The Taste Of Night

16

If you head away from the Strip on the I-95, past the old wash and the clusterfuck known as the Spaghetti Bowl, you’ll end up in a tony and relatively new suburban master-planned community, where housing prices reflect the desirability of the area, and residents make sure the distinction is known. As you make your way up Summerlin Parkway, the mountain ranges that once lay so far from the center of town begin to butt up against rows of communities plotted to provide developers with the greatest return per square foot. The uniformity of the houses also provides neighbors with added anonymity; nobody knows exactly who’s being rude when they drive directly into the garage of the house looking much the same as theirs, closing the door with nary a how-dee-do.

It was in one such neighborhood, pressed against a mountain-a hill compared to the ranges hovering over the valley, but mountainous nonetheless-that Joaquin’s nondescript home rested. Of course, Joaquin would like that. The blending, I mean. Physically he was that way as well. Most people would pass right over him; just a tallish man with shadowed eyes, pale skin, and hair a bit too long to be fashionable. But just as the bones beneath that benign exterior were blackened with decay, what lay in that house was coiled and waiting to strike.

I pulled up half a block from his lot to study the darkened windows of a detached home, light beige and single-story, with shuttered windows and a security gate over the front door. The front yard was xeriscaped-what a good little environmentalist our Joaquin was-and it blended perfectly with the houses on either side of him. I’m sure he enjoyed walking among the mortals he stalked, waving to a future victim on his way back from the mailbox, or petting the dog of a man whose wife he’d already marked as his own. I winced to see a tricycle trapped next to his mailbox, the thought of Joaquin living next to children instantly icing me over.

Stepping from my car, mask fixed firmly over my eyes to conceal my identity as Olivia, I had an arrow already notched in my conduit, held ready at my side. The street was deserted, but I’d already decided my approach would be from the hillside. The desert side, I thought, peering into the darkness. Just as he’d once approached me.

Nothing smells as fresh and clean as the night-laden desert air. The dusty floor was packed solid under my feet, the star-flecked sky swung wide overhead, and I moved lithely among bramble, boulders, weeds, rocks, skirting the jutting cacti poised like spiny sentries all along the hillside. As a kid I’d taken many such forays into the desert night, the complete dark and stillness adding to the thrill of the illicit outings. Joaquin probably thought of this hillside as his own, but that didn’t faze me. I’d always considered the whole of the Mojave my home.

The brick wall separating his house from the untamed desert was my first hurdle. I vaulted it in a quick, single motion, watched only by the half cast eye of a slivered moon. Landing in a worn patch of grass, I darted beneath an overgrown pepper tree, where I remained for another minute to temper my thumping heart. I’d dreamed of this day too long to let my emotions overtake me now.

I approached the house cautiously, struck by the complete stillness. It was summer, and though the birds had retired for the night, chirping crickets should have softened the silence. Yet not even a blade of grass rustled in the breeze ferried from the hillside behind me. It was like the air too had abandoned this lot, run off by Joaquin’s predatory scent in the same way pesticide kept insects at bay.

Or killed those who didn’t obey their instincts, I thought, swallowing hard as I slid up the back porch. Reaching into my utility belt, I opened a compact mirror and peered into it to gauge the angle needed to reflect the home’s interior. Even in baggy black fatigues, my face half covered by my mask, I had to admit I looked fabulous. Whoever it was who said, “Die young and leave a pretty corpse” was probably a fan.

Flicking my wrist toward the window, I did a swift sweep to detect any movement inside. There was none. So I tilted the compact slowly, making out a couch and coffee table in the dim room, a television perched on a small rectangular stand, and shadows-the normal kind-layering one another in varying degrees of density, banished near the left corner where a dim utility light, probably the bulb over a stove in the kitchen, had been left on.

I moved back from the window and followed the wall until I reached the sliding glass door. Putting the compact away, I gripped my conduit in one hand and a heavy-duty flashlight in the other. Something told me Joaquin was so confident nobody would dare enter his private domain that he didn’t bother with an alarm system. What I didn’t expect was for him to neglect locking the door as well. Surprise, then wariness, held me back when the door slid smoothly open, not even a squeak to break the oppressive silence.

