Vicki Pettersson - Cheat the Grave

“I already have.”

I frowned, and the glyph on her chest lit in response, delivering those deep-set eyes back into a face I’d helped create. Her mouth was rimmed in crimson, like she’d been smoking blood.

“What did you do?”

“Separated her soul from her body. Took her awareness out of that already rotting mess. I helped her,” Skamar added quickly, though she didn’t sound happy about it.

I thought of the Tulpa leaning over to suck life from Xavier’s body, and of the magic candle leading to Midheaven that yanked out soul bits along with a blown breath. I lunged for the darkness.

We remained silent long after I finished being sick.

“If it’s any consolation, her fear and pain eased at the end. Her consciousness thanked me.”

A tear rolled down my cheek. “And now?”

“She’s gone.”

Silence again, but I couldn’t hear it over the screaming in my head. Finally Skamar sensed my panic settling. “I will watch over you when I can.” Reluctance edged every word. “I was built to battle the Tulpa, it is my reason in all things, but if there’s enough left over…”

Meaning there were no promises. I might yet end up a bleeding sack of slivered organs and crushed bone, consciousness trapped in a postmortem stain.

Hours earlier I might have retorted smartly, but now I only nodded and swayed. Skamar’s arms steadied me, but I remained unaware of my body, so numb the command to wiggle my feet didn’t register. I’d seen and even caused gruesome death before. People pitched into the afterlife with limbs wheeling to fight the inevitable. But I’d never seen something living reduced to such abject nothingness.

I angled my head to face her. “Do I smell like fear?”

Skamar hesitated, then shook her head.

“What, then?”

“Despair.”

“Will it encourage him?” I asked, because I knew Mackie would scent it eventually. That’s why Skamar had taken me here, into the tunnels beneath the city, where emotions could be temporarily crushed between two worlds.

She glanced up like the answer was scrawled in graffiti on the tunnel’s slope. Then she sighed. “It will fuel him.”

Another truth. I nodded woodenly, mentally chaining myself to it.

“Come,” Skamar said, holding out a hand.

That was the prod I needed to feel my body again. But I recoiled, lost my footing, and slid into a crouch against the curve of the tunnel wall. “Five more minutes. Just a little longer in the dark.”

Her hesitation was silent argument, but then her glyph lessened until it soundlessly snapped off. I heard a slide, Skamar reclining across from me, and we both disappeared again, drawing the thick silence around us like a quilt. I sat in the long ticking minutes without any idea of how to fight this, or even if it would help to turn and run. Mackie had crossed worlds to find me, and city limits meant nothing to rogues. I could flee to another continent, and he would still be able to track me. If he had the will.

I thought of what he’d willfully done to Luna’s body, and swallowed hard.

“Goddamn Hunter,” I said. His name tasted like bile. I cursed his other one. “Goddamn Jaden Jacks.”

“That’s right,” Skamar murmured in the dark. “Anger will help.”

And I’d need all the help I could get. I frowned, then scrambled to my feet, holding out my hand this time. I saw and sensed nothing, but knew Skamar’s hyperkeen eyesight had me flooded, as though in a spotlight. Her loose, dry hand wrapped around mine, leading me forward, and together we headed out of the darkness, back into the city, hauling emotions strong enough to stoke an inferno.

I drove. Specifically, after Skamar dropped me at the guard-gated compound my not-so-dearly departed stepfather had left to me, I had the estate guard let me into the garages, left my black Porsche there, and took Xavier’s gold-toned Bentley. I’m sure that had him squirming six feet under.

Sailing from the gates and out onto residential streets stained with neon and oil, the Continental GT was the opposite of urban camouflage, yet I didn’t think Sleepy Mac knew the difference between a Bentley and a Buick. I figured he was aware of Olivia’s possessions and routine, which was why I didn’t head to Valhalla. Despite the army of security at the casino, I wouldn’t be any safer there than at the death house. It would also be the equivalent of thrusting innocents into his homicidal path. Besides, companionship was an illusion. Despite Skamar’s reluctant promise to watch over me when possible, I was as alone as when Warren had abandoned me on the shallow bank of the Las Vegas wash.

So I drove through the bold, bleak city, a landscape colored by my own problems, wanting to at least make Mackie work to find me. And though still shaky from losing Luna, still horrified at the nature of her death, I was steadying. I’d long faced my personal demons head-on, and merely running made me antsy. Even if I did have a good reason for it. To temper my unease, and at least feign proactivity until I figured out what to do next, I pulled out my smartphone and surfed the Web for info on Arun Brahma. I hadn’t forgotten that either he or someone around him was angling for me, or that they were using Cher’s family-my only remaining family- to do so.

Rich as the proverbial Midas, untouched by even a remote whiff of anything resembling a recession, the international textile magnate Arun Brahma was also the kind of handsome some would call devastating. As someone with a good deal of experience in real devastation, I wouldn’t go that far, but I could understand Suzanne’s attraction. He had the gold undertones of his Indian descent, with the strange light eyes that relatively few in his culture were blessed with-which was why, I decided, they were so desired. People always valued more that which the masses did not possess. Stick the same eyes in the face of a Swede and they wouldn’t be remarkable at all.

Yet combined with the dusky skin and perfect thatch of ink-dotted hair, they were remarkable. The photo I pulled up with his Wikipedia entry showed a man who knew it too. His smile was cool and wide, smug with the knowledge that he’d been born with reservations tapped out in his name. Here is your palace, Mr. Brahma. Here is your empire. The world is your garden, everything in it yours to be plucked like fruit .

I wanted to hate him. My knee-jerk reaction was to dismiss a man born to the lucky sperm club. Yet I caught the envious thought like a fly between two fingers, and just as swiftly flicked it away. Who was I to talk? From the outsider’s perspective, Olivia Archer was a bubble-headed debutante with an entire empire also thrown at her rose-petaled feet. Everyone had some sort of substance to them, even if it was only the clay that made up all of humanity. My purpose in studying Arun now was to find out what lay beneath the slick, playboy exterior.

Because there was more to Arun Brahma than that. Either he was an agent masquerading as a mortal, or he was a rogue agent who’d somehow made his way into the valley. I leaned toward the latter explanation, if only because he could travel so freely between countries and continents, something a real agent, Shadow or Light, could not do. But why his interest in me? And why now?

I looked up, and realized with a start that nearly an hour had passed. I’d been driving in circles both mentally and literally-getting nowhere on the streets or in my search for any real information on Arun. I also found myself skimming the warehouse district, and did a quick U-turn without stopping. The troop owned a building not fifty yards away, though the place had essentially been Hunter’s. He had set the security system, laid the booby traps coiled inside, and run the tests to develop weaponry for the troop’s battles with the Shadows. But now he was gone and there were only unfinished sketches inside, foam mock-ups for conduits he’d never make, and a ceiling of mismatched stars above a bed we’d once made love in. Everything he’d left behind in this world locked up tight. Everything but me.