Vicki Pettersson - Cheat the Grave

I froze, unsure what to say. I sensed a drama involving me, but like a person wrongly accused, wasn’t yet sure how. Carlos, still reclined, pulled a card from his shirt front pocket as he spoke and slid it toward me. I leaned forward, frowning as I recognized the small square format. It was a trading card so old the stock paper was thinned and frayed at the edges, and worn so finely in one spot I could almost see the grain of the paper.

The black and white photo showed a man wearing tight jeans and an unstructured blazer winging open to reveal a mesh tank top as he leaped through air. Very eighties. His conduit was some sort of mallet, and his name, troop number, and city were scrawled in Spanish across the card’s bottom. His vital stats were on the back, similar to a ballplayer’s, and identical to the cards featuring superheroes sold in comic book shops all over the world. Gently, I handed the card back.

Carlos took it between two fingers and tucked it back in his pocket. It was probably the last of his father’s trading cards in existence.

I glanced back up into his face, noting the resemblance now, especially those darkly expressive eyes. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

He inclined his head, and lifted his shot glass from the table, allowing the edge to kiss his lips. I echoed the movement as he said, “Your mother had him killed the day after he arrived.”

I sputtered homemade tequila over the glossy tabletop. Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I bent my head and cleared my throat of its burn before letting out a huge sigh.

“I guess here’s where I say I’m sorry, and while I have no control over my mother’s actions now, never mind back then, I’m sure none of that matters. You’ve clearly been planning your vengeance for a long time. I expect you’ll kill me in the same way she murdered your father. You latinos have deep poetic leanings.”

“We do?”

“Yeah. Ever the closet romantics.” I shrugged. “So what will it be? Decapitation? Pull out my guts? Boring ol’ slice of the arteries?”

His amusement vanished and I was sorry I’d asked. The reminder of his father’s death was obviously still painful, and it only occurred to me belatedly that it might be better not to know how I was going to die. “He was ambushed while seeking sanctuary in the Strip-front cathedral.”

“The Guardian Angel?” I’d heard it’d once served as a place for rogues to connect with one another, but that was long before I’d come along. Warren had made sure of that.

“That’s right.” Carlos drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “She could have warned him not to enter, but she didn’t. Two agents of Light chased him out. They ambushed him in the brush surrounding the springs. Let his blood run where the natural streams once had.”

I swallowed hard. He made the Light sound as brutal as Shadows.

Carlos pursed his lips as he stared through his glass of amber liquid. “He was impossibly fast, my father. They’d never have caught him if he’d known Las Vegas like you…or me.”

“Is that how you’ve evaded Warren for so long? Because you know the city?” Its pockets and hidey-holes. How else could a rogue survive?

“That…and I’m even faster.” He slumped lower in his seat, but the movement didn’t look sloppy. His long- apparently speedy-legs sprawled like a desert spider taking hold of a rocky crag, and the top of his white shirt flared to reveal the hard lines of a smooth, honeyed chest. If I wasn’t currently so put off by male agents of Light, I might have been moved.

I turned in my seat, glancing back at Tripp and the others, but they hadn’t moved. Swiveling back, I found my glass again full. Carlos smiled. “Um, just so I can firm up my plans for the evening…you’re not going to kill me?”

“No.” He sipped.

So did I. “Why?”

His soft lashes curled up as he lifted his gaze, making him look angelic as he nodded at José. The owner silently crossed the room, lifted a bright orange sombrero from its peg, and removed a picture box hidden underneath. He then presented this to me as he would a menu, and the two men exchanged words in the smooth cadence of their native tongue while I flipped a clasp on the shadow box’s side and opened it up.

“Cuidado,” Carlos said, but the warning was unnecessary. My gasp told him I knew exactly what I held. Knew too who was depicted on the inside cover: me, my image drawn upon the manual…and done so long before I’d ever been born.

The book wasn’t inked, only penciled, and wasn’t even a proper comic, having been drawn well before the format’s Golden Age. The pages were bound together with a peeling yellowed glue, and every brushstroke had a sense of age to it, a style as easily discernible to the modern eye as a Pixar movie versus Bugs Bunny’s debut.

At least the subject matter was familiar. A woman cloaked in shadows, running through a tunnel while glancing over her shoulder. Her face was indiscernible, her body long and muscular and absent of the pinup features commonly associated with females in comics. Despite the shading, I knew this was me. The old me, though, Joanna, before my transformation into an action figure with body parts more important than the whole. The drawing perfectly captured how I moved, or at least how I felt when I moved.

Adding to its accuracy, and its mystery, this had clearly been sketched by someone used to the strong, serious lines of cartography or botanical drawings. I felt like I was holding a piece of art worthy of Sotheby’s, and flipped through it quickly to find the attached story. A jagged tear interrupted, though, and disappointment ripped through me as well. Some point in the manual’s storied past had found it rent in two. I glanced up to find Carlos watching me with sympathy, and knew he’d felt the same loss upon seeing the tear.

“How old?” I managed, my voice a mere creak.

“Closer to the first manual than anyone I know has ever seen. My father must have had it for years, maybe since he was a boy. He obviously knew what it was.” Carlos rubbed his bare chin thoughtfully. “He hid it under a pew in the cathedral just before the attack which took his life. It was an agreement between my mother and him. Her idea. She wasn’t as fast, but she was smart.”

I reached forward, unable to resist running my finger over the images. “What does it say?”

“It foretells the Kairos’s birth in this city. That here she would be raised, survive attack, go into hiding, and discover her true destiny upon metamorphosis in her twenty-fifth year.” He waved his hand over the open pages. “This legend on these pages was why he sent us here when our own battles were deemed lost.”

I shook my head, and the mescal took hold. I shook it harder to regain my vision. I couldn’t play savior to this man, or anyone, anymore. I’d tried it before, and look where it had gotten me. “Look, I did some of those things, it’s true. The commonalities are even uncanny…” How many other women in Vegas had done all that?

And how could every depiction on these panels ring so true and right in my marrow? “But you’re too late. Maybe if he’d had the full issue, or the one printed after this, he might have seen that.”

“You are the Kairos.”

“I am a mortal.”

“You underestimate your strength.”

“Understandable…since I have none.”

Carlos remained unmoved. “Did you read the text on the final full panel?”

“It’s in Spanish.”

He held out his hand. “Then I will read it for you.”

Cradling the manual like a prayer book, Carlos cleared his throat and began to read from the blurb on the inside cover in a strong, clear voice, his accent transposing beats in the sentence, like it was music. “‘Light returned to the valley, where the meadows had long been falsely lit, to lure and fool the unwary. But with this true light came genuine hope. Balance seemed possible…right up until the Great Sorrow. This event marks the onset of the Fifth Sign: the Shadow binding with the Light.’”