The Scent of Shadows

27

As we circled the casino, looking for the best place to stage our entrance and Warren’s eventual extraction, the Strip was coming to life. Early morning joggers bounded up the near-empty streets, dodging slower pedestrians who’d emerged in quest of sunlight or breakfast buffets. Life, I thought, went on. I studied the building before us, the faux castle facade, the lush landscaping that surrounded it like a moat. It was no longer a mere casino, I realized, but a guarded fortress. And I was trying to scale its walls.

“I have an idea,” Hunter said, and headed toward the casino. “Give me five minutes.”

“Wait! You can’t go in alone!” The Shadows, were they there, would scent him. And I was sure they were there.

He shrugged off my arm with an irritated jerk. “Just five minutes. Meet me at the main entrance.”

It passed like five hours. By the time I rounded the building from the street side, Hunter was already on patrol, dressed in a Valhalla security uniform and scanning the area intently. His back was to me, so I exhaled to let him know I was there. He whirled immediately, heading straight for me.

He was fearsome, even clothed as a mortal. His blueblack hair was no longer loose, slicked instead, and banded at the base of his neck. He had his warrior’s face on, and though I knew who the game face was really for, the murderous look in his eyes still sent a chill down my spine. His whip was nowhere to be seen, but his mortal weapons were secured at his sides.

“Two guns?” I said, eyeing a holster on each side and a baton at his back.

“The Tulpa’s paranoid.”

The Tulpa wasn’t the only one. I glanced behind me, staring down a senior citizen about half my height. I didn’t like how exposed I felt on the street. And I could smell Hunter, his adrenaline and nerves as acute as smelling salts in my nose. “Let’s go.”

He shifted, and stepped in front of me.

“What are you doing? Move.” I skirted around him. He stepped in front of me again.

“Act like we’re arguing,” he said.

Exasperated, I scowled at him. “We are arguing.”

“I mean act crazy.” I tilted my head, looking at him. He spoke again, through clenched teeth. “Give me an observable reason to detain you.”

“I feel stupid,” I muttered, but halfheartedly threw my arms up in the air. “Whoo-hoo!”

His large palm smacked my head so hard my teeth clattered.

“Ow! Bastard!” I pushed away, but Hunter angled his body, giving me some slack and pulling me back, three times in quick succession. I finally realized he was making it appear I was struggling with him, and that it had worked. Our progression through the porte cochere was marked by several wary, if curious, sidelong glances. At the entrance, politely attended by a blank-faced doorman, I spotted a smoky half globe on the ceiling and knew that not everyone eyeing us was on the casino floor.

“I said take off the mask,” Hunter said suddenly, loudly. He hadn’t, of course, but I was up to speed now.

“Fuck you,” I said, placing one hand on my head as though to prevent its removal, pushing him away with the other. He twisted my arms behind my back and slapped cuffs on them.

“Hey!” The panic in my voice was real. I didn’t like being cuffed, my conduit out of reach, but there was a warning in Hunter’s eye and I stopped struggling so much. I knew there was no way a masked woman could get through Valhalla without being apprehended by hotel security. The outfit was one thing—it was Vegas, after all—but a mask was another.

I also knew that once detained, a suspected robber would be escorted to a holding room for interrogation, either by hotel security alone or in tandem with Metro. That’s where I was headed now, though in this case the place Hunter was dragging me was precisely where I wanted to go.

Which got me to thinking. If hotel surveillance had caught me entering with my mask on, hadn’t it also caught Hunter coming in off-shift, changing into a uniform, and escorting me to the back of the house? Wouldn’t he be questioned about it later by those who worked for the Tulpa? And wouldn’t the answers, ultimately, reveal his true identity?

His entire life would be compromised, I thought, and the Zodiac troop would have no one on the inside of the Tulpa’s organization. Again.

Of course, I knew Hunter had already thought of this. He was giving it all up, I realized, everything he’d worked for. His identity. His life. The job that would help him infiltrate the Tulpa’s organization.

