looking my way.
There was an Asian girl I didn’t recognize looking up at me with eyes as wide as the heroine on the manga she was holding, a threesome of boys who couldn’t have been more than ten poring over some sensational find in the store’s far corner, and the rest were the usual suspects. As one of them trotted toward me, I shot Zane-the only adult-a half wave. He grunted in response and turned back to the paperwork splayed next to the register.
“Hey, Archer.” Carl Kenyon was a shrewd-eyed boy verging on gangly, and just strange enough that every time I saw him I felt like saying,
At least, I noted, he’d grown out of his fondness for excessive body hair. And, as wary as I was about Joaquin’s imminent arrival, I was happy to see Carl. I guess he’d grown on me too.
“Hey, Carl. What’s up with the ’do?”
“Thought I’d try something new,” he said, touching the spike tips gently with inkstained fingers. “What do you think?”
“I think you look like the spawn of Satan.”
“Yeah, and you still look like my brother’s favorite blowup doll.”
“Speaking of, what’s the deal with the size of my breasts in last month’s manual?” He’d drawn me so top heavy a stiff wind could have knocked me off balance.
“Creative license,” he said with a shrug.
“A little too creative.”
“Well, I have to do something. Ever since your side and the Shadows called this unspoken truce-which is totally lame, by the way-it’s been hell to keep reader interest.”
“Can’t you just make something up?”
“Like what?”
I thought for a moment. “Give the Shadow Aries a strange itching sensation down there. While you’re at it, make their Gemini accidentally chop off her own hair with her machete. Mangle it too. She’ll really have to do it for continuity’s sake.”
Carl grinned and held up a hand to high-five me, but when I responded in kind, he drew back, frowning. “What’s that?”
I glanced down and spotted the scar on my left bicep. Damn. It was the wound Liam had given me before I’d killed him. I covered it up without answering.
“How’d you get a new scar?” Carl persisted.
“It’s not a scar,” I said.
Carl turned to Zane. “Is it a scar, Zane?”
Zane didn’t look up. “Yep.”
I glared at him.
Carl looked back at me. “How’d you get it?”
I clenched my teeth. “I cut myself on one of my arrows.”
Carl wrinkled his nose in disbelief and glanced back over his shoulder. “How’d she get it, Zane?”
Zane, bulbous body still hunched over his work, did look up this time, and he met my eyes with malicious glee. “She crossed over into an alternate reality, chased a Shadow agent throughout Valhalla, where she was ambushed, cut, and somehow still managed to survive.”
The other kids, who’d been inching forward during this telling, started throwing questions at me all at once. They were like prepubescent rioters. I felt the urge to retreat as their stinky little bodies pressed up against mine.
“You gonna give them milk and cookies before you put them down for their naps too?” I asked Zane. Actually I snarled. Didn’t faze him, though. He just shrugged, reached for his work so I could see the sweat stains circling his pits, and kept writing. Which left me to deal with the Lost Boys.
I felt a tentative tug on my arms, and looked down to find the small Asian girl looking up at me, concern brimming in her large eyes. “You were injured?”
One of the older boys shoved her out of the way. “She was almost killed, dude. Nothing can scar an agent except a conduit.”
“That’s cool,” his bald twin added.
“I wish I could cross into other realities,” one of the ten-year-olds threw in, and I rolled my eyes.
“I can’t believe you weren’t going to tell me,” Carl said over them all, his voice filled with hurt as he shook his head. He lifted up my sleeve to get a better look. “How’m I supposed to draw you accurately if you don’t tell me these things?”
I slapped his hand away. “You’d find out from Zane’s storyline soon enough, anyway.”
They all looked to Zane. He sighed and put down his pen, leaning back so his substantial weight was propped against a glass case. I feared for the case. “Actually, he wouldn’t have. Everything that happened from the time you entered the aquarium to the time you woke up this morning…never happened.”
“I don’t understand,” the girl said softly, tilting her head.
“I don’t either,” the twins said together, then grinned at each other.
Carl scratched his head.
“I do.”
We all turned to the back of the shop, where a lone figure rose from his chair, thin and pale and wavering like a snake under a charmer’s spell. Sebastian, I thought, my lips curling. The little freak. Actually the big freak now. He’d grown a whole foot in the months I’d known him, and his bones seemed to rattle in his skin as he stepped toward us, eyes never leaving mine. For some reason the kid had never liked me.
“What do you know, Sebastian?” Zane asked him. I glared at him, but he only shrugged back, a half smile lifting one fat cheek.
“She,” Sebastian yelled, pointing a finger at me, “is hiding something! She doesn’t want anyone to know how she got the scar because she doesn’t want anyone to know what she was doing in the aquarium last night!”
“But you’re an agent of Light,” said one of the bald twins. “What could you have to hide?”
“Did you fulfill the second sign of the Zodiac? Will all the Shadows die on a cursed battlefield?”
Obviously a reader of the manuals of Light.
“Or did you finally jump to the Shadow side?”
“Dude! I told you she would! You owe me five trading cards!”
“Or did you find your mother?” the girl asked, peering up at me sweetly.
“Did you get it on with one of the underwater divers in the kelp forest?” Carl asked, nudging me in the side.
I looked at him.
He grinned. “A boy can dream.”
“No!” Sebastian yelled, slamming his fist down so hard on a glass case I thought I heard the top crack. “You idiots! There’s only one way to wipe out an entire block of time so it can’t be recorded in the manuals. Only one way you can disappear for twelve straight hours and nobody know where you are, who you are, or what you’re-”
He didn’t get to finish. The others had all turned back to me, and Carl’s fist shot into the air. “The aureole!” they all yelled together.
The twins started hopping around, I think they were trying to dance, and the girl began clapping madly, her face a mixture of delight and hero worship as she gazed up at me.
“Man, the aureole,” Carl said, shaking his head. “Good job, Archer. Two times in six months. That must be some sort of record, huh, Zane?”
“The aureole,” Zane repeated in a whisper, nodding to himself as he turned back to his work. I should have known I couldn’t keep it a secret.
“How long do I have?” I said, crossing to stand in front of him, a half-dozen kids trailing me like I was the Pied
