The Scent of Shadows

3

It was midnight as I made my way home, exactly twenty-four hours before my next birthday, and the nightly bacchanal that was Las Vegas was in full swing, a strange cross-culture of midwestern hedonism and foreign bafflement. The Strip was a neon necklace strung from one end of the valley to the other, like gaudy costume jewelry dressing up the desert night, and despite the sharp November air, every street, walkway, and aerial tram was packed with tourists. Their gazes were wide-eyed and expectant, like they expected someone to drop money in their lap at any given moment.

I bundled into my wrap, then my car, and gassed it past Bellagio and Caesar’s before hurtling over the wash that flooded the Imperial Palace’s parking garage every monsoon season. Lowering my window halfway, I allowed the cool air to bite at my cheeks and ruffle my hair. Even if my mind hadn’t been buzzing with thoughts of Ben, or images of Ajax writhing on the floor—and then, again, more thoughts of Ben—I’d have been wide-awake. Vegas came alive at night, and so did I.

I’d often thought how boring it’d be to grow up in a place where everyone was the same…until I realized that everyone really was, essentially, the same. They watched the same television shows, ate at McDonald’s, had their coffee at Starbucks, and hopped the same airplanes to return to whatever state or country they thought made them different. While they were here, however, no matter what color, shape, or accent they sported, they wanted identical things. To be entertained. To get lucky. And to be allowed to dream, just for a while, that anything was possible. Despite its checkered past and dubious press, Vegas spoke to people of hope. And hope, as they say, makes fools of us all.

I left all that frantic hope behind me and turned onto an asphalt-slung back road only the cops, locals, and well-tipped cabbies knew about. Within five minutes I was coasting along Charleston Boulevard, the glitter of the Strip replaced by littered alleys and underpasses, where the unlucky huddled in wary groups rather than optimistic ones. These were the people tired of playing the fool, and the dichotomy between these two faces of Vegas was not lost on me.

That was how I first spotted the homeless man pawing through a steel trash bin, his tattered duster whipping violently around his calves…on a wind-free night. He glanced up as my headlights arched over his graffiti-tagged domain, a giant rat reclining on two legs, beady eyes following my vehicle until the possibility of danger had passed.

Two minutes later, as I turned onto an unpaved shortcut, another vagrant appeared—dressed similarly, no less—and half scuttled, half walked toward my racing vehicle, gazing right at me through the window as I passed. I trailed him in the rearview mirror, wondering at the way he followed my path into the middle of the road and just stood in the dust, watching as I sped away.

I didn’t see the figure in front of me until it was too late. Tires squealed, the windshield cracked with a sonic boom, and a body careened over my roof, thumping and wheeling overhead before disappearing into the inky night. Tumbleweeds scraped my doors like fingernails, rocks battered the tires and underside of my car, and I spun twice, carving dizzying whorls into the dry desert bed before miraculously coming to a rest without flipping.

The pitch of night—complete on this barren desert side street—couldn’t mask the smell of burning rubber, or the ragged sound of my breath breaking in sharp spurts from my lungs. It took a moment to get oriented again, but when I did I found myself facing the direction I’d come. In the background were the circus lights of the Strip.

In the foreground was a man crumpled on the desert floor.

I began to shake. Then, before shock could set in, I began to move. Grabbing my cell phone, I pushed from the car, the screech of door against bramble arching in the air like a lonely cry for help. My headlights illuminated the person I’d hit, but it seemed to take me forever to run on jellied limbs and slide to a crouch beside him.

I don’t know how I recognized him, perhaps it was the long coat, but even before I reached the crumpled figure I knew I’d find that beggar. The one I’d already seen. Twice.

Multiple smells hit me at once. Pungent body odor, the man surely hadn’t washed for weeks; vomit, sour and smelling of the bottle; and something greasy, whether his hair or clothes or the dinner he might have unearthed from that trash bin, I didn’t know. There was another scent too, one I couldn’t name. I knew only that it was him, and I tried to ignore the voice in my mind telling me there was no way he should be here. That it was impossible. That I’d left him miles back in the dark.

His face was turned away from the beam of my headlights, and a wiry beard kept me from seeing if a pulse beat in his neck, but his limp limbs were turned in impossible angles and gruesome directions. It didn’t look like an ambulance would be necessary. Shaking, I touched his skin for a pulse. I had just killed a human being.

His head rocked, eyes opened wide, and he screeched in my face. I fell backward, gasping, and quickly scrambled out of reach. His cry hadn’t been one of pain. It even sounded joyous, like he’d made some sort of discovery. It sounded, in fact, like he’d cried, “Eureka!”

