Vicki Pettersson - The Taste Of Night

I feigned a yawn, like his words-and knowledge-didn’t matter. “I’ve been kinda busy lately. You know. Saving Las Vegas from evil beings bent on chaos and destruction.”

“You mean tourists?” Liam grinned at my unamused stare. “Wouldn’t it be so much easier to protect these mortals if it weren’t for the whole ‘free will’ thing?”

“Forgive me if I don’t get into the moral responsibility of promoting individual choice with a guy who takes his orders from an evil overlord.”

“An overlord, I should remind you, who’s also your father.”

People just loved to throw that in my face.

“So is that why you’re here? Dear ol’ Dad send you to convince me to turn to the dark side of the force?” I rolled my eyes and caught Vanessa heading toward the Henshalls. Damn.

“Actually I wanted to see for myself what all the excitement was about.” And he looked me up and down, doing just that.

His curiosity didn’t surprise me. I was something new, after all. Something spoken about in the superhero mythology and written about in our texts, but that no one on either side of the Zodiac had ever seen before. I was the first star sign who’d ever been both Shadow and Light, the person our mythology called the Kairos , and the fulcrum upon which the supernatural fates hinged. Basically I could tip the metaphysical scales in the favor of whatever side I chose, Shadow or Light, which made me a valuable commodity in the paranormal world.

“And?” I finally said, resisting the urge to cross my arms over my chest.

Liam leaned close in a way that must have looked intimate and wolfish from afar. “I think you’re the biggest joke I’ve ever seen. I think you’ve as much chance of being the Kairos as my dirty socks. And I think you should die for even breathing the same air as I am right now.”

“Then it’s a good thing,” I said slowly, “that I don’t give a fuck what you think.”

And now my paternal heritage pushed itself to the fore-front, soot and dust overpowering his own scent as my vision went red at the edges, telling me my eyes had gone tar black.

If Liam was startled, he didn’t show it. He just reached out very slowly and put a hand to my face, resting it on the side of my cheek. I let him, just to show I truly felt no fear just then. I could reach up and snap his wrist before anyone in the room blinked, but I let him touch me. I was feeling philosophical about the whole thing. I’d touch him back soon enough.

He let his hand rest before patting my cheek hard enough to sting, and probably leave a red mark as well. “You’ve got the balls of your father, I’ll give you that. Do you know he was actually proud of the way you took care of Ajax and Butch? A Shadow, proud of the Light.” He shook his head and scoffed. “But I want to see what you’ve learned since then. I wonder, do you know how to do more than just fight?”

“Like what?”

He let his gaze wander off over my shoulder, as if he was pondering the eternal question, and when his eyes returned to mine, he smiled. “Like…run.”

He was gone before I could take a breath. I swiveled as the air rushed past me, caught myself before I darted after him. People were watching. Plus it was already too late. Liam was already halfway to his destination; a normal door with a red-lettered exit sign fixed above it, but with another symbol above that, one noticeable only to those who knew how to look.

I cursed inwardly and bit my lip as I stared at the tiny winking star that marked a portal. Once Liam opened it, he shot a final victorious glance back at me, then slammed it so hard the room’s chandeliers rocked and the champagne flutes shook on their trays. I sighed inwardly. Even the mortals had noticed that.

More importantly, the star above the doorway flickered, then blinked out. Portals disappeared as soon as they were accessed, a paranormal precaution against mortals accidentally getting through…and proof positive the Universe had a twisted sense of humor.

Run, Liam had said. But what he meant was follow. And even though my instincts told me not to, that a trap awaited me on the other side of reality, I didn’t have much of a choice. Either I stopped Liam before he got too far, or my hidden identity would spread across the supernatural world like napalm across the rain forest.

And if that happened, Kairos or not, my troop would place me in a secured holding cell to wake up a week from now with an entirely new identity, and alias, to get used to. That’d be the end of the relationships I’d been working on so hard these last six months. Good-bye to Cher. Good-bye to the life I’d built.

Good-bye to Olivia.

And that wasn’t going to happen. So I said nothing to Vanessa, who was staring hard at Lena Carradine’s lip implants, and slipped out of the room when no one was looking. And once outside I did as Liam wanted, even in skyscraper heels. I ran.

Portals are to the supernatural realm what dreams are to the subconscious, ways to access an alternate reality. Everyone encounters these supernatural gateways at one time or another, usually in the form of an elevator skipping the floor of a button you know you just pushed, or the feeling of being watched out of a window that is, by all accounts, empty. Small things, mostly, but ones hiding an entire world behind their impenetrable cores.

Needless to say, humans were personae non grata in the supernatural realm. Portals were…unstable. Even an agent didn’t always know what lurked on the other side. Sometimes you didn’t want to know.

In this case, however, I needed to get to the danger awaiting me on that side of reality, and to do so I climbed the stairwell to the roof, disconnected the alarm, and exited there. Sure, there were active portals inside the casino, but I didn’t have time to look for one now, and there was always one located at the apex of a giant building-something having to do with the mechanics of superstrings-so that was the one I beelined for.

The lights of Vegas were on full throttle, but I ignored the sight and pulled my conduit from my bag. The flathead of the crossbow shone like polished onyx in the reflected light, and the wire string gleamed thin and dangerous as I thumbed off the safety. Its weight in my palm warmed me even more than the balmy late-spring night, and I quickly located the tiny variable star winking like a diamond chip above a maintenance hatch and reentered the building.

The greatest difference between the real world and this alternate one was the silver-gray tint smearing the entire landscape, obscuring everything that wasn’t an agent’s aura in a dull, hazy, shroud. Texture and weight played a factor in the depth of color, so buildings were denser than cars, and birds and butterflies were only the lightest shade of smoke. People could be ashen or silvered, depending on their mood: this was a mirrored world, the earth in negative, a place that divided light and shadow down to its most basic structure. Even the air carried that clouded tint into your lungs, the ions and electrodes laid bare so that each breath tasted metallic.

Yet all the natural rules still applied, which was why I still had to run when chased by Shadows, and I still had to dodge people and objects, and basically avoid those who operated in the real world. We could still be seen by mortals, though perhaps a better word was sensed . It wasn’t an entirely comfortable feeling to brush up against an agent operating in the supernatural realm, rather like biting down on a wad of tinfoil, and feeling that ache in every limb, pore, and soaring cell of your body. Without even realizing they were doing it, mortals would step aside when I brushed too close, or quickly look away if we happened to make eye contact. Because I had no pigment to attract the eye, they seemed to feel a touch of vertigo if I was too near, and-to the amusement of some of our more immature agents-were easily unbalanced.