Arrogant bastard, I thought, widening the gap. In one quick movement I’d breached the threshold and whipped my flashlight over the room like a spotlight arching over the night sky. There was nothing here but the objects I’d seen through the window, so I clicked the light off and let my eyes adjust to the interior, sliding the door shut behind me.

On closer inspection I saw the flotsam and jetsam that occupied Everyman’s household-newspapers stacked neatly to one side of the sofa, four different remotes to operate one TV. Typical man. Next to an oval glass-top table I spotted a large water bottle, like the ones delivered door to door in big green trucks, brimming with coins.

How about that? Joaquin saves his pennies.

Another smaller jar rested on a wooden chair that looked to be sized for a child. At first I thought it contained the overflow coins from the first, but these weren’t the right shape or size, and coin didn’t gleam in the moonlight like broken seashells. I reached into the jar.

I knew even before touching them that they weren’t seashells. Running my tongue along my top row of teeth, I paused over the smooth surface mirrored in my hand, minus the root. At least he’d washed the viscera from each tiny trophy before depositing it inside. Fastidious, I thought, clenching my jaw. Then I wondered which of the hundreds was mine.

“Stop it,” I ordered myself, depositing the tooth back with the others. I wasn’t going to start playing victim just because I was finally facing the man who’d tried to make me into one. But I wondered what he planned to do when the jar was brimming. Something significant, probably. Something to mark the occasion. Or maybe he’d just start another jar. Maybe he’d simply go on killing.

“Not after tonight,” I swore, and turned with more determination, if less care, to search the rest of the house. “Not ever again.”

Thirty tense seconds later I had the kitchen canvassed, as well as the laundry room leading to the empty garage. That half of the home searched, I turned my attention to the hallway, and the bedrooms I knew lay beyond. My feet were silent on the living room carpet, and I paused only long enough to affix a bugging device beneath the cheap metal coffee table, placing the bug to track it in my inner ear. I wanted to know if he entered the living room while I was in another part of the house.

Away from the kitchen light, in the pitch of the darkened hall, the scents of charred candy and rancid flesh grew stronger. I caught myself breathing shallowly through my mouth, trying not to let too much of the stench in. The front rooms had been for show, with all the charm of a third-rate sitcom set. This, though, was where Joaquin lived. His stench was imbedded in the walls.

Inching along until I came to a trio of closed doors, I studied them all, then raised my conduit to the door on the right.

Let’s see what’s behind door number one, I thought, swinging it open. I crouched, prepared to blow the shit out of a secondary bedroom that had bare floors, naked concrete lying in spotty patches of light from the streetlights leaching through the vertical blinds. It was a workshop of some sort, I saw, straightening. All the tools were normal enough; jigsaws and cordless drills, pegboards anchored across an entire wall filled with hammers and wrenches and screwdrivers, aligned according to purpose and size. Drill bits lined the workbench in neatly arrayed plastic boxes, and I was willing to bet the locked drawers were equally well kept.

So, I thought, the anal freak liked to do his work away from the prying eyes of neighbors and passers-by. Interesting, as it didn’t appear he was much for home improvement.

I returned to the hallway, leaving the room open. Door number two was positioned on an interior wall, too small to be anything but a utility closet. I told myself I was being thorough as I moved toward it, and that I wasn’t avoiding what could only be Joaquin’s bedroom directly across from that.

I whipped the closet open to find nothing but a bare light-bulb, the string used to turn it on swaying from the ceiling. I pushed that door open as far as it would go, just as I had with the first, then turned to door number three. Joaquin’s bedroom. God, I did not want to go in there. But if I could catch him unaware, blow off his head in his sleep while he dreamed of murdering little girls in the desert and taking their eyeteeth home as a prize…well, isn’t that what I’d come for?

The memory of the jar in the living room mobilized me, and I took a deep breath of Joaquin-soaked air, filled my lungs with it, and held it as I reached for the handle.

A noise on the other side stopped me.

It wasn’t a snore, or the rustle of bedclothes as someone shifted positions, but a pleading sound, a soft whimper followed by ragged breathing, and in the brief silence I was sure I could hear someone struggling to crawl across the bedroom floor.