He hollered again, this time drawing out the syllables, and I couldn’t tell whether he was laughing or crying, but that twisted, mutilated body began to shake. “Eu–re–kaaaa!”

I reached for the cell phone I’d dropped, but was stopped by the man’s voice; throaty, strong, and surprisingly authoritative. “Don’t touch that phone!”

“I—I’m just going to call an ambulance.”

“Don’t need no ambulance.”

I pushed the emergency button. “You need a doctor.”

He just looked at me and grinned, still sprawled on the gravel like some beat-up and forgotten doll. I waited for a dial tone, the emergency operator, for anything that would connect me to someone who could help, but the phone had gone dead. It must have broken when I’d dropped it.

I looked at the vagrant and knew I couldn’t move him, but I couldn’t leave him there either. I’d never leave someone else helpless and vulnerable, alone in the desert. “I’m going to drive my car over, and we’ll find a way to get you in, okay?”

“No, no. I’m a quick healer,” he said, and just like that the leg beneath him straightened with an audibly sickening pop. “See?”

I didn’t. I thought I might vomit, but I didn’t see. “Let me get my car anyway.”

Ignoring his protests, I jogged back to the car and slipped into the seat. Then I pulled alongside the man, who was now, amazingly, sitting up, and—careful not to bean him in the head—pushed open the passenger door to view him through the other side.

“Told you I heal quickly,” he said, waving at me with a hand that was broken just above the wrist. The torque of the movement was nauseating, but not as much as the way he suddenly jerked the arm upward, snapping it back in place. We both stared at the arm, poised midair. Then he gave me a little finger wave, grinning. “Bet you can’t do that.”

I opened my mouth but nothing came out. The wrist, obviously healed and fully functioning, appeared as good as new. That’s when I realized the dusty ground, the man, and even my car, were as dry as they’d been before the accident. There were no body fluids or blood; no urine released as battered muscles convulsed then went lax with injury. I glanced from the wrist into clear eyes that watched me intently, corners crinkled in a knowing smile.

“Uh…”

Stepping from the car, I watched from over the hood as he slowly straightened. He was still bent at the waist, but he’d been stooped like that back beneath the underpass and appeared otherwise fine. Which brought me back to my original question. How had he gotten here?

“How—How…” It was about as much as I could manage, and I had to settle for the truncated version. “How?”

“I told you. Quick healer. Like you.” And he began to walk away.

I put my hand to my cheek, where he’d pointed. It was the one Ben had touched, the one that had been bruised and tender. I frowned. The soreness was gone.

“Sir, come back.” I rushed to catch up. “What’s your name?”

He doubled over instantly and began to laugh; maniacal, breathless spasms rocking his body back and forth while tears streamed over his grimy cheeks. I looked around to see what was so funny, and came pretty quickly to the conclusion it was me. His laughter broke off into wracking coughs, and he bent over, hacking away. I pounded on his back, trying to help.

“You ever read comic books?” he asked, straightening suddenly, all signs of ill health vanishing with the movement.

I wiped my hand on my pants. “You mean like Donald Duck?”

“I mean like Superman, Wonder Woman…Elektra.” He said this last word with all the panache of a seasoned lounge act, fingers splayed in the air with theatrical introduction.

“No.” This whole conversation was getting stranger by the moment. I took a step back, muttering to myself, “What do I look like? An adolescent boy with cystic acne and bondage fantasies?”

“Not fantasies,” he said, overhearing me. “History. Research. The truth multiplied by the collective consciousness equals fact stranger than fiction.” He began chuckling again.

“Sorry?”

“I’m a superhero!” he announced, raising his arms like a competitor in Mr. Olympia. “Hero to the superheroes. Command leader of Zodiac troop 175, division of anti-evil, La-as Vegas!”

After what I considered an amazingly brief period, I closed my gaping mouth. I even formed words. “I really think you should get in the car, sir. I’ll pay for an exam.”

“You’re sweet,” he announced to the desert, grabbing my arm. “So sweet. So good. One of the good guys. Like me.”

Yeah, I thought. Just like you. “Ah, look. At least let me take you to the shelter. They’ll give you food. You’ll have a place to stay for the night.”

“Day is night and night is day in this, your city, your home,” he said, pointing back toward the neon lights. “Vampires, if they existed, would love it here. Cats too.” He craned his neck at me pointedly. “It’s a great place for all nocturnal hunters.”

“What did you say?”

“I said hunters. Like you. Like me too, because I found you.” He jumped, performing a dusty heel click. “Eureka!”

