The Taste of Night (43 page)

“It’s not you on the outside,” I continued speaking, almost conversationally, as the printless pad of my thumb aligned with the smooth gem sitting on my ring finger. “It’s you on
the inside that I want gone.”

I said it like I was making a wish, and depressed the stone into its setting.

Joaquin, kneeling in front of me, sneered like he didn’t already know he was dead.

“Don’t give me that psychological mumbo-jumbo, or act like you’re made entirely of Light. If that were true, I wouldn’t have been able to string you along, using your thirst for vengeance against you.”

“I know. Which is why I’m letting it go.” And I pinky-swore that to the Universe. “I have better things to do with the rest of my life.”

He leaned down, chest touching mine, and I stared into his eyes, startled by the sudden realization that they were actually a dark moss color, almost pretty. Crazy the things you realized when you were no longer afraid for your life. “With the next five minutes, you mean? And what’s that?”

I ignored the heat of his breath, the pungent sulfur rising from his soul, and tried to read his mind, wondering when he’d realize he couldn’t touch me anymore. “Helping others. Fighting for those who can’t fight for themselves. Giving voice to those who can’t speak.”

He saw how earnest and honest I was, and doubt flickered across his face. It was fleeting, contradicted by the facts as he knew them, which he spelled out, though for my benefit or his, I didn’t know. “You’re pinned beneath me like a butterfly to a board. You’ll never do any of that.”

Too bad he didn’t know all the facts.

“I already have,” I said simply, and let my gaze slip past his shoulder. Joaquin turned.

She stood, solitary and small, just outside the maze, half obscured by the shadows of the warehouse. She didn’t look like an agent of Light, I thought, as Joaquin’s weight eased off me. In fact, right now Tekla looked like the least heroic agent I’d ever seen. I didn’t know how much Joaquin could really see of her—the aura that was usually a steady soft lavender was now crackling around her in sharp violet
snaps—but he couldn’t take his eyes off her, and he didn’t move as she stepped into a moonbeam, the light making her look ghostly and one dimensional.

So it’s true
, I thought, eyes flicking to the unwavering Joaquin.
She really could trap you in her gaze
.

She was wearing a robe of crimson red, a weapon like a crossbow with a chain attached to it, held at her side. Her son’s. On her chest was a pulsing glyph, and with every steady beat of the Scorpio sign, the hollows of her face lit up; unsmiling, severe. Vengeful.

I spread my palm flat, moving my fingers away from the ring that had called her to me, and she acknowledged me with a flick of her gaze as I propped myself back on my elbows, pulling my legs in tight. Joaquin shifted into a fighting stance. I’d have stood myself except I wasn’t sure what Tekla was going to do. But if there’d been a bunker to disappear into, I’d have ducked into it at that moment.

“Well, well.” Joaquin lengthened the words, his head coming up and fists tightening at his side, like he didn’t know he was moving because she allowed it. “If it isn’t the Scorpio figurehead. Come to save the Kairos? Or just happen to be in the neighborhood?”

Tekla didn’t even blink, and for the first time, even with two hundred yards between us, I could feel the combination of control and power that made her so revered among the troop. Swallowing hard, I wished again for that bunker. “Don’t mess with her, Joaquin. You’ll just make it worse.”

He spared me a glance, a kind of half-amused, half-annoyed sneer that turned to confusion when he scented my own rising nervousness. It wasn’t an act. The ring hadn’t just brought Tekla to me. The energy used to call her was like a taut rope linking us together. The room suddenly held the stillness of a vacuum, or the eerie abandonment of a coastline right before a monsoon. What was it Tekla had once told me? About the destructive power of vengeance?

Revenge is an A-bomb that will flatten everything around you
.

I curled up tighter into myself.

Joaquin frowned, then expelled the scent from his nose, nostrils flaring as he turned back to Tekla. She still hadn’t moved. “I take it you’ve come to play, then. Two against one? Not good odds, but it’s not as if I haven’t raped and killed two women in one night before.”

When Tekla still didn’t speak, Joaquin’s own nervousness mounted, though it wasn’t nearly as high as it should’ve been. If he could feel what I felt—the raw rage gathering behind the fragile shell of that diminutive frame—he’d be on his knees already, begging for forgiveness. Instead his nerves heightened his arrogance…though the maze between them probably also had something to do with it.

