City of Souls

22

Exhaustion was a formidable opponent. As worried as I was, it pulled me into sleep again, even though I was slumped on the warehouse’s cold concrete floor. I watched peacefully as my mind played out my worries in a dream. Skamar was leading Jasmine away from me. I yelled for them to come back, but Skamar only lifted the young girl to her toes and began floating, faster, so that Jasmine had to run to keep up. Finally, the young girl put on a sudden burst, the speed provided by my swiped powers, and took the lead enough to turn back and look at me as she ran. The pink and white streaks in her dark hair flew around her face like zigzagging neon, and she shot me a sheepish smile before waving through the hole in Skamar’s stomach.

“It will still be okay,” she said, pivoting to jump through that gaping hole like a circus performer. She somersaulted and came to her feet with her hands in the air. “If you put me above yourself.”

I woke to a sharp pounding on the steel bay door. Jasmine’s sweet voice still lingered as I clamored to my feet. I checked three different peepholes to make sure there were no Shadows outside before turning off the alarms.

“You look like crap,” Vanessa told me with a weak smile. But despite the worry cutting lines around her eyes, she looked much better than the last time I’d seen her. She wore a black scarf around her head, pinned to one side with a silver broach. That was the only remaining sign of the Shadows’ handiwork. Her speech was perfect, her ear and thumb and nose regrown, unmarred. I looked down, and she wiggled her left foot. Good as new.

Nice to know someone could heal, I thought, rubbing at my eyes. “Where is everyone?”

“Warren doesn’t want to meet here anymore. It’s counterintuitive, I know, but this warehouse is our safest place on this side of reality. He wants to guard its location for as long as possible.”

So he thought the Shadows would find it eventually.

“Are you okay?” Vanessa asked as I sighed. She put a hand on my arm and I covered it with my own.

“Yeah, I just had a strange dream.”

She grunted. “Not surprised. Do you know how to lock this place up?”

I nodded. “Hold on.”

Deciding it would be safer to leave my bag and the soul chips in the warehouse, I tucked it in the bottom drawer of a standing toolbox, before running through the series of codes Hunter had shown me. I held my breath, hoping I remembered them correctly. Otherwise the whole place would blow. Vanessa and I backed a safe distance away, but nothing happened. I gave a quick prayer of thanks. I seemed to be praying a lot all of a sudden.

“What time is it?” I asked, knowing only that it was early morning. I never wore a watch. The kind Olivia Archer would wear would be a dead giveaway on the Kairos’s arm.

“Almost seven. Not that you’d know it by this weather.” Keeping half a step in front of me, she motioned me south. “Um…Happy Birthday, for what it’s worth.”

“Oh. Yeah.” I was twenty-six now, and a bit surprised at the fact. A part of me, it seemed, hadn’t expected to make it a year. And Ashlyn, my daughter, was now eleven. “Thanks.”

The sky was lumpy gravy, gray and badly stirred. Behind the shifting clouds, though, was a riot of flashing color, red and oranges battling with that strange liquid blue and green strain, like the most elaborate production show to hit town was being rehearsed on that side of the sooty curtain. I ducked my head as thunder ripped across the valley, like it was wired in surround sound. The grand finale, I thought worriedly, couldn’t be far off.

Vanessa saw me looking and followed the trail of thunder across the sky. “Warren’s concerned too.”

Finally, I thought, shaking my head. “So where are we meeting?”

“Shapiro’s Kitchen,” she said, talking about the latest celebrity chef to be lured to town. “It’s not open yet, so it’ll be private, and because it’s so new, no one could have tracked any of us there.”

It was a stand-alone restaurant, a risky business move in a town where the most successful restaurants were backed with the seemingly endless cash flow and street traffic from an attached casino or hotel. Word was, though, that Sam Shapiro’s name would be enough to draw a crowd. That’s not why I remembered it, though. “Wasn’t that supposed to be a safe zone?”

Vanessa shrugged, but the stiffness of worry was caught in the movement. “In another life.”

