The Scent of Shadows

23

Felix and Micah helped me back to my room, where Greta lit candles and some spicy incense to thicken the air, and gave me a pill to block the connection between Warren and me.

“You need your rest,” she told me as I swallowed it, feeling both relief and guilt as I did so. “Concentrate on building a mental wall between Warren and yourself. Protect your thoughts and feelings from those who are probing at him to get to you. That’s more important even than blocking the pain.”

Easy for you to say, I thought, eyes following her from the room. But the smoke from the incense interceded after that, floating between the synapses in my brain, taking the edge from my worries.

“Warren would want that,” Rena added, and I glanced over to where she sat in the corner, rocking in a chair she’d brought in from her own room. “You can bet he’s doing the same.”

The destroyed craters where her eyes should have been had turned to black pools in the candlelight. All her other charges were tucked in bed for the night, and she’d offered to tend to me while what remained of the troop convened in the briefing room. I knew what they were doing; talking about me, around me, but—once again—not to me. I wondered hazily which of them would cast the deciding vote…and how soon before I was kicked out of the sanctuary. Sacrificed for the sake of their leader.

“You should be meditating,” Rena said, as if that would solve everything as she leaned back in her chair.

“The meditation exercises aren’t working,” I told her, managing to work up a snarl, but paid for it when my intestines filled with fire.

“That’s because you’re not doing them,” she said lightly as I pressed back into my pillows, writhing until the burning subsided.

When it finally felt like all I had was a mean case of heartburn, I glanced back at her with watery eyes. “They’re going to vote me out, aren’t they? They hold me responsible for Warren’s capture.”

She shook her head, but it was a defeated rather than reassuring gesture. “No, Olivia. The Shadows orchestrated this, just as they’ve orchestrated every heartbreak we’ve ever had to endure.” She dropped her head back, seeming to deflate where she sat, before adding, “And Warren did this too. He always does.”

This last bit was said with a sort of long-standing resignation, and I’d have tried to read her aura, but I was too tired, groggy with the smoke rising in the air between us, and too afraid it would cause me more needless pain. I also wanted to ask what she meant, but was afraid I’d get more mumbling about Warren’s secrets—as Micah had done—or protestations that it wasn’t her story to tell, as Greta had claimed. So, instead, I asked a different question.

“How’d Warren get his limp?”

Her rocker creaked to a halt. I swallowed hard, but didn’t fill the silence lengthening between us. Rena had seen Warren through his first life cycle; if anyone knew about him and his past, it was she. And though there were larger questions than this niggling at me, this one seemed innocuous enough to start with, so I waited silently for her to tell me what she would.

“His father gave it to him.”

I’d jolted, causing fire to light along my spine. It reminded me that sudden movements were a bad idea, but I’d been expecting anything but that. “But…but only…”

“Conduits can leave lasting disfigurement, yes.” She grimaced, rocking harder. It didn’t look comforting. “Have you noticed Warren doesn’t carry a personal weapon?”

She went on, though she couldn’t see my nod.

“He wouldn’t touch the Taurean conduit after his father used it against him…and after he, in turn, used it against his father.”

And what she told me next was more than I’d ever have guessed about the man who was so absurd one moment, so serious the next.

Samson Clarke hadn’t been the first choice for his generation’s Taurus. Another agent, a woman named Mia, had possessed that star sign, though Samson gained it after the Shadows ambushed her in a drainage tunnel leading to the Las Vegas wash. He avenged Mia’s death over the next few years, taking out two of the Shadows who’d trapped her in that tunnel, and helping his peers kill a third. Meanwhile, he’d taken up with the younger sister of the Arien Light, and Warren was born shortly thereafter.

The birth of a son, rather than a daughter, had been a disappointing blow to Samson, one he never hid from the scrawny child growing up, literally, in his father’s shadow. Never one to let a little thing like monogamy stop him, Samson cast Warren’s mother aside and set his sights on someone who’d already proven herself capable of producing a daughter. The leader’s mate. When she rejected him outright, rather than deciding it had anything to do with him, or her distaste for the way he’d so faithlessly treated Warren’s mother, he decided it was because he wasn’t powerful enough for her. Yet.

Rena sighed, and if she had eyes, they’d have been unfocused, looking through the present and the smoke from the incense filling up the room, while vividly reliving the distant past. “So he tried to take the position of troop leader for himself.”

But Samson Clarke talked in his sleep. Warren, who’d been charged with straightening his father’s room and tidying his belongings at the end of each day—including sharpening his conduit—discovered the details of his plot over a period of several days. His fear of his father’s wrath, plus a desire to please him despite the years of neglect Samson had shown him, kept him from saying anything to the other star signs. But on the night his father attacked the troop leader, Warren suddenly discovered the courage to stand up to Samson…and nearly had his legs cleaved out from under him for the effort.

“The leg wound is a reminder of the night he killed his father,” Rena told me, her voice carefully absent of emotion, “and, though he doesn’t ever say it, it’s also a reminder that he failed to save the real troop leader.”

And yet the others still rewarded him with the Taurean star sign, and later with the troop leadership, ironically giving Warren what his father had been so desperate to possess.

I laid where I was, mind still hazy from the incense, but more numb from the telling. Warren’s own father had betrayed him. After a moment more I found my voice, though my mouth was sandpaper dry. “Why couldn’t Samson just have worked for the title of troop leader? He was obviously a good agent. Couldn’t he have made it there, eventually, on his own?”

“He wasn’t lineally qualified,” Rena said, her chair squeaking beneath her as she rocked. “He was born an independent.”

“A rogue agent?” I blurted before I could stop myself. “I mean—”

She smiled wryly and waved off my stuttering. “He absolutely personified the term.”

