The Taste Of Night

the nightly bacchanalia of the Las Vegas Strip, I took a succession of rights on the gridlike streets and climbed into the city’s gritty underlife, where I truly felt at home.

When I’d been me, Joanna, I’d canvassed these streets religiously, snapping pictures and documenting the welfare of Sin City’s displaced and forgotten. Back then I’d been tough, a student of a fighting system called Krav Maga, but these days I was practically immortal, and I didn’t have to worry about my safety while handing out sandwiches to the men and women pooled in the city’s darkest crevices, or while helping the runaways I found cowering beneath the possessive arm of someone bigger and meaner and more predatory than themselves. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get off on that. Now I could protect people without worrying about getting hit or stabbed or shot, and how cool was that?

Tonight I had the additional protection of the aureole, which meant I could climb into bed with my greatest enemy if I desired, and he’d never even know I was there. I was like a ghost in both the paranormal and the mortal world, and right now that suited me fine.

About a block away from a run-down strip club I spotted a man watching the building’s back door. Actually I scented him first. He was breathing hard and smelled like wild game and curdled desire. So I began to stalk him, the spikes of my heels ticking like a time bomb as I snuck up behind him. He was already jittery with ignoble intentions and fled easily, even as one of his prey slipped out the back door.

By the time we hit Carlisle Street, the sweat rolling down his neck had nothing to do with the evening’s warmth, and he was breathing harder still. If there was one thing I hated, it was a human predator. And after a night in which I’d been on both sides of the hunt, his ill intent struck me like a punch to the gut. Finally he swerved down an alley filled with large green metal Dumpsters, weaving his way past stripped tires, broken bottles, and the carcass of something that used to be small and furry and living. Scenting that his desire to stalk had been blunted, I let him escape over a fence topped with cyclone wire, whimpering under his breath as the scent of fresh urine joined the stale urine already staining the alley walls.

I know what you’re thinking. Big, bad supernatural chick picking on the poor little human, but I didn’t do it just for sport. A decade earlier I’d been attacked, raped, and nearly killed by a man who’d smelled a lot like this one, and I’d be damned if I was going to let some other woman fall prey to the same fate. And yet I didn’t know if that drive came from the heroine in me, or if it was-as I really suspected-my father’s genes asserting themselves.

My father. The Shadow Archer. The Tulpa.

I sighed and leaned against the rusty metal fence. It was easier to face that here, in the dark, surrounded by refuse. Easier too to admit that I’d lied to Regan about not being curious about my father.

Why wouldn’t I be? I’d been born on his birthday-exact date, exact time-yet another herald of the Kairos legend. But what he was-other than the darkest of the Shadows-was another legend entirely. Because the very definition of the word Tulpa was rooted in Tibetan mysticism: it meant materialized thought. And it meant my birth father was a being who’d been created rather than born.

Created, I thought, pushing off from the fence, by someone with a profound amount of energy, perseverance, patience…and, if you asked me, too much time on his hands.

So how do you wrap your brain around the idea that your birth father first existed as a thought form? Well, first you had to get on board with the idea that thought was just another form of energy; same as desire, belief, love. But energy was a powerful, volatile thing, and if a person-and not just a supernatural, but a mortal too-could visualize something so completely even their own mind was fooled into believing it existed, they could generate that thing in their life. If they were adept enough, they could even create a separate being. A Tulpa.

But if what I knew about the Tulpa was enough to fill a thimble, his knowledge of me was even smaller. At first he’d only known that I was the new Archer of Light, his opposite on the paranormal Zodiac, and that alone would’ve been enough to make him wish for my destruction. But as our lineage was matriarchal, he also knew my mother was Zoe Archer, once his greatest love, now his greatest enemy. With her in hiding for the past decade, he was all too willing to take her betrayal out on me.

And then he discovered I was his daughter as well, and the tactics had changed. He was now trying to recruit me to the Shadow side, an approach that obviously wasn’t sitting well with all his evil, stank-ass minions.

I was jolted from my thoughts by Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” pealing from my handbag. “Not now, Cher,” I muttered, peering down at the glowing face of my cell phone. But duty had me answering anyway.

“Where did you go?” she asked without preamble. “One minute you were there, the belle of the ball, and then next you were gone.”

“I got…sick.” I mustered up a cough as I left the alley. “Decided to head home early.”

“Oh, honey! Do you want me to come over and play nurse? I have a great product to loosen up congestion. It contains pig placenta and no preservatives!”

“No!” I swallowed, softened my tone, and said, “No, Cher. But thanks. I’m just going to work on the computer for a bit, and then go to bed.”

Which was as big a lie as any I’d ever told. While Olivia had been a closet geek beneath all the peroxide, gloss, and L’eau d’Issey, the computer guru bit was something I’d had to drop as soon as I took over her identity. I could impersonate a bubble-brained socialite, but a self-taught computer genius was a bit beyond my second-rate dramatic skills. Luckily, most people who knew her in real life, as opposed to cyberspace, didn’t know about her surprising, and sometimes illicit, little hobby.

Another pause, this time with Cher mentally ciphering what I meant by this. “Starting up your business again?” she asked carefully.

As if, I thought, rolling my eyes. I’d never even gotten Olivia’s blasted machine to work, even after inputting every word I thought she might use as a password-Archer, her birth date, Prada. Nothing worked.

“No, I…I forgot my stupid password.”

“Oh. Want your backup disks?”

Backup disks? I blinked as I slipped past a stray dog, unnoticed. “Uh…you still have them?”

“Of course. Locked in the floor safe just like you told me. Momma tried to move them into the safety deposit box, but I told her you needed easy access for times like this, you know?”

I did a quick mental calculation. Dusk set at seven-fifty tomorrow. Joaquin would allegedly be at the shop four hours before that. So I could feasibly squeeze in a visit to Cher, grab the disks, kill my arch nemesis, and still manage to cross over to my troop’s headquarters no later than mid-dusk. And that brought the first true smile to my face since I’d found out about the bachelorette auction.

So Cher agreed to meet the next afternoon and made me promise to rub vapors over my chest for my cold, but as we hung up I’d never felt better. There were secrets stored on those disks that had to do with me. My past.

Maybe even my mother.

Because I had questions for Zoe Archer, and they weren’t just of the where-ya-been? variety either. She was the only agent who’d ever gotten close enough to the Tulpa to try and ferret out a weakness to be used against him, to sleep with him. To make him vulnerable.

And that was what I was most curious about. How to find him, hurt him, kill him. I’d vowed on our first and only meeting that I’d do all those things. Ruin anything with the Archer insignia on it-which included all of Xavier Archer’s businesses-and commit my every waking moment to destroying him and the Shadow organization. He’d suffer for all the cruel deeds he brokered in this valley, and more importantly, for authorizing the attack that had devastated me a decade earlier.

So I left the abandoned streets behind me, heading home as I thought of death and destruction. Wanting to cause it all myself.

Sometimes I was such a daddy’s girl.

5

The greatest benefit in taking over Olivia’s identity was not having to learn a whole new set of mores, thoughts, and values. We’d essentially held the same worldview and basic ideals, and though our approaches to life differed in many ways, our bond had been a tight one. I’d sworn to her that I’d never leave her, that I’d guard her from anyone who wanted to harm her in either word or deed or thought, and I had.