Vicki Pettersson - The Touch of Twilight

He whipped his gaze up to mine. “Again?”

“Don’t look at me that way!” I bristled, stood, and bristled again when he pushed me back onto the stool. “I’m not seeking her out, I’m not losing control of my emotions, I’m not even going near Ben. She’s like a poisonous mushroom. She keeps popping up whenever the conditions are right.”

“You mean when you’re alone and vulnerable and not suspecting her attack.”

I flipped my hair back and focused on the alone part. “Hey, it’s not like I’m trying to keep Chandra from accompanying me-”

“Anymore,” he added quickly, but I ignored that too, gritting my teeth as he swabbed the cool, stinging alcohol over my knee.

“Besides, it doesn’t seem to matter where I go or who I’m with. She’s locating me almost at will. I can’t figure it out.” I scratched at my chest, and Hunter gently pulled my hand away so he could reach my forearm. I hadn’t even realized it’d been nicked.

“Tell me what you were doing when she found you,” he said, pushing up the long sleeve.

“She didn’t,” I said, swallowing hard. “I found her.”

I told him about the woman in the alley, what I’d done, where I’d left her, and felt his eyes on me when my voice broke, his work slowing. Without looking at him, I quickly moved on to the Tulpa’s decree that I not be killed, though he stopped bandaging my arm altogether when I said I’d lost my conduit. It was a moment longer before I could look him directly in the eye, but when I finally managed it, I found none of the disgust or anger I expected…or that I felt for myself.

“Oh, Joanna,” he said softly.

“Don’t,” I said, tearing up. “You’ll make me cry. And I can’t cry.” I scratched at my other arm and wished for my room in the barracks.

“Okay,” he said, drawing the word out as he rewrapped a length of gauze. “So you said you think the Shadow changeling told Regan where you were going?”

I nodded. “I know it. Douglas heard my conversation with the other kids. They wanted me to kill Jasmine, if you can believe that. They said it’d been done before by a guy named Jaden Jacks…”

I started to rise to grab the manual the boys at Master Comics had given me, thankful for something to do, but Hunter stilled me with a palm on my thigh. “And did it actually look like Regan in the alley?”

“God, yes! You think I would’ve struck her otherwise? But it was dark and she’d marked the mortal with her own scent, I’d know it anywhere, and I tried to pull back but it was too late and-”

“Shh.” Hunter’s hands stilled my own, which were moving faster and faster in the air with the telling, and I took a deep breath, realizing I was close to hyperventilating. We both waited until I was calm enough, and then my gaze met his. His voice matched it in softness. “So if you know Regan so well, how can you not see she’s been planning this forever? That woman’s injury wasn’t your doing.”

“It was,” I argued. “It’s because I know her so well that I should have seen it coming.”

“So now you’re responsible for all the evil in this world as well?”

Take some fucking responsibility…

I shook my head, loosening Regan’s words, but unable to keep from recalling how soundly my elbow had cracked against that woman’s flesh. I scratched my chest absently, tears threatening again. “All I know is Regan possesses knowledge of my old identity and my new. She has my past, my conduit…my number. And she can find me at will. I just don’t know why. ”

Hunter straightened, eyeing me narrowly, and I froze in mid-scratch. “What?”

“What are you doing?” His voice was low, modulated, and suspicious.

“Playing patient to your bossy-ass doctor act,” I said, scratching again as I indignantly pushed off the stool. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

He pushed me back down. “Allowing your skin to breathe.”

“What?” My hand stilled on my arm as he reached for my sleeve and ripped it. I was about to yell that cashmere didn’t come cheap when I glanced down at my bare arm. At first it looked like flaking skin to me, but then Hunter was peeling it away in strips, like dead skin lifting from a healing sunburn, but in neat, even rows. “What the-?”

The bronzed slivers lifted, and the scar I’d gotten four months earlier from a Shadow agent named Liam Burke appeared. I realized immediately I hadn’t seen it since applying the makeup Regan had left in the ladies’ room. I’d barely been aware of the itching since then; it’d been as subtle as the bite of a mosquito in summer, something to be slapped at, but not concerned with.

“Shit.” She hadn’t left it by accident. “It’s the makeup.”

“It’s a tracking device,” Hunter clarified, and peeled a thin, flexible strip from my arm.

I was a fucking idiot.

And Regan made a brutal man named Ajax, and a psychotic one named Joaquin, look like kittens at play. Of course she wasn’t going to come at me with guns blazing. Women fought differently. I knew that.

Hunter pulled out a knife and a pair of goggles from the stacked tool chest next to us, and I sat stone-still as he cut a giant cross through the center of my turtleneck, then angled the blade toward my chest. The cool tip whispered against my skin until it caught on the edge of the compound. Hunter picked at the edge carefully, close enough I could feel his breath on my earlobe as he worked, the dark hair that was only just growing out again falling across his forehead in front of me. The blade scratched, moving between us, and I kept my hands clasped in my lap. Yet with his head lowered, eyes covered and his hands busy, I could allow my gaze to fall to his lips, slightly parted as he concentrated on my skin. Damn .

“There are microscopic wires embedded in the compound. They flattened as you spread the makeup out, and hardened into a flat web of interconnected transmitters.” There was still no censure in his voice, and I was thankful for that.

“That’s how she found me at Master Comics,” I said, trying to think back to all the times the compound had itched, indicating the feed was live. “And tonight.”

“Where else did you apply it?”

“My calf,” I told him, then froze. Oh shit. “The back of my thigh.”

He lifted his gaze to mine, and for a moment wickedness lived in his smile. “Bend over, baby.”

“Ah, maybe I should do it myself,” I said, holding out a hand for the knife.

He sobered immediately, shaking his head. “You have to be sure to get it all, or else she might be able to lock in on you using the remnants.”

He wasn’t angling, and he wasn’t flirting. It was fact, and we both knew it, so I sighed and began taking off my clothes-including my tattered turtleneck-while Hunter went to retrieve a solution he said would neutralize the compound and a wide-angle edged scraper used for sculpting putty. “Is there a toy you don’t have?” I called as he retreated, but he dismissed me with a wave and kept walking.

The intervening minutes gave me time to order my thoughts. It was good that I’d come here. Warren might have had a few choice words to fling in my direction, but Hunter hadn’t gone on attack, and his words had loosened a knot that’d been forming inside me. I still needed to take responsibility for the results of my own actions…but I didn’t need to weigh myself down with Regan’s as well.

And as for Regan…

“Time to pay a little visit to the state prison,” I murmured, folding my pants. Because if Regan wanted to play hard and fast with lives she had no right to touch, then I would match her move to move. I’d attack her next by honing in on her soft spots, and when I reached the bruised center of her life?