“Or maybe you come here often…eh Tekla, old girl? Could this be a pilgrimage of some sort? Coming to pay your respects at the site where your son took his last cursed, gurgling breath?” He snickered, and I felt my chest tighten as the air grew thin around me. I gasped for breath, but Joaquin kept talking. “No offense to the Archer over here for the attempts I’ve made on her life, for the one I’ll make as soon as I take care of you, but I have to admit…Stryker was my favorite kill.”

It was like an airplane had lost its cabin pressure, and I had to put my hands to my temples as they began to pound, my eardrums tightening into a squealing ache. “Tekla,” I whimpered.

But she didn’t spare a glance, a thought, or an instant for me. With steps that started slowly, then accelerated, she strode right up to the point where the maze began. Then through it. And directly toward Joaquin. The electrical current that should’ve zipped through her body, frying her from the inside out, rose above her in noxious vapors, coalescing like storm clouds overhead. Joaquin gasped—or tried to as he backed up into me, he seemed to be having trouble breathing now as well—and I kicked at him, wanting to be as far from him as possible when this unnatural disaster struck.

Still striding forward, eyes locked on her target, Tekla
lifted her arms. “Never utter my son’s name again.”

The cloud didn’t rain. It exploded. Downward, outward, shafts of fire sheared the air in blinding arrows, careening into what remained of the maze. Those walls too flared before shattering into thousands of shards, turning the warehouse into an asteroid field of electric slabs and searing light.

I tried to lift myself to my knees and crawl from the storm’s eye, but something rammed into my elbow, and the screech of living current whizzed through me. I dropped into the fetal position, crying out, but the sound was lost in the zing of live electricity. And in Joaquin’s screams cresting over me in waves of unseen horror.

Tekla drew closer, and the ripping winds sagged around me as she reached my side. Calm broke around my body, like a door had been slammed, and silence buzzed in my ears, though the rest of the warehouse was still fraught in chaos. I glanced up to find her hovering above me, protecting me. But I didn’t rise. Instead, I felt like I should genuflect.

The Tulpa’s maze was annihilated. All that remained of the walls were flying bits, some small as ice cubes, others large as icebergs, each jagged piece visible, and careening toward a swirling vortex under which, I realized, was Joaquin. Like bees swarming, the heightening mountain en-shrouded his body, only a bloodied foot or hand appearing before being attacked, and drawn back into the core. All I could make out between snaps of light was the gleam of steadily pooling blood widening on the floor. More blood, I thought, than one body could hold.

As haphazard and total as the destruction was in the warehouse, the only scratch on me was on my elbow. I gained my feet as the roar in the air softened, and straightened when it was silent enough to hear my breath rattling in my chest. Intermittent grunts came from the pile of debris, usually preceded by a sharp sizzle or crackling pop. The scent of electrocuted flesh permeated the air, and suddenly I
wasn’t so happy to have my breath back.

I turned to Tekla, who kept her eyes on Joaquin and the swarm until it died off altogether. I wondered briefly if she was seeing what I did, or if she was remembering as well; the night her son was taken from her, the blood that had seeped over the floor then, the weight of his severed head in her lap. Then the Tulpa’s maze dissolved completely.

Take that, Tulpa.

I stepped forward, my footsteps like gunshots in the silence, until I stood over a body so mutilated and burned I barely recognized it as a person, much less Joaquin. He was still alive, though his limbs were no longer intact, severed bits lying in awkward angles, like an abandoned puppet loosed from its strings. His flesh smoldered in places where the larger sections of wall had struck, imbedding themselves to fry through skin and muscle and tissue, cracking against bone. The smaller injuries, surface ones, merely cleaved off digits, or dug themselves into organs, revealing finely sheered sections of his core where flaps of skin waved like bloody flags.

His nose no longer existed. The soft flesh of his cheeks looked like they’d been carved almost with purpose, and his thin-lipped mouth extended ear to ear, the full set of his teeth revealed in a permanent smile. His bones were black, but I knew they’d been that way before, and my eyes wandered to his glyph, still heating his ravaged chest in irregular, smoky beats. I looked at it, hating it, despite all the carnage wracked upon the rest of him.

I glanced at Tekla and saw the same nothing in her eyes that I felt in my chest, and without looking at me she held out her conduit, useful again now that the Tulpa’s maze had been annihilated. Heart in my throat, I nearly reached for it before sighing and shaking my head. I’d made a vow.