We trudged on in silence after that, stuck with this one.

The places we were safe in this city-this world-had shrunk shockingly fast. Since Shapiro’s Kitchen was supposed to have been a designated safe zone, meeting there was a calculated risk because the Shadows knew about it. Yet Warren obviously felt comfortable with the plan, and because of that, I tried to push my own worry away. Something about it didn’t feel right, but I was exhausted, and needed to trust that his judgment was better than mine. So Vanessa and I stuck to the surface streets, burying ourselves in pockets of darkness whenever a lone car would pass, until we finally reached the sleek round building. Not until then did I realize how worried she’d been as well. At Shapiro’s Kitchen she melted into Felix’s arms and he buried her in his embrace. I swallowed hard, thinking that should be me with Hunter. Yet because I’d screwed up so badly, he was caught out somewhere beneath a threatening sky, searching for a girl I had broken.

I didn’t have much time to give in to regret. Warren met me at the hostess podium. “You’re okay?”

“For now,” I muttered, but his gaze was flat and disinterested, and he was already turning away. I tried to tell myself that he was preoccupied with thoughts of saving the world, but I couldn’t help a final glance back at Vanessa and Felix, dissolving as one into the alcove of a coat check, whispering so softly that even I couldn’t hear.

I sighed and followed Warren through a mahogany paneled hallway and into the main dining room. The tables were already spaced, the floor laid out the way it would be on opening night. Stacks of linens threatened to topple in one corner, and a cart of glassware was totally out of place on the opulent floor, but you could already see that the dining room was going to be magnificent. The focal point, however, was the glass-encased kitchen, where-for the viewing pleasure of a gastronomically appreciative audience-Sam Shapiro himself would direct his crew like he was conducting an orchestra.

It was in this fragile interior that the troop was huddled, and they were battered. Not physically, not like me. But Iraqi War battered, like they’d been fighting for years and there was still no end in sight. Battered like they sometimes lost sight of what they were fighting for but kept on doing it anyway. Battered like people who had to keep taking orders, because left to their own devices, they might float away.

They greeted me when I entered, but the curiosity and enthusiasm that had met me after my first return from Midheaven wasn’t there. They knew I couldn’t tell them anything about the place, and the loss of Hunter and Jasmine-and now Skamar-weighed heavily upon them.

It was in that weighty silence that my eyes fell on the object in the middle of the stainless steel table. I blinked. “What’s that?”

“We got you cake.”

I felt my brows wing up to my hairline. “Cake?”

“For your birthday,” Warren said, coming to stand at my side. He was the only one who sounded even remotely enthused about it. “You didn’t think we were going to let our Kairos’s big day pass without notice, did you?”

“Cake,” I repeated dumbly, thinking I might puke if I tried to take a bite.

“You can say thank you,” he muttered, pushing past me. I watched him go, frowning, then met Micah’s eyes. He rolled his. Good to know I wasn’t the only one who didn’t feel like celebrating.

“Thank you,” I muttered, following him around the table to join Gregor on the other side. Gregor put his good arm around me and kissed the top of my head. I felt a little better after that.

But almost immediately Vanessa appeared in the doorway, eyes wide, and face ghost white. Though her mouth worked open and shut, nothing came out. Warren quirked his head and took a step forward. “Van-”

“Vanessa! Get in there!”

A whimper escaped her throat and her fear hit us all with the full force of a cyclone. Felix yelled again behind her and I drew back at the strain in it, so different than the reunion I’d witnessed only moments before.

Warren headed that way. “Felix? What is it?”

Felix came into the room so slowly it looked like he was freeze-framed. Vanessa whimpered again. A gurgling laugh sounded somewhere behind him.

“Um, Warren?” Felix inched to the side once he’d breached the glass threshold to reveal my conduit shoved into the small of his back. Behind it was Regan DuPree. And behind that, I thought, mouth going dry, shuffled Hunter Lorenzo, wrapped tight in his own whip.

