Cheat the Grave

has a fancy magnet which attaches through your nose.”

Cher kept the nose ring, so I gamely reached for the brow hoop. I squinted at the tiny designs flaring from the diamond like rays from the sun but couldn’t make them all out in the dim, flashing light. I’d been having trouble with my eyesight ever since it’d reverted to 20/20. Meanwhile, Cher lifted my shirt without asking, a faux belly ring dangling from her fingertips, but she drew back in surprise. “Oh, you already have one. That’s hot.”

I glanced down ruefully. Maybe, but it hadn’t been by choice. I thought about telling Cher where I’d gotten it, the story of a parallel realm called Midheaven, ruled by women who considered themselves goddesses, and fueled by the souls of those who entered there. But I didn’t want to give her nightmares…or ideas. That underground world was a pocket of distended reality, like a bubble of poisonous, trapped gas. It offered a place for rogue agents to hide from whatever trouble they’d left behind in this world, but it did so at a price. It was a twisted place that twisted people in return, stripping them down, literally changing them at a cellular level.

Besides, tonight was supposed to be about safe and normal. So I wasn’t going to allow in memories of my lost powers, my myriad mistakes, or other dangerous worlds.

Or of the man who’d betrayed me for one of those goddesses.

“Hunter,” I whispered into my wineglass, the name lost in the bowl and the bus’s growling technothrob. Then I banished his memory like a ghost and lifted my chin, determined to do the same with my thoughts. And be normal.

So as the rolling disco/revival got under way, I gave the pole nearest me a considering look. One foot in front of the other. That was how I’d re-embrace my humanity, my sister’s life, and the sole responsibility for protecting my own. I’d forget about the Shadow and the Light soon enough…and that I’d once been both. Surely then, even the images dogging my recent dreams-of Hunter suspended amidst a star-studded sky, and wrapped in the slim, soft arms of another woman-would fade away as well.

2

The bus dropped the lot of us mid-downtown, and while the other partygoers scattered like frilly cockroaches in the bright lights of the Fremont Street Experience, I instinctively hunched in the night. My senses weren’t what they used to be-I couldn’t smell emotion, taste intent, feel violence approaching from behind-but still knew that feeling like prey meant you probably were. Besides, unlike the other mortals surrounding me, I knew what predators lay in wait in this concrete jungle.

So the bums and panhandlers resting in the cold night cavities near the spilling neon didn’t bother me. They didn’t seem to trouble the socialites and party kids much either. A world cruise was enough motivation to ignore both pedestrian and social ills, and had the participants moving in their Manolos. Watching a woman in a fur push the feet of a sleeping indigent off a park bench near Main Street Station so she could sit and study her map, I shook my head. I loved Suzanne…but sometimes I seriously questioned her judgment.

Meanwhile, Cher was shivering in short silver, her boa offering the only warmth, and her cute faux nose ring winking in the retro bulbs studding the Golden Nugget. She’d refused to don a coat, saying it would ruin her club kid vibe, though she darted covetous glances at her competitor’s fur as she said it. I sighed. When I’d last been part of a team, I was paired with a weapon-wielding, building-jumping superhero who could lift fifty times his body weight. Cher, on the other hand, was a mortal girl who idolized Perez Hilton and thought caustic Twitter updates were the best way to inflict pain. And in this state, she’d be helpless to resist a pashmina, forget a full frontal paranormal assault.

“One of the clues is planted at a bar,” she piped up, gazing at our clue sheet. We’d had a choice of three. Each, Suzanne had instructed, would lead us upon a different path with varying degrees of difficulty. So getting through the clues and back to the bus quickly was as much a product of fate as intelligence.

“Really?” I raised my brow ring. “A bar? In Vegas?”

She glanced back at the woman in the fur and bit her lip. “Hopefully their clues are just as challenging.”

Challenging? This was like looking for a specific bulb in a sea of neon. “They’re making us use our brains.” I leaned against a billboard on the Nugget’s brick face, searching for movement along the rooftops, while thinking it unfair to ask of a bus full of tequila-swilling boa wearers.

Cher blew a stray orange feather from her lip. “Envision the Mediterranean sprawled like a blue carpet before you.”

“I can go any time I want,” I said airily.

She cocked a hand on one slim hip. “Then think positive for my sake.”

“Sure. I’m a glass-half-full kind of girl.” Which is why I was jumping at the slightest sound.

But the Mediterranean comment caught hold. When was the last time I’d taken a vacation? Agents couldn’t leave the city they were charged to protect, yet even before joining the troop last year, I’d rarely left Vegas. Why should I, I’d reasoned, when the world came to me? Why go- I’d always thought with admittedly less reason-when the man I’d sought for over a decade was in this city?

But now I was an outcast, and that man was dead.

I was also so wound up the nearest slots were sending my nerves to clanking.

Straightening, I angled the map my way. The Mediterranean suddenly sounded pretty good. “It says here that the sky is our map. We have to correlate the right star systems to those above, which will give us the coordinates to our first destination.”

We craned our necks back, but it was too bright on the ground to see any stars. Good. If I never read the sky’s mysteries again, it’d be too soon. Fortunately, a year spent in a troop that practically worshipped the sky meant I’d already memorized the major star patterns.

“Here, give me that,” I told Cher, holding the clue sheet eye level. The faster we did this, the faster we could get off the streets.

Squinting at the numbers again, I dug through the canvas goodie bag given to each team before we’d disembarked from the bus. In it were a flashlight, a detailed map, and the item I held up, a compass. “I’ll chart it, you use the key on the map’s side.”

We spent five minutes bumping brain cells before coming to an agreement on which direction to head. Man, I missed the days when I could run down the block in zero to sixty. I’d have been back before Cher could vogue.

Cher slipped the canvas bag across her chest. “The corner of Ninth and Sandstone, then.”

“I know a shortcut.” I motioned for her to follow and we headed away from the canopied light show of notsosubliminal messages and into the weed-choked environs of urban Vegas. Unlike the Zodiac agents who’d grown up hidden from the world’s view until they metamorphosed into full-fledged star signs, I wasn’t gifted with sanctuary when I was young, and by the time I hit the quarter century mark-the coming-of-age for the initiates-I’d been bat tling evil on Las Vegas’s back streets for a decade. Sure, back then the demons I faced had been my own, but that hadn’t made them any less formidable.

“Slum much?” Cher asked cryptically as I unerringly led her down another narrow alleyway. I turned to reassure her, but caught movement from a boarded-up convenience store behind us. My immediate impulse was to sniff at the air to scent out the cause, but that power had been drained from me along with all others. Besides, it could have been anything from floating debris to a shuffling homeless person, or nothing at all.

Immediate arrival at our destination provided distraction for us both. A neon sign heralded the spot, though parts of its tubing were burnt out and the remaining red glow muted by what looked like centuries of caked dirt. Yet the service it advertised was clear.

“A psychic,” I said, feeling my gut sink. Anything having to do with astrology bumped too closely for my liking against the World that Could Not Be Named.

“Smells like cat pee,” Cher said, bringing me out of my momentary reverie.

“We can hope it’s a cat, anyway,” I muttered, taking the lead. I had no weapon beyond my sharp tongue, but it was still natural for me to protect any nearby mortal. Old habits died hard.

Yeah, and sometimes they take you with them.

Climbing a narrow stairwell, we reached what in earlier, cleaner, more hopeful times might have been called a mother-in-law apartment. Right now it struggled to be a garret. I wouldn’t have touched the walls even were I still impervious to disease, and Cher stayed to the stairwell’s center, like the building was contagious. The thin hallway