The Scent of Shadows

21

My emotions were under control by the time I reached Greta’s room. My eyes dry, face serenely composed—which, I knew, on Olivia only looked blithely unaware—and my energy carefully controlled. I didn’t want to run into any of the others without all my barriers in place. I half expected to find Chandra lurking around each sharp corner, sure she’d been the one to slip the paper under my door, but she was nowhere to be found. If it had been her, then she obviously thought her business with me complete.

I heard a shot of laughter from the direction of the children’s ward, saw a sole female cat out on patrol, two kittens stumbling along behind her, and increased my pace, intent on arriving at Greta’s undetected. I’d just turned the last corner, casting a final, furtive glance behind me, when I slammed into something, someone, who grunted and gave with the impact.

“Warren.” We both stepped back, each startled by the other, and I frowned when I saw the color drain from his face. “Are you okay?”

“Of course.” His words were as jerky as his movements, and he swallowed hard. “I’m fine.”

But I’d never seen him looking more disoriented. He was sweating, pale, and bleary-eyed, and all the crazed self-assurance I so readily associated with him was gone. In its place was a man who looked tired and old and scared. Whatever had transpired in the hours since I’d last seen him, it had left him uncertain and shaky.

“You don’t look fine. You look funny.” I sniffed lightly at the air. “You smell funny.”

“Well, we can’t all look as good as you, now, can we?” he snapped, a thin hand rising to rub at his face.

“Geez, Warren.” I drew back. “What happened? What did Greta say?”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss my therapy sessions with you.” I must have looked as injured as I felt because he cursed beneath his breath and tried to soften his words. “Look, Gregor’s been out there, alone, for over a dozen hours. I’m just…worried. I’m going after him.”

“But…why can’t someone else go? The Shadows have targeted you.” Because of me, I thought, and guilt speared through me now that I could see the toll it was taking on him.

“I’m the most experienced,” he corrected, standing taller. “We can’t lose Gregor. He’s the only one of us—other than myself—who’s held his place in the Zodiac for more than twelve months.”

“What about Micah? Or Hunter?”

He shook his head. “Talented, both of them, but they’re both new recruits. Micah’s not even supposed to be a star sign. He’s support staff, like Greta.”

“So it hasn’t just been five agents killed in the last few months—”

“It’s been ten. Ten of the finest,” he finished, voice weary.

“Jesus,” I said under my breath.

“We replenish the signs only to have them destroyed again. One, our Virgo, the very next day.” He looked at me, and his face was hard again. I’d seen this kind of determination before. I’d captured it with my camera on the faces of street people who knew all was lost but were determined to go on anyway. “I won’t lose another. I’m going out there, I’m going to retrieve Gregor, and then I’m going to shut down the Zodiac. We’ll wait until the troop is whole again, strong again. Then we’ll take on the Shadow warriors as a team.”

“You mean…leave the city vulnerable?”

He closed his eyes, and they moved like minnows beneath their lids, as if he were already watching the outcome of that decision. “We have no choice.”

“For how long?”

“As long as it takes to train up a new Zodiac force. A year. Maybe more.”

“A year!” I exclaimed, thinking of all the damage Ajax and his ilk could do in that amount of time. Thinking also of young teenage girls being attacked in Quik-Marts and the desert, and left there to die. “That’s too long.”

“Got a better idea?” His eyes snapped open, fired on me.

“Hey, don’t take it out on me! I’m just saying—”

“Well, just don’t!”

“God,” I exclaimed, balling my fists. “Why are you so upset with me? What did I do?”

“I’m not—” He cut off his words as he realized he was yelling, and inhaled deeply. On the exhale he continued. “I’m not upset with you, okay?” he lied. “Greta and I had some things to discuss and they’ve put me on edge. I’m sorry for yelling. I’ve got to go.”

His fear reached out to burn the lining in my nose. “Wait a minute. Things? Like me?”

“Things,” he mimicked sharply, “that are confidential. It’s not your business what I discussed with Greta.”

“It’s my business when you come out of that room treating me like a stranger. Like an enemy.” I folded my arms as he opened his mouth to deny it. “The conversation lingers on you, Warren. It smells like an industrial solution. It’s metallic and cold, and it’s heightening as we speak. Why were you discussing me with Greta?”

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” he whispered. “I’ve done enough for you.”

I drew back, surprised. Who was this man? I angled my head, exploring the air around him with my thoughts; nasal receptors probing like centipede legs.

