The Scent of Shadows

love.

“She just wouldn’t give up,” Micah continued, shaking his head. “A more single-minded and brave woman I’ve never met. She spent years with the Tulpa, then years with Xavier, and in the process forfeited any personal joy she might have had, any chance at a normal life.”

“She still failed,” I pointed out.

“Yes, but she was so close,” he said, tucking a curl behind my ear. “A few more weeks and she would’ve had him.”

“But?” I prompted, needing to know why she’d disappeared so abruptly, both when I’d needed her most and these people had needed her also.

“But you.”

Micah looked at me with utter stillness, a bittersweet smile on his face. “You inherited more than your mother’s cheekbones, Joanna. You possess her genetic makeup, and while she had the ability to hide her own scent, you weren’t protected. You hit puberty, entered what we call the second life cycle, and your hormones went rampant. Shadow agents were scouring the city looking for her, and one of them—”

“Found me.” I closed my eyes as the final pieces of the puzzle clicked together. No wonder her grief had been so palpably guilt-ridden.

“He tried to kill you, to kill everything that was good and pure and…Zoe in you. Just so you know, any one of us would have died that night.”

But I hadn’t. Why? I glanced at myself in the mirror. The eyes were still mine, I noticed. They’d deepened like the night at the mention of my attack. “His genes,” I said. “They protected me.”

Micah inclined his head. “I guess you could say the Tulpa, the creation, was now your creator. You’re something new, Joanna. Something never seen before, though your existence has been foretold. See, you’re the only one who’s ever been both…certainly the only one who’s ever survived such an attack. The only one.”

Then he explained about someone called the Kairos, the fulcrum, upon whom all their fates hinge. It was part of their mythology, both Shadow and Light, and Warren apparently thought I was it. I was silent for a while, trying to let that soak in with all the rest, but everything just seemed to pile up on the surface of my consciousness. “Does he know about me?” I finally asked.

Micah shook his head. “Not that you’re his daughter, thus not that we suspect you’re the Kairos either. He only knows that you’re Zoe’s. We can all smell it on you now that you’ve reached your third life cycle. And now that he’s aware of your existence, he’ll be gunning to take out his revenge on you.”

So the leader of the paranormal underworld—or at least that of the greater Las Vegas valley—had a hard-on for my blood. Fabulous. I bit my lip and looked up at Micah through the mirror. “So did he do it?”

“What? Who?”

“The man. That night. Did he kill…” I searched for the right words, but there weren’t any. There was only the truth. “Did he kill all that was good in me?”

“Yes,” Micah said softly, but smiled. “But that you’re even asking that question should reassure you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Simple, Joanna. He broke the potential hero in you. Then your mother put you back together.”

The machines were silent, no dripping or beeping to mark the passage of time, and the room was painfully quiet as I pondered this. An answer to one of my life’s most enduring questions was taking shape in my mind, but before I could form it aloud, Micah did it for me.

“She gave you everything she could, every olfactory blend we’d created to protect her, every personal power that kept her whole. She used chemistry to mask your pheromones and then she hid you, even from us. But that left her open to discovery and vulnerable to attack. She knew it was only a matter of time before the Tulpa found her, and if he got hold of her…” Micah shuddered.

“But how could she just leave? Abandon everything she’d worked for?” Abandon us, I wanted to say. I wondered if I hadn’t said it aloud because Micah gave me such a look of disdain and annoyance that I immediately felt ashamed.

“She gave it all up for you.”

I didn’t move, not even to swipe at the curl that lay tickling my left cheek. I heard myself breathing, heard Micah behind me, and cast my thoughts in his direction, just to see what I would discover. He smelled like silver powder, rain clouds, and Old Spice. The blend fit him perfectly.

“So what am I supposed to do now?”

Find the Tulpa? Find my mother? Find out how the Shadow agents were killing off the star signs?

“Just learn to stay alive,” Micah said gently, and put the brush down. “We’ll never know what you’re capable of if you don’t at least do that.”

“And you’re going to teach me?”

“Me,” he nodded, “and others. We’ll teach you to be the person you were born to be. We’ll teach you the ways of the Zodiac, of the Archer in particular, and your mother’s legacy.”

A legacy of star signs and superheroes. I glanced in the mirror at the finished product, an image that had emerged at some point during the past ten minutes. Blue eyes widened back at me, the rims of contacts barely discernable along the edges of my irises. “Wow.”

Micah beamed behind me. “We found some great photos of Olivia in your house. You have a real talent. I was able to capture her down to the most minute detail.” He reached into the pocket of his lab coat and pulled out the photo I’d brought with me to the motel the night we’d met. “See?”

I held the photo in front of me, studying it carefully, before lifting my eyes to the mirror. There was no discernable difference between the two images. I frowned. Shouldn’t I, at least, be able to tell us apart?

“See how happy she is,” Micah said, pointing out one difference.

“That’s because someone’s taking her picture,” I muttered. But it wasn’t. It was just Olivia. Happy, yes. And open, trusting. Innocent. “I look more like Olivia than Olivia,” I said.

“I would bet,” he said, nodding cautiously, “if you were willing, you could even fool Xavier.”

I glanced at him sharply, then sighed. What were my options? I mean, I wanted my old body back, my own face if only so I could scowl and not have it look like a sultry pout, but I couldn’t exactly ask him to change me back, not after I’d already been dead almost a week. An altogether different identity would be just that, different, but hardly an improvement.

Stay alive, I thought doubtfully. Survive. To do that I would have to convince the world I was Olivia Archer. One part of me thought, How hard could it be? Olivia shopped and brunched and chaired a bevy of balls and charities, and—at night, when no one was looking—ran an illegal website. I could probably just skip that part.

But what about the harder part of being Olivia? Could I really allow myself to be that soft without seeing myself as weak? That vulnerable without thinking like a victim? That agreeable without believing I was a pushover? It wasn’t the things Olivia did that gave me pause. It was her utter defenselessness.

I pursed my lips and watched Olivia pout across from me. So that’s how she does it, I thought, and smiled. Her mouth—my mouth, actually, since it’d been the same—curved upward, looking devastatingly seductive in that heart-shaped face. I lifted my eyes to Micah, who was watching, waiting as I decided.

“You did a very good job, Micah.”

He took the compliment for what it was, a concession, and an acceptance of my situation. A grin bloomed in reply. “Thank you, Olivia,” he said.

Olivia.

Me. Olivia. I took a deep breath, then released it slowly, until my body felt emptied of air. Perhaps this way, through me, Olivia could still live. I rather liked that idea. It was the least I could do for her…and the only thing now. At least it made me feel less helpless, and that was something. As for the rest, I’d just have to figure it out as I went along. “You may send my father in.”

Micah held out a hand and gently helped me to my feet so that we stood eye-to-eye for a moment. “Yes,” he finally said, “I think you’re quite up for a visit now. A miraculous recovery, really. Your father will be so pleased.”

Then it’d be the first time I’d ever pleased him, I thought sourly, but that wasn’t what I said to Micah. It wasn’t what he was waiting to hear. It wasn’t, I thought, what Olivia would say.