The Scent of Shadows

stop. I threw everything—the monitors, the machines, the cords, the tables and plastic chairs. All the while a voice, my true voice, was severing the strands of my new vocal cords. “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you…”

Olivia, so good and sweet and pure, never had a chance against Butch, and my heart had broken at that fact every day since her death. And my mother, who would have been able to fight him, hadn’t been there to protect her; ever since I learned the real reason for her absence, my heart had bled for her too.

But never once had I allowed it to break for myself. I had breath, and I had life, and I told myself that was enough, and more than I deserved. But after seeing Ben’s face, his all-consuming anguish, there was no stopping it. I screamed, and broke, and shattered everything around me, so it would represent how I felt, so it would match my insides; everything torn and stripped, raw and aching. So tired. And so very, very sorry.

When I’d finished—two minutes, two hours, or two years later—I found myself curled into a fetal position, rocking back and forth in the corner of a demolished and empty room; the makeup artist had long since fled, the lights busted on the walls, their counterparts swinging on bare wires from the ceiling, machines toppled and silent and dead.

“Joanna.”

I looked up. Warren’s appearance, as sudden as the first time I’d seen him, surprised me, as did his use of my real name. He’d been calling me Olivia for days. He was dressed the fool again; an unwashed, unwanted bum reeking of desperation and desertion, but his eyes were trained on me with a sort of sober ferocity, and that brought fresh tears to my eyes. He was really seeing me. “Now the true healing can begin.”

I shook my head slowly, then harder, and covered my face with my palms. This wasn’t healing. This was attack; the way antibiotics assault a foreign agent planted inside the body, though in this case I was the foreign agent. I was the virus inside.

“I am not dead,” I told him through stiffly splayed fingers. He knew this, of course, but I needed to hear the words for myself. “I’m not. I feel more, and I smell more. I’m more alive than I’ve ever been.”

“Olivia—” he began, crossing the room.

But I cut him off and backed away. I didn’t want consoling words or generic explanations. “I’m not Olivia! I’m not weak or vulnerable! I’m not…” That good, I thought. “That innocent.” What I was was alive, damn it, and I wanted someone, anyone, to know it! No, that wasn’t quite true either.

I wanted Ben to know it.

Warren crouched in front of me. “It’s enough that you know who you are. As long as you know, the rest won’t matter. In time.” And something in his tone made me think he’d had occasion to tell himself the same thing.

But he was wrong, I thought as he held out a hand. It mattered because Ben mattered. What this was going to do to him—again—mattered. But I took the hand anyway. It was the only one being offered to me.

Warren pulled me to my feet and steadied me before him. “I know who you are too. And I promise I won’t ever forget.”

“I’m Joanna,” I said, and allowed myself to weep. I was both Light and Shadow and knew now that I always had been, but more than that…“I’m still me.”

I remained in the hospital another week. Even Xavier’s raging and threats weren’t enough to get Micah to release me into his custody. I was safer there than I’d be anywhere on the outside, and Micah wanted to keep me hidden until he was sure they’d completely masked my old scent and he could provide me with a new olfactory identity as well.

“We have to make sure it’s perfect. Ajax is especially good at scenting out the identities of new agents,” Micah told me one day as he toyed with my hair again. “Probably because he takes it personally.”

“Personally? Why?”

Micah shook his head, muttering something about Warren and his damned secrets, before continuing, louder, “Ajax’s mother betrayed the Tulpa by crossing over and trying to become Light.”

I turned in my chair to face him. “You can do that?”

Micah forcibly turned me back to the mirror. “Oh, yes. Just like humans, we always have a choice in who we want to be.”

I thought that was a damned ironic thing for him to say to me, but Micah had resumed flat-ironing my hair— I’d apparently become his favorite new doll—and missed my pointed look in the mirror. “We took out three of their Zodiac signs in as many weeks because of her advice.”

At least I knew now why Ajax grew so incensed when anyone mentioned his mother. “So did she stay… Light?”

Micah shrugged. “She may have, if she’d lived long enough. We changed her identity, masked her scent, did everything we could to make her ‘invisible’ to the Shadows. Only one person could have located her.”

Someone who’d been inside her, I realized. Someone who’d been of her. “Ajax let the Tulpa kill his own mother?”

“Oh, no,” Micah said, putting down the brush. “When Ajax found her, he did it himself.”

My own sense of smell was also blossoming in ways I’d never have imagined. The bouquets that filled my room were like floral injections into my bloodstream. The roses bled color behind my eyes, carnations spiced my palate. The first time I stepped onto the hospital’s outdoor patio I almost fainted at the assault of textured scents there. I could smell emotions too; the gaseous heat of anger, the seepage of cloying suspicions into the pores, and the dry vibration of denial as the dramas of the hospital played out around me.

But Warren was wrong about the rest of the world not mattering. I grieved for Ben daily, and, though I’d never given it much thought before, found myself also mourning my old life; longing for my house, my darkroom, my clothing, my old body. I couldn’t believe how much I’d taken for granted; the ability to move about in the world as myself, and speak my mind without wondering first if it was something Olivia would say.

I was a disappointment, if not a complete failure, at this last task. Xavier would frown when I automatically responded caustically to one of his remarks, leaving my bedside not long after. And Cher would fall uncharacteristically silent when I reacted to one of her bubble-brained ideas with nothing more than a blank stare. Micah explained to them that I wouldn’t seem totally myself for quite some time, that hiccups in my character were to be expected, and I was experiencing prolonging trauma from seeing my sister plummet to her death. That, at least, was true. But he never explained how to recover from that.

He did, however, fill me in on the Zodiac’s history, answering my questions as rapidly and thoroughly as I fired them, still feeling guilty, I think, about turning me into my sister.

When Warren first told me about the Zodiac troop, I pictured cartoon figures, hyperbolic symbols of the forces of good pitted against evil flying through the air, wearing ungodly amounts of spandex, and bright capes fluttering behind them like bulletproof banners. But Micah spoke of an organized, if otherworldly, quest for personal power, dominance over city politics and influence over community mores, and gradually the bright primary colors of Saturday morning cartoons were replaced by stark slashes of blurred action. The human drama of life and death played out in my imagination on a canvas of black and white…one occasionally splattered in bloodred. In other words, it was our reality of Shadow versus Light.

We’d always been here, Micah said. We weren’t extraterrestrial like Superman or Captain Marvel, and we hadn’t always been referred to as superheroes. But as long as there’d been humans, there’d been individuals who could access places and planes others could not. People who were faster, stronger, better healers.

“Ever wonder what a mortal would be capable of if he or she utilized more than just ten percent of their brain at any given time?” he asked me one day while fine-tuning the work he’d done on a tooth I’d chipped but Olivia hadn’t.

A few mortals do use more than that, of course, and even one percent is enough to make a perceptible difference. For example, there are those individuals who can control pain enough to, say, pin themselves with a foot-long needle—in one side of their body and out the other—with no apparent damage done and no blood to show otherwise. There are others who can spontaneously inflict a sort of self-hypnosis, slowing their bodily functions enough to place themselves into an almost catatonic state. This was particularly helpful, Micah said, if there’s some mortal injury done to the body and no medical help readily available.

So it was possible, in part, for humans to attain greater strength and control and ability…given a healthy amount of discipline and practice. “For us, though,” and here Micah winked as he peered into my mouth, “it’s as natural as the blood moving through our vessels.”

Yet even we have our limits. We might be able to manipulate the boundaries of our minds and bodies, but