Like I’d once struggled to crawl across the dusty desert floor.

Thinking of tiny bodies, crushed spirits, and airless desert nights-and all those goddamned teeth in the living room-I expelled the tainted air from my chest and yanked the door open. But there wasn’t another young girl looking up at me with bloodied limbs and pleading eyes. That was just me, my mind. A memory. Instead there was something else.

And boy, did it look happy to see me.

“Uh…good doggie?” I said, taking in the sight of an animal with the muscle of a bear and the angular ferocity of a wolf. He let a warning rumble loose in his throat, and the deep reverberation jarred through my immobile bones like a jackhammer through concrete. His ears were pricked forward, eyes bright, and I had no idea what kind of dog he was beyond “not friendly.” Those eyes narrowed as I took a small step back, flashing scarlet, though that could’ve been my imagination. One thing was sure. If dogs could speak, this one would be saying, Yum.

No wonder the back door had been unlocked. Who needed a security system when Cujo lurked inside? Those hadn’t been whimpers of pain I’d heard from the other side of the bedroom door, but cries of longing as the beast sensed an intruder. I swallowed hard, shifting my weight to take another step back, and pulled from my mind the only word I could remember from a long-ago documentary on the Discovery Channel.

“Stay,” I said in German. Or so I thought. I’d probably said Puppy Chow because he launched from his back haunches so fast my vision blurred.

I raised my weapon arm too late. I couldn’t clear the beast’s bulky weight, and his front paws-flashing wickedly sharp claws-sank into my shoulders, mouth open and snapping. It was all I could do to wedge my forearms between us as I bowled over backward, footing lost, the stench of matted fur and stale dog breath washing over me as I hit the hallway floor.

My head slammed into the baseboards, and black dots threatened to swallow my vision, but I squeezed my eyes shut, lowered my chin, and crossed my arms over my face. He was reaching for my nose, but found my left arm instead, and I cried out as dozens of razors punctured the skin, and again when he reared back, pulling flesh and tendon and muscle with him. If there’d been more room for him to angle himself in the narrow hallway, the bone would’ve snapped. As it was, the space created between us was only wide enough to get one knee up, and I rammed it into his midsection, turning feral growls into a savage howl.

Great. Now I’d pissed him off.

He lunged again, but this time I caught his throat, fisting the fur there to yank him toward me. As I scissor-kicked my legs simultaneously, he flew over the top of me like a vulture swinging over its prey, twisting in the air to launch another attack even before he’d landed. But I found my knees as he crashed to the ground, and when that great muzzle snapped open again, I centered my conduit in that throat and fired inside.

The beast jerked as if puzzled, his jaw snapping shut on a bubbly whine. He shuddered as if he was swallowing the arrow, then blinked. Shuddered again. And his mass expanded by another foot.

“Shit,” I said, realizing too late what I’d done. This beast was to Joaquin what my cat, Luna, was to me, a warden. It couldn’t be killed, maimed, or reasoned with by an enemy agent. Wardens were trained from birth to defend their owners and territory, to recognize and attack whomever took the risk anyway. If it seemed like an unfair trade-the Shadows had dogs while we had cats-well, you hadn’t seen Luna shear the eyesight from a Shadow agent in one wicked swipe. Not wanting to see what this hound could do given the same opportunity, I leaped over him, batting clumsily against the narrow walls like a pinball machine on full tilt.

Instinct had me darting right, into the workshop, and I kicked the door shut just before the dog barreled into it with a jarring thud. The door shuddered under his weight, and I didn’t bother with the lock. A few more hits like that and the entire frame would split in two.

I raced to the window, shoving the blinds aside only to find a barred-up alcove. A fluorescent bulb burned down on me in a mocking echo of the streetlights outside, bricks plastering the frame where the window used to be. He’d rigged it, the bastard. No window. No exit.

Conduit ineffective, I searched the room for another weapon, and had just grasped the handle of a screwdriver when the door crashed in. I whirled to find twin rubies of hate fixed on me, a muzzle bared and rumbling, and teeth as sharp as pokers visible in an oversized jaw. Knees bent, I braced myself as the dog lunged again.