I turned back to Joaquin, and his eyes, the only part of his face not completely rearranged, ran wildly from Tekla’s face to mine. “You want us to hurt you,” I told him, throwing his words to me back in his face. “You expect it. And you’d be
disappointed if we didn’t.”

Okay, so I didn’t need vengeance anymore…but I still loved having the last word.

Joaquin’s lower jaw hinged open as if to speak, but blood pooled down his chin from the stub of his tongue, and Tekla fired before any sound could gurgle out. A palm-sized anchor imbedded itself into the center of his glyph. She fingered a release button, and the chain attached to the anchor retracted, yanking Joaquin’s black and bloody heart out with it. His glyph snuffed out like a candle beneath Tekla’s gentle breath, and a whiff of sooty smoke joined the cloying rot saturating the warehouse air. The kill spot would impress generations to come.

“Do you like to fly?” the Tulpa asked after I’d settled myself across from him in the stretch limo, careful not let the door latch shut behind me. We were parked in an elongated lot just off Sunset and Eastern, watching the planes take off and land at McCarran in a carefully choreographed dance across the night sky. There weren’t many coming in these days, though authorities had begun letting healthy people go home once an anonymous caller had explained how the virus was being spread, and how to test for its presence.

“I wasn’t aware I could,” I finally said, as a jet powered into the air in front of us. The Tulpa was making me pick up the antivirus in person, and—after I’d made him swear not to kill me, order me killed, or have me followed back to the sanctuary and then killed—I’d relented, naming the time and place. I’d come to this viewing lot as a kid, and had always loved the deep rumble of power as the jets streamed, one after another, into the sky. No reason to share that, though. My childhood was none of this being’s business.

“I mean, like that,” he said, waving his hand to indicate the airstrip in front of us. “In planes. Do you enjoy the
power of the machine as it slings you from the earth and into the sky? Does it make you wish you had wings?”

“Sure,” I told him, shrugging because it cost me nothing to say it.

“What does it feel like?” he asked, real curiosity tingeing his voice.

I glanced over at him, but I’d lost the power to see auras entirely after my run in the maze, and there was no color outlining his form to indicate mood, emotion, or intent. To be honest, I didn’t miss the ability that much; I hadn’t been adept enough with it for it to be much more than a distraction, but it made me wonder what other capabilities he’d stolen from me.

He was in the corner right now, his face again obscured in shadows, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he just carried them around with him, like an umbrella he could flip open at will. That thought was less unsettling than his prior explanation, that I only saw what I expected to see when I looked at him. So it bugged me that he was featureless now, as if I hadn’t made up my mind about him yet.

Whatever, I thought, struggling to keep my expression neutral as I faced forward again. I was back in my disguise too; red wig pinned to my head, ruddy makeup, and baggy clothes to hide Olivia’s form and face. I’d been hoping he’d just hand over the antivirus and we’d go our separate ways, but I guess we were going to chitchat first. “Haven’t you ever flown?”

“We all have limits, Joanna.”

“So you’re saying you
can’t
fly?” I asked, and had to wonder immediately why he was telling me this. It wasn’t like revealing some pseudo-secret was going to have me softening my stance toward a wicked, mass-murdering being spawned from the sick mind of a man I was glad was dead. He had to know that.

“I can’t leave the valley,” he clarified, furthering my suspicion. “It’s a restriction. Neither can you.”

I toyed with the up and down button of my window, letting
the heat of the night air leach into the limo’s cabin, and the blast of the air conditioning drive it out again. “Sure I can.”

“Have you tried since your metamorphosis?” he asked, and I paused, window halting halfway. I bet he was raising a brow from his place in the shadows. And I knew he was shaking his head. A soft chuckle slipped from the dark. “Does Warren tell you nothing?”

“Warren believes—” I started, then corrected myself. “
We
believe the most important lessons are taught in the doing, not the telling.”

“In other words, he’d have waited until you were on the airplane to let you find out.”

I made a face. “Probably.”

He laughed again, and reached out to swirl a tumbler of brandy, light cutting through the cut crystal to set the liquid glowing in amber warmth. He had nice hands, really; strong, wide, but elegant. Though I guess that could’ve been my imagination too. “Well, maybe there’s wisdom in letting someone believe they can do anything. That way they push the boundaries of the known, test their limits, refuse to take no for an answer. I should remember that.”

I stopped playing with the window long enough to nail him with a glare. I didn’t need any schooling from the Shadow side. “The vial, please?”

