light sound as brutal as Shadows.

Carlos pursed his lips as he stared through his glass of amber liquid. “He was impossibly fast, my father. They’d never have caught him if he’d known Las Vegas like you…or me.”

“Is that how you’ve evaded Warren for so long? Because you know the city?” Its pockets and hidey-holes. How else could a rogue survive?

“That…and I’m even faster.” He slumped lower in his seat, but the movement didn’t look sloppy. His long- apparently speedy-legs sprawled like a desert spider taking hold of a rocky crag, and the top of his white shirt flared to reveal the hard lines of a smooth, honeyed chest. If I wasn’t currently so put off by male agents of Light, I might have been moved.

I turned in my seat, glancing back at Tripp and the others, but they hadn’t moved. Swiveling back, I found my glass again full. Carlos smiled. “Um, just so I can firm up my plans for the evening…you’re not going to kill me?”

“No.” He sipped.

So did I. “Why?”

His soft lashes curled up as he lifted his gaze, making him look angelic as he nodded at José. The owner silently crossed the room, lifted a bright orange sombrero from its peg, and removed a picture box hidden underneath. He then presented this to me as he would a menu, and the two men exchanged words in the smooth cadence of their native tongue while I flipped a clasp on the shadow box’s side and opened it up.

“Cuidado,” Carlos said, but the warning was unnecessary. My gasp told him I knew exactly what I held. Knew too who was depicted on the inside cover: me, my image drawn upon the manual…and done so long before I’d ever been born.

The book wasn’t inked, only penciled, and wasn’t even a proper comic, having been drawn well before the format’s Golden Age. The pages were bound together with a peeling yellowed glue, and every brushstroke had a sense of age to it, a style as easily discernible to the modern eye as a Pixar movie versus Bugs Bunny’s debut.

At least the subject matter was familiar. A woman cloaked in shadows, running through a tunnel while glancing over her shoulder. Her face was indiscernible, her body long and muscular and absent of the pinup features commonly associated with females in comics. Despite the shading, I knew this was me. The old me, though, Joanna, before my transformation into an action figure with body parts more important than the whole. The drawing perfectly captured how I moved, or at least how I felt when I moved.

Adding to its accuracy, and its mystery, this had clearly been sketched by someone used to the strong, serious lines of cartography or botanical drawings. I felt like I was holding a piece of art worthy of Sotheby’s, and flipped through it quickly to find the attached story. A jagged tear interrupted, though, and disappointment ripped through me as well. Some point in the manual’s storied past had found it rent in two. I glanced up to find Carlos watching me with sympathy, and knew he’d felt the same loss upon seeing the tear.

“How old?” I managed, my voice a mere creak.

“Closer to the first manual than anyone I know has ever seen. My father must have had it for years, maybe since he was a boy. He obviously knew what it was.” Carlos rubbed his bare chin thoughtfully. “He hid it under a pew in the cathedral just before the attack which took his life. It was an agreement between my mother and him. Her idea. She wasn’t as fast, but she was smart.”

I reached forward, unable to resist running my finger over the images. “What does it say?”

“It foretells the Kairos’s birth in this city. That here she would be raised, survive attack, go into hiding, and discover her true destiny upon metamorphosis in her twenty-fifth year.” He waved his hand over the open pages. “This legend on these pages was why he sent us here when our own battles were deemed lost.”

I shook my head, and the mescal took hold. I shook it harder to regain my vision. I couldn’t play savior to this man, or anyone, anymore. I’d tried it before, and look where it had gotten me. “Look, I did some of those things, it’s true. The commonalities are even uncanny…” How many other women in Vegas had done all that?

And how could every depiction on these panels ring so true and right in my marrow? “But you’re too late. Maybe if he’d had the full issue, or the one printed after this, he might have seen that.”

“You are the Kairos.”

“I am a mortal.”

“You underestimate your strength.”

“Understandable…since I have none.”

Carlos remained unmoved. “Did you read the text on the final full panel?”

“It’s in Spanish.”

He held out his hand. “Then I will read it for you.”

Cradling the manual like a prayer book, Carlos cleared his throat and began to read from the blurb on the inside cover in a strong, clear voice, his accent transposing beats in the sentence, like it was music. “‘Light returned to the valley, where the meadows had long been falsely lit, to lure and fool the unwary. But with this true light came genuine hope. Balance seemed possible…right up until the Great Sorrow. This event marks the onset of the Fifth Sign: the Shadow binding with the Light.’”

His deep, dark eyes blazed expectantly.

“More fucking signs,” I muttered, and poured myself some more fucking tequila. I took another sip of my liquor, holding it in my mouth so long it numbed my gums and swelled my tongue. Carlos obviously thought the fifth sign was my willingness to work with the yahoos making like Tony Montana behind me, but that wasn’t possible. I swallowed the warm tequila with a grimace. I was no longer Light. Or Shadow. I was no longer Joanna, or really Olivia. I was not a daughter. I was not a weapon. I was not the Kairos. I leaned my elbows on the table and said as much to Carlos.

“And that’s where I come in.” Carlos finally leaned forward, forearms on the edge of the table, fingers twirling his shot glass, though not a drop spilled. “I can teach you the tricks and trade of being a rogue. The power in being powerless. The Kairos is not meant for only Shadow or Light. She is preordained to be the deliverer of us all.”

I leaned forward as well, meeting his dark, pretty, zealous gaze with a cynicism earned by listening to too many zealots. “Carlos, you seem like a…nice man. Fairer than any I’ve met in my recent past, that’s for sure. But you’re too late. Even if I were the Kairos-obviously untrue-I’m not anymore. I gave up every drop of my power and aura and life force- chi, whatever you want to call it-to save a mortal child. There’s more power left in the bottom of this bottle than there is in my entire body.”

