Cheat the Grave

6

I had to return to the bus, of course. Or the “scene of the crime,” as Terry whispered when I came up beside him, not looking over as he mentioned he had been there, seen everything…and survived. I glanced at him askance, then realized he thought I was a spectator, and he’d positioned himself behind the yellow police tape for just this purpose. Prima donna.

But there was quite a crowd for him to play to. Even my cabbie was standing alongside his open door, smoking and gossiping and staring at the destroyed party bus now surrounded by the yellow tape and flashing sirens. It was an abnormal sight, even for Vegas.

A handful of ambulances made a U shape in the center of the street, back doors flung wide to administer aid to the lightly injured, which helped me feel momentarily protected. Mackie wouldn’t return as long as there were this many people milling about. He, like all agents, operated in the shadows.

“…not everyone else was so lucky.”

I glanced back at Terry as he closed his eyes, a tear slipping from beneath one tarred lash. The mesh of his shirt was torn, his eyeliner smeared, and the new piercing in his ear was bright pink against his sallow flesh. I bet Tripp hadn’t even sterilized the piercing gun before sticking a hole in the poor guy. For some reason, that made me feel sorry for him. I returned my gaze to the destroyed bus, its top peeled back like a tomato can. With a blade alone. I shivered.

“We are lucky.” I shook my head, but immediately regretted it. It was as if Tripp’s infective, tapering smoke had slid past my earlobes and into the fragile drums to clog my thoughts like swamp water. I raised a hand to my head. “Though my hearing feels funny.”

There was a gasp beside me, and I turned in time to watch Terry’s eyes widen. “Concussion!” he screamed, pointing at me.

Three EMTs surrounded me like bees on a hive. Great.

“The cowboy knocked her out as he carried her out of the bus,” Terry said as someone started feeling up my skull. “She shouldn’t even be standing here now!”

Well, that was true enough.

A female tech tugged me in the direction of the nearest ambulance, but I was practically bowled over halfway there.

“Suzanne.”

The bear hug tightened. “Oh, darlin’! Oh, dear! Oh, honey-are you okay?”

She punctuated each exclamation with a smacking kiss, but I managed to nod in the middle of the gentle mauling, which earned me more bracing hugs and heavily accented endearments. The female EMT, clearly used to such emotional displays, disentangled me from the distraught woman and her seemingly eighteen limbs, but when Suzanne pulled back, I noted the knots in her hair and circles under her eyes. She looked a decade older than when she’d trailed a bunch of disgruntled socialites off the bus.

My heart fell cold and plummeted to my toes.

“Cher?” I asked in a small voice. The last I’d seen her, she’d just been tossed none-too-gently from Tripp’s back. Where she’d only been because of me. Just like Olivia.

Oh God. If something had happened to the vapid, shallow, softhearted ninny because of me…

As I searched Suzanne’s swollen red eyes, the fine lines of worry around them crinkled, belying her age. “She’s in the hospital, but she’s fine. They’re making sure the bump on her head is no more than just that.”

“Like we should do with you,” the tech put in, blotting out Suzanne as she shone a light into my eyes.

I let out a breath I hadn’t even known I was holding, and blinked away the spots and threatening tears. Suzanne gave me a watery smile when I again met her gaze, while a stethoscope was pressed to my back. The tech had the endless pockets of a circus clown.

“But what happened to you?” Suzanne asked as I was dragged to the bright interior of one of the ambulances and pushed onto a stretcher despite my obvious fitness. I concocted a story about being woken by the sound of sirens, alone in an alley, sans pocketbook. I was halfway through an explanation of the alley’s other inhabitants when a man sidled up next to Suzanne.

“Excuse me.” He had a cop’s inflection, though he wasn’t wearing a uniform. I sat up, ignoring the EMT’s protests, eyes flicking to the badge at his waist. “Can we finish your statement now?”

Suzanne looked at me with injured eyes. “They won’t let me go to the hospital until I finish telling them everything I know.”

Like she was a criminal.

I turned a cold eye on the cop. “Her daughter is there.”

“Stepdaughter,” he clarified, and Suzanne and I both narrowed our eyes. “And if we get this over with now, we can find the man who did this to her much faster.”

I put a comforting arm around Suzanne, who’d begun softly weeping. “You clearly don’t have children.”

His brow lifted. “And you do, Miss Archer?”