“Impatient, aren’t you?” More amusement.

“I get it from my mother,” I said smartly, holding out my hand. His own whipped out, grasped mine before I could withdraw it, squeezing so tightly my arm began to go numb.

“I know,” he said, and bilious smoke swelled to fill the limo’s interior. It was a good thing I had the window down, else I risked suffocating on the mawkish scent. I looked down and saw his fingers through the haze; they’d turned into claws, the nail beds hinged to the bone, and slashing out in curved talons with pronged tips. I belatedly realized I should’ve specified not
injuring
me as one of my conditions in being here. There were a lot of ways to hurt someone and still keep them alive. Fucking hindsight.

But his grip relaxed, the pressure lessened, and by the time the fumes lessened, those honed fingertips had turned fleshy once more. A slow inhalation of breath sucked the rest of the smoke back into his body—which was weird in itself—but then he was caressing my hand, and rubbing a manicured thumb over the ring I’d used to call Tekla to me in the maze.

“Where did you get this?” he asked, his voice as soft as his touch. I looked down. The light pulsing from beneath the prongs had been snuffed as soon as I’d depressed the stone into its setting, so it was dead now, just another stone, and useless. At least until I passed it on to another. But I wouldn’t do that yet because…

“Zoe gave it to me.”

But he already knew that. He knew what this ring was, what it did, and by the tight control suddenly straining his vocal cords, I was willing to bet he’d also given it to her.

He released my hand, and I pulled it tight to my chest, rubbing it as I watched him reach into the inside pocket of his double-breasted suit and pull out the fragile vial of save-the-world serum. He didn’t hand it to me, instead rolling it back and forth in his palm.

“There was a story I once heard,” he said, and I’d have rolled my eyes, except I had a feeling he wasn’t merely stalling. His powerful tenor was more distant than I’d ever heard it, his profile visible as he leaned his elbows on his knees and stared out the window to the sky above. “A legend about a person who would one day be born with equal parts sun and moon dominating her temperament, those planets warring so strongly within her that, unlike all others, she’d never have to bend to the influence of the stars. She would have the ability to freely choose the path she’d walk in this lifetime. Choose, also, the allies who would walk beside her. Their adversaries, so equally matched before, would be crushed beneath them. The first sign that one side would soon assume ascendancy over the other was the discovery of this unique individual.”

I made a sound in the back of my throat, impatiently tapping my finger on my mahogany armrest. “I’ve heard this story somewhere before.”

He ignored me. “The second portent that one side was finally to fall to their enemies was the sweep of a plague over their battleground, amassing casualties on both sides.”

“Alas,” I said wryly.

He didn’t even pause in his telling. “But the third sign…”

I interrupted here, tired of being ignored, and wearied by a story that still seemed like some remote legacy about someone I didn’t know. “Isn’t written yet.”

“Was written the moment the second was fulfilled,” he corrected, and turned to face me as my mouth fell open. His smile flared in the moonlight splicing through his window, and he almost looked human. “The third sign is the reawakening of Kairos’s dormant side. A new journey through the city she was born to, and rebirth into the troop she thought she was destined to defeat.”

“Gee,” I said, dryly. “You just can’t trust those urban legends, can you?”

“Not always,” he said easily, leaning back into the shadows, only his hands remaining in the moonlight, pale next to the bloodred vial he carelessly palmed. “But I bet I can get you to switch sides in return for Zoe Archer’s life.”

I froze, even though my stomach heaved. He was lying. Lying and bluffing, and I called him on it. “You don’t have it to trade. She’s remained in hiding through my adolescence, metamorphosis, and a virus that threatened the entire troop and valley. You don’t know where she is, and you have nothing to draw her out into the open.”

“There’s you,” he said simply, and held the vial out to me.

The straight answer so shocked me that for a moment I didn’t move. And then, as squarely as a pie in the face, it hit me why he
really
hadn’t killed me back at Valhalla. It wasn’t because I was his daughter, or the Kairos—this legend he spoke of now—or even because he wanted to send me into
his maze and steal my power for himself. He still wanted
her
. God. His quest for vengeance made mine look like child’s play.

I forced myself to reach out and take the vial before he withdrew it, but because I was suddenly shaking, I had to be extra careful not to let my hand tighten around it once it was in my fist. I lifted my eyes to the inhuman ones I knew were watching me from the shadows. “I won’t let you use me against her,” I said quietly.

