Vicki Pettersson - The Touch of Twilight

But he was dead now, and with nothing left to haggle with, Regan soon would be too. I swore it.

“Something else is causing the vibrational outbursts,” I said, changing the subject as we took the off-ramp down Casino Center Drive.

“Something else?” he asked, and I told him what Regan had said in the bathroom. Yet there wasn’t anything else in the paranormal realm-there were Shadows, there were Light, and that was it-and Hunter said as much as we veered north. I shrugged, unable to answer, knowing only that Regan’s surprise, and ultimate relief, had been real. Maybe Warren would know more when we found him.

I pulled to a stop in front of a street-side meter and switched from my impractical heels into a pair of black canvas boots with silent rubber soles, Velcro securing them tightly about my ankles. I’d have liked to change out of my black skirt and silk top, but there wasn’t time, so I locked everything but my conduit in the car, then took the lead on foot. I’d been a freelance photographer before my metamorphosis into a superhero, and had logged more hours on Vegas’s back streets than any other agent.

We slipped past the four-block stretch still remembered by locals as Glitter Gulch. Though having undergone an extensive facelift-including a canopy of light, a name change, and an exodus of most elements of urban decay-the Gulch would always be grittier and more infamous than its temptress sister, the Strip, and for that I was pleased. Long live the ninety-nine-cent shrimp cocktail.

For now, we strained to see beyond the canopy of neon and into the scarred landscape of an in-fill site, the still developing Union Park. The city had bought the railroad land that’d been Las Vegas’s original link to the rest of the world, and while the ambitious multi-use development promised to revitalize this historic urban center, right now it was a sixty-one-acre cross-hatching of cranes and gigantic mounds of earth. And a stark black void had opened up directly above the skeleton of one promising high-rise hotel and casino. I didn’t say anything about our new beard being located at what seemed to be the center of all that opaque darkness because Hunter’s stiffening posture told me he was thinking the same.

A beard was a mortal who acted as a front for troop activities. Beards-or goats, as the Shadows referred to them-were given gifts, usually monetary, in exchange for allowing us to own their lives. Most thought we were a new crime organization, while others were sure we were government special ops. Interesting that there didn’t seem to be any perceptible difference. Naturally, some beards figured out the truth and ran to the press with fantastic stories about superheroes and monsters battling for the soul of the city, but the stories never ran. When you had your thumb on the pulse of the entire valley, it was easy to intercept one frantic, babbling mortal.

The Shadows, of course, had no qualms about torturing and killing our human allies in an effort to ferret out our secrets, and seeing this unidentifiable black cloud so close to one of our beards’ outposts worried me. Meanwhile, they flaunted their allies, knowing we wouldn’t harm them. The most notorious of them? The man I’d once believed was my father, the seemingly untouchable casino magnate, Xavier Archer. I had to admit, the first time I’d heard the term goat , I’d laughed. The thought of a heavyset, thick-jowled billy goat wearing Armani cracked me up.

But I wasn’t laughing as we slipped past the construction fence into the old rail yard. The black cavity above the steel scaffolding appeared even denser as we advanced into the construction zone. Even the sky looked dry-erased around and above its field. Yet the structure below appeared sound, and more, the explosive particles that tasted like microscopic tin arrows on my tongue seemed to be drawing closer, pinging off one another with each breath, as if desperate to re-form whatever object had been obliterated. I doubted anyone inside that bubble of darkness could see a foot in either direction, but I covered my face with my mask anyway. I wanted my Olivia identity protected in the event that the particle-charged sac burst.

“You sure this is it?” I asked Hunter when he halted in front of one of a dozen construction trailers circling the shell of the high-rise. It was hard to tell one nondescript building from another in the haze.

“I’m the one who set it up,” Hunter replied coolly, angling his head back at the giant structure. “I did the research, scouted the location, picked our man, set him up as foreman. He’s in charge of this project in the day, and at night maintains visual surveillance of the entire downtown area from the top floor of that structure. His name’s Vincent Moore.”

Gone was the man whose deep gaze and subtle flirtation had made me squirm. Equally absent was the one who’d taken cheap shots at the urban cowboys. In front of me stood our troop’s weapons master, the man who lived and breathed hand combat, weaponeering, and all the arts of martial command that so perfectly aligned with an Aries’ natural physicality.

Physical talents aside, however, Hunter’s greatest weapon was his mind. Ever the tactician, he was constantly assessing and planning, and was more at home in a combat situation than in a La-Z-Boy. Like a general marshaling his forces, he called on everyone to be their best, and if you fell short-and I had on occasion-the silent rebuke was deafening. In short, Hunter was the hero we all wanted to be.

“So then where’s the top floor?” I said, straining to see any sign of life in the pitch-topped tower. Now that we were closer, I could make out filmy veils of ionized air draping to the ground from the thick nucleus in the blackened sky. They were like black flags hung up to dry in uneven layers from the top of the two-hundred-foot scaffolding.

“It was blown to smithereens about ten minutes ago.”

We turned to find a filthy, greasy, soured, and tattered man approaching. His hair was matted with dreadlocks, and an authentic limp had him swishing and swaying in horror movie mode. “I can’t see him,” I told Hunter, “but boy can I smell him.”

Our troop leader stepped closer and his features sharpened, as if drawn by a coal pencil. His sun-slammed skin was muted in the dark, but brown eyes pinpointed us in beady assessment. He was dressed in secondhand fatigues and a tattered trench coat, his standard vagrant guise, and one that’d served him well. Mortals found him too frightening to approach, and the Shadows found him too repulsive to scrutinize. “Better?”

“Not particularly,” I said, eyes watering. Olfactory acuteness was both a blessing and a curse.

“It’s about to get worse,” he said, motioning us away from the base of the building. Sharing a confused glance, Hunter and I followed.

“I’m assuming you mean the haze,” Hunter said, as we sped up. Warren’s leg injury had done nothing to slow him down. If so, he’d never have ascended to troop leader, much less remained there.

“And the situation. Our contact was up there just before the corporeal explosion. Top three stories fell like hotcakes. Indication is they have him imprisoned on the same level used to gain access.”

We all glanced up, then diagonally to the crane that any enterprising Shadow could traverse. And they were all that. Shit.

“How many?” Hunter asked, meaning Shadows.

“At least four from the way they’ve managed to secure all lower-level passages. But my guess is more than half a dozen.” Warren smiled then, and I had to shiver a little. The look was off-center, brittle, slightly whacked, and thin. Don’t get me wrong, Warren was one of the good guys, but he was the leader of a troop of paranormal beings who got off on this sort of situation.