Vicki Pettersson - The Scent of Shadows

I could be any and all of those things, but I picked out my titles like selecting fruit from a vendor’s stall. Enemy , I thought, picking it up, taking a bite, finding it sweet. Huntress , I thought, adding it to the other. Once the prey, now the predator . I pocketed that one, saving it for later.

“Tell me who you are!”

“Can’t you see?” I turned my head to face Greta, still lingering uncertainly by the doorway to my hospital room, and I smiled. I knew from her gasp that I wasn’t supposed to be asking the questions, but I suddenly had all the answers. Hearing footsteps in the hall, I leaned to peer around Greta. “Look, see how my aura precedes me? See the barbed texture of my soul? The vessel is fierce, is it not? My mind is bathed in crimson.”

In a full panic now, the mind-Greta whirled, shifting so her back was to the wall. Her whisper wobbled. Her hands fumbled, doing something behind her back. “Tell me your name.”

The answer was heavy in my mouth, numbing the tip of my tongue. I gasped with its weight, and my eyes burst open with my mouth. “I am the Archer!”

And like an arrow loosed from a bow that’d been held too taut, too long, the woman I should have been winged past the last ten years like a fiery comet, plowing into me with all the knowledge I’d been born—and buried—with. The knowledge of the Archer, the Zodiac…and my place in it.

A second pair of eyes opened up behind my own, blinked wonderingly, then crinkled as a smile lifted one side of my mouth. Alternate ears, with drums tunneling down into my soul, popped as if the pressure on them had finally been released. New taste buds exploded on my tongue, and every pore in my skin hummed to life, making me more attuned to the particles weighing down the air than I’d even been before. My sixth sense had returned. It had taken a decade, but I was finally healed.

I rose.

A crash, the sound of glass shattering on the floor, and Greta was backed up against the far wall of her room, a vial shattered at her feet. The transition from the hospital room I’d been imagining and Greta’s chamber was abrupt, but I was still my dream self, my real self, a predator haloed in red. I smiled as I turned my head to meet her eyes. She looked afraid, and I was sorry for that, but I wanted a mirror. I wanted to see for myself.

“How did you do that?” Greta asked as I swiped a damp tendril of hair from my cheek. She nearly had her face under control again, a mild sort of worry pressing in on her delicate brow, but her voice was searching, and just sharp enough to cut through the thin webbing of resistance left by the hypnosis. “I put you under. You’re not supposed to be able to come out of it without my assistance.”

“I’ve been under for a long time, Greta.” I stretched, like awakening from a long nap, and studied my reflection in the dresser mirror across from me. The color was still there, not the vibrant crimson of my dreaming state, but a banked flame like a burner set to low. It was warm and steady, and this time I knew it would never go out. “It was long past time to wake up.”

And I felt refreshed. My pores drank in the air, and the room appeared brighter. Greta was tinged in a sallow green, though; her fear, I guessed, and again I was sorry for that. I inhaled deeply, then jerked back, frowning. “What’s that smell?”

“I—I couldn’t reach you. I was drawing a syringe to bring you out of the trance chemically.” She waved a hand at the glass littering the floor, one side of her mouth lifting wryly. “Turns out I didn’t need it after all.”

I wrinkled my nose. “I can smell the enzymes in it. I can also smell your perfume without even inhaling. Isn’t that funny? It’s like I can breathe through my pores.” I turned from studying the glow of my aura in the mirror, and caught the fear in her eyes. Smiling, I went to her and took her face in my hands. “Don’t be afraid, Greta. I no longer am.”

And I left the room after that, with Greta gaping as I trailed confidence and knowledge and power like a silken red cloak behind me.

Doors that won’t open, elevators that won’t come when you call…they’ll come now .

Intending to test this theory, I entered a locker room almost oppressive in its silence, my heels clicking sharply on the cement floor. The lockers fanned around me like sentinels guarding the perimeter of the circular room, and there was the faint hum of energy coursing through the illuminated emblems. My eyes went immediately to the centaur, glowing steadily and reassuring in a soft green neon.

I tried to ignore the five dormant signs, but Warren’s admission kept sneaking up on me—ten agents, not five, had been murdered in the past few months—and the unlit glyphs belonging to those agents looked like bullet holes to me. Soundless, colorless, empty voids where no light could penetrate as long as their deaths remained unavenged.

Dragged from the recesses of a broken mind, the true memory of my mother made me believe that I could do that. Avenge them. I turned my attention back to my locker. Whatever was inside this steel trash bin was going to help me be the woman she’d given her life for me to be. It would teach me how to be the Archer. It would help me create a safe place for myself in this world again.

So forgetting about the empty eyes of the fallen star signs bowing around me, I put my hand to the palm plate. The button in the middle lit up in a red, inviting square.

“Just so you know,” I said, whispering into the locker’s horizontal slats, “the answer to my own life’s mysteries aren’t inside of you. They’re inside of me.” I pressed the button, a bittersweet smile touching my face. “My name is Joanna. I’m the Archer of Light.”

And as easy as that, a click, and the latch released. I shook my head. All I’d had to do was take a trip down into myself…and come back as a different person.

The photo Warren had shoved in the day before wasn’t lying at the bottom of the locker as expected, but was taped to the inside of the door, along with three others, and my breath caught as I viewed the four together.

The first was of my family as I once knew it. My mother, bent forward, one arm around Olivia, another around me. We were all wearing matching smiles, and it looked like we were at Disneyland. Xavier was in the picture too, but he was relegated to the background, arms folded resolutely across his chest, studying the domestic scene as if wondering who those people were. His impatience with the moment was set in his shoulders, though I couldn’t read his expression. His face had been cut from the photo.

The second was of my mother alone, obviously taken at the sanctuary. She wore a black bodysuit that clung to the muscles of her able body, her bright hair gathered high atop her head, arms stretched forward as she aimed some sort of weapon at an invisible enemy. Her face wore an expression I’d never seen before—determination, hatred, strength—and I smiled looking at it.

Then Ben’s picture, a smile lifting one side of his mouth as he slept, dreaming of a future that would never be. I traced his jaw in the photo, remembered how it’d felt beneath my fingertips. This photo would also serve as a reminder that some loved ones had to stay tucked safely away. My mother had taught me that much.

Finally, Zoe with another woman. Their arms were thrown about one another’s shoulders, and they were laughing into the camera, looking impossibly young. It meant nothing to me, but it obviously had to her, so it would remain.

The only remaining item was nestled in the corner on the floor, a small package wrapped in brown postal paper, secured with aging twine, with a note tucked between the folds of the paper. I weighed it in my hand. Sturdy and small—the length and width of one palm—it was weighty for its size. Removing the note for later, I ripped open the packaging.