Vicki Pettersson - The Scent of Shadows

I looked away, pretending I hadn’t noticed, but it made me wonder. What did Warren have to feel guilty about?

There was a single door facing us as we reached the top of the landing, and Warren stepped aside so I could peer through the window. After a moment, despite it all, I felt a smile slip over my face. There were people; a few I recognized, a few I didn’t, but that wasn’t why I was smiling. In a room of unrelieved white, mats lined the floor and lower walls, and punching bags dangled from steel beams set at cross purpose to one another. Along the far wall were baskets of ropes, pads, and mitts, full to overflowing. It was a dojo. Sure, it was shaped like a pyramid, and its walls were mirrored from floor to pointy little tip, but it was a dojo all the same. For the first time since yesterday I felt at home.

The tight handful of people—and tight they were; you could read it in their closed expressions, their crossed arms, their wary attentiveness—seemed to have been waiting for us. Greta’s tea turned acidic in my belly as I looked at them, the mirrors in the room making it appear there were more of them than there were. I didn’t even have to sniff at the air to know Chandra had already relayed what had happened in the sick ward.

“Attention, please,” Warren said unnecessarily. “This is Olivia, the new Archer of our Zodiac.”

Nods and murmured greetings met this, which I answered with one of my own. I let my eyes pass over Chandra, who’d begun scowling the moment we’d stepped through the door, and settled on Vanessa’s face, open and friendly by comparison, though I noted a wariness there that I hadn’t seen in the locker room.

Micah was hunched in the corner, on a bench that looked like it might give at any moment under the towering bulk of his weight. Felix was stretching, and he sent me a little hand wave from the center of the mat. There was another man I didn’t recognize leaning against the incline of the far wall, one leg propped behind him, arms folded over his chest as he openly studied me with dark eyes.

One by one I began to do the same, sizing each of them up, quickly filing them into three categories. Possible allies; Micah, Felix and Vanessa. Adversaries; certainly Chandra. And the X factor, the man I had yet to meet. There was Warren, of course, but sometimes I just couldn’t tell with him.

“As Olivia hasn’t been raised in the Zodiac, she doesn’t yet know where her talents lie, she doesn’t have a personal conduit, she can’t track Shadow agents, and for now she can’t leave the sanctuary…”

“Some superhero,” Chandra muttered.

“We’ve already found her to be athletic and a quick learner, but she knows nothing of our history or the way we wage war so she has a lot of catching up to do. I expect all of you to help her, and in time I have confidence she’ll live up to her…potential.”

He’d been about to say something else. I caught the syllables wanting to form on his lips, but he’d changed his mind at the last moment. Still, we were connected, and the words neatly formed themselves in my own mind. Lineage. Legacy. Legend .

So he still wanted to believe, I thought, glancing over at him. What’d happened with Tekla hadn’t changed that, at least.

“If she’s so helpless, how’d she kill Butch?”

All heads turned to the man across the room. His brown eyes flickered when they met mine, but his face remained otherwise expressionless, no emotion skimming the surface of that still exterior, no judgment one way or the other as he looked at me to answer.

Well, two could play at that game. I batted my eyelashes, folded my hands in front of me, and answered as Olivia would. “He tripped.”

“Tripped?” Chandra repeated coldly.

“Over my cat.”

It was more in keeping with Olivia’s image than, say, Oh, I tortured the bastard until he keeled over and bled out at my feet . To my surprise, they all began to nod. Except for the lone man I didn’t know. He just continued to watch me with that cool and steady gaze. Probably not in the ally category, I thought wryly.

“So, you had a warden even before you knew you were a member of the Zodiac troop?” Felix asked. “That means you’re highly intuitive.”

“Intuition is a talent we all share,” Chandra muttered.

Vanessa, either missing or ignoring the venom in her voice, added, “We augment that with other talents that complement our place in the Zodiac.”

“What other talents?” I asked, fighting to keep my eyes from straying to the corner man. With him, I couldn’t even fathom a guess.

“Start with your talisman,” Micah said, standing. “What is it?”

“Your glyph,” Warren said, nudging me.

“Okay.” I unzipped my fitted jacket.

“One guess where her talents lie,” Chandra muttered.

I faltered, cheeks flushing hotly, and began to zip it up again.

“No, it is a talent,” the man told her, and this time when I looked at him, I saw something other than mild disinterest. He pushed off from the wall, moving lithely, almost sliding toward me. In the way of most alpha males, he took up a lot of space.

“People will underestimate you,” he said, coming to a stop in front of me. “They’ll see only the shape of you, the curves and swells and softness. It’s as much a camouflage as fatigues and face paint in the Amazon, because people will see what they expect to see.” He gave me a smile that said, But we know different .

I had a sudden urge to slap that look off his face. Whatever he thought he knew about me couldn’t compare to the reality of who I was, or who I’d been. He didn’t fucking know me at all. But I held still, watching carefully as he reached out and lowered my zipper for me. “And you are?”

“Hunter,” he supplied, as respectfully as a man could when he had a hand on your top. His skin, I noticed, was that pale gold that couldn’t be bottled or bought; the hair, glossy and black and gathered in a low, blunt ponytail. As contained, I thought, as the rest of him. After opening my jacket, he moved to the side so the others could see. I kept my hands steady as I stretched the sport tank down, but it was an effort. The places where his fingers had skimmed my flesh were warm, like little pilot lights had been ignited beneath the surface.

I kept my eyes firmly away from Warren. I didn’t want to see his smirk, or that knowledge in his eyes, because I knew he could feel the effect this Hunter was having upon me. So I just kept my head down as I revealed the skin just above the point where my cleavage began to rise.

“Hunter’s our weaponeer and head tactician,” Warren supplied, a smile in his voice. Bastard. “Anything martial lies in his sphere of expertise.”

I decided a little animosity would go a long way toward helping me regain my equilibrium, so I tilted my head and glanced back up at Hunter. “Anything?”

Hunter shrugged, the slightest of movements. “I’m Aries. Physicality is where my talents lie.”

“Hand combat?” I asked. I tried not to sound challenging. Really, I did.

Okay, no I didn’t.

“Why?” he said, rising to the bait, and I saw what he meant about his physicality. He’d barely moved a muscle and yet there seemed to be less space between us than before. “You like to fight?”

I ignored Warren when he cleared his throat next to me, and shrugged, just an innocent lamb waiting to take instruction from Mr. Martial Arts. I quirked a brow at him. “I like to win.”

“At what? Candyland?”

I whirled to give Chandra a fist-sized example of “at what,” but Warren was there, blocking me with his body, eyes burrowing into mine. “I have to leave now. I have a session with Greta. I trust you’ll be fine without me, Olivia ?”