The Taste of Night (15 page)

“Come on, then,” I said, and the furry little warden followed me in before the doors whisked shut behind us.

I glanced down at the cat once the elevator started its descent. She was sitting primly, facing forward like me, her tail curled tightly about her, as self-contained as if she were alone in the steel box. “You don’t think I’m acting like a rogue agent, do you?” I asked her, because of course that’s what had been left unsaid in the astrolab. It’s what Tekla meant when she claimed I was jeopardizing the troop, why she’d insisted I stay in the sanctuary. It was the reason neither of them wanted me out there on my own. They hadn’t needed to say it in order for me to feel it. The possibility was as real to them as my joining the Shadow side, and they were constantly on guard against both.

Thing was—and I’d never say this aloud—I wasn’t entirely unsympathetic toward the plight of the independents. Most, I’d discovered, were simply agents displaced by unrest and unbalance in their own cities. Well, I certainly knew what that was like. And often they were all that was left of a troop decimated by the opposing side. I mean, what were you supposed to do—where were you to go?—when life as you knew it no longer existed? When the family you’d been raised with had been targeted and murdered, one by one? I knew what that was like as well.

So it didn’t seem fair to me that every independent was labeled a rogue and forced to retreat to towns or suburbs too small to warrant concentrated attention. Not only was that mind-numbing for a cast-out urban dweller, but to take on and survive enough opposing rogue signs to make a name for oneself? Those were odds even the most hardened Vegas bookie wouldn’t touch. Gathering enough allies to build another troop? Near impossible. Most small towns didn’t have enough of a human population to warrant one. And though it was possible for independents to join a city’s already established troop, it was rare. Most Zodiac signs had been ancestrally filled for generations, and the battle to keep the signs within a given family’s lineage was fierce.
Warren, I thought wryly, would know that better than most.

My feline companion and I stepped out into a passageway facing a set of smoked-glass doors. I held one open, let the cat saunter in ahead of me, and followed her into a dimly lit room that arched around us like a steel womb.

And it
was
a womb of sorts. Cavernous throughout the middle, with an echoing concrete floor, the high ceiling looked to be drawn upward to a single prick of light, a bright star holding together the sides of the room. Though the walls curved elegantly into a 360-degree circle, length after length of paneled sheets gave the illusion of an octagonal shape. There were twelve emblems, two per sheet, and each individual panel represented one of the twelve zodiac signs. Grouped in pairs as they were, they looked like they were eyeing the entrance I’d just come through with great suspicion.

There was also another pair of eyes trained upon me, but these held surprise rather than mistrust, and—if I wasn’t mistaken—a healthy dose of awe.

“Hello,” I said to the young woman I’d seen earlier in the boneyard, feeling free to regard her with as much curiosity as she was showing me. She was petite, at least five inches shorter than I was, and slim-boned, though that meant nothing in the world of supermechanics. Pretty in the way of Victorian debutantes and romance heroines, she had a head of cascading mahogany curls Botticelli would kill to paint, and guileless eyes that sparkled with hope…a handy trait for a hunter of conniving, vicious, and deadly supernatural beings.

“You’re the Archer,” she said, the awe seeping into her voice.

“And you’re…” I couldn’t think of a polite way to say it. “Very green.”

She grimaced, revealing green gums. “Micah says it’ll wear off sometime tomorrow. It’s kind of embarrassing, but at least I’m not alone. Marlo,” she said, and held out a hand.

“Who tagged you, Marlo?” I asked, the question echoing through the room as we shook hands.

“Vanessa.”

“She’s a good shot,” I said sympathetically.

“I was just lucky to be included. Initiates aren’t usually invited to train with the troop, but Tekla prophesied dangerous trials ahead for me, so Warren said it was okay to start my advanced training early.”

I wouldn’t have sounded so joyous about grave tribulations in my future, and told Marlo as much.

“Oh, but it’s an honor,” she said, wide eyes going even wider. “Tekla usually only forecasts the fates of full-fledged star signs. All the initiates she’s ever cast for—Hunter and Zoltan and Mace and Stryker—have gone on to do great things. I’m the youngest yet.”

Hunter was certainly accomplished, but Zoltan and Mace were before my time so I didn’t know anything about them. Stryker, though, had been ambushed and murdered in the process of metamorphosis—no longer an initiate, but not yet a star sign—and I wondered if she’d thought of that.

Instead of mentioning the dubious honor of being aligned in fate with Stryker, I changed the subject. “So you must be the Libran initiate, am I right?”

Marlo nodded enthusiastically. She was only a couple of years younger than I, but her sheer excitement made her look much more so. “I’ve been training for a few weeks now. Hunter says I’m making great strides. He’s already designing a weapon he says will play on all my strengths.”

I raised a brow. You didn’t need super senses to tell she’d already developed a super-sized crush on our weapons master. She’d probably grown up idolizing all the older troop members, I told myself. Plus she and Hunter had both been born and raised in the Zodiac. They might make a good match in the future, probably a great one. Libra and Aries were opposites on the Zodiac wheel.

So why was jealousy shooting through my blood like warmed quicksilver?

“That’s great,” I told Marlo, and quickly crossed to the panel with an outlined rendering of a centaur on it. It glowed, reassuringly bright, and the tension drained from me as I looked up at it. As I glanced around at the eleven other emblems circling the room, most lit like mine, satisfaction coursed through me. Most of these signs had been dark when I’d first come to the sanctuary, dead like Stryker’s. The troop had been systematically “depleted” by the Shadows…Zane’s fancy way of saying murdered. But we were back up to ten members now: the Libran sign waiting for Marlo to mature enough to undergo metamorphosis, and for Tekla to either take up the Scorpio sign or pass it on. So far she’d refused to do either, and Warren seemed content to let her contribute solely from within the sanctuary.