For now, though, he was dragging me across the main casino floor, around slot banks and carousels, between bleary-eyed tourists who’d been at the tables all night and garishly flashing neon that seemed to me to say “Go back! Go back! Certain death lies ahead!”

We reached a pair of towering double doors and Hunter punched the handicapped access button. They swung open automatically like a cavernous mouth opening to reveal Valhalla’s bowels. Where the real work, both natural and supernatural, was done.

“Stay close. It’s easy to get lost,” Hunter said, his grip easing, his pace increasing. “There are no cameras back here, bad for morale, but there are eyes everywhere.”

He turned left, then right, then a series of quick lefts. After the first two passageways we saw no one, which was strange for a casino. Hunter gestured down a long corridor. “Loading docks are that way. Might be a possible escape route later, but I think the freight elevators are a better bet. Less traffic.”

I looked at him. His face was drawn tight, as if strings were winging his features downward. “I can smell you,” I said.

“I know,” he said, and his voice was tight too. He wasn’t sweating, but his scent reeked from his pores.

“You’ll be a target.”

He looked at me, still for the first time. “That’s why I’m telling you where the loading docks are.” I swallowed hard. “Now pay attention.”

We entered a seemingly unending hallway, steel-plated from the floor to about four feet up, a barrier against carts and trolleys and other equipment that bumped along on the hotel’s daily business. “The Tulpa is headquartered down the longest corridor in Valhalla. Ever see those horror movies where someone’s running down a hallway that just keeps getting longer and longer?” I looked behind me. We were a hundred yards in. I looked ahead. At least a hundred more to go. Hunter glanced over at me. “Now imagine running it with a dozen Shadow warriors at your back.”

I swallowed hard. “I’d rather not.” But I looked above for possible escape routes, at the walls and floor for possible weapons. There was nothing. Just smooth, shiny walls and a disturbing fluorescent trail of elongated wall lamps.

“They call it the Gauntlet,” he said, watching me.

“Of course they do,” I said. That earned me a chuckle.

The hallway dead-ended, which I hoped wasn’t symbolic, and we shifted right, stopping abruptly. An elevator bank stood right in front of us, the numbers above winging from one to twenty-four. Hunter and I faced the doors, neither of us talking nor looking at one another as he unlocked my hands and placed the cuffs in his back pocket. Then he pushed the button. It began its downward descent with a loud ding.

I turned to him suddenly. “Hunter, I have to apologize.”

“For what?” He was only half listening. The elevator was on the top floor. We were in the basement.

“For all this.” His eyes flicked to me, then back. Ding. Floor twenty. “I know what you’re risking today. I know you’re going to lose everything.”

I knew also what it was to lose everything.

“Let’s not talk about it.” He glanced up at the lighted numbering above the doors, but the way his jaw clenched gave him away. Ding. Ten floors away. “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” I said, tentatively, “but just one more thing.”

“What?”

Half turned, I didn’t look at him as I rubbed my wrists where they’d been shackled. “I’m sorry.”

“You said that already.”

“Not for that.” Ding. Eight now. “For this.”

And I stepped into him, unwinding with my shoulders so my elbow struck him just below his temple. He went down like a tree trunk. I had to lunge to keep his head from whacking the concrete floor, and as I lowered him he somehow managed a belated attempt for my throat.

“Ungrateful bastard,” I muttered as his hands fell away. Strong ungrateful bastard.

I pulled the cuffs from his back pocket, secured them around his wrists, and kept the keys. I hated to cuff him but it would be less believable that he’d been overcome if I didn’t. I told myself it was for his safety, then removed his guns—stuck one in my boot, the other at my waist—his baton, and the telltale mark of an agent of Light, his conduit.

“You’ll kill me when you wake up,” I said to him. “But at least you’ll wake up.”

Which led me to the last thing that needed doing.

Leaning over Hunter, who cut a fierce figure even in an unconscious state, I thought of what I’d learned about him. Not a lot. But there was that way he watched people, the quiet scrutiny belying his casual manner. I admired that. I thought of the way he created things with his hands—weapons, sure, but artistry was a skill I’d always coveted. Then I thought of the way he’d intended to sacrifice himself today, and hadn’t said a thing about it, knowing nobody would realize his intentions until it was too late.

