Vicki Pettersson - Cheat the Grave

“I know.”

He backed away, disappearing into the shadows.

“Take my ID with you!” I hissed after him, because if Warren thought even a rogue Shadow knew my cover identity, he’d alter my memory, my mind, and my life altogether. It wouldn’t have anything to do with my general safety either. He’d do it only to protect the troop.

So I took a steadying breath after Tripp and my belongings disappeared and resettled my head on the hard glass top as if napping there. Then I waited in silence, mere moments from facing an entire cadre of superheroes. The agent of Light. The troop that had abandoned me completely.

“What are you doing here?”

Warren’s query, flat and suspicious, wasn’t at all what I’d practiced responding to in the mirror of my barbwitted dreams. Still, I did my best work on the fly.

“Shopping,” I said, turning my head to the wide-open door where eight agents of Light fanned out like a palm frond. Warren was centered like the sun, and the others were planets revolving around him. I gave them all a sweet smile from beneath my unyielding ties, then focused on my former leader. “What do you think, the pearl necklace or the choker?”

“Joanna.” His impatience, immediate and unearned, had my hands clenching at my sides. I studied the craggy, sun-scorched skin I knew so well, and the hardness in his eyes I was beginning to know better. He was dressed in his favorite cover guise, a vagrant in a trench so tattered only his demeanor was more frayed. The last time I’d seen him was at the entrance of a swiftly flooding tunnel. He’d just locked a fellow troop member in another world with a calm ruthlessness, and had been thinking of abandoning me to the Tulpa to save his own skin.

“I’m thinking pearls,” I continued, fighting the memory in order to keep my voice light. “Every high-powered female executive should own a set.”

I glared at each agent in turn, the men and women who had once feared me for my dual-sided nature, who’d overcome it to accept me as one of their own, and who now regarded me as distantly as if we’d never met. Studying each carefully blank gaze, I tried to figure out who had left me the warning not to go out tonight.

Perhaps Vanessa, I thought, staring at the subtly exotic woman. We’d been the closest. She looked both beautiful and strong in her long black silken scarf, worn since her hair had been shorn weeks earlier. She’d secured this one with an antique silver brooch, an iron bolt pinning the black silk to the side. Other than the hair, which was still growing out, she’d otherwise recovered fully from the attack that claimed digits and limbs from her flesh. A sharp corner of the glass cabinet dug into one of my calves, and my sarcasm reared. Good for her .

Maybe it’d been Micah. Healer wasn’t only his position in the troop, it was his calling. He might have an interest in preventing my injury…if he still cared. I found the seven-foot man standing to the left of Warren in shadows that so obscured his features I couldn’t read whether any concern for me lie on them. But Riddick was next to him, and with a jolt I realized Micah wasn’t in the shadows. They were in him. This time it was the physician who sported some kind of injury, a realization doubly shocking since agents always healed from attack unless struck by a conduit.

But how did a man as fair as Micah turn dark? Not black, no, because that was natural, and this was anything but. It was as if grit and soot strained at his pores, his skin acting as barrier, like a cement truck that had to keep moving so the ash or brick or burnt lime-whatever was inside of him-didn’t still and set.

My gaze lingered too long, and he inched back. I jerked my gaze away, automatically wanting to give him privacy and to cover for us both, and studied the others instead. Riddick was ginger-haired, tight-muscled, and driven, but had yet to gain the experience that would make him into a dangerously seasoned agent. Jewell, next to him, was the same age, and they’d grown up in the sanctuary together. While she was a second daughter and had never expected to inherit her star sign, she almost wore the responsibility better. Having it unexpectedly thrust upon a person often made them more vigilant and serious, as I well knew.

I couldn’t figure any of them keeping Warren out of the loop, though. If any knew about Mackie and his quest to kill me, if any cared- and I thought it likely there was at least that between us-they’d have told him. Unless one of them had opened the gateway to Midheaven, accidentally let the demon spawn out, and was too afraid of Warren to fess up. Though agents’ actions were regularly recorded in comic book form, thus a matter of public record, this wouldn’t be if it could upset the balance between Shadow and Light.

So had one of them planted the old conduits for me? Maybe…though wouldn’t it have been easier to show up on my doorstep, hand me my crossbow, and bid me good day? I thought again of the fury I’d once seen blanketing Warren’s face. Maybe not .

“Joanna.” Tekla now, their Seer. Though the smallest, staturewise, she was arguably the strongest of them all. She watched me as carefully as I’d studied the others, her odd, birdlike stillness making me nervous, as always. She read the stars and skies, and carried the Scorpion sign fiercely in memory of her son. A mother wasn’t supposed to outlive a child in any world, and since reclaiming the star sign, Tekla had been more daring and vigilant and aggressive than the others. Warren loved it, but I could have told him there was a fine line between nervy and nutty.

I continued on like I hadn’t heard her. “Of course, there’s high-powered like me, and then there’s high-powered like you. There’s a difference between mortal power and those who allow it, isn’t there?” I struggled with the restraints any one of them could have broken through, and had the satisfaction of hearing someone moan. It sparked something dormant and dark inside of me.

“Riddick, untie her. Joanna, this isn’t about you.”

“Of course not.” Gritting my teeth, I wondered what my anger smelled like. “If it was, you wouldn’t be here.”

Riddick, coming close, looked like he was holding his breath. It pissed me off even more. “Hello, ‘friend.’

How’s life treating you ?”

He didn’t respond or look me in the eye, but his strong fingers fumbled at my ties. I snorted.

Warren cleared his throat. “Gregor, Jewell. Check the rest of the building.”

“Harlan’s not here, asshole.” I added the insult because it would get his attention. “Don’t you think I’d have said so first thing?”

“But he was,” he said so accusingly it was as if I’d invited the attack on my life. “We can smell him.”

That’s the part I focused on. “Can you?” I replied sweetly. “How interesting. I can’t.”

And I didn’t realize how furious I still was about that loss-about all of them-until the sharp words were out of my mouth. I’d been finely ground under Warren’s ambitious heel, and I was as bitter as a glass of Campari.

“And you don’t know where he went?”

I stared, buying time by taking in his scruffy hair-longer than when I’d last seen him-and the trench he’d abandoned a few months earlier, but had apparently reclaimed. Security blanket, I thought snidely. But I also tempered my emotions, knowing he’d scent out a lie as fast as I could tell it. So I scrounged up my annoyance as a cover. “I know where he was . On a party bus filled with mortals, including my best friends.”

Warren’s opportunity to turn a barbed phrase. “ Your best friends?”

“Oh, that’s right,” I said, pretending to muse over Cher’s relationship to Olivia, not me. Never mind that I’d been forced to care for them and see to their safety over the past year. Someone here should have since taken up that slack, but in their efforts to avoid me, no one had. The memory of Cher’s soft arm falling to the ground was what finally put me over the edge.