Because though the Shadows had technically killed Mia, Samson Clarke was the one who’d pointed them her way.

“Ah, Olivia,” Rena sighed, when my horrified gasp filled the room. “Just because agents of Light are…super, other, more, if you will, doesn’t mean we don’t have the same shortcomings as the humans we protect. Warren’s father was abnormally ambitious for an agent of Light. Being stronger than mortals—than most agents on either side of the Zodiac, even—wasn’t enough for him. He’d ascended from nothing into the position of the Taurean star sign, but he wanted more.”

And he’d wanted it enough to go from merely wishing for leadership to maiming his own son.

I thought of the way Warren nearly snarled each time someone mentioned the independents. “It’s why he couldn’t trust me fully, even though he wanted to.”

Rena made a sound of agreement, before adding, “And it’s why every death he fails to stop is a sign in his eyes that he doesn’t deserve to be leader. That his lineage—the son of a vicious rogue agent—means he’s a failure before he’s even started.”

No wonder he was so willing to sacrifice himself for Gregor. For us all.

“What about the rest of them, then?” I asked. “What are they going to do now?”

“What they were born to do, of course,” Rena answered, folding her hands and leaning back. “They’re going to save him.”

“But the Shadow agents are waiting for them in the boneyard.” My eyes roved over her face. Surely there was a better plan than that. Even I could see that turning me over to the Shadows was a far better alternative. “They said themselves that the entire Zodiac will be completely wiped out.”

“Without Warren, it is anyway,” she said, a sigh floating from her. She patted her hair, an unconscious, nerve-filled gesture, since not a strand was out of place.

I frowned, because a woman so protective of her children shouldn’t sound this defeated. “And what do we do?”

“We hope. Pray. If that’s not enough, we wait until the next batch of initiates is ready.” Her voice was soft, almost drowsy, but the scent of nightmares accompanied it, not dreams. “Not long, half a decade at most. Then we rise again.”

“But they’ll die!” I said, catching myself before I sat up.

“Yes.” And her own head fell. “They’ll all die.”

And now I did shoot up in bed. My diaphragm burned and the heat rose like smoke to my gorge, but it was bearable. “How can you sit there so calmly and just let them go?”

Stiffening, Rena’s rocking abruptly stopped, and I swear if she had eyes she’d have been glaring holes through me. “It kills me to think of Warren out there now, suffering. He’s a favorite of mine. Always was. But there’s nothing I can do save discipline and train the next batch to be stronger and better and smarter than the last. To teach them where this group went wrong…and where I went wrong with them.”

I stared at her in disbelief. “You blame yourself?”

“A mother always does.” Then, more softly, “Even a blind old surrogate like myself.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, and so the minutes ticked by, marked by the clock next to my bed, the soft glow of numbers finally blurring as my fatigue rose. The candlelight was relaxing, the incense finally doing its trick, and I would have fallen under, probably waking when it was all over, if it weren’t for the sob that escaped the darkened corner.

“I always have to let them go,” Rena said, voice cracking in naked emotion. “Just sit here. Sit on my hands, even if those hands are clenched in fists.”

I swallowed away my fatigue and turned my head back to her in the faint candlelight. She looked like a battle-scarred angel in her shapeless robe; lost and, for a woman with so many charges in her care, entirely alone. “Would you go? If you could, I mean?”

“I would sacrifice myself for each of them, over and over,” she said, every word solid and sure. She straightened in her chair. “I would take that pain in your gut and wrap it around myself so tightly it could never get loose and touch one of my children again. I would burn my eyes from my sockets every day from now to death if it meant saving even one.”

“Because you’re a mother, and that’s what a mother does,” I said, nodding, thinking of my own. Not that any of her sacrifices had ultimately mattered. Here I was, trapped, and as much at the mercy of these people as I’d been at Joaquin’s hands years earlier.

“No,” Rena said, surprising me. I squinted at her in the dim light. “Don’t you get it yet? It’s because I’m Light, and that’s what we do. That’s what Warren did for Gregor, what he’s doing for you. It’s why the rest of them are willing to sacrifice themselves for him.”

Because he was Light.

“Oh, my God.” I blinked once, my heart thumped twice, and I slowly rose to a sitting position in bed, careful not to let the dizziness pooling in my head topple me again. “That’s it.”

Rena started, and her rocking faltered. “What?”

I felt a leap in my belly as I leaned over and flipped on the light, and I felt my own excitement transmuted, knowledge registering with Warren. I snuffed what remained of the incense, reached for the water on the nightstand, and touched the glass to my cheek to cool the skin. Then I drank deeply to clear my mind, dousing what I could of the flame in my belly and ignoring the rest. Snagging my duffel bag, I rifled through it, pulling out the first dark article of clothing I could find. It was a black cat suit, half cotton, half nylon, and deplorably low-cut, but that couldn’t be helped.

“He’s of the Light. They’re of the Light.”

They’ll take away my voice.

The pieces were coming together rapidly now, but it felt like a slow progression, like the evenly spaced ticking of a clock when I was already running out of time.

“My God, why didn’t I see it before?” See it, I thought, and almost giggled.

My eyes for your voice.

“Where are you going?” Rena asked, leaning forward when she heard the rustling of my clothes. I rushed past her into the bathroom, where I knotted my hair messily at the nape of my neck and splashed cool water on my face, clearing my senses further. I was going to need help, I thought, glancing back at her through the mirror. What I had to do was near impossible. What I had to prove was unbelievable, even to me.

“Not me. Us,” I said, returning to the doorway. I stared down at her, and she was so focused on me I would’ve sworn she could see me. She rose, face inches from mine. “It’s time to stop your rocking and praying, Rena,” I told her, grabbing her hand. “We’re going to go save your favorite son.”