Now, getting run over by my Jaguar XK8 coupe could hardly qualify as a discovery, but I wasn’t going to argue the point with someone obviously suffering severe mental trauma. Then again, I thought, studying his lopsided grin, maybe I hadn’t hit him hard enough. “Let me take you to the hospital. You really need help.”

“Aren’t you kind?” he said, tearing up, grasping my arm again. “Aren’t you special? I can just smell the uniqueness on you.”

I jerked away and stumbled as Ajax’s short lesson on pheromones flashed through my mind. I was suddenly very aware I was standing in the middle of the desert with a complete—and, apparently, completely mad—stranger. “Look, mister, I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s nothing special about me. Got it? You just need help.”

“You don’t think you’re special? How sad. So sad.” He shook his head, and really did seem dispirited by the thought. “But you are. You have special skills. Warriors’ skills. That’s why you’re being watched.”

“By whom?” I asked, though I already knew of two people. Ajax. And Ben.

“Power is knowledge, and knowledge is power. Know thyself. All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing…”

I’d have sworn on my life Ben and I had been alone in my father’s office, but we spoke the final words together. “…and a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

We both stared, the cold, dry night sharpening between us. He was no longer bumbling about. And I was no longer feeling kind. “Where did you hear that?”

He tilted his head at my threatening tone. “You must develop your skills. Realize your potential. Your power, indeed, lies in your knowledge, but right now you know nothing.”

I decided then I’d had my share of nutcases for one night. I turned my back and began to walk away. “You don’t know me, old man.”

His next words halted me cold. “You’re Joanna Archer, sister to Olivia, daughter to Xavier and Zoe. You have a birthday tomorrow, midnight, an auspicious one…” He waited until I’d turned back. “Auspicious, that is, if you live long enough to see it.”

And I was on him before I knew it, the lapels of his tattered jacket twisted in my fists, my face thrust in his despite the stench and craziness that lived there. “Who are you?”

He placed his hands over mine, and I felt the strength in them and was surprised by it. You couldn’t tell by looking at him, and that was something I should have remembered. You could never tell who a person really was just by looking.

“Your second life cycle ends today. Tonight, Joanna.” He lifted my hands from his lapels, gently, and returned them to my sides. “I’ve come to warn you.”

I shook my head, and wrapped my arms around my body, but kept my eyes on him as I backed away. “You talk in riddles, old man.”

“Ah, but you’re a straight shooter, aren’t you? An Archer, you are.” He made a motion like shooting an arrow into the night, and tilted his head, considering me. “Not just a hunter, though. A target too. The hunter becomes the hunted.”

The wind suddenly picked up, shifting so a breeze blew my hair across my cheeks, setting the hem of the man’s trench coat fluttering around his ankles. He lifted his nose, and his nostrils drew wide, then narrowed again. “Smell that? They know you’re here. But don’t worry. They know I’m here too.”

“I don’t smell anything,” I said, and I had no idea what he was talking about.

He tilted his head in that crazy way he had. “Because you haven’t been taught to recognize their kind. Close your eyes and think of once living things decaying in the ground. A pet rabbit buried then unearthed after a week. Fungus rotting on overripe fruit. Hot sulfur rising from a hole in the earth to taint the wind. Now try again.”

I turned my face into the wind just to humor him, and immediately caught a whiff of something that reminded me of sulfur. Possibly tin. A rusty can.

With the flesh of a long-dead animal sweating inside.

“Christ.” It smelled like Ajax, and I turned my head away sharply, only to find the bum regarding me solemnly. The look sent chills through my spine and into the soles of my feet. Someone this crazy shouldn’t look so sane. I pivoted to leave. Fuck this guy. He could just stay here with his riddles and delusions and rotting scents.

His voice rose, carried to me on the filthy breeze. “You were walking through the desert when you were sixteen years old, leaving your boyfriend’s house in the early morning hours, smelling of passion and love and hope, the same scent that clings to you tonight, in fact.”

My heart was beating so hard I wouldn’t have been surprised if it leapt from my chest into my hands. How did a homeless man who jumped in front of cars and smelled like a sewer know anything about my personal scent? How did he know about me? I turned to find him closer than I expected. So close I had to hold my breath.

“You were attacked by a solitary man who seemed to be everywhere at once,” he continued, dark eye boring into mine. “You were raped, strangled, and left for dead. You awoke with a broken memory beneath the scorching midday sun, and no idea of who you really were. Your memory gradually returned, but you never fully recovered your burgeoning sixth sense. You mended your broken body and turned it into a machine, a weapon, a warrior’s tool. Good thing too. You’ll need it now.”

“How do you know all this?” God, but I hated how small my voice sounded.