The professional tone altered into derision. I leaned forward, slipping a fraction inside of his personal space. “I have people I care about, if that’s what you’re asking. I was with one of them when she got knocked unconscious by…” A Shadow agent. A rotted man. A grave-dodger. “…a cowboy.”

“Then maybe I should take your comments as well.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, matching the arctic chill in his voice, and before he could protest, I sat back. “I’m suddenly feeling a little dizzy.”

The EMT glommed onto me like she’d been waiting for those words, and my arm was cuffed before I blinked. The officer shifted into view over her shoulder, mouth thinned. “Then maybe I should contact you at your workplace instead?”

“Sure,” I said lightly. I pointed with my free arm into the distance at the tallest, brightest building in the sky. Valhalla Hotel and Casino. Which I now owned. “You know where it is.”

His eyes narrowed into pinpricks. “Yes, being a casino heiress seems to pay very well. Though even the loftiest job can’t keep you safe all the time, huh?”

He dug out a business card and handed it to me, and one to Suzanne as well. “You ladies contact me if you manage to think of anything useful.”

Suzanne, missing the slight, just sniffled as she deposited the card in her purse. I crossed my legs and gave him a carefree smile, letting it fall when he joined a handful of other officers across the lot. After a moment they looked over, shaking their heads and muttering under their breaths. I knew how Suzanne and I looked in our designer wear and bleached hair-like two fireflies trapped in a bottle between the late night neon and harsh ambulatory lights. I didn’t need superhearing to know they thought us frivolous and useless, our brain matter as thin as tissue. Everyone made judgments based on first impressions, and police officers were most often proven right. Besides, how could those men know that beneath this waxed, perfumed, sculpted frame was a former heroine with a vigilante’s heart?

Then again, most people had some form of street smarts lurking beneath their chosen exteriors. Even Suzanne had some iron to her spine. She ran marathons, had raised a teenager on her own, and navigated the annual sale at Nordy’s with a warrior’s instinct. I glanced over to find her cleaning her nail beds.

Well, a shark’s instinct, anyway.

But Suzanne’s sort of savvy, as well as Cher’s, was harmless. Admittedly I hadn’t always felt so benevolently toward them, but after being turned into Olivia, I’d lost the ability to sum a person up based on their skin alone. I no longer judged them for using their looks to shape their realities. Besides, it wasn’t as if they were operating a Ponzi scheme. Their need to shellac, color, and buff every possible body part was a bit obsessive, but it didn’t hurt anyone else. So big deal.

“Don’t pay attention to it, Livvy-girl.”

I hadn’t realized I was glaring at the clustered men until Suzanne spoke. I shook my head, my hearing taking a momentary dip until equilibrium returned. “They’re jerks.”

“Well, that’s as obvious as Terry’s need for attention,” she said wryly, causing both me and the tech-clearly the one to treat the distraught man-to snort. “But what did I tell you years ago, when you were broken-hearted for your sister and embarrassed about your runaway Momma?”

I frowned, not knowing. Olivia had never shared it with me. “Um…hot pink is the new black?”

She kept her gaze even and didn’t smile, that iron spine peeking through. “That it ain’t your business what other people think of you. Especially assholes.”

“But they’re wrong.”

“Which is their right.” She shrugged and started playing with some cables, letting them drop when the tech cleared her throat. “Can’t change it. Might as well ignore it.”

“Is that what you do?” I asked, then cringed when I realized I’d just told her people thought she was a bimbo.

“Yes,” Suzanne said resolutely. “I ignore the gossips and naysayers and, yup, the assholes, and just go about doing what I gotta do to claim my own life.”

I glanced back at the party bus containing booze, boas, and stripper poles.

She followed my gaze, pursing her lips. “You know, people criticized me when I married an older man, first saying I was a gold digger, then sayin’ I was the one who put him in his grave.” She swallowed hard at the memory. “But we shared a powerful love, even if it was short-lived.” She lifted her chin as she returned her gaze to me. “So I was never embarrassed about it. After all, I knew true love…”

“And how many people can claim that?” the EMT put in, sighing. Suzanne nodded.

Frowning, I thought of my childhood sweetheart, Ben, whom I’d outgrown through time and experience. Then of Hunter…who’d thrown me away.

“After Cher’s daddy died,” Suzanne continued, oblivious to my silence, “I was also criticized for tryin’ to raise a girl closer to my age than not. I neither had kids nor knew the first thing about ’em, but I knew something those assholes didn’t.”

“What?” asked the tech, wrapped up in Suzanne’s story. I wondered too.