I pressed the button next to the slats just below my sign, and spoke my password clearly and directly into the opening. Nothing happened.

“Wha—?” I slapped my palm against the metal panel, and cursed. “Not again.”

Repeating my password met with the same results. I sighed. The panel, actually a door, and the words, really a combination, were the only thing between me and the panel’s contents. Sometimes I hid things in there, and every once in a while I opened it to find a gift—some small trinket like a photo or article of clothing—though nobody could explain how or when it’d gotten there.

More often than not, however—especially lately—this happened. Which meant it now contained some important object, one that would eventually be helpful to my fight in the Shadows, if only I could get to it.

I went ahead and pushed the disks I’d carried with me through the slats, waiting to hear them thunk to the ground on the other side. I was met with only silence. “What kind of superhero can’t get into their own locker?” I muttered blackly, jiggling the latch below.

“Try giving it an offering.”

I turned to Marlo, who was busy spoiling the cat splayed on a stamped concrete star. She’d kept her distance, but was watching me carefully. “Sorry?”

“An offering,” she said, standing, wiping cat fur off her black trousers. “They can be testy sometimes. You might have to bribe it.”

“I’ve already put something in there.”

“Yes, but that was probably to keep it safe, right?”

“That’s what a locker’s for.”

She shook her head. “You need to give it something that’s the opposite of safe. These things are tools. You must be approaching a growth spurt in your education. Feed it something it can use to assist you in the future, and it’ll trade you whatever’s inside for that info.”

I’d have to go back down to the barracks and find something there. “I don’t have anything.”

“Here,” she said, turning away. “Try this.”

I watched her stride over to the Libran locker, and cocked my head. “You have a locker already?”

“Yeah…sort of. Well, no. It doesn’t really lock yet, or recognize my imprint, or respond to my voice…” She ducked her head like she was afraid I’d laugh, but I didn’t. I knew just how she felt. She pulled out a pad of paper and a pen from a duffel bag at the foot of her locker, and handed them to me. “So, anyway. Just write something about yourself and stick it in there, but make sure it’s something you wouldn’t want anyone else to know. Maybe a secret hope or desire. Something worthy of trade.”

“Worthy of trade,” I repeated, looking at the pad she’d pressed into my hand.

Her head bobbed rapidly. “Whatever’s in there is important enough that you have to work for it. The harder it is for you to access, the more useful it’ll be to you later.”

“Then why make it so hard to get?” I muttered.

“Because that’s how life works,” she said, shrugging it off in a way that made her appear even younger. “The most vital object lessons are the only ones worth striving for.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “You’ve been talking with Tekla, haven’t you?”

“Just try it,” she said with a shy smile. When I didn’t move, she started. “Oh…right. Uh, let me know how it goes.”

“I will. Thanks.” I waited until she’d gone and then glanced at the cat. It returned my look before lifting a leg to clean itself.

Turning back to my locker, I slapped the pad against my thigh. “Something worthy of trade.”

Well, there was the way I’d broken into the boneyard, but Warren already knew about that, or my run-in with Regan, but I wasn’t about to admit that to
anybody
just yet. I thought of the jealousy that’d rushed through me when Marlo spoke of Hunter. Hm. That was certainly nothing I’d ever admit; it’d be mortally embarrassing if either of them knew. Was mortal embarrassment enough?

I wrote the admission down, folded the paper, and slipped it between the slats of the locker. Nothing happened. So I wrote another note—
Fuck you
—and slipped it through as well. A second later it was spit back out.

“Just testing,” I said. I kept thinking. Something I wouldn’t want anyone else to know. Well, that was easy. All my secret thoughts revolved around Ben Traina. How I didn’t want anyone to know how much he still occupied my waking hours. How my body warmed at the thought of him. How I’d broken into Warren’s cabinet in the record room and reviewed the file I knew he’d keep on Ben because of his past association with me.

I smiled bitterly at that last thought. Warren kept tabs on every aspect of his agents’ lives, easy since he watched most grow up in the sanctuary, and assigned them their identities once they began working on the outside. But then there was me. He was still puzzling out my past piece by piece, slow going since he didn’t trust my account not to be influenced by emotion, or some other agenda he didn’t name. And digging into my past meant digging into Ben’s.

After the attack on me, after Ben decided he was at fault for being unable to stop it, he responded by marrying someone safe—someone who wouldn’t sneak across the desert on moonlit nights—then blamed her for not being me. Warren’s notes indicated he’d been repeating his childhood, treating his new wife as his father had treated his mother, though I could’ve told him that.

I remember thinking I’d have argued with Ben as I studied those files. But the six-year-old records Warren had filched from a mortal shrink’s office indicated that this other woman hadn’t.
I don’t handle breakable women with care
, Ben had told the doctor…and there was a postscript that showed the psychiatrist believed him enough to be worried for the woman’s safety.

So Ben gave his sweet, breakable wife a divorce—even though she said she didn’t want it—and also gave her half of what he owned at the time. Fast forward a few years, and she was remarried—a banker this time, not a cop—and living in southern California with three dogs, two kids, and another on the way.

But this wasn’t about Ben, I reminded myself, tapping my pen against my bottom lip. This was about me, my neuroses. So I slid my back against the cold, unyielding metal, dropped to the floor, and began to write.