“I told you. I have my talents. You have others.”

“You mean, like a superhero?” If that’s what he thought, he obviously had the wrong girl; my life was a fucking soap opera, not a comic book.

The man pursed his lips and looked up as if reading the stars like a map. They were powerful pinpricks this far out in the desert, brilliant and spearing sharply from the sky in the clear night. “I can’t help you now, Joanna. It’s too early by a moon’s rise. I just came to warn you. If you survive, I’ll be in touch.”

Then he began trudging off in that halting gait, heading for the void of empty desert space. But he paused a moment later, and for the first time his body language was uncertain. “Joanna?”

I stared back at him and shivered.

“Make sure you survive.”

Funny, but that was the sanest thing I’d heard all day.

Sanity had been a relatively elusive state since my rape almost a decade earlier. The strange desert interlude with a man who had no business knowing about me brought back just how hard I’d fought since then for even a modicum of normality…though I suppose the novelty of being threatened with a serrated poker might have had something to do with it as well. Either way, both strangers had talked openly about things that had gone unspoken in my family for years, chatting as easily about my patchwork past as if they were asking me to pass the salt…

What’s wrong, Joanna? Seeing things that remind you of a sweltering summer night?

You were attacked by a solitary man who seemed to be everywhere at once.

You were beaten, strangled, and left for dead.

It was true, I had been. But as a rule—one meant to keep that hard-won sanity in check—it wasn’t the truth I generally chose to concentrate on.

After the attack, after I’d healed about as much as a person can heal from such a thing, and after I’d spent nine months in hiding, I did eventually finish high school. I wasn’t going to let myself be trapped, or further victimized by a man who’d already taken so much from me. My anger and fear were replaced by determination and the belief that just because someone tried to make you into a victim didn’t mean that’s what you had to be.

So I did normal things. I went to college, and majored in photography and art. I pushed my mind just as I pushed my body, stretching myself socially before I had a chance to freeze or petrify, and turn into something hard and brittle and dead before my time.

And I forgot, or told myself I forgot, about the child.

It also became important for me to escape Xavier’s gilded cage, that architectural behemoth so falsely resplendent on the outside, but with the moldy invaders of sorrow and blame that’d moved in after my attack. So I lived in a dorm, I had a roommate who kept a record of the men she slept with on a wall calendar. I joined a sorority—okay, only for about a minute, but still—and I pushed myself to date, making sure my gut reaction, that first impulse to withdraw and automatically say no, was kept in check. That’s when I made my rule: never say no. Of course, I sometimes cursed myself and the rigidity of that rule—I’d lost count of how many groping hands I’d had to wrest away—but fending off drunken frat boys was a cakewalk after what I’d been through.

And I’d been extremely careful not to wall myself off, which was why Ben’s comments about hiding behind my camera had touched such a nerve. Okay, so I stalked the city streets when I should have been home preparing a meal for a husband and two-point-five brats. Big deal. But I’d found, in the shadows of this city—my glittering town of dollar buffets and neon dreams—a lack of judgment about such things as what was normal. When I took my camera to the streets, nobody cared about my past or my name. When I tiptoed through the shadows of ugly alleyways, looking into faces that stared fearlessly and openly back at me, I could stop striving and pretending to be whole. And I could just be whole.

But now some bum who thought he was a comic book hero was telling me someone was going to try and attack me again. Worse, there were reasons, despite the man’s incoherent rambling, to believe what he said. One, I already had been attacked. Pretty good sign. Two, our conversation had smacked of more than obscure riddles and hidden meanings. It’d mirrored Ajax’s, if not exactly, then in word choice and content. They both claimed to know me from my scent. They both declared I was special in some way. They each said I was still being watched.

Thirdly, other than my name, family, and past, that scruffy, stinking vagrant had spoken of details nobody knew, some of which I’d purposely forgotten myself. The clincher was, he knew the words I used to describe myself, words that defined who I’d become, filling the holes left in my psyche by a young girl’s inability to defend herself.

Weapon. Warrior. Hunter.

Because despite all my hard work to become a whole woman, and a relatively open one, I was still keenly aware that he—the attacker—had never been found. He never saw the inside of a cage…at least not for what he’d done to me. And he was still out there. I felt it in my ancient fractures. I heard his voice every time dusk set along the Strip.

But I had a place here; in this world, this city, these streets. I’d made it for myself through grit and determination, and I wasn’t going to give it up now just because an anorectic psycho and some deranged bum had knocked haphazardly into my life.

No, I swore, speeding home on the neon-slicked streets. Not me. Not without a knock-down, drag-out, fuck-you fight.