It saw, or sensed, the screwdriver in my hand, and dodged my stabbing motion, barreling into my body, flinging my arm wide. Our howls mingled as he latched on to my bicep this time, and I head-butted him before he could rip it open. He snapped at my face once, twice, saliva dripping to pool on my chest, and I backpedaled, lurching into a defensive position again.

“Bring it, you mangy, flea-bitten prick!” His ears flattened at the growl in my voice. This time I waited until he’d committed, his jaw plunging precariously close to my unguarded neck. I took a risk, one that would cost me a hand if I judged wrong, and let my fist disappear into that great mouth, felt the barbed teeth skimming the soft skin at my wrist, then wrenched the screwdriver upright, lodging it between the lower jaw and palate. Eyes bulging with pain, the dog’s frenzied growls snapped off into whimpers and I fled around the workbench, knocking it over before barreling through the remains of the shattered door and out into the relative freedom of the hallway.

Whimpers followed me. No wait, I thought, tilting my head. They were growls.

No, they were whimpers.

And growls.

Forcing myself to turn slowly, like the moon circling the earth, I shifted my attention back down the hallway and into the living room. Where another dog inched slowly forward, head lowered, eyes bright.

Fresh out of screwdrivers, my left arm still throbbing from the first dog’s assault, I lunged for the next nearest door. Almost human in their outrage, cries sprang up in the hallway. I pulled the closet door shut behind me, and stood shaking in the dark as ramming, accompanied by furious howls, escalated outside.

I fumbled for the light above my head, my hand shaking so violently the string slipped through my fingers twice. Finally I snapped it on with a quick jerk of the cord, and blinked in the unrelieved wash of the bulb. Sucking in a deep breath, I held it before slowly forcing it out. The dogs could scent my fear in the air, and it drove them into further frenzy. I straightened my mask calmly enough, until it sat firmly on the bridge of my nose again, yet my heart skipped a beat when I started taking inventory, eyes falling to my left arm.

So that’s why it hurts so much, I thought, studying the saliva and blood-coated limb. The bones were miraculously intact, but a flap of skin the size of a baseball fell open when I lifted my arm, exposing muscle, tendon, and a vein that had somehow escaped assault. That pumped merrily along like a beautiful string of red licorice. I was grateful, but it wasn’t something I especially needed to see.

Using my right hand, I unhooked my utility belt, letting the pouches slide onto the floor before securing my left with the thick leather. It was awkward, and took a bit of time to fashion something both secure and flexible, but it gave me something concrete to focus on, other than the numbness that was quickly shifting into agony. By the time I finished, my hands had stopped shaking, and the dog had ceased beating at the door.

It would never look the same again, I thought, with real regret. Wardens left scars; they were as deadly as conduits in this way, though perhaps Micah could smooth over the worst of the damage with another extensive surgery. Provided I lived long enough to undergo one, I thought, flexing my fingers. Meanwhile intermittent whines and scrapes at the door broke the otherwise eerie silence.

I leaned back, cursing my stupidity. I should’ve waited to confront Joaquin outside his lair. Now the element of surprise had been wrenched from my grasp by fur and teeth and glowing eyes, and that gave me a reason to snarl. Joaquin would love the idea of me squirreled away in his closet, anticipating his return in the hours before my death, and I’d just decided I’d rather be a chew toy than provide him with any such satisfaction when the wall behind me shifted.

I jerked upright, my first thought, Earthquake. That, or they were detonating something at the nearby nuclear test site, though I quickly realized neither of those things would’ve caused this wall alone to move. I whirled, flattening my palm against the drywall where my head had been resting, and pushed. Nothing. I pushed again, lower this time, putting all my weight into it. There were no corner seams that I could see, no markings to differentiate the wall from any other.

I pivoted to face the door, and leaned back again.

This time, when I felt the wall shift, I went with it, pushing with my weight. Apparently I didn’t know my own strength. The top of the wall flipped backward while the bottom scooped me up, like a seesaw extending the length of the closet.

In retrospect, it would’ve been a simple thing to let the panel fling me back, my legs arching overhead so I could somersault off the platform before the wall swung back into place. Instead I panicked, stomach lurching as my limbs flew out, a leg nearly getting wedged between the ceiling and the opening created by the pendulum’s motion. I bent my knees just in time, but the movement threw me forward, and I slid from the tilted entrance into a heap on the floor, head first.

