The Taste of Night (8 page)

But now I could read the Shadow manuals, report my findings to the other agents of Light, and we could anticipate their actions from the information gleaned there. Cosmic balance or not, Warren had no problem listening as I recounted
The Shadow Chronicles: Under the Cover of Darkness.
I suspected this was another reason the Shadows had been lying low as of late.

“Shadow,” I replied in a low voice. There was nothing to be ashamed of, but I didn’t exactly relish the world knowing my business, and I was all too aware of Sebastian lurking just behind me.

“Ohhh, they’re sucking you in, aren’t they?” Carl said loudly. “You’re inching over to the dark side.”

I gritted my teeth and silently counted to three. “I just want to know a bit about this agent’s history. How she lived, how she died.” I couldn’t find out about Regan directly; her first and second life cycles—from birth to puberty, then from puberty to age twenty-five—weren’t depicted in the manuals. The third life cycle was the only one recorded, so her history, strengths, and identity would remain veiled until she metamorphosized. Studying the actions of Regan’s mother, however, might give me an idea of what I’d someday be up against…and possibly her true motivations in seeking me out.

A voice popped up at my other side. “I can show you where they are.”

The young girl again. I smiled, amused by the way her eyes kept darting to my smooth fingertips, and flattered by her obvious infatuation. She had glossy black hair cut in a sharp bob, with a long fringe overrunning her brows. Long lashes fluttered above deep-colored orbs, and she wore a schoolgirl’s uniform, complete with knee-high socks and polished Mary Janes. I hadn’t seen anyone this cute since Shirley Temple last graced the screen, and I wondered why
she was hanging out with these losers.

“I’m sorry,” I said, bending so I was eye level with her. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced. I’m—”

“The Archer,” she said quickly. “I know.”

“Jasmine’s a big Zodiac fan,” Carl said, patting her on her head. They had to be about the same age, but he was at least a half-foot taller.

“Just the Light series,” Jasmine clarified. “When I grow up I want to be an agent of Light too.”

Sebastian gagged behind us. I ignored him and smiled at Jasmine. She was like a little pixie, and I couldn’t easily envision her conking Shadow agents over the head with billy clubs like I had the night before. “Well. Eat your veggies.”

She nodded vigorously and took my hand. I straightened and headed in the direction Carl was pointing. “In the storeroom, all the way to the back, right-hand side, fifth shelf from the bottom. Let me know if you need any help.”

I’d need help all right, I thought, letting Jasmine lead the way. Help explaining, justifying, and ever being allowed out of the sanctuary once Warren found out what I’d done. If I wanted to find Joaquin before then, I had to get busy. Two weeks felt like a mere ten minutes away. Then again, if I was lucky, I thought, looking at my watch, five more minutes was all I’d need.

Jasmine and I had to pass single-file along a dark hallway before getting to the storeroom, which was strange in itself. The building didn’t appear that long from the outside, though I hadn’t been around the back. Not only that, the air was growing colder as we progressed, until the warmest thing around me was Jasmine’s hand clutching my own. Rubbing one arm with the other hand, I kept my eyes focused on a light directly ahead, shivering as I thought of hot toddies and furry slippers. Odd for late May in Vegas.

Finally we crossed the threshold from darkness into light. I blinked a few times so my eyes could acclimate, then
blinked again to be sure what I was seeing. And feeling. The cold was gone, replaced by a warmth as welcoming as a wool blanket falling over my shoulders.

For a moment I thought I’d entered another portal rather than a storeroom, but that wasn’t possible. Jasmine was with me; and though she was an oddly cute kid with a startling awareness of supernatural phenomena—prepubescent teens had an acceptance of the extraordinary that adults had long lost—she was no agent. Yet here we were, in a room more befitting the manor house of an English lord than the storage room of some caustic counter jockey. Sure, there were comics stored along every inch of the wall, but the shelves were made of thick mahogany planks, and matching crown molding arched toward a cavernous ceiling soaring over a room the size of a small theater.

