Vicki Pettersson - The Scent of Shadows

“Well, I can. It smells like the earth’s core; sulfur and heat. It smells like things buried deep; rotting flesh, gorging worms. Evil at work.” I was moving across the hallway as I said this, and I ended up in front of Hunter. I leaned into him, an almost seductive move; one knee bending into his body, the flesh of my forearm brushing his, my breath warm on his neck. I inhaled deeply. “Not like you. You smell like the smoke rising from a living campfire. Like the green wood and the grasses and the wild things that spice embers bursting in the air. Don’t you think?”

“If you say so.”

“What?” I drew back and looked in his face. “Can’t you smell yourself?”

He stared back at me, unblinking. “I can smell emotions, sure. I smell adrenaline and perspiration when I work up a sweat, but the basic compound that makes up my molecules is too familiar to me. I can’t identify it.”

“So you can’t identify it on, say…” I looked around, as if searching for a target. Found it in Greta. “…her?”

Hunter looked from me to Greta and back again, frowning.

Micah stared at me, openmouthed. “I can.”

“I can too,” Vanessa said, and furrowed her brows. “I smell Gregor as well.”

“This is ridiculous,” Greta blustered.

“Micah too.” Gregor nodded. “And Warren.”

It was my turn to smile smugly. “Scents are attached to emotion. When Greta discovers something deeply personal through hypnosis, she tags it. When you think of that particular emotion, you emit a pheromone that calls to the Shadow agents.

“But as she’s marking you she also takes a vial of your essence and injects it into herself so that her true scent becomes invisible to each of you.”

“Anosmia,” I heard Felix whisper.

“She binds herself to you the way Micah bound Warren and me. The way she was trying to mark and bind me when I woke up in her office.” I saw a movement at the end of the hallway, and motioned Rena forward. “Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it.”

They all turned, sensing the movement, except Greta, who kept her eyes hard on my face.

“There’s a reason she keeps lovebirds in her room and office…” Greta turned too, then. “And it ain’t love.”

We all watched Rena’s slow approach, and I heard Greta’s breath quicken. After that I could only sense the growing curiosity of the others as Rena drew closer.

She held a kitten. Black and white, with tufts of wild fur, it was sleeping peacefully, its breathing easy as it lay cupped in her palms. A small smile was fixed on Rena’s destroyed face as she stopped a foot in front of Greta and held out the slumbering animal.

For a moment nothing happened. Then, on the next tiny intake of breath, the kitten’s body stiffened, its eyes flipped open, flickered once, and registered Greta standing there. Its back arched immediately, every hair standing on end, then it hissed and lunged for her with tiny, unsheathed claws.

Greta smacked at the bottom of Rena’s cupped hands and sent the kitten flying.

Hunter lunged, catching the flipping body just before it touched concrete. Greta ran for her office, Gregor tripped her up, and she sprawled like a spineless scarecrow.

“The birds were an excuse to keep the cats away,” I said when the shouts in the hallway had finally quieted. “Her office and her room are the only places she can’t fully mask her true scent.”

Greta rolled, eyes dry. Wide, but with madness, not fear, they locked on me with unfettered hatred. Bilious blackened color, like smoke, pooled to surround her body. One by one she studied the others as if coming face-to-face with them for the first time. “Your precious leader will be dead by morning.”

“We should send you up the chute,” Felix said. “You deserve to fry for what you’ve done!”

Greta spit in his direction, not bothering to hide her Shadow side now. She reeked of maggots and rotted eggs, a fetid blend that literally spilled from her pores.

Vanessa advanced on her, nose wrinkled in disgust, eyes fired with fury. “Maybe we’ll just let her loose in the cat ward. Her and her little lovebirds.”

“I raised your father,” Rena said, shaking her head. “He’d be so disappointed.”

“He’d be used to it,” Greta retorted, but I don’t think anybody felt sorry for her.

“But there’s no way he’d—” A sharp pain slashed through my chest and I bent, legs buckling. My mouth opened in a soundless cry as I hit the floor, and Hunter tried to lift me, but I resisted, needing to feel the ground beneath me, anchoring me. “They’re hurting Warren again.”

Greta started to laugh. “The Tulpa knows you’ve found me out! They’ll kill him now…and it’s all her fault!” She pointed at me.

Warren screamed in my brain, agony wracking us both, but nothing came out of my mouth. Then a sickening spiral, down, down into myself, and I knew that Warren, wherever he was, had passed out. That didn’t stop Ajax. He laughed, and the sound resonated in my mind. A boot-shaped sole slammed into my kidney, I retched, and Greta’s laughter joined his when my jaw cracked with a finishing blow, even though nothing had been touched on the surface. I gave thanks that Warren was unconscious, but shuddered knowing he’d have to wake again.

Around me the others were trying to figure out a way past the Shadows in the boneyard.

“Even if you figure out a way to hide your marks,” Greta interrupted, sneering, “and you won’t because those marks are fresh, Hunter was the last—”

“Bitch,” he murmured.

“—it’ll be too late for Warren.” She bared her teeth, and it was hard to see where kindness had ever lived on that face. “You’ll never get to him in time.”

It was the last thing I heard for a while. The questioning and confused babble continued ruminating up and down the hall, and the voices laughing and groaning in my head fell into the background. I tuned them all out, but at length became aware of a dull but insistent tapping. I pried one eye open to find Tekla pointing at me from the other side of the glass again. Only I got it this time. She wasn’t pointing at me. She was pointing at the glass.

“You’re all lost,” Greta was screeching from her position across from me on the floor. “Hear me, Archer? They’ve already won!”

There was the report of flesh meeting flesh, a palm arching across Greta’s face. Then Chandra’s voice, as angry as I’d ever heard it. “Tell us where he is!”

She cackled. “I won’t, no matter what you do, and I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing I did my job! You’re all marked! Do you hear me? Targets! You’ll never even reach his kill spot.”

Warren stirred inside me. He was alive, and if I wanted him to stay that way, I knew what I had to do. As my fingers searched, found my conduit sprawled next to me, the tapping on the window ceased. Forcing myself to keep my hand steady, I pointed it.

“Hey, Greta,” I said, and watched the satisfaction fall from her face as she turned to find herself staring down the pointed shaft of my arrow. “I’m not marked.”

I shifted and shot fluidly, and though it was the first time I’d fired this weapon, it was as if I’d been born to the motion. Greta shrieked and ducked, though she’d be lying in her own kill spot had I still been pointing it at her. Instead, the arrow cleaved through the window of Tekla’s cell, shattering the glass into hundreds of tiny pieces that fell like diamonds onto the hallway floor. Tekla’s face appeared a moment later, but her voice came first.

Warren’s voice.

“Come to Paradise, the Hall of the Slain, also the dwelling of those who never die. Where virgin warriors guard the gates of eternity. The palace with five hundred and fifty doors. Where dead warriors feast, where gods abide.”