“Stop it,” he ordered, and an invisible mental wall rose like a tower around him. He pushed past me and began stalking away.

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

“It’s you!” he yelled, whirling on me with hot and furious eyes. “Don’t you get it? It’s not me, it’s you!”

I stared into those angry eyes, watched as they banked, smoked, then dimmed. Unfeeling now. Apathetic. Dead. He’s shut down on me, I thought with injured wonder. He just closed me out, turned me off.

I felt my eyes grow wide, and my breath stuttered out of me on a whisper. “You bastard. You’re the one who brought me into this, remember? You yelled ‘Eureka!’ and jumped in front of my car! You knocked me out and made me into this,” I said, motioning up and down Olivia’s body.

“You want your life back, Joanna?” he asked, surprising me by using my real name so openly. I looked around but whipped my attention back to him when he took a step toward me. “Or, excuse me, I mean that empty excuse of an existence you called a life? Well, fine. Once we find a way to get you out of here, we’ll cut you loose. Physically. Mentally. Completely. Happy?”

I would have been; a handful of days, or even hours, earlier. But this was abandonment, and even less of a choice than he’d offered me before. So why now?

I tilted my head and took a step toward him. “You’re afraid of me.”

Alarm lashed through my gut like a whip, and Warren’s jaw clenched. He hadn’t wanted me to feel that, and tried to cover the slip with words. “We were wrong. I was wrong. We should have never approached you, never introduced you to the Zodiac at such a late age.”

I ignored his words, paying heed only to the emotions rippling like hot oil beneath the waxy exterior. “You don’t trust me.”

“I don’t trust the Shadow in you!”

My body jerked before I could control it and my heart skipped a beat. A wire of panic began to spread outward from the core of my belly. He’d been the last person in this subterranean hell I’d have expected to utter those words. Even though I suspected Warren of hiding secrets, I thought they’d had to do with Tekla or some troop dynamic I had yet to understand. But not me. Somehow, I’d taken it for granted, from the beginning, that he’d always be on my side. “And what about the Light? What about my mother’s side?”

“Your mother,” he scoffed, bitterness oozing like venom to coat the walls around us. “Zoe’s gone, Joanna. She’s so gone she’s never coming back. Perhaps she lived with the Shadow side so long that she began to enjoy it. Who knows? She could be there now, living a life of ease, because it is so much easier, you know…” I did know. “Shit, for all we know she could be the one feeding the Tulpa information about our star signs—”

“No.” I shook my head hard. “She wouldn’t.”

“And how do you know what she would or wouldn’t do? You never knew her at all.”

My mouth trembled closed. He had me there.

“We’ll forget Zoe ever existed, and soon we’ll do the same with you. Then we can all just go back to living in our separate realities.”

My heart cracked at that, and I knew Warren sensed it. He could feel and smell and hear the echo of it in his blood…if only he wanted to. “So…just like that?”

He looked me over, his face softening momentarily, and he blinked. Then it hardened again, his emotions petrified, and it turned him into something other than a crazed bum and a leader of the underworld. It nullified him. “I have to go.”

“Just like that, Warren?” I repeated, raising my voice after him. “You’re going to turn your back on me like I didn’t lose my entire life, my identity, my sister? Like nobody’s trying to kill me too?” He kept walking and I raised my voice. “Like my eyes didn’t bleed from their own fucking sockets?”

No response, just the silly little slap and slide of his gait. Suddenly, though, it didn’t look so silly. It looked resolute. Defeated. Final.

“What about this special connection we’re supposed to have, huh? What about that?” He rounded the corner without looking back, hearing me but not listening. “Don’t turn your fucking back on me!” I slammed my fist against the wall. “Warren!”

My voice echoed emptily down the hall, then trailed away in a choked whisper. “Don’t…don’t leave…”

Slumping against the wall, I tried to catch my breath. How could he? He knew me, who I was and why. Hadn’t he held me while I lay sobbing on the floor, watching my own funeral play out on the local news like some sick reality show? He knows me, I thought, the real me. He knows…

“That I don’t even know myself.”

Shaking, I pushed away from the wall. I didn’t want to break down here in the hallway where anyone could see me. Where Warren’s mistrust lingered like a virus.

So I lunged for the closest escape, Greta’s door, and it swung open so quickly I was two steps inside before I realized I’d forgotten to knock. Half blind with shock and self-pity, I barely registered Greta’s surprise or the way she jolted before she could control it. Her hands disappeared behind her back and she backed into her dressing table, my reflected face pale and ink-eyed behind her.