“You, my dear, don’t have a choice. It’d be one thing if you’d come to me willingly, but now you’ve pissed me off. You want to be an enemy, daughter? Fine. I’ll provide you with a worthy foe.”

“See,” I said, with more confidence than I felt, “I just knew we couldn’t have a civil conversation without at least one veiled threat.”

“Veiled?” He leaned forward then, and I saw him again, that same guido who’d promised to let me live if I could escape Valhalla, his maze, the infection coating the city. But this being gave a new meaning to the phrase
organized crime
. And I doubted any of the old-time mobsters had eyes that flared in cherry red flames from upper lid to lower, and a voice so low it could cause the earth to quake. “The minute you step from this car my vow is fulfilled, and we’ll be opponents once more.”

Okay, so not exactly veiled.

I glanced around at the squeaky tanned leather seats, polished decanter and glasses, mahogany armrests, and flat screen, currently off. A slim line of green neon slid around the carpeting, casting a soft glow over everything but the shadows layering his face. I sighed. “Well. It
is
a nice car.”

Those glowing eyes remained unblinking and unamused. I guess I got my sense of humor from my mother as well.

“All right,” I said, tucking the vial into a pocket I’d lined with foam. “Since we’re telling stories, I have one for you as well.” I looked up and waited until I saw a slight nod—he’d indulge me—before continuing. “Once upon a time there
was a being who got off on injuring and influencing mortal lives, spreading disease and destruction in hopes that it would snowball. He wanted humans to feel chaos, to spew out soured emotions so he could feed off that negative energy, making it easier to sow evil thoughts, habits, and deeds among them. But that alone was never enough for him. He was always wanting more. And that, ultimately, would be his downfall.”

“It’s true,” the Tulpa said, to my surprise. “Joaquin was stymied by his own aspirations. He died in that maze because he reached too far.”

And because I hadn’t been talking about Joaquin, I paused, leaned back in my seat, and stared.

And saw something far more revealing than any aura. I saw the puppets. And I saw the strings.

“How about that,” I said, wonder spreading through me. “Joaquin was trapped in a maze before he ever stepped foot in that warehouse.” I shook my head, a humorless laugh escaping me. How could I not have seen it before?

The weight of those red orbs on me told me I had his full attention now.

“You laid out a labyrinth so large and intricate, it spanned this entire city. The virus was just a diversion, sleight of hand. You weren’t targeting the agents of Light as much as you were cleaning house on the Shadow side. And you used me to do it.”

There was a deep breath—he was composing himself, but it was too late—and his eyes burned out, slipped back into the obsidian slate that so perfectly matched mine. “I handed you your greatest enemy on a silver platter. Where’s the gratitude?”

I shook my head, scoffing at that. “I handed him to you. Of the two of us, you considered him the greater threat. But it was a win/win situation for you, wasn’t it? You knew I’d go after him and you’d either score some power from me
or
stop him from looking for the original manual.”

“Or both,” he said baldly, no longer denying it. I suppose
he thought he was safe, that it was all said and done. That this story, the legend, was already written. He smiled, teeth flashing, and seemed to read my mind. “That is, if it were true. Right now it’s just a cute story.”

“And one that should be told,” I said coldly, knowing it already was. Somewhere in this city, Zane was getting a buzz on. It’d be interesting to see which manual this conversation showed up in, the Shadow line, or the Light. I thought of Regan, and how she, like Joaquin, was keeping my identity to herself. It seemed the Tulpa hadn’t yanked the threat to himself out at the roots. He’d merely snapped the top off a rapidly growing weed. I grinned widely, and let him see that secret in my smile. “Who knows? Someone might take up an interest in collecting.”

Maybe it was the smile that got to him. His fingers twitched on his knees. “An unhealthy interest.”

“Why?” I asked, tilting my head. “I mean, if the original no longer exists?”

When I realized he wasn’t going to answer, I shrugged and climbed out of the car. But then I just stood there. I had a feeling he couldn’t let me leave with the last word, and I was right. Seconds later, the window rolled down soundlessly. “You don’t honestly believe that you can beat me, do you?”

I lifted my gaze to the clear night sky and thought about how he’d almost killed me once, how I thought I was dead again after chasing Regan and Liam back into Valhalla. And how Hunter and I had approached it with not much more going for us than a whole lot of chutzpah the night before. I hadn’t really believed I could beat him then. Not any of those times. But somehow I’d survived him.