Regan pushed Felix through the doorway, and Vanessa jolted like she was going to leap forward, but she held herself, knowing an arrow would pierce either her or Felix before she could take a single step.

Regan looked much the way she had the last time I’d seen her, skin unraveled in vertical strips from head to toe, blackened at the edges, revealing bone. She was wrapped in dirty gauze from neck to ankle, thrift shop clothing donned atop that, but neither concealed the thinning of her ribboned skin. The flesh had corroded, and the stink I’d been tracking all over this city was worse. In the confines of the kitchen, it made bile stick in my throat.

She gave us all a tattered smile, her mouth winging upward in jigsawed pieces to reveal spaces of gum, oozing and receding from the bone. She knew how macabre she was, how grotesque, and she played it up under the full glare of the fluorescent lights. “And what are the agents of Light celebrating tonight, huh? I mean, what could you all possibly have to celebrate?”

Nobody answered or moved. She was dead, the knowledge of her inability to escape this room now that she was in it drawn across her gaze like a toddler’s scrawl, but she was suicide-bomber dead. The question was, who did she intend to take with her?

That scribbled gaze fell on me.

“Just tell us what you want,” Hunter said, again showing why-though he was the one closest to death-he was the one everyone looked up to. Warren might be troop leader, but it was Hunter who acted when the rest of us wouldn’t. He spoke while everyone else remained mute. He’d been out there canvassing the city for Jasmine while we huddled in safety.

And what did he get for his troubles? A mummy-worthy wrapping in his own conduit, barbed spears from the whip burrowing into his flesh.

Regan’s head swiveled unsteadily on her neck as she turned to look at him, her smile opening up, red-tinted pus oozing to stain her lips.

“Oh, I believe I want the same thing you do, my friend. Some good, old sat-is-fac-tion.” She drew out the word, like in the song, and pushed Felix with the tip of my crossbow. He backed away slowly because she still had Hunter, and she pulled him along behind her as she sauntered into the center of the room. Crossbow still aimed at Felix’s heart, finger on the trigger, her gaze fell down. “Mmm. Cake.”

“How did you-”

The weapon swung Riddick’s way, so close it crossed his eyes and his mouth fell shut.

“Shh,” Regan said, reaching forward. “I like cake.”

Felix took a step back, toward Vanessa. Regan sensed the movement-the tiniest breeze probably felt like a sandstorm when you’d been skinned-and directed the bow back his way.

Warren held up his hands. “Everyone hold still.”

Keeping her hands steady, Regan leaned down. Her tongue was divided in four separate slices, but each found a bit of birthday cake, and though the white frosting disappeared in her mouth, I was able to follow its journey down her throat.

“Mmm,” she hummed, straightening. “See, now that’s satisfying.” It was unclear whether she meant the cake or having the entire troop at her mercy. She turned back to Hunter. “Have you tried this yet, my friend?”

Why did she keep calling him that? My friend. It was the exact phrase she’d used in the pipeline with the Tulpa…

My new friend.

My sharp inhalation brought Regan’s gaze back my way. “Ah,” she said, sounding satisfied. “And now you see.”

She was the person he’d been meeting with in the Shadow manuals, the hidden contact lurking in the dark. The one he’d been talking to weeks ago when he said everyone should be allowed their greatest desire.

And her desire, her satisfaction, was in seeing me realize it. Me, also, on a hook. Betrayed. Brokenhearted. All of the above. Regan was only satisfied when destroying other people’s loves, their futures, their possibilities. Her mother had done this with her father, turning him into the worst sort of criminal. Regan had tried to do the same with Ben.

And she had apparently succeeded with Hunter.

Suddenly, little incongruities began to add up: how Regan had slipped past Hunter during the chase in the pipeline. How, in her current state, she’d ever managed to get her hands on him now.

Oh my God, I thought, the realization hitting me afresh. He’d been working with my greatest personal enemy for weeks! And he still made love to me. I let him lay his head on my shoulder, find rest in my arms. We were lovers, and friends…and now enemies too.