I seemed to be having that effect on people these days.

She put a hand to her chest. “Olivia!”

“I’m sorry. I just…I’m not—” I’m not Olivia. I’m not a superhero. I’m not anyone. I’m not going to cry, I thought, even as the first tear fell. “I just needed someone to talk to.”

“Oh, dear. Of course you do.” She rushed to my side, though I saw her hesitate before wrapping her arms around me, and that made me cry even harder. She urged me toward her flowered settee. “Come, sit.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated, accepting the tissue she pressed into my palm. I made a tentative dab at my eyes, then gave up and let my face crumble upon itself. “I didn’t know who else to come to and I needed to talk and I saw Warren and he won’t…he just…and he…”

“Shh,” she said, pulling my head to her chest. I rested it there. Rested, it seemed, for the first time since my mother had left me a decade ago. I closed my eyes, slumped against her soft chest, and inhaled deeply. I knew her now, I realized. The twin bouquets of roses and the herbs she brewed for her own teas were fused upon her breath and skin, her signature scent stamped like a star on the surface of my temporal lobe.

Gradually, the distress and misery left my body, sliding away through my tears, and I relaxed. My sobs were replaced by blessed nothingness, my body went limp against hers and, after one final sniffle, I lay silent. Greta continued to rock me, and though I knew she still feared what’d happened that morning, still feared me, I was so grateful for the momentary kindness that I didn’t care.

“Thank you,” I said, swiping the back of my hand over my face. “Again.”

“One of those days?” she asked quietly.

“One of those lives,” I muttered, a bitter laugh hiccuping out of me.

“You’re overwhelmed, dear. You’ve toured the sanctuary. Met the others—”

I held up a hand and cut her off. I shot her an apologetic glance before lowering my palm and sighing. “What I am is tired of people either treating me like some chosen deliverer or an evil pariah. Mostly, though, I’m tired of pretending to be someone I’m not.”

“What do you mean?”

I mean that I am so fucked up you wouldn’t be talking to me now if you knew who I really was. You’d run and hide and cower in the corner. You’d scream for help, you’d flee for your life. I met my gaze in the mirror. Isn’t that right, Joanna? Olivia? Whoever you think you are.

Greta was watching me through the reflection too, but her face slid out of focus like in the movies, dissolving into the background as my own grew sharper. It was like my skin was thinning out, the bones beneath beginning to jut through the meticulously sculpted image reflected there. I swallowed hard.

“Everyone I’ve ever been close to in my life is either dead because of me or I pushed them away long ago. Even my mother ultimately left because of me.”

“That’s not true. That wasn’t your fault.”

“And I like violence,” I went on, ignoring her, hands clasped tightly around my knees. “I’ve never admitted that before, but I do. I like to inflict it, I like the power of having inflicted it. I go into dark places searching for people to harm me, just so I can mete out justice in my own twisted way. With my fists, Greta. With the hatred that fills my heart.”

She smiled, deflecting the seriousness of my words. “So, what you’re saying is you’re not perfect?”

“You don’t understand,” I said, whirling on her. “I can’t do this! I can’t be the person you all expect me to be!”

“But you’re Zoe Archer’s daughter.”

“I’m the Tulpa’s daughter too.”

She tilted her head. “Is that what’s bothering you?”

“It’s what’s bothering everyone else,” I said, and told her about my run-in with Warren in the hall.

Greta let out a weary sigh. “We had just finished a session. I hypnotized him, and he lived out his greatest fear in his mind. Your fates are deeply intertwined.”

That brought my head up. “What do you mean?” I asked. “What fear?”

Her eyes grew sad, the edges tightening as she shook her head. “That you, the woman he’s pinned all his hopes on, may betray him.”

I could only gape at that. Warren’s actions made sense in the light of her words, but the words themselves didn’t quite compute. Me? Betray him?

Greta tried for a reassuring smile. The tightness in her jaw kind of ruined it. “When your mind is that vulnerable, every sense is amplified. Seeing you so soon after he felt, watched, heard, and scented your betrayal—”

“But I didn’t betray him!”

“But his mind believed you had.” She leaned back on the settee and waited for my eventual nod. “Think of an athlete visualizing success for himself on the playing field. The mind can’t tell the difference between what’s imagined and what really happened. Warren lived out your betrayal, or the possibility of it, up here.” She pointed one delicate finger at her own head. “Don’t worry. He’ll be back to normal soon. As normal as Warren can be.”