“Ouch,” I said, my neck making adjustments that would’ve made a chiropractor cringe. I untangled myself, rose carefully, and felt for my conduit as I looked around. There was nothing to see…literally. I felt my eyes widen, I felt them blink, but the void was as complete as if I’d been dumped into a black hole. Joaquin could’ve been standing inches from me and I’d have never known.

That thought, plus a healthy dose of paranoia regarding a third dog, forced me into action. I might be blinded, but I had no intention of returning to that closet, or the set of razor-sharp teeth waiting for me beyond that. Using the wall as a guide, I took a step forward, then another. With the third came a telling rustle in the air. Of course, it registered too late. As I shifted my weight forward, the floor dropped from beneath me, a gaping mouth upturned to swallow me whole. I freefell, arms pinwheeling as I plummeted, ambushed yet again by something I didn’t know.

I was beginning to feel picked on.

It wasn’t a long fall. A child could’ve managed it in a playground. But I had no idea how far this rabbit hole went, so when the floor reared up seconds later, the impact jarred my bones and I crumpled like a wadded-up paper doll.

“Ouch,” I said again, really meaning it this time. Pushing myself up with my good arm, I held the other lightly to my forehead. Pissed-off fireflies danced before my eyes, and I watched with a shiver of alarm when they coalesced into two slim lines, like they’d been giving their marching orders by the U.S. military. My head screamed, and my arm took up the echo in a pulsing beat, but I sent up a silent prayer of thanks once I realized the lights weren’t just a trick of my battered brain, but a path leading deeper into this residential underground.

I hadn’t found Joaquin, I thought, taking a cautious step forward, but I’d somehow stumbled upon something he valued enough to keep hidden behind attack dogs, secret passageways, and a simpering urban veneer. So I followed the glowing snake of lights along its subterranean path, not looking back as I traced the twisting coil deeper underground.

My eyes gradually grew used to the dim underground, and I could make out shapes and symbols along the smooth walls, like the hieroglyphics of a lost tribe long before the written word came into existence. Some characters I knew, others I recognized by sight but still didn’t understand, and more were entirely new to me. Though they made no sense to me, I knew enough of Zodiac mythology to figure they probably told a story the deeper they progressed.

Deeper, it turned out, didn’t mean lower. As my attention returned to my footing, I was surprised to feel the path shift again to the earth’s surface. Into the mountain, I thought, suddenly realizing why Joaquin had chosen this location. I increased my pace, and after one more S-curve the footlights ended. I paused outside a carved entrance covered by velvet curtains so heavy and black, I’d have thought I was about to fall into another void if I hadn’t seen the edges. Taking a deep breath, I drew the curtain aside…and stepped into the most gorgeous room I’d ever laid eyes on.

“Well, look at that.” Ignoring the fact that it was an underground cavern, everything looked like a scene right from Architectural Digest. Well, if AD crammed their “best of” issue into one room, that was. There was no rhyme or reason to the stash; Art Deco chairs with bright orange seat cushions held court next to statues of African kings. A vintage Asian china service was displayed primly on a tortoise-patterned tabletop, while a gold-leafed floor lamp sent soft light blooming across a makeshift vignette of white ceramics and glazed coral. And that was just one corner of the jam-packed room. Elsewhere, Oriental rugs draped the dirt-packed floor in vibrant patterns, and a gigantic bed loomed dead center, where a giant oak headboard and a virtual mound of bedding rose in a luxurious wave of stripes and prints and color. And then I looked up.

The ceiling was made from the desert floor, though centuries of baking in the unrelieved sun couldn’t keep out the shell-backed, shiny-skinned, and multilegged vermin that had survived the ages as well. Snakes and lizards, wasps and worms, and vinegaroons-a particularly foul cross between a spider and scorpion-festooned the ceiling like living chandeliers, macabre creatures twisting in the lamplight, their movements played out on the walls in triple size.

Desert predators, all of them. It didn’t matter how much gilt was in this room. This was still Joaquin’s home. And he, I thought, watching a snake fall headfirst from ceiling to floor, was the largest predator of them all.

