Vicki Pettersson - City of Souls

“So what now?” Warren finally asked. I could tell by the tightness constricting his voice that it rubbed him to ask, but right now the Shadows were firmly in control.

“We wait,” said the man securing Vanessa, the man-I could tell from scent-who’d defiled our Zodiac’s Leo. This was the first time I’d met him, but I recognized him from the Shadow manuals. Harrison Lamb was Micah’s opposite, the Shadow side’s new Virgo. I’d killed his uncle Ajax nine months earlier, and because of Ajax’s prowess and brutality, Harrison hadn’t been expected to succeed Ajax until later in life.

Yet despite his sudden rise in rank, he was surprisingly self-possessed. He moved with grace, wore his paranoia with an ease that said he’d rather be wrong than dead, and hardly made any effort to withhold the smell-or in the Shadows’ case, the stench -that rose with emotion, giving him away to his enemies. I took in a good whiff, committing the scent to memory: Gucci cologne laid over an ashy sack of skin laid over a marinating stew of organs laid over decaying bone.

In short? Shadow.

Harrison stretched and yawned, bloodied fingers splayed to the ceiling like he was completely unconcerned that a six-foot, seven-inch agent of Light was creeping up on him. In contrast to his current posturing, Micah was a gentle soul where his troop was concerned, using a sweet disposition and his surgeon’s skill to attend to our health. Though his fury sat atop his emotions like oil upon water, I could already see him calculating how to put Vanessa back together, how to reattach and regrow and erase all the damage the Shadows had done.

Harrison saw it too. “Don’t worry, Micah. We used mortal knives to cut away the fat. They all regenerate…eventually.”

But it would be an excruciating process. We couldn’t die from the strike of man-made weaponry, but we felt the pain just as acutely.

Micah’s jaw clenched and he took an involuntary step forward. Harrison unsheathed a barbed poker from the holder behind his back, immediately stilling the advance. The unspoken message was clear. If Micah kept moving, Harrison would instead drag Vanessa outside the safe zone and use his personal weapon upon her…and then she’d never heal.

“So what are we waiting for?” I asked. For us to give in? For my allies to turn me over? To allow Vanessa to go to her tortuous death without a fight? I narrowed my eyes on Harrison’s responding grin, thinking if that were the case, it was going to be a long wait.

Vanessa’s renewed struggle drew every eye. She was wild, almost fierce now, gagging on the blood her movement caused to seep from her mouth and nose. Harrison leaned down like he was concerned, then looked in turn at each of us, dark humor giving life to his eyes. He continued this cruel pantomime, glancing back and forth in exaggerated concern, before letting all expression drop from his face as his gaze arrowed in on Felix. Lifting one side of his mouth, his skeleton momentarily flashed, as if revealed on an X ray. Then his smile was back, and he was slipping a hand over Vanessa’s mouth and nose. She began suffocating immediately.

When I was younger I didn’t fully understand why it was so distressing to see a woman specifically brutalized by a man. As a victim, I’d identified with anyone who’d ever been forcibly overcome by another. Violence was impervious to gender, and it didn’t always come in physical form either.

It was only as I grew older, and especially once I’d gained strength no mortal woman or man could know, that I realized why this was such an abomination. Yes, using a physical force on someone smaller than you was immoral. But an attack on a woman was an additional insult-it was an attack on life itself. Every strong man-down to the worst rapist and murderer-had once been nurtured, if only for a small while, by the softness and solace of a woman’s body. To turn upon that was a desecration, and in our world-a matriarchal society where power was passed through the woman’s bloodline-it was absolute blasphemy.

And Felix-as good and strong a man as any-still took his solace in Vanessa. He reveled in her wit and smile, her laugh and, yes, her body. She was his soft spot. So, despite it being a safe zone, he lunged.

The Shadow conduits still didn’t appear. Their power was useless in a safe zone, but what could be done-what I didn’t know how to do the first time I was attacked in a safe zone-was to turn the attacking agent’s power against them. It was a more dangerous sort of power because, as any soldier knew, it was easier to defeat an enemy if they were already at war with themselves. It would have been enough for Harrison to face down Felix alone, but the Shadow troop timed their defense so perfectly it was clear they’d anticipated this response. When Felix was no more than five feet from Harrison, they all held up a hand, ringing him in silent negation.

He didn’t freeze, as I’d thought would happen to an agent trapped in a cloud of their own power. Instead he thrashed as he was lifted from the ground, fighting invisible bindings, like he was being pulled from every side at once. One hand clutched at his throat when he hit the ground, the other at his chest, and he flopped like a fish on a dry bank. This eventually dropped off into random twitches, pitching the Shadows’ laughter even higher.

I didn’t move, nor did any of the other agents of Light. I’d been warned against trying to help someone who’d breached a safe zone…warned too that no one would help me if I did the same. The bond between troop members was so strong that the negative energy would be transferred, and we’d both end up being strangled by our power.

No, not strangled, I thought, watching Felix heaving. Drowned .

“Anyone else want to try?” Harrison asked lightly as Felix continued to gasp. I swallowed hard. At least the gasping was an improvement. And his limbs had fallen still, so the power was abating, being reabsorbed. “How about you, little Kairos? I mean, you’re the cause of all this. Want to take a long shot at redemption?”

“Why don’t you give it a go, Harrison?” I said. “I mean, take out the Kairos, the woman of legend, and you’ll go down as one of the most powerful, badass Shadows of all time.”

His eyes flickered like he was briefly considering it, but a sneer quickly replaced the look. “In a safe zone? Do you think I’m stupid?”

“Yes. Ugly, foul-smelling, and inbred too.”

His gaze flat-lined. “Well, I’m not the single-handed cause of my entire troop’s collapse.”

“Nor am I.” I wasn’t responsible for someone else’s evil, even if I was the target.

“Oh, but you are. You broke your changeling, right? And breaking the changeling of Light, that one special little child, is what caused the manuals of Light not to be written. So now the children of the world can’t read of your antics in comic book form. Their fertile little minds don’t birth the dreams and power that give you the energy to fight us. Your entire troop is weakened.”

“We’re not getting weaker.”

He held out his bloodied hands. “We’re getting stronger, so it’s the same thing.”

Because their manuals were still being recorded, detailing the battle between good and evil, and sold in comic book shops all over the nation. The fact that manuals vital to our survival were masquerading as comic books wasn’t as oxymoronic as it might seem. There was something to be said for hiding in plain sight, and though truth might be stranger than fiction, in this case they were one and the same.

So Harrison had an ugly, foul-smelling point. Despite our demigod status in this smoggy, bright valley, our micro-universe was as fragile as a rain forest’s. Knock out one little organism, and suddenly the whole ecosystem was thrown off balance.