She was joking, but I couldn’t manage a smile. It did, however, get me thinking. “Do you think this hypnosis might help me?”

“What do you mean?”

I tried to keep my voice steady, but my hope trembled out in the words. “I mean, would you be able to draw out more of the Light in me? Bring it more to the forefront? Make it stronger than the…other side?”

She picked up her glasses from the small table at the head of the love seat, putting them on as if to examine me closely. “You’re concerned about the balance of Light and Shadow inside of you?”

And she was watching me so expectantly that I found myself telling her; about the construction workers, and how I used my senses to plow through their lives. What it had cost them. And how it made me feel.

“Powerful. Superior. Untouchable.” I swallowed hard, not wanting to go on, but afraid if I didn’t things would remain the same between Warren and me. Between us all. “I couldn’t predict what would happen, and, believe me, if I had I wouldn’t have done it, but I did do it, Greta. I did it on purpose.”

I paused for her reaction—revulsion? disgust?—but got only silence. Then a slow, rising interest that grew as Greta tapped her finger against her thigh and considered me over the rim of her glasses. “And you want me to rid you of the impulse to play God, is that it? So that if this ever happens again you won’t feel the need to stand in judgment?”

“It’s not my job to put anyone in his place. I know that now, and I…I don’t want to be like him.” And I didn’t. I didn’t want lashing out at others to be my first instinct anymore. It was a defense that’d served me well after my attack, and in the years I’d had to live under Xavier’s disapproving stare, but it was different now. Because I was different.

“I can’t plant anything in your psyche that isn’t already there, Olivia,” Greta said as I rose to pace the floor in front of us, my boot steps muffled beneath her Persian rug. “I also can’t remove Shadow impulses. It’s part of who you are.”

I stopped before her. “But can you teach me to control it?”

Greta pressed her lips together in a look so scrutinizing I was afraid the answer would be an immediate no. But after what felt like forever, she nodded, and motioned for me to recline where I was. A sigh rocketed from my body as tension uncoiled in my belly, and gratitude for this small kindness, when kindnesses had been so hard to come by of late, teared up in my eyes.

Drawing a chenille blanket over my lower body, Greta loomed over me like a benevolent angel, and the last thing I saw were her earnest gray eyes, cloudy with intent. Then she slid a cool palm over my face and began to count. The numbers formed beneath my lids—cloudy and ephemeral and ghostly—and I began the backward spiral into the recesses of my own mind.

I’d never been put under before, and therefore wasn’t sure that I could, but I listened to the soft lilt and direction of Greta’s musical voice and let her words settle into me, bone deep. My arms grew heavy at my side and my heartbeat slowed like an insect being caught and trapped under the sap of a weeping elm. My skull was light in contrast, thoughts floating there like feathers, as disconnected and random as if they belonged entirely to someone else.

Warren’s baffling treatment of me was forgotten, as were Chandra’s cruel remarks and Hunter’s probing ones. All of these thoughts were like papers cluttering a desk, quickly swept aside as light and insignificant, the real work etched more permanently on the surface beneath.

Greta’s words were fingers pushing against the shadows in my mind, into soft, pulpy places I had never known existed. Or at least, never acknowledged. A few words floated in these deep morasses of thought—raped, vengeance, Tulpa—alligator heads lifting above the brackish surface before sinking again beneath my subconscious, and no matter how hard Greta tried she could not raise them again.

She had better luck sweeping aside the thinly veiled curtains of my Light side; where, from behind the safety of my lids, I could stare directly into the blaze of an imagined sun. Golden light singed the edge of brain tissue, and the neon of the city I was born in set my blood buzzing, heating the crimson liquid to a lively pulsing glow.

While Greta probed, I lived in the center of this glowing womb; warm and cleansed, safe and guarded. Peace bloomed in my heart, and I sank, deeper still, into a state of contented relaxation. The secrets living inside me began to whisper to her. Whisper, as they’d been whispered to me long ago. Greta whispered back.

“I’m going to ask you some questions and you’ll answer me with the first thing that comes to mind, all right?” At my sleepy sound of assent, she continued. “We’ll start out easy. Do you know your name?”

“They call me Olivia.”

There was such a prolonged silence after that, the nascent heat began to ebb.

“It’s not your true name?”

“No.”

“Who are you, then?”

“Secret. Can’t tell.” A sigh heaved out of my body, hollowing it. “I no longer know.”

“And…who’s Olivia?”

