Vicki Pettersson - The Scent of Shadows

I remained in the hospital another week. Even Xavier’s raging and threats weren’t enough to get Micah to release me into his custody. I was safer there than I’d be anywhere on the outside, and Micah wanted to keep me hidden until he was sure they’d completely masked my old scent and he could provide me with a new olfactory identity as well.

“We have to make sure it’s perfect. Ajax is especially good at scenting out the identities of new agents,” Micah told me one day as he toyed with my hair again. “Probably because he takes it personally.”

“Personally? Why?”

Micah shook his head, muttering something about Warren and his damned secrets, before continuing, louder, “Ajax’s mother betrayed the Tulpa by crossing over and trying to become Light.”

I turned in my chair to face him. “You can do that?”

Micah forcibly turned me back to the mirror. “Oh, yes. Just like humans, we always have a choice in who we want to be.”

I thought that was a damned ironic thing for him to say to me, but Micah had resumed flat-ironing my hair—I’d apparently become his favorite new doll—and missed my pointed look in the mirror. “We took out three of their Zodiac signs in as many weeks because of her advice.”

At least I knew now why Ajax grew so incensed when anyone mentioned his mother. “So did she stay…Light?”

Micah shrugged. “She may have, if she’d lived long enough. We changed her identity, masked her scent, did everything we could to make her ‘invisible’ to the Shadows. Only one person could have located her.”

Someone who’d been inside her, I realized. Someone who’d been of her. “Ajax let the Tulpa kill his own mother?”

“Oh, no,” Micah said, putting down the brush. “When Ajax found her, he did it himself.”

My own sense of smell was also blossoming in ways I’d never have imagined. The bouquets that filled my room were like floral injections into my bloodstream. The roses bled color behind my eyes, carnations spiced my palate. The first time I stepped onto the hospital’s outdoor patio I almost fainted at the assault of textured scents there. I could smell emotions too; the gaseous heat of anger, the seepage of cloying suspicions into the pores, and the dry vibration of denial as the dramas of the hospital played out around me.

But Warren was wrong about the rest of the world not mattering. I grieved for Ben daily, and, though I’d never given it much thought before, found myself also mourning my old life; longing for my house, my darkroom, my clothing, my old body. I couldn’t believe how much I’d taken for granted; the ability to move about in the world as myself, and speak my mind without wondering first if it was something Olivia would say.

I was a disappointment, if not a complete failure, at this last task. Xavier would frown when I automatically responded caustically to one of his remarks, leaving my bedside not long after. And Cher would fall uncharacteristically silent when I reacted to one of her bubble-brained ideas with nothing more than a blank stare. Micah explained to them that I wouldn’t seem totally myself for quite some time, that hiccups in my character were to be expected, and I was experiencing prolonging trauma from seeing my sister plummet to her death. That, at least, was true. But he never explained how to recover from that.

He did, however, fill me in on the Zodiac’s history, answering my questions as rapidly and thoroughly as I fired them, still feeling guilty, I think, about turning me into my sister.

When Warren first told me about the Zodiac troop, I pictured cartoon figures, hyperbolic symbols of the forces of good pitted against evil flying through the air, wearing ungodly amounts of spandex, and bright capes fluttering behind them like bulletproof banners. But Micah spoke of an organized, if otherworldly, quest for personal power, dominance over city politics and influence over community mores, and gradually the bright primary colors of Saturday morning cartoons were replaced by stark slashes of blurred action. The human drama of life and death played out in my imagination on a canvas of black and white…one occasionally splattered in bloodred. In other words, it was our reality of Shadow versus Light.

We’d always been here, Micah said. We weren’t extraterrestrial like Superman or Captain Marvel, and we hadn’t always been referred to as superheroes. But as long as there’d been humans, there’d been individuals who could access places and planes others could not. People who were faster, stronger, better healers.

“Ever wonder what a mortal would be capable of if he or she utilized more than just ten percent of their brain at any given time?” he asked me one day while fine-tuning the work he’d done on a tooth I’d chipped but Olivia hadn’t.

A few mortals do use more than that, of course, and even one percent is enough to make a perceptible difference. For example, there are those individuals who can control pain enough to, say, pin themselves with a foot-long needle—in one side of their body and out the other—with no apparent damage done and no blood to show otherwise. There are others who can spontaneously inflict a sort of self-hypnosis, slowing their bodily functions enough to place themselves into an almost catatonic state. This was particularly helpful, Micah said, if there’s some mortal injury done to the body and no medical help readily available.

So it was possible, in part, for humans to attain greater strength and control and ability…given a healthy amount of discipline and practice. “For us, though,” and here Micah winked as he peered into my mouth, “it’s as natural as the blood moving through our vessels.”

Yet even we have our limits. We might be able to manipulate the boundaries of our minds and bodies, but we’re still bound by the universal laws of gravity and physics, and a good deal of our abilities can be explained by quantum mechanics, something Micah said humans are only marginally beginning to understand…and which I didn’t understand at all.

So, though free of mortal law, we were still confined by universal law, which is why the troops had developed ways for science to augment our abilities; chemistry to mask our pheromones, biochemistry to study how different we really are from human, and genetics, because—like mortals—we’re constantly evolving, even still.

I laughed, however, when Micah claimed even astrology was considered a science. I couldn’t stop myself, though I wish I had when he drew back, leaving a suction hose hanging from my mouth, his fierce expression made fiercer by the sharp dental instrument held aloft in his hand. “Myths—Greek, Roman, Neopagan—die out, Joanna. But you can’t kill the stars. Astrology is a science. Maybe not a well-understood one, but back in the day doctors like me were called shamans. Scientists were called mystics, and these were the mediators between the visible and invisible worlds. There’s no difference between the cabalistic and medical fields, not if you really think about it. Both still have impenetrable secrets, and if you can’t bring yourself to believe that, just remember this: every life and death is written in the stars.”

But I was struggling with something much more basic than that. I was having trouble wrapping my brain around the idea that I wasn’t human, that I was something…extra. Something other. Micah, realizing this, tried to simplify things for me.

“Look,” he said, a smile reaching his eyes, my insult about the science of astrology all but forgotten. “Think of us as being related to mortals in the same way primates are. We’re long removed cousins, but on the opposite side of the developmental spectrum.” And then he shot me a full smile. “What? You didn’t think the human race was all there was, did you?”