“Joanna.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t even look at him.

Regan laughed, a tattered chortle, and dug my conduit into the cake, licked frosting from the tip.

“I see nothing,” Warren interrupted, brow furrowed. “I see a rogue agent trying to bargain her way into a better situation.”

“Then let me elucidate.” Regan chuckled, and yanked on Hunter’s whip. “Your star superhero here has been working with me. I give him what he wants, he gives me what I want.”

“Bull.” Riddick looked at Hunter with the same sure expression he always had.

Hunter gazed straight ahead, looking at no one.

“It’s true,” Regan continued, shrugging so the flesh on her shoulder wobbled. “How else have I eluded you for this amount of time? I mean, fuck!” Her face went wide with the enraged word, and literally split. Part of her tongue darted out to lick the blood on the side of her mouth. “Even I can smell myself. Yet I continue to get away. Slip through holes in your defenses. Disappear into the wild night.”

Still staring at Hunter, Riddick finally winced, like it was painful. He clenched his jaw when he saw me looking, and turned to face Warren.

I didn’t blame him. Even I, having long known that Hunter was up to something, that he was meeting with someone he shouldn’t be, that he had a secret identity and agenda, had never fathomed that his contact had been Regan.

And he’d slept with me after what she’d done to me, to Ben. He entered me while helping this… this walking carcass. This being I hated so very much.

The shock sizzled in my brain, clouding it, making it heavy on my shoulders. I felt the additional weight of Hunter’s gaze. He knew that with every passing minute I was putting more and more of his betrayal together. Right now it seemed endless. A long road, and I was riding in a car that would never stop.

“Is this true?” Tekla spoke up from the far corner of the room, and though her arms were folded across her body as usual, the wall looked like it was holding her up.

“I had reasons,” he told them all, still looking at me. “Good ones.”

“Your reasons are my reasons!” Warren pounded at his chest, and we all jolted as if from a stupor. Tekla straightened. Everyone else looked at the floor.

Regan tucked my conduit beneath her right armpit and stuck her index finger directly in the center of my cake, swirling it, blood mingling with the white frosting.

Hunter glanced at me and I wanted to shake him. Instead I looked away. But Warren had words enough for us both.

“Hunter, did you help this-this-” He finally gestured at the center of the room, the former Shadow now smashing the cake between her fingers, a child in her own sandbox, “-this, escape us? Even knowing she had Jo’s conduit?”

I cleared my throat before Hunter could answer. “Hey, Regan.”

Her sugarcoated hand stilled.

“How’d you know we were here?”

Vanessa was shaking her head. “You told her about this place too, didn’t you, Hunter? Damn it, I used this safe-house last week!”

“We did,” Felix said flatly, stepping to her side. Regan tilted her head at the couple, another considering smile growing on her face.

“Stop looking at them and get your hand out of my fucking cake.”

“Shut up, Jo!” Warren’s eyes were on my conduit. Regan’s were again on me. “This is about Hunter.”

“I never put Jo in danger,” Hunter said stiffly. She yanked on his conduit in warning. His mouth snapped shut.

“Except that Regan is still alive,” Warren said.

Hunter glared at him.

“And here now,” Regan added, still focused on me.

“How did you get here?” I wanted to know. I knew I was probably in shock, but something just wasn’t adding up.

“By trusting nobody but myself.” She pointed my conduit at my heart. “Now get your ass up over here. You and I are going for a walk. Bring the cake.”

Hunter frowned, and beneath his brows I saw shock and fear and shame, and possibly even the need to keep me from walking out that door.

But he couldn’t move. Because Regan, his “friend,” had turned to watch his reaction.

And that was when Warren moved. Not to the Shadow-no, that would have been certain death for me, him…maybe both-but in front of me, using his body as a shield and with a bargain on his tongue.

“Not her.” He said it calmly, as though bartering.