“Dead. She’s dead. It’s a dead girl’s name.” A whimper escaped me, inhuman, but for the sorrow that laced it. “I’m so sorry, Olivia.”

“It’s okay. Just stay with me now, listen to my voice.” She kept talking until my breathing had returned to normal. “What would you like to be called?” she finally asked. “What should I call you?”

“I have to be Olivia in order to survive. No one can know differently.”

“Does Warren know?”

“Of course. He made me. So did Micah.”

A tapping, like a considering click, fingernails against wood. “All right. Olivia. You have a duty to do. Do you know what that is?”

“Return balance to the Zodiac.”

“Return it? Or…” She left the question open.

“Not return it. Unbalance it. Hunt them down. Obliterate the enemy, destroy them all. Use my gifts to do it, but I don’t know how.”

She ignored the rising question in my last remark. “And who is the enemy?”

“Ajax. A man named Joaquin. The Tulpa. There are others. I’ve smelled them, but I don’t know them. And…”

“And?”

“The enemy is inside of me also.”

“No, Olivia, it doesn’t—”

“Yes, Greta. It does.” My voice deepened, like an instrument someone else was strumming. I stirred, jerking my head side to side. “I must destroy the Shadow within and without.”

“Shh. Let’s take a step back now. Listen to my voice, and follow the words. Are you with me?” She paused for my sleepy nod. “Good. Now, think. What experience will most help you in unbalancing the Shadow? What will allow you the vengeance you spoke to me about? What will help you restore the agents of Light to the Zodiac?”

“Krav Maga,” I answered without hesitation. “The skills I learned after Joaquin destroyed me the first time.”

Again, that press of questioning silence, before she went on. “And what was that like?”

I shivered, the memory sweeping through me. “Cold. So cold after, when the scorpions crawled over me, but didn’t sting. They knew I was dead. They scuttled away, legs mired in my blood.” I shivered again, then stilled. “But she found me and warmed me. She gave her own power and gifts over to me. So I would survive it. And avenge it.”

“Who, Olivia?”

“My mother.” I smiled. And I remembered. One day, when the time comes, you’ll understand I didn’t leave. I fled. “Ah, I see now. I understand.”

“Focus, Olivia. Listen to my voice,” Greta commanded. “What gifts did she give you? What will allow you to battle the Shadow side?”

I didn’t answer. Instead, I saw my mother’s face floating directly above me, her hair falling like golden-red curtains over her cheeks, eyes burning with hot, furious tears.

“Olivia?” Greta questioned.

My mother’s mouth moved, three words fired like shots over the bow. I love you.

“Olivia!” Greta again, panicked now.

“Love,” I answered simply, realizing I’d carried it with me all this time. “She gave me complete and unconditional love.”

And the dam gave way. The memories I’d blocked so successfully for so long flooded my brain, the rush of them deafening in my ears, and I was borne on their tide back in time. Back to the hospital again; to the machines, tubes, painkillers, and stitches. Back with the bruises and the swelling, the torn fingernails and the rope burns still buried in my neck. Back to birth of my second life cycle. Back, I thought, when I was sixteen years old.

I turned my head and she was there, next to me. Not just hair and haunted eyes, but the whole of my mother; body and essence, skin and aura. I stared, drinking in her features; the freckles standing out defiantly on a button nose, the pressing of delicate bones beneath too-pale skin, a scar I’d always meant to ask her about. She swept shiny fingertips across my face and gently smoothed back my hair.

“Sleep,” she said, and somewhere in the back of my mind I knew my mouth had moved, the command and voice issuing from my throat, my memory. I settled deeper into myself, obeying her.

“Olivia?” Greta’s voice was far off and wary, no longer authoritative or sure. She was right to be alarmed. My mother’s voice had taken over.

“I’m going to show you who I am, who you are,” I said in my mother’s voice, as she had once said to me, “who you will be someday.”

She leaned over me, hair swinging delicately over my bloodless cheeks, blue eyes boring into mine. “Because you will survive this. It has been foretold. You will fulfill the first sign of the Zodiac. You will rise again as our Kairos.”

Then she put her soft lips to my chapped ones, and resuscitated my soul. Desert sage—blooms sagging, but stalks strong, as though wet with a summer monsoon—infiltrated my senses. The juice from a fig cacti, which kept knowledgeable predators alive in the desert, trickled down my throat, coating my belly. I breathed in a homey spice, like cinnamon but stronger, and it numbed my skin from the inside out so that every muscle in my body simultaneously relaxed.