I cocked my head, listening to the pressing silence in this underground tomb, realizing that was exactly what this could be. If something went wrong down here, chances were nobody would ever find me. I’d remain deep underground, sealed beneath the hillside, Joaquin’s home marking my grave. But I couldn’t return the way I’d come. Even if I could vault up the pitch-dark incline back onto the platform at the false closet’s back, there were still the dogs to consider. And Joaquin’s return was growing imminent. Maybe he’d hole up in the Shadow sanctuary, passing along with the dawn into that reality. That would give me at least twelve hours to figure a way out of here.

But, looking around, I didn’t think so. The ornate bed told me he slept as much down here as he did upstairs-probably more. Why share a street and a neighborhood with others when you had a mountainside all to yourself? And Joaquin was a loner. He preferred to work alone, live alone, kill alone. Besides, the lights had been left on. I don’t care how forgetful or apathetic, nobody left the home fires burning if they were going to be away more than twenty-four hours.

And, I thought, pushing through the room, nobody as cautious as Joaquin had a bunker without a secondary escape.

The crunch of hard little bodies sounded beneath my boots as I crossed the dirt-packed floor. I jerked back heavy wall hangings, looking for hidden doors, and lifted rugs for trap doors that led even deeper. Dusty carcasses of roaches and abandoned snakeskins littered the undersides. “Sweep it under the rug” was apparently a maxim Joaquin took literally.

As I straightened, my eyes flitted to the far wall, where a large black curtain matching the entrance was fixed like an inkstain over the carved earthen walls. When I yanked it back, however, I had to pause before my feet would move in the right direction.

Joaquin might have spent his downtime in the previous room, but this was the one he loved. Starkly different from the first, almost Zen-like in its austerity, it had a simple wooden trestle centered and spanning six full feet, and a candelabra picketed at each end. None of the wall hangings or adornments I’d woven my way through, in what I now realized had been a small antechamber, were evident here. Instead, the garish lights were replaced by thick black tapers, set at precise distances apart, none currently alight. This floor was bare too, but stamped firm and worn smooth with use and time, and obviously great care. The most startling thing, however, were the crevices pocking the bare walls, like eye sockets following my every move.

I tucked the curtain behind a wrought-iron wall sconce, picking up the scent of champa as I ventured further inside. For a moment I thought I was standing in the world’s largest wine cellar. It was certainly cool enough. And, I thought, looking up, the surface creatures hadn’t breached this section of the mountain cavern. Spotting a gold-plated lighter on the table, I picked it up and put it to the taper closest to the door, then lifted that eye level to peer into one of the cylindrical holes. Visions of tarantulas and rattlers filled my head. No way was I blindly sticking my hand in there. But the holes didn’t contain bugs, and they didn’t house wine.

I slipped my hand inside one and came out with a stack of papers, puzzled until I lifted the front page to the light, and read the heading there. “Twilight Alliance,” I said aloud, my finger tracing a drawing of two Shadows grasping forearms. I frowned, pushed it back into its slot, and pulled out another. This one was called Black Fire and featured a Shadow agent named Quentin Black, a pyromaniac who liked to send the fire department into fits every spring by torching distant areas of the valley simultaneously. A third depicted a woman who seduced mortal men into doing her bidding-theft, rape, murder-then set them on the paths to their own suicides directly thereafter.

They were Shadow manuals, rows and rows of cubbyholes filled with them, some two and three to a crevice. I spotted a ladder with a rail that slid along the perimeter about fifteen feet up. Joaquin’s own private Shadow library, I thought, as Regan’s words at our initial meeting shifted through my head.

He likes to be the first to read the Zodiac manuals.

“So Joaquin has himself a little hobby,” I muttered, opening a manual. A scream, followed by a harsh, rattling laugh, bounded from the pages. But was it more than that? Because a setup like this seemed excessive for a mere hobbyist. I knew collectors who kept their comic collections in plastic sleeves and behind glass cases…but in underground mountain chambers in a cathedral-type setting? That didn’t just border on strange, it tipped into full-blown obsession. An obsession, I thought, putting the manual back, that Joaquin either didn’t want to share or didn’t want anyone else to know about. Interesting.