Ding. Until now.

Allowing this paltry information to coalesce in the forefront of my mind, I bent and very gently covered his mouth with my own. The spread of flesh upon flesh was intimate, but nothing compared to the even more private opening of minds and souls. I exhaled, breathing a soft stream of essence into his mouth.

My mother had been right. You could taste the Light in another person, like bubbles on the tongue, and you could smell a person’s soul on their breath. I glimpsed Hunter’s strength, the sweet ardor of his physical essence and the surprising gentleness of his inner spirit. I continued to breathe, allowing our breaths to mingle so that I drew him up, in, and knew that somewhere in his unconscious state he was doing the same with me. In doing so, he was experiencing far more of me than any man ever had.

I allowed it, seeking the connection that would allow me to pass not only my knowledge and memory and experience to him, but my power as well. My kiss became a prayer, my breath a shield. I cupped his cheek with one hand—my touch now a weapon, shared—and closed my eyes to pour myself into him.

And the filmstrip began.

Some memories take only a moment to burn into the gray matter, but their images are imprinted forever. The horrific death of his parents came to me in dull and numbing flashes, viewed from the eyes of a boy watching helplessly from the corner. Shadows were spinning around him, but he was too small and helpless to do anything but watch. I heard his vow, buried beneath hot tears and his parents’ broken limbs, that he’d never be weak again.

The equally sad but still sharp death of my sister was my painful contribution. It came in the one image of that night I recalled above all others; her pinwheeling through the night, calling out my name in bald desperation.

Other memories passed in such blinding flashes they set my skin to prickling. Hunter making love to a slim dark woman, a lone tear sliding over his cheek.

My final night with Ben, a storm cloud breaking like a shot overhead.

The birth of a daughter, and a heart awash in more love than it had ever known or expected.

The birth of another, unwanted, unnamed, and untouched before being whisked away.

Had I not known what memories I’d lived and what I had not, I wouldn’t have been able to tell which belonged to me. As it was, we alternated our lives’ greatest hits in bright flashes, trading knowledge, secret desires, longing and regrets, along with our greatest loves and our most poignant sorrows.

Then a turn into such sudden blackness it was like being pitched down a roller coaster and careening off its tracks. A shiver went through my body and quaked into his. I showed him a hypodermic needle flashing, and Greta’s death powering through my limbs. Breathing the memory outward, I gave the aureole up like a gift, and Hunter took it, his subconscious greedy in a way I knew he’d never allow when fully awake. He sucked the power away, and it pulsed through our mouths, our lips moving, our tongues intertwined, the memory a lead line weighted to our hearts, loins, and heads. He grew hard beneath me. I opened my eyes to find him watching me with his soul—wondrously, thankfully, lovingly—and my body responded. My heart did too.

You’ll be safe now. I’ve shielded you as you shielded me.

But the Shadows will scent you.

So I’ll have to kill me another.

His hips rose beneath mine, and I pressed into him, forgetting myself in the strong mingling of power and limbs and dreams. The raw sexuality pulsing between us surprised me—what had started out as a chaste kiss now burned torridly between us—but it wasn’t as surprising as what I sensed him thinking next.

Brave, brave Joanna…

Shocked, I pulled away. Breathing hard, I watched his eyes flutter, heard him groan in protest and satisfaction. Then he fell still.

He knew my name. A bell chime, like a warning, sounded behind me as the elevator hit home. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, but sensed nothing of Hunter. There was only me now. Alone.

He knew my name, I thought again as the doors slid open.

And that comforted me. I rose, knowing I might die, but that somebody would remain behind to remember me. Someone who really knew me. After Olivia’s death, and the loss of Ben, I hadn’t believed anyone else ever could.

Placing a final chaste kiss on Hunter’s lips, I left him lying spent and sprawled in the corner against the wall, and didn’t have a bit of guilt. I had given him enough.

I entered the elevator, pushed the button, and lifted my head as the doors whisked shut. The cart began its ascent. Toward Warren, I thought. And toward my next, and possibly last, kill spot.