“Her,” Regan insisted.

“Not her,” he repeated. “Hunter.”

“No,” I said without hesitation.

Regan laughed so hard her guts tore through, shining and pink among the blood and shredded flesh. She used an elbow, grunting as she pushed them back in, but kept laughing. “What is this? Puppy love? Could you really care for a man who made a deal over your flesh?”

“I did not-”

She yanked on his whip. Hunter winced involuntarily.

“In return for what?” I wanted to know. What was so important that it would cause Hunter to betray me? All of us?

“It doesn’t matter,” said Warren, Mr. Black-and-White. But it mattered to me.

Regan licked her lips, her tongue darting out in four different directions. “Come with me and I’ll tell you everything.”

I nodded for a moment, then took a step forward. Felix stepped in front of me, beside Warren, creating a wall. Then Tekla was there. They were lined up like ducks, waiting for Regan to pick them off. She began to laugh again.

I too saw what they were doing. Sacrificing themselves for me, their Kairos, if need be. Regan could squeeze off one shot before someone tackled her. But the one agent she shot, they’d all determined, wouldn’t be me.

“Fine,” she finally said, dropping back from the table. “It’s better this way anyhow. As long as I’m alive, I’ll find her. For now, I’ll take her lust-puppy.”

She began backing up, crossbow pointed straight ahead.

“No-”

“Jo, let him go!”

“In return for what?” I demanded again, looking at Hunter now. “What were you going to give me over for?”

“I wasn’t. Not ever.”

Regan answered for him. “A free trip to Midheaven. A few ounces of my soul. About all that’s left.”

“If that,” I snarled. She laughed again and bled some more.

“Why would you do that?” Warren was as incredulous as I. “After I expressly ordered no one to go there.”

I frowned. No one but me.

“After the measures I took to keep this troop safe from that evil place.” Warren shook his head, disbelief oozing from his pores. “You would go against that, after I’ve practically raised you, after all I’ve taught you, after I gave you a home and a place and a name in this troop? You put our Kairos at risk? You put this troop at risk!”

Hunter’s jaw clenched. “I was only going after what was mine.”

Warren’s chin lifted at that. “So go. Because what’s here is yours no longer.”

Regan sighed happily. “Guess you won’t need this,” she said, and let Hunter’s whip go slack before giving it a momentous yank with an enthusiastic growl. The torque jerked him from his feet, each barb in the whip’s length ripping from his torso and taking skin with it. I think it was the first time most of us had ever seen Hunter injured, and it was like something had been defiled. Regan tossed his conduit in the corner, took a bow in the wake of our collective gasp, then picked him up in a headlock, the tip of my conduit buried in his forehead. A line of blood began to trail between his eyes. His level gaze remained fixed on Warren.

“Wait,” I said, voice cracking. Things were happening too fast. I couldn’t begin to guess what was held in those heavy glances passing back and forth between Warren and Hunter, what had happened in their shared past, but somehow I knew I couldn’t let Regan’s appearance here break the alliance between these two men. I couldn’t let her break Hunter.

But Warren had made up his mind. Everyone else recognized his characteristic stubbornness, and they closed rank, filing in front of me until only Hunter and Regan stood across from us.

Hunter, bloodied and hunched over, said to Warren, “Don’t do this.”

“I said go.”

“Wait!” I tried to push past Warren. He pushed back.

“This is pathetic.” And Regan Dupree pistol-whipped Hunter with the butt of my crossbow, flipping the weapon around in her palm as he fell, before centering back in on Warren. Her physical destruction hadn’t taken away any of her speed.

“Go,” he told her.

“What?” My voice came out in a feeble shriek, but no one else made a sound or a move, and Regan began a slow, backward retreat, dragging Hunter’s dead weight with her.

“Happy Birthday,” she said to me, winking as she pulled him through the doorway. Through the glass enclosure I could see his limbs bumping against table legs and chairs, and then-as suddenly as she’d arrived-both of them were gone.