“I have total confidence in you.”

“That manual did nothing in my hands,” I pointed out, important because they once had. All written histories burst to life and color, “Pow!” and “Bam!” exploding from the panels in brilliant bursts when in the hands of an agent. Carlos shrugged, unmoved, and even in my increasingly drunken state, I knew why before he spoke.

“Because you’ve become an independent.” It hadn’t come to life in his hands either.

“You mean a rogue,” I said, raising a brow, testing him.

“I mean a part of this valley’s prophesied revolution. The woman who will rise from ash to become the leader of a new world order.”

“Gee, why does that sound familiar?” I tapped my chin like I was really considering it, then brightened. “Oh, yeah-because I already did that. And failed.”

Carlos only lifted a dark brow. “Tell me. What is Warren’s stated agenda for the agents of Light? Defeat the Shadow agents for good? Annihilate them from the valley?”

I shook my head. “Balance. He said a true and continual balance between the two sides will allow mortals the greatest choice in their own lives.”

“Yet he continues to seek the Shadows’ destruction.”

“As they seek his.”

“There is no balance when destruction is the goal. It’s like adding a fat kid to your end of the seesaw. The other side is forced to overreact.”

“There’s no other way with the Tulpa.” The leader of the Shadow side had long made it known that any Light in the valley would be exterminated. His position was as inalterable as Israel versus Palestine. The only way to stand firm against attack was to preempt it yourself.

“Ah, but there is. True balance in life comes only when there is total freedom of choice…from either side.”

Carlos sat back so suddenly my mortal eyes only picked the movement up in panes. “Let me ask you something. What do you see when you look at me?”

My eyesight blurred as it trailed his features; cinnamon face, hair a soft, black blot. “You’re the Latin archetype. The one they write songs about.”

“Thank you,” he said, beautiful smile widening. “But I meant, what do you see of my intent? My nature?”

“Oh.” I flushed, but then chalked it up to the drink, and shrugged. The idea of a flirtation or romance was about as attractive as a harelip. “Well, you’re Light. I’d be able to tell even if I hadn’t been an agent. I bet even lifelong mortals flock to you.” Especially the women.

His smile went closed-lipped, modest and knowing, and he lifted his chin, angling his eyes over my shoulder.

“And what about Tripp?”

“Clearly Shadow. Even Fletcher and Milo would have been easy to spot.”

“Once, you would have been right. But things are different when you’re reduced to gray, and that’s what being a rogue truly means. We walk the line between both sides, accepted by neither. We are all gray.” He laughed then, which made no sense to me until he explained, “That’s what we call ourselves. Grays.”

“So what about me?”

“Born gray,” Carlos replied immediately. “A natural blending of Shadow and Light.”

“Natural?” I laughed so loud and long that disapproving mumbles rose between my decidedly unfeminine snorts.

“What, you had to work for the ability to enter the sanctuary of the Light? Or bring to life the glyph on your chest? To leap to rooftops? To survive man-made weaponry?”

“I had to learn,” I remembered, thinking specifically of the way my glyph, a bow and arrow, burst to life in glowing brilliance upon my chest when in danger. That didn’t happen anymore.

“A different thing altogether.” He waved the protest away. “And now you have the added ability to walk the line between superhuman and mortal.”

I began to scoff, but he cut me off with a lazy flick of his wrist. “Oh, I can tell you think you have nothing by the way you carry yourself. There is a fatalism about you that says you expect to be attacked and killed and there’s noth ing you can do about it. But do you know what I see when I look at you?”

“A pin-up with attitude?”

He didn’t smile. “I see a woman with everything.”

“I’m not the Kairos.” I said flatly.

He surprised me by agreeing. “Not right now.”

“So what can I be to you?” What exactly was Carlos after?

“You can be saved. Join our cell, or at least consider it, and I promise our full resources in protecting you from Sleepy Mac.”

“You’re rogues. You have no resources.”

He lifted a brow. “You didn’t know of our existence until now, right?”

I bit my lip. True, nobody in the troop had mentioned it. And Warren was obsessed with the subject. If he thought a splinter group of former agents was living in his domain, he’d blow the whole place up.

I glanced back at Tripp, Milo, and Fletcher. These people-Shadow, Light, gray and super- still had a use for me. Sure, they’d bred chaos the world over, but they were already working to change that-at least if Carlos was to be believed. And while I wasn’t sure I did believe him, I could go along with it for a while, at least until Mackie was subdued. Then I’d get back to my mortal life.

“What about Mackie? True death to the monster, or just a one-way ticket back to Midheaven to get him out of your hair?” I thought about the men in Midheaven, and what Mackie’s absence might mean to them. Each would have a better chance of escaping that twisted world without the knife-wielding piano player there to intercept. That Hunter was over there still had nothing to do with it.

“Oh, no.” Carlos’s dark brows creased low. “Most of the men in Midheaven are rogue agents. Tripp wasn’t able to tell us about them”-because what happened in Midheaven stayed in Midheaven, I thought wryly-“but he could tell us of Mackie’s purpose there once he began interfering with this world’s mysteries.”

He meant once Mackie came after me.

“Okay. Get rid of Mackie,” I said, turning back to Carlos. “And I’ll try to keep an open mind.”

Carlos allowed only a small twitch to his lips. “And may I ask why?”

I thought about my drowning, about being abandoned in a desert wash along with broken bottles and stripped tires, and left with a body too weak to hold its own weight. Yet I spoke of my most recent loss. “Because the bastard killed my cat.”