While there was space enough for multiple aisle dividers in the center of the room, it was already clustered with leather easy chairs, each with an overstuffed ottoman, and mismatched side tables piled high with comics, texts, and what looked like a teetering cup of forgotten coffee. At the room’s core was a square stone fireplace lit and jumping with orange flames, its flue suspended yards above, but still able to capture the smoke as it rose lazily from the ash. Hence the warmth. I turned a circle around myself, taking it all in.

Observing my reaction, Jasmine pointed to a tight circular staircase in the back corner of the room, which wound up into a rectangular platform, leading to what I assumed was an attic. “Zane’s living quarters are upstairs, but he spends most of his time writing and researching down here. He says the fire keeps his third eye open, and the dance of the smoke lends inspiration.”

“Geez,” I said, whistling as I ran my hand over a stack of titles dating back to the eighties. “He must have every comic written for the past fifty years.”

Jasmine shook her head earnestly. “Oh no, these are all manuals. Zane wouldn’t waste valuable storage space on
regular comics.”

“All manuals?” But there were thousands of them, tens of thousands. “How far back do they go?”

“All the way to the beginning,” she said, pulling me toward a tottering stack of sleeved comics pushed up against a corner shelf. “Back to when the first troops settled in the valley.”

“Really?” I’d never thought to ask before. I’d been too concerned with the present to worry or wonder much about the past, but I knew that Las Vegas was only a hundred years old, and the troops wouldn’t have formed here until there was a large enough population to merit notice. That’s when agents moved in, staked out their places on the city’s star charts, and began the whole good-battling-evil-for-the-sake-of-mankind bit. This same scenario had played itself out for centuries in every major metropolis, though the suburbs were the domain of the independents. Too many representatives of the same star sign—even Light—tended to destabilize things, so rogue agents weren’t tolerated within city boundaries. I knew all this, but nothing about where the agents originally came from, or how far back the beginning really was.

I asked Jasmine just that and she eyed me with a small frown, though more out of concern that I didn’t already know than suspicion as to why I wanted to. “You mean back to the original manual?”

“Is there such a thing?” I asked, watching as she knelt, hair swinging to obscure her china doll face, and began picking through the stack. I mean, I knew there had to be at one time, but what shape or language or location it was in was anyone’s guess. But the idea was compelling.

“Well, you know originally legends on both sides of the Zodiac were passed on orally, right?”

I nodded like I had, and leaned against a bookcase as Jasmine handed me a manual with an agent of Light running through an alley, a shadow looming on the brick behind him. “Well, the first manual was put to paper—or papy
rus—as oral storytelling was becoming obsolete. It documented the original division between Shadow and Light, and foretold everything from the spread of troops to the new world, the proliferation of cities throughout North America, to the migration westward. It also predicted the creation and rise of the Tulpa.”

I blinked. The little girl-turned-walking-encyclopedia blinked back. I said, “I’d love to see that.”

Jasmine scoffed, looking back down to blindly pass me another comic. “Yeah, you and the rest of the paranormal world.”

“What do you mean?”

“Legend has it that it also contains the so-called recipe for killing the Tulpa, but each metropolis possesses one copy only. Our city’s original manual is lost. Or destroyed. Nobody really knows. Maybe the Tulpa got ahold of it and destroyed it himself. Still, the knowledge buried in that one manual is so complete, so powerful, it’ll forever tip the balance to the side of the Zodiac troop that possesses it, so the search goes on. That’s Zane’s quest, you know. He’s given his life over to finding the original manual, or die trying.”

“Yeah, but…how?” Nobody knew if the manual even existed. Where did you start the search for something nobody could account for? “Might as well be searching for the Holy Grail.”

Jasmine shook her head, sending smooth sheets of hair swinging. “There are supposed to be clues planted throughout the earliest manuals that reveal its location. Alone they’re nothing more than simple parables and entertaining anecdotes. But together they form a comprehensive map leading directly to the master manual.”

“So somebody should assemble them,” I said, accepting two more manuals, and wondering—with not a little irritation—why Warren hadn’t told me any of this. “Someone should patch together the clues and start tracking it down.”

“Well, duh,” Jasmine said, causing me to blink in affront. Hard to stay mad, though, looking at her wide-eyed inno
cence. Besides, she was right. Surely I wasn’t the first troop member to think of it. She stood and began studying another shelf. “But the earliest manuals were created before the widespread use of the printing press. One edition only, handwritten.”

