Vicki Pettersson - Cheat the Grave

Same as everyone else, crybaby . I thought again of the first Shadow agent I’d ever met and battled, Ajax. His mother had defected to the Light side, leaving him embarrassed, outraged, and haunted by the betrayal. But if what Io was saying was true, he’d been dependent on the link as well, as attuned to his mother as a concert violinist’s ear to the string. He’d used it to find her, and when he did, killed her. I glanced back at Io, shuddering and wondering if she’d unlocked those secrets in his body, and somehow helped him.

Io was holding her palms over me, not touching my skin, though heat from her hands radiated into my body, like flat lasers searching for signs of life below a bleak sky. She tsked, shaking her head. “Your chakras are blocked. Your spleen is almost entirely comprised of black bile. How do you even walk upright? You need to start allowing yourself to feel the things that have shaped and formed you, my girl. The ones that have de formed you. Once you accept them, you can present your new shape to the world.”

My mind winged over my long ago rape, my mother’s abandonment, my sister’s death, my ejection from the troop. My deformities. I paused a little too long on the thought of Hunter, probably because of his appearance in my not-dream, and whisked a tear away. Disconcertingly, Buttersnap ate it from my new fingertips.

“You need to make this old world conform to your new curves.” She tilted her head up at me, even though she was working below, and gave me a conspiratorial wink. “A confident woman’s body…a most dangerous terrain.”

I nodded like I understood, but I really just wanted her to look away.

“By the way, he’s over here. Want to feel him?”

“The Tulpa?” I shook my head. She could feel my father in me. How gross was that? She’d probably wrap her hands around the organ telling his story and come away with acid fingertips.

Io stared at my face, observing every pore with those unblinking eyes. “Well yes, him too. But I meant the other. The one you been trying to tell yourself is not meant for you.”

And she pushed without permission, moving aside ribs and lungs with a necessary gentleness. She could kill me, I realized, with a mere twitch of her thumb. My heart pulsed in her palm, faster when I realized she was cradling it, and then it expanded, opened to her. Opened to me too.

I smelled a doused campfire, wet wood and tobacco, soapy suede, sunset heat. I closed my eyes, dizzied, and breathed in Hunter-the way he was when he moved inside of me, when he bent his head to mine, when he met me halfway, then kept coming. My heart beat faster, my palms begin to sweat, my mouth parted, and I swallowed hard.

Then I thought of him pursuing Solange. “Dreams are the only place that man, that scent, exists.”

But even as I said it, I heard his dream voice-wrapped in hot tobacco and suede-calling. Oh my God. What are you doing here? I’ve been trying-

Trying to what? Say he was sorry? Forget me, maybe? Trying to come back to me?

No. I’d seen his face before he left for Solange, and Midheaven. He was resolute in what he wanted, and that was her. What he’d probably been trying to do ever since was sever this so-called soul connection the other women had been taunting me over. We’d shared a unique magic once, called the aureole. For a brief time he’d known my thoughts and I’d shared his. Swapped them as if we’d lived them. Took individual experience and made them our own.

Solange was obviously angry about this, so he was working to appease his wife.

Fine. I’d happily agree to cutting the cord if it meant her calling off Mackie.

So I didn’t care if he resided in my body like Io said. Like I’d just scented. Those campfire logs were really driftwood disappearing around a river bend. The heat of sunset was the end of our affair, and my job now wasn’t to remember, but to excise him. If I just kept moving, maybe he’d work his way out like a splinter under the skin.

Io finally put my heart back in its place, like tucking an egg in its nest.

“Are we done?” I asked. This emotional prodding was worse than the dream. Buttersnap licked a tear from my cheek. This time I let her.

Io smoothed damp hair from my forehead and offered me a surprisingly kind, and yes, motherly, smile. “I know you feel weak right now, but you know what Carlos would say?” She straightened and donned a perfect Mexican accent. “Don’t underestimate the lowly. You’re a night crawler now.”

And a gray. Frowning, I glanced back up at Io. “What does that mean?”

She smiled, and held out a strong hand. “Why don’t you come see for yourself?”

Much of the Zodiac world was hidden beneath the known one. Midheaven was locked in the water and sewage system built to relieve our bowl-like valley of the seasonal floodwaters. The sanctuary where agents of Light were born, raised, and trained to battle Shadows was hidden below the Neon Boneyard, where the famous signage of Las Vegas’s yesteryear was put to rest. The Shadows too had a place of sanctuary, though it had yet to be revealed to me. Following Io, I wondered about that. Surely Warren knew, or at least suspected its location. Had he said nothing to me, and ordered the others to do the same, because of the Shadow in me? Had he trusted me so little from the beginning? Did he think I’d go knocking on the door and ask to join their troop after he so thoroughly tossed me out of his own?

I wouldn’t, of course. Accessing the sanctuary of Light had nearly killed me the first time I tried it, and the only way I could safely pass the security system unharmed was by donning a mask Hunter had designed to shield my Shadow side from the system’s defensive light. The undoubtedly painful necessity of trial and error aside, I had no desire to experience the Shadow side’s equivalent, or hang out with a bunch of rotting, homicidal demons in my copious spare time.

But it was obvious from Io’s unblinking, wide-eyed stare that the Shadows made their home belowground as well. A mutation like hers wasn’t created in a vacuum. Basic biology demanded a reason, use, and purpose for everything in the world, and following this former Shadow ward mother-alongside a warden that would have eaten me whole a scant few weeks earlier-I couldn’t help wonder at mine.

“What do you think?” Io asked, motioning with one great arm at the remnants of nuclear fallout like it was her own Buckingham Palace, half turning to me as she continued walking.

I thought it looked like the place had been bombed, but kept the snarky comment to myself. “You said the cell has only been here a decade?”

Because despite the postapocalyptic feel, the bunker was rather homey if you didn’t mind living like a mole. Though the passageways were narrow in some places and wide in others, hollowed out shelves housed scentless white candles, and the walls beneath these were caked in mounds of wax. The ground was worn smooth, and looking up, I noted the ceilings had been sanded into roundness. It was as cool as a wine cave, though not cold, which I found surprising. Winter nights were as fierce in the desert as the summer’s heat, the flat Mojave terrain welcoming of extremes.

In addition to the candles, cables ran along the passageways, metal hooks securing them into place, though where they started and ended, I didn’t know. There were also objects cemented in the walls-pens, stones, medallions, broken pottery, silver rings-certainly nothing that would be out of place in a trash heap, though each was fastened with obvious care. I wiped my sore fingertips along a Scrabble tile caked in what was probably fallout, and Io paused, answering my unasked question.