Cheat the Grave

him, was the same age, and they’d grown up in the sanctuary together. While she was a second daughter and had never expected to inherit her star sign, she almost wore the responsibility better. Having it unexpectedly thrust upon a person often made them more vigilant and serious, as I well knew.

I couldn’t figure any of them keeping Warren out of the loop, though. If any knew about Mackie and his quest to kill me, if any cared- and I thought it likely there was at least that between us-they’d have told him. Unless one of them had opened the gateway to Midheaven, accidentally let the demon spawn out, and was too afraid of Warren to fess up. Though agents’ actions were regularly recorded in comic book form, thus a matter of public record, this wouldn’t be if it could upset the balance between Shadow and Light.

So had one of them planted the old conduits for me? Maybe…though wouldn’t it have been easier to show up on my doorstep, hand me my crossbow, and bid me good day? I thought again of the fury I’d once seen blanketing Warren’s face. Maybe not.

“Joanna.” Tekla now, their Seer. Though the smallest, staturewise, she was arguably the strongest of them all. She watched me as carefully as I’d studied the others, her odd, birdlike stillness making me nervous, as always. She read the stars and skies, and carried the Scorpion sign fiercely in memory of her son. A mother wasn’t supposed to outlive a child in any world, and since reclaiming the star sign, Tekla had been more daring and vigilant and aggressive than the others. Warren loved it, but I could have told him there was a fine line between nervy and nutty.

I continued on like I hadn’t heard her. “Of course, there’s high-powered like me, and then there’s high-powered like you. There’s a difference between mortal power and those who allow it, isn’t there?” I struggled with the restraints any one of them could have broken through, and had the satisfaction of hearing someone moan. It sparked something dormant and dark inside of me.

“Riddick, untie her. Joanna, this isn’t about you.”

“Of course not.” Gritting my teeth, I wondered what my anger smelled like. “If it was, you wouldn’t be here.”

Riddick, coming close, looked like he was holding his breath. It pissed me off even more. “Hello, ‘friend.’

How’s life treating you?”

He didn’t respond or look me in the eye, but his strong fingers fumbled at my ties. I snorted.

Warren cleared his throat. “Gregor, Jewell. Check the rest of the building.”

“Harlan’s not here, asshole.” I added the insult because it would get his attention. “Don’t you think I’d have said so first thing?”

“But he was,” he said so accusingly it was as if I’d invited the attack on my life. “We can smell him.”

That’s the part I focused on. “Can you?” I replied sweetly. “How interesting. I can’t.”

And I didn’t realize how furious I still was about that loss-about all of them-until the sharp words were out of my mouth. I’d been finely ground under Warren’s ambitious heel, and I was as bitter as a glass of Campari.

“And you don’t know where he went?”

I stared, buying time by taking in his scruffy hair-longer than when I’d last seen him-and the trench he’d abandoned a few months earlier, but had apparently reclaimed. Security blanket, I thought snidely. But I also tempered my emotions, knowing he’d scent out a lie as fast as I could tell it. So I scrounged up my annoyance as a cover. “I know where he was. On a party bus filled with mortals, including my best friends.”

Warren’s opportunity to turn a barbed phrase. “Your best friends?”

“Oh, that’s right,” I said, pretending to muse over Cher’s relationship to Olivia, not me. Never mind that I’d been forced to care for them and see to their safety over the past year. Someone here should have since taken up that slack, but in their efforts to avoid me, no one had. The memory of Cher’s soft arm falling to the ground was what finally put me over the edge.

“What I meant to say was”-and here I yelled, muscles straining as I rose against my bindings-“he attacked the only friends who stuck by me after I lost everything!”

My voice was scratchy from the strangling, but louder than I’d raised it in weeks. And it felt good, using the only power left to me. It also surprised the so-called superheroes surrounding me. Even I had no idea this much raw anger simmered so close to the surface. Sure, I was resentful that every fresh morning brought with it a wave of renewed rejection, but this was the kind of fury that had once had my eyes burning black in my skull, my breath coming from me in waves of noxious hate.

It was my father’s anger, and that, at least, I harbored still.

Felix’s face was taut and drawn into the middle, as were Micah’s mottled, sooty features. Tekla’s remained unreadable, though she too had fallen superstill. Riddick’s powerful hands briefly fell to his sides, and Jewell had begun crying, though she wiped away the tears before Warren whirled to see. Vanessa didn’t bother. Though Warren gave her a warning under his breath, she defiantly continued to stare at me. I stared back as relentlessly, but didn’t soften anything. Sense my pain and your betrayal as I did. Scent it like a chalk outline stamping the air. Feel its abrasion erupting behind your eyelids at night.

“Enough!”

I sucked in a deep breath, the air cool against my heated anger, and turned that hard stare back on Warren. “I don’t take orders from you, old man.”

He damned near hissed. “All mortals are subject to my whim.”

I raised my brows so high they probably disappeared into my hairline. “So we owe you fealty, is that it? For your protection?”

He sniffed, regaining his composure. “Something like that.”

“Then where the fuck were you tonight?”

His lips pinched reflexively and I knew he wanted to punch something.

My arms were still bound, but by now my legs were finally freed, so I decided to take my one-woman guilt trip on the road, slipping off the countertop, but staggering as pins and needles crawled up my limbs. I leaned against the glass case, refusing to fall in front of them as I hissed, “Where the fuck have any of you been?”

“We’re not going to risk-”

“Shut up!” I fired back, because I’d heard the official statement, and wasn’t buying it. “It was rhetorical. Riddick, are you fucking done yet?”

He mumbled what could have been an apology as the last of my bindings fell loose. I pushed from the counter to stand, and realized that my dizziness wasn’t due to the change in positions. I was flush with the power of someone in full control of another’s guilt. In this case, many others. And not just people. Superheroes.

Clinging to the power like a barnacle on a hull, I limped forward. “If you’re done here, I’m going to find a clinic and get cleaned up.”

Micah, ever the physician, stepped forward, sad eyes tucked into the smoky skin, voice strained with pain. “I can-”

“No!” Warren and I yelled in unison.

To ward him off, to keep anyone else from touching me, I swallowed back the lump in my throat and tried on a sneer I only partly felt. “It looks like you can’t even help yourself.”

Jewell gasped, as did Felix, but Micah just stepped back-which I took as a symbolic return to his betrayal of me-and Warren and I again locked gazes. I knew I’d hurt the big softhearted man, but I worked better with anger than pity, which was what I needed to get through this.

Warren made a growling noise in his throat. “Tripp did that to him, and if you know where he is, you need to tell us.”

“I don’t expect to meet up with Harlan Tripp again.” A white almost-lie.

“But you might. And just in case…” He fished in his pocket, then held a cell phone out to me. “Use this if you see him, or hear of any other rogues hiding in my city. It’s an untraceable number, you won’t talk to a person, but you can leave a brief message. We’ll only contact you if we must.”

I fondled the phone, a one-way channel into my past. Why was everything with Warren always so one-way?

“Believe me,” he said, mistaking my silence for acquiescence as I placed the phone on the counter beside me.