Suzanne’s responding smile was fierce. “I needed that little girl’s love, just as I’d needed her daddy’s. And my little Cher-bear needed mine.”

Olivia had too. She’d escaped to their home after our mother abandoned us, and while I shut down-thinking I’d caused the abandonment-Olivia could only find ways to endure it.

Suzanne addressed the tech now, chatting like friends over tea. “So now people are talking about Arun like he’s a golden egg. Like I laid a trap and he slipped right in. But I’ll just chin up and ride through that too. Ride all the way into my late years like I’m straddlin’ the sunset. And you know why?”

The tech, unblinking, shook her head.

“Because I choose love again. And no gossip or naysayer-certainly no ass hole-is going to keep me from love.”

The tech slumped, leaning back on her haunches. “You’re so right.”

“Yes I am.” Suzanne put a hand on the woman’s leg. Only she could bond with another woman under such circumstances. I’d have rolled my eyes were it not for the force of her words. “True love never dies. Even when it’s gone, its memory keeps you safe.”

Even the loftiest job can’t keep you saf… .

Asshole, I thought again. Though the officer was right about one thing. “Love can’t keep you from getting sideswiped by a bus. Like tonight.”

We’d almost lost Cher.

Suzanne turned back to me, the knowledge stark in her eyes. She finally nodded. “But it isn’t love that’s dangerous. Every life gets sideswiped at one time or another. Sometimes more than once. The question is, what do you do after that? Build something new out of the shrapnel…or just stay safe?”

The now-sniffling tech put her hands on me again, and I squirmed, suddenly tired of being touched. Having lone wolfed it for years after the attack on my life, I still got twitchy with too many people around me, too many hands on my body, even if they were soft and reassuring and supportive. I simply fared better emotionally when my knuckles were wrapped and I was punching something heavy. Having something to beat against loosened tension inside of me, enabling me to drop my worries behind like fallen foes until I was the last woman standing. I shut my eyes, mentally sparring.

Double jab. I am not weak.

One-two-three. I keep myself safe.

Push for space, front kick…take out a fucking kidney. I protect my friends too.

But I was weak. I was not safe. And Cher and Suzanne were not safe around me. Mackie now knew what they looked and smelled like. If he thought I really cared for them, he’d use them to get to me.

I sat up quickly, ripping off the cuff, and pushing the tech’s hands away.

“I have to go,” I whispered, clamoring from the ambulance, tears cutting through the words. I added something about Cher and the hospital, though I had to stay away from her too. Especially now.

Head lowered so my hair hid my face, I picked up my pace, ignoring the EMT’s calls, the watchful cops, and the rubberneckers snapping photos and video to upload to YouTube. Look what I saw on my Vegas Vacation.

“Olivia! Wait!” Suzanne rushed to catch up, her mouth already open in protest. Yet whatever she saw in my face had her mouth moving soundlessly before she managed, “Do you have a ride?”

I jerked my head curbside, where Kevin waited. My driver had practically arrived before I’d hung up the phone. After all, I was Olivia Archer.

Suzanne’s lips pursed, and I could tell she wanted to say more, but at last there was only a teary smile of her own, and a final hug enveloping me in her custom perfume and soap and shampoo. All signature Suzanne. Then her phone trilled from within her handbag, and she untangled herself with a sob.

“Arun-” she was already saying as she lifted it, hands shaking, to her ear. I turned away to give us both privacy, but glanced over my shoulder once. She was curled around that phone like it was a lifeline, arms wrapped around her slim body as if holding herself up. But she wasn’t keeping herself upright, I thought as I turned away. It was Arun. Because she chose him, and love.

And they chose her.

Suzanne may have been right about true love never dying. I didn’t think so, but the things I didn’t know had turned out to be more varied than I’d ever imagined. Still, her determination to hang onto love-and Cher’s Disneyfied dream of it-didn’t match up to my own experience. I couldn’t put my faith in a fairy tale. Sure, I believed in the wicked witch and the fire-breathing dragon parts, but the happily-ever-after? True love?

I scoffed, and pushed the thought away.

Misgivings about love aside, there were a shitload of other things I didn’t understand, all of them more pressing than finding some elusive Prince Charming. For example, who had removed the lock on this side of Midheaven, letting out Mackie and Tripp, and effectively any rogue who still had enough willpower and soul energy to attempt the crossing?

