Vicki Pettersson - The Scent of Shadows

“Well, no matter. I don’t really expect you to see this, Joanna, because I know they’ll fix it—fix you —so you never see your sister again, but just in case…just in case you’re stupid enough to stay nearby, in my city, alive , I thought I’d send my own birthday wishes. Give you a little something to remember me by too.”

He blew a kiss, as Olivia had, and as I sat there, I smelled rotted cactus juice, cold ashes, and another odor in the apartment that wrapped around my neck like crimson pearls, a drop of blood for every person he’d ever killed, and there were many. I gagged. Luna raced from the room, ears flattened, and I had to cover my mouth and nose with my palms so that my voice came out muffled. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”

“Just so you know, I can smell you too,” he continued, and lifted a hand to his neckline where he withdrew a silver chain and began toying with it. I wanted to plow my clenched fist through the television screen. I wanted to rip that chain from his fingers and put it back around my neck where it belonged. “You’re everywhere even though you appear to be nowhere. But then, we both know looks can be deceiving.”

He inhaled deeply, a connoisseur musing over a glass of wine. “Yes, you’re here in your sister’s apartment, just as you can be scented in your own secluded, sorry excuse of a house. I’ve even been to the dojo where you trained for what must have been years. Your sweat and blood and fury absolutely stain that place, like the pit of a rotted apricot, all that golden juice gone to mold.”

He shuddered delicately, before lifting my necklace and running it between his lips, scraping it along his front teeth, licking it with his tongue. I lowered my hands as the room cleared of his scent.

“Do you know,” he continued conversationally, “that I could even smell you at your funeral? Not in the coffin. No,” he shook his head, “that wasn’t you they lowered into the ground, was it? But your imprint was on that poor sap who actually believes you’re dead. You know,” he paused again, tilting his head, “the cop?”

I rose to my knees to grip the sides of the television screen, my face inches from Ajax’s. He smiled indulgently and crossed his legs. It would have been effeminate if it hadn’t been so damned calculated.

“I know you’re new to all this, dear, so let me give you a little lesson. Love has a distinctly pungent smell, and when it attaches itself to another emotion, such as sorrow, it acts as a bonding agent, as an enzyme does to a molecule. Processing it. Altering it. Making it other than what it was alone. I find the results particularly…heady.” He sniffed delicately. “You can imagine how surprised I was to find that Joanna Archer had allowed herself to be loved. It’s rather nice to know, actually. Restores my faith in womankind.”

Ajax ran his tongue over his teeth, letting it flicker over the chain again, chin lowered as he leaned forward. “Just so you know, he’d be dead by now…except for one thing.” The look on his face turned feral. “It’s so much harder on you both with him alive.”

Then he blew me another tainted kiss. “See you soon, Jo.”

I was breathing hard by the time the screen went blank again. My tumbler was empty but I was perfectly sober. I tried to slow my breathing, but what I really wanted to do was punch something. The sonofabitch had been here, I thought furiously. I’d seen immediately that the room was as it was now, all of Cher’s homey touches in place, as opposed to Olivia’s taping session, where her surroundings looked more lived in.

He’d also been in my house. In Asaf’s studio. Within reach of Ben. And I couldn’t protect them, I thought wildly, because I wasn’t allowed to go near them. Not as me, at least.

I lifted my head, catching the movement in the pane of glass opposite me. The sun was high in the afternoon sky and rays bounced from the windows, a tangible layer between the city and myself. Superimposed upon that, however, was a sharper image. I stared, and took in the female form reflected there. It was a body of silken curves and shining hair, hiding myriad psychic scars and a spine of steel.

“She’s beautiful,” I murmured, staring at myself. And that was the problem. I still looked in the mirror and saw someone else. Like the city beyond that pane of glass, my interior landscape was overlain by Olivia’s image. Olivia’s body. Olivia everywhere.

But this was an Olivia the world had never seen. Her full lips were pressed thin with rage. Her eyes were dark and dead, and cold with hate. I closed those eyes, breathed in deeply as Micah had taught me…and emptied myself of it all.

I could feel the life pulsing from the living plants around me. I sensed Luna curled into a protective ball in the next room, and I scented the lingering traces of all the people who’d recently passed through the apartment.

Ajax had been there exactly two days earlier, noon sharp. He hadn’t bothered masking his scent. He wanted me to know and hate that he’d been here, and to fear him as well.

Instead, I pushed that hatred and fear and knowledge aside and imagined myself—the woman I remembered myself to be—merging with that soft shell of flesh reflected in the glass. When the room was entirely clear of emotion, I opened my eyes.

She stood as before. I glanced down at the photo of us on the couch then back up. Olivia and me in both. Olivia and me in one. “Show me,” I said aloud. “Show me how to be you.”

Cher claimed I had no goal and no purpose. Well, now I did. Now I fucking well did.

I put the vodka back into deep freeze, and made a pot of coffee so strong and black it burned like acid in my stomach. Then I watched the disk again. And again. I studied Olivia, and I studied the montage that was my former life with increasing objectiveness, and when I was done, I studied him.

Three pots of coffee later, when the sun had set and the Strip was sprawled like a glittering invitation below me, I glanced again at the woman superimposed upon the city. She wasn’t quite whom she was meant to be, but she was different. Not a superhero, to be sure, but Cher would be gratified. She was no longer a completely empty shell.

“She’s learning how to live,” I said, and I picked up my new cell phone and turned it back on. In the light reflecting from that glowing pane, my sister and I both smiled.

I still had questions about my new life, but at least I knew why Warren had said not to contact him until I had Olivia’s mannerisms, habits, and thought processes down pat. If I didn’t wholly believe I was Olivia, nobody else was going to either. So, while Warren and Micah had promised answers, I decided to seek them out myself. With an hour to spare before a scheduled “date” with Cher, my first, I decided to use the time for research.

“Not just research,” I corrected, aloud. “Mythology.”

Only two blocks from the salon where I was to meet Cher was the comic book store that Micah had mentioned to me. I swung into a parking spot in front of an L-shaped strip mall that also housed a beauty supply store, a video store, and the most familiar sign of modern-day suburbia—Starbucks. As I stepped from Olivia’s TT, I sniffed lightly at the wind. I’d had the nagging feeling of being watched ever since leaving the apartment, but I hadn’t scented or seen anything peculiar. The cars closest to mine belonged to patrons of a sandwich shop three doors down, so I dismissed the feeling as nothing more than nerves and headed for the entrance of Master Comics.

“Oh yeah,” I muttered, looking at a life-sized Aqua-Man painted on the shop’s windows, “this looks like exactly where the answers to the world’s paranormal mysteries are kept.” I walked in anyway.