And I bet private collectors had snapped those up like priceless Monets. My heart sank. “So they’re all gone. Spread out so thinly that no one collector can piece together the whole.”

At the disappointment in my voice, Jasmine turned her attention from the shelf she was scanning, fingers pausing over a section marker to hold her place. “But the trick is to keep looking, and people do. Agents die, remember? Manuals are bequeathed, won, stolen, bought. That’s what keeps Zane in business. Not only does he trade out and up with every agent interested, but he thinks because he’s the record keeper he has the best chance of finding the original.”

“And you believe him?”

Jasmine shrugged. “One thing’s sure. The Tulpa is endlessly sending agents to troll this place.”

“Then he’s worried,” I said, following Jasmine along the near wall of stretching bookcases. “I didn’t know the Tulpa could be made to worry.”

She stopped beneath a leaning ladder of polished mahogany, adroitly plucking a manual from the dozens buried on the third shelf. She handed it to me as she turned around. “Zoe knew.”

I froze, and the jolt wound through my body like a live wire, making my printless fingertips tingle as I grasped the manual.

“Do you have that one?” she asked innocently, tilting her head.

I shook mine, unable to tear my eyes from the cover.
The Archer,
it said,
Agent of Light
. Beneath the emblazoned caption was a photo of my mother.

She couldn’t have been any older than I was now, dressed in short-shorts and go-go boots that were made for more
than walking—it was an outfit guaranteed to get her in the creator’s door. But there was blood on her thigh, her conduit—now mine—was clutched in both hands, and she was gritting her teeth, staring into shadows, bent-kneed as she backed away toward an opened door. I flipped open the manual, and caught a flash of color as a howl of rage splintered the silent room. The word
nooo-o-o!
bubbled up from the page before popping in a angry red spark.

“This is the one where she killed him, isn’t it?” I asked Jasmine, flipping to the back. “The Tulpa’s originator. When she thought killing Wyatt Neelson would weaken the Tulpa.” It hadn’t though, I thought, scanning another page where she escaped through a sewer lid portal. Instead it had loosed Neelson’s hold on him, the creator’s death doubling back to make the Tulpa stronger.

Jasmine nodded, rising to her tiptoes to flip back to the beginning with me, revealing the panels that showed my mother using manipulation, patience, her body, and pure chutzpah to gain that information from the Tulpa. She was already pregnant, I saw. And she was worried that with the hormone shift that came with pregnancy, the Tulpa would soon smell it on her. It would give her Light identity away.

I
would give her away.

“This is my favorite,” Jasmine breathed, as we watched Zoe sneak from the Tulpa’s bedroom, him sleeping peacefully—face only partially revealed in black and white—while she stood framed in the doorway, her silhouette backlit, fists clenched, glyph fired. “She was wonderful.”

But she had failed. Killing the Tulpa’s creator had only freed him from the power of the original mind. From then on he’d been free to think and feel and act as he wished. And what did he wish for more than anything? To kill the woman who’d betrayed him.

The very last page showed her returning to the sanctuary, being wheeled into the sick ward by an impossibly young Micah, who told her not to worry. He was going to
change her identity so the Tulpa and his agents would never find her.

And they hadn’t, I thought wryly, closing the book. They’d found me instead.

“There are others,” Jasmine said softly, watching my face with those giant doe eyes. “Lots. Would you like me to find them for you?”

“I don’t know.” Which surprised me. I wanted to find my mother, right? I wanted to exact revenge on the Tulpa for forcing her to run, leaving Olivia and me. So why was I so conflicted now? Why did it feel like watching events that had profound impact on my life through my mother’s eyes would somehow be a betrayal to my younger self? “I don’t know,” I said again.

I looked around the room, wondering how many of these books had the power to forever change my impression of myself, and how many times that perception would flip-flop. Where I would end up when I finally knew all. I looked back at the schoolgirl in front of me. “How long have you known all this, Jasmine?”

A half smile flashed, a question she could answer, and a dimple flickered with it. “I was born knowing. Just like Carl, and Sebastian, and the twins. We’re changelings.”