I pulled out another manual, and though I immediately recognized there was something off about the cover, it took me a moment to realize this one wasn’t the work of Zane and Carl.

Philly’s Penumbra, set in Pennsylvania. Backdated a week. Joaquin must have them overnighted to his home, but if so-I looked up again at the cavernous height of the ceiling, manual slots soaring all the way to the top-he was doing so with every Shadow troop in the country. Which meant the accounts of the Shadows’ dealings in each major city in the United States were archived in this room. A quick tour around the perimeter confirmed this suspicion, though it didn’t explain why. He couldn’t interact with or influence the balance of troops in other cities as far as I knew. So what was the point of all this? Was he picking up tips from the manuals? Incendiary techniques from Quentin Black? Or just a simple diversion for those nights when he wasn’t out raping, murdering, and otherwise victimizing the women of Las Vegas?

“Except…” I muttered, tapping my fingers against the cool earthen wall. Except there were too many of them, stacked too precisely, protected too well, and collected too obsessively. I crossed to the trestle table and the sole manual lying there, opening it to a page that’d been bent, marked because it was obviously meaningful to Joaquin in some way. I saw only a panel depicting a street fight between agents of Light and Shadow in a city with a river winding through the middle of it.

He was studying it. But for what? “Why?”

As tempting as it was to stop and investigate further, I couldn’t risk it. Today was Thursday. The new manuals came out every Wednesday, and after Joaquin had committed whatever crimes and melee he could happily manage in a twelve-hour period, I’d bet another eyetooth he’d be back here, poring over pages that would bring this shrine to life with sound and color and light.

A plan began to assert itself. If I could find a place to hide, somewhere I could burrow in so deeply that Joaquin would never intuit my presence, I could stalk him from down here. I could take him in this room, which he felt was a safe and hallowed refuge. One moment he’d be leafing through pages of violence, incense burning the air, and the next he’d be sitting, stunned, in the afterlife. I smiled. There was a lot to be said for the element of surprise.

The crowded anteroom would be my best bet, I decided, snuffing the black taper and exiting the room after one final look. There were dozens of niches and crannies where I could bury myself; an old English wardrobe, a sliver of space beneath the giant bed, or a leaning bookcase piled with old tomes, though that might be tricky to wriggle my way out of later. I rejected a large trunk as being too uncomfortable-plus if Joaquin carelessly threw the lock, I’d have sealed myself in my own tomb-and studied the rest of the room, kicking off a scorpion as it scuttled across my boot.

Somewhere on the hillside’s surface the day was being born. Now that I was more than human, I felt the nascence of dawn and dusk the same way consciousness slipped into me at the start of every morning. I’d known coming into this I probably wouldn’t be heading back to the sanctuary at dawn, but I still had to fight back a wave of regret. It disappeared entirely seconds later as a noise sounded from the bug I’d planted in the living room. It was a lock snicking, a door being opened, then keys tossed on some hard surface, probably the coffee table, as the sound thudded jarringly through my earpiece. I looked around with renewed resolve. The evidence of my run-in with the hounds of hell would probably send Joaquin scurrying to his hidey-hole to make sure for himself that nothing had been tampered with.

Which meant I had to hurry.

I yanked the device from my ear as my gaze landed on a space I’d dismissed before as being too narrow. But it was deep and would provide easy access to the other chamber, and I could slip behind Joaquin when he ventured inside. So I slid in sideways, angling to nestle back as far as I could, and cocked my conduit in front of me as I made sure my mask was firmly in place. Then I slowed my breathing until the air around me was as pristine as glacier wind, and waited.

I’d been standing still a full thirty seconds when it occurred to me to wonder: if daylight couldn’t seep underground, why was it growing brighter in here? With a gasp, I looked down to see my glyph alight, then an arm like a crowbar yanked me against a body I knew all too well. My wrists were grabbed, torqued expertly in an unnatural angle, making my dog bite throb anew, and my conduit clattered uselessly to my feet.

“Regan said you might be stopping by,” Joaquin whispered in my ear.

I’d have sighed if I had any air to spare. Instead I choked on fear and adrenaline. As I said, there was a lot to be said for the element of surprise.