Then there was the exotic and redolent scent of the womb where I’d once lived. It smelled like night-blooming flowers, and the wind across the bright side of the moon. I recognized it immediately, and inhaled deeply. She gave me more. As all great mothers do, she gave me all. “See? You can taste the Light in another person. Now store this power deep inside of you. Because he’ll come for you again.”

“Olivia!”

Greta’s voice had my mother looking up. She frowned, annoyed at the invisible interruption, before rising and heading toward the door. She looked back at me only once, one hand braced on the door frame, a petite and powerful figure eyeing me with fierce love and resigned determination. “Watch Olivia. She’ll show you how to survive.”

And she was gone. Again.

“Tell me your true identity,” Greta demanded, entering the hospital room through the portal she’d opened in my mind. Her outline snapped with power, like sparklers bursting to life along her skin, but I merely looked at her, words tumbling like dice through my mind. Goddess, bitch, whore, mother, daughter, sister, friend…

I could be any and all of those things, but I picked out my titles like selecting fruit from a vendor’s stall. Enemy, I thought, picking it up, taking a bite, finding it sweet. Huntress, I thought, adding it to the other. Once the prey, now the predator. I pocketed that one, saving it for later.

“Tell me who you are!”

“Can’t you see?” I turned my head to face Greta, still lingering uncertainly by the doorway to my hospital room, and I smiled. I knew from her gasp that I wasn’t supposed to be asking the questions, but I suddenly had all the answers. Hearing footsteps in the hall, I leaned to peer around Greta. “Look, see how my aura precedes me? See the barbed texture of my soul? The vessel is fierce, is it not? My mind is bathed in crimson.”

In a full panic now, the mind-Greta whirled, shifting so her back was to the wall. Her whisper wobbled. Her hands fumbled, doing something behind her back. “Tell me your name.”

The answer was heavy in my mouth, numbing the tip of my tongue. I gasped with its weight, and my eyes burst open with my mouth. “I am the Archer!”

And like an arrow loosed from a bow that’d been held too taut, too long, the woman I should have been winged past the last ten years like a fiery comet, plowing into me with all the knowledge I’d been born—and buried—with. The knowledge of the Archer, the Zodiac…and my place in it.

A second pair of eyes opened up behind my own, blinked wonderingly, then crinkled as a smile lifted one side of my mouth. Alternate ears, with drums tunneling down into my soul, popped as if the pressure on them had finally been released. New taste buds exploded on my tongue, and every pore in my skin hummed to life, making me more attuned to the particles weighing down the air than I’d even been before. My sixth sense had returned. It had taken a decade, but I was finally healed.

I rose.

A crash, the sound of glass shattering on the floor, and Greta was backed up against the far wall of her room, a vial shattered at her feet. The transition from the hospital room I’d been imagining and Greta’s chamber was abrupt, but I was still my dream self, my real self, a predator haloed in red. I smiled as I turned my head to meet her eyes. She looked afraid, and I was sorry for that, but I wanted a mirror. I wanted to see for myself.

“How did you do that?” Greta asked as I swiped a damp tendril of hair from my cheek. She nearly had her face under control again, a mild sort of worry pressing in on her delicate brow, but her voice was searching, and just sharp enough to cut through the thin webbing of resistance left by the hypnosis. “I put you under. You’re not supposed to be able to come out of it without my assistance.”

“I’ve been under for a long time, Greta.” I stretched, like awakening from a long nap, and studied my reflection in the dresser mirror across from me. The color was still there, not the vibrant crimson of my dreaming state, but a banked flame like a burner set to low. It was warm and steady, and this time I knew it would never go out. “It was long past time to wake up.”

And I felt refreshed. My pores drank in the air, and the room appeared brighter. Greta was tinged in a sallow green, though; her fear, I guessed, and again I was sorry for that. I inhaled deeply, then jerked back, frowning. “What’s that smell?”

“I—I couldn’t reach you. I was drawing a syringe to bring you out of the trance chemically.” She waved a hand at the glass littering the floor, one side of her mouth lifting wryly. “Turns out I didn’t need it after all.”

I wrinkled my nose. “I can smell the enzymes in it. I can also smell your perfume without even inhaling. Isn’t that funny? It’s like I can breathe through my pores.” I turned from studying the glow of my aura in the mirror, and caught the fear in her eyes. Smiling, I went to her and took her face in my hands. “Don’t be afraid, Greta. I no longer am.”

And I left the room after that, with Greta gaping as I trailed confidence and knowledge and power like a silken red cloak behind me.