Vicki Pettersson - The Scent of Shadows

“I told you. I have my talents. You have others.”

“You mean, like a superhero?” If that’s what he thought, he obviously had the wrong girl; my life was a fucking soap opera, not a comic book.

The man pursed his lips and looked up as if reading the stars like a map. They were powerful pinpricks this far out in the desert, brilliant and spearing sharply from the sky in the clear night. “I can’t help you now, Joanna. It’s too early by a moon’s rise. I just came to warn you. If you survive, I’ll be in touch.”

Then he began trudging off in that halting gait, heading for the void of empty desert space. But he paused a moment later, and for the first time his body language was uncertain. “Joanna?”

I stared back at him and shivered.

“Make sure you survive.”

Funny, but that was the sanest thing I’d heard all day.

Sanity had been a relatively elusive state since my rape almost a decade earlier. The strange desert interlude with a man who had no business knowing about me brought back just how hard I’d fought since then for even a modicum of normality…though I suppose the novelty of being threatened with a serrated poker might have had something to do with it as well. Either way, both strangers had talked openly about things that had gone unspoken in my family for years, chatting as easily about my patchwork past as if they were asking me to pass the salt…

What’s wrong, Joanna? Seeing things that remind you of a sweltering summer night?

You were attacked by a solitary man who seemed to be everywhere at once.

You were beaten, strangled, and left for dead.

It was true, I had been. But as a rule—one meant to keep that hard-won sanity in check—it wasn’t the truth I generally chose to concentrate on.

After the attack, after I’d healed about as much as a person can heal from such a thing, and after I’d spent nine months in hiding, I did eventually finish high school. I wasn’t going to let myself be trapped, or further victimized by a man who’d already taken so much from me. My anger and fear were replaced by determination and the belief that just because someone tried to make you into a victim didn’t mean that’s what you had to be.

So I did normal things. I went to college, and majored in photography and art. I pushed my mind just as I pushed my body, stretching myself socially before I had a chance to freeze or petrify, and turn into something hard and brittle and dead before my time.

And I forgot, or told myself I forgot, about the child.

It also became important for me to escape Xavier’s gilded cage, that architectural behemoth so falsely resplendent on the outside, but with the moldy invaders of sorrow and blame that’d moved in after my attack. So I lived in a dorm, I had a roommate who kept a record of the men she slept with on a wall calendar. I joined a sorority—okay, only for about a minute, but still—and I pushed myself to date, making sure my gut reaction, that first impulse to withdraw and automatically say no, was kept in check. That’s when I made my rule: never say no. Of course, I sometimes cursed myself and the rigidity of that rule—I’d lost count of how many groping hands I’d had to wrest away—but fending off drunken frat boys was a cakewalk after what I’d been through.

And I’d been extremely careful not to wall myself off, which was why Ben’s comments about hiding behind my camera had touched such a nerve. Okay, so I stalked the city streets when I should have been home preparing a meal for a husband and two-point-five brats. Big deal. But I’d found, in the shadows of this city—my glittering town of dollar buffets and neon dreams—a lack of judgment about such things as what was normal. When I took my camera to the streets, nobody cared about my past or my name. When I tiptoed through the shadows of ugly alleyways, looking into faces that stared fearlessly and openly back at me, I could stop striving and pretending to be whole. And I could just be whole .

But now some bum who thought he was a comic book hero was telling me someone was going to try and attack me again. Worse, there were reasons, despite the man’s incoherent rambling, to believe what he said. One, I already had been attacked. Pretty good sign . Two, our conversation had smacked of more than obscure riddles and hidden meanings. It’d mirrored Ajax’s, if not exactly, then in word choice and content. They both claimed to know me from my scent. They both declared I was special in some way. They each said I was still being watched.

Thirdly, other than my name, family, and past, that scruffy, stinking vagrant had spoken of details nobody knew, some of which I’d purposely forgotten myself. The clincher was, he knew the words I used to describe myself, words that defined who I’d become, filling the holes left in my psyche by a young girl’s inability to defend herself.

Weapon. Warrior. Hunter.

Because despite all my hard work to become a whole woman, and a relatively open one, I was still keenly aware that he—the attacker—had never been found. He never saw the inside of a cage…at least not for what he’d done to me. And he was still out there. I felt it in my ancient fractures. I heard his voice every time dusk set along the Strip.

But I had a place here; in this world, this city, these streets. I’d made it for myself through grit and determination, and I wasn’t going to give it up now just because an anorectic psycho and some deranged bum had knocked haphazardly into my life.

No, I swore, speeding home on the neon-slicked streets. Not me. Not without a knock-down, drag-out, fuck-you fight.

The first thing I do every morning is make coffee, put on sunscreen, and take my birth control…the goal, of course, to be alert and protected at all times. Today I added a couple of aspirins to my caffeine cocktail, showered away the stiffness from last night’s train wreck of a date, and readied myself for a last minute meeting with the infamous Xavier Archer. His secretary had called just after eight to say he wished to meet with my sister and me, and though she asked my availability, I knew it wasn’t a request.

I agreed to the afternoon appointment, then searched my closet for something Xavier might find appropriate, knowing, in truth, he didn’t think it appropriate to be seen with me at all. I was a gross embarrassment to him, for things I both could and could not control, and it was laughable to even try appeasing him, though long ago I had tried. By now it was just about keeping up appearances and playing the game.

As one might imagine for a gambling maverick, my father was big on games.

Comfort won out over making a good impression, and Isettled on a fitted T-shirt with three-quarter sleeves, stretch jeans, and my favorite leather boots—I’d already had them resoled twice—all in black. Throwing on a scarf and peacoat, I then drove the five miles from my modest tract home to my father’s custom-built compound. You couldn’t miss it. It took up an entire city block on the far west end of town. I was admitted by a guard with sideburns, large jowls, and a bodybuilder’s physique—Elvis on steroids—and moments later pulled into the circular drive of a home more suited to the Côte d’Azur than the Las Vegas valley. On the way in I met up with Olivia.

Physically, my sister and I were opposites in all ways that counted. I sported a straight, uncomplicated chin-length bob, while she seemed to walk around in a perpetual shampoo commercial. My face, though unlined and fine-boned, was rarely made up, while Olivia regularly held court at the Chanel counter. Today she was also dressed in Prada pink—obscenely cheerful for the month of November—and flanked by her favorite accessory, her best friend, Cher. I sighed as I looked at the two of them standing together beneath the dome of the marble portico. They were like pastry figurines atop a wedding cake; just looking at them gave me a sugar high.