What was this “cell” Tripp was entering-a place to keep him safe? Surely not another lockup. And could I be safe there too? Because how the fuck was I going to dodge a homicidal agent with a soul-stealing knife when my own protection was skin-thin?

“I could use a fairy godmother about right now,” I muttered, and I didn’t mean a rogue Shadow agent fond of shit-kickers and strange cigarettes. Even had I agreed to help Harlan Tripp, he was no match for Sleepy Mac. He’d already been wounded, didn’t seem to have a conduit, and besides, I’d seen the fear in his eyes when he mentioned Mackie.

Cautiously, almost furtively, I reached into my pocket and fingered the phone Warren had given me. I’d been able to count on him and the troop to cover my back in the past, but Mackie had ruled over agents like him in Midheaven. The strongest agent of Light I’d ever known was over there now, though hoping Hunter Lorenzo would rescue me was as reasonable as believing in fairy tales about princes on noble steeds.

Because Hunter hadn’t come after me. And with Mackie and Tripp’s disappearance, he had to know the entry between the two worlds was open…and my life was in danger. His girlfriend-no, his wife, I remembered belatedly and bitterly-had sent Sleepy Mac.

And that brought me to Solange. Ah, beautiful Solange. I sighed, thinking of Midheaven’s queen bee. Sola, Hunter called her. Other women adorned themselves in clothing to entice, makeup to enhance, baubles to catch the eye. But Solange was the adornment and enhancement and enticement of her world. Her appearance was a private thing, a bottle you’d found and rubbed. The answer to anything you could wish. At least, that’s how she appeared there .

But she’d originally been a Shadow agent, also from the Vegas valley, escaping to Midheaven a few years earlier for some unknown infraction against the Tulpa. She and a man named Jaden Jacks had met here, unwisely beginning an affair that was a paranormal mixing of oil and water. When Warren discovered it, he forced J.J. into a new identity-Hunter Lorenzo-and ordered him to forget the Shadow he loved.

Except he never did. Hunter spent years searching for Solange. He donned a new cover identity and kept it from Warren. And sought her even after we became lovers.

As for my would-be rival, all I knew was this: Solange was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, but it was a beauty gained by raping the souls of others. She used alchemy, magic, and a uniquely savage mean streak to turn those valuable bits into gems, which she then strung into a recreation of the night sky. So beneath her soft, inviting exterior was a beast as vicious as a rabid hellhound, and that was the type of woman who thrived over there. In short, Solange made Mackie look like a pet rock.

And Hunter was in love with her.

So I’d helped him get to her. As hard as it was-and it’d been as acute as being struck with Mackie’s blade- what else could I do? Even learning of his past-discovering I hadn’t known him at all-I’d wanted good things for him. Besides, Warren had thrown him from the troop, essentially declaring paranormal jihad on his ass, so there wasn’t anything left for him here anymore.

There was you.

I shook my head, stopping when the smoky feeling hit me again, though I was grateful to note it was marginally less. No, Warren had been clear on the terms of Hunter’s banishment. If he’d stayed, Hunter would have been a rogue agent, driven from the city to live somewhere not yet populated enough to warrant a troop. If he remained in Las Vegas, or tried to contact any of his former allies, then the people he’d been raised with in the sanctuary of Light would kill him. So, either way he was an outcast. At least in Midheaven he’d have the love he’d so long searched for.

But he’d betrayed me, not by leaving me for his version of true love, or even because he’d failed to warn or protect me from Mackie. But he had been the one to tell Solange who I was, so that she could whisper it into Mackie’s ear. Go after Olivia Archer, I could practically hear her purr. Joanna’s alias in that parallel world.

I shut my eyes and leaned my head back on the buttery headrest. Whomever contacted me that afternoon had been right. I should never have gone out tonight.

True love never dies…even when it’s gone, its memory keeps you safe.

“Bullshit,” I whispered, though I didn’t believe love, once felt, just disappeared. My first love, Ben, still influenced my life, though our love belonged to a different place and time. No less meaningful, but no longer relevant to the woman I was today.

Yet my burgeoning love for Hunter had been different. We were two fallible people with scarred pasts that had springboarded us into the same passion. I might have been wrong about the permanence of both relationships, but they had shaped me. Love, truly felt, really did leave a mark.

But so did getting whacked with a tire iron. And in my experience, that’s how love marked a person’s life. It was as random as violence. As senseless as an early death. And Suzanne was dead wrong about one thing in particular, I thought, a lone tear slipping over my cheek. Love could be dangerous.

Mine was fucking killing me.