The Scent of Shadows

innocuous, just colleagues enjoying an after-hours drink before facing the drive home, but I recognized them as the men who’d chased Ajax. The shorter was dark and severe-looking, but the taller appeared happy and light, bouncing on his toes as he approached the cab. The paranormal world’s answer to Laurel and Hardy.

The doors opened for them. “Is it taken care of?” Warren asked as they slid in.

“Of course,” the first man said. He slouched low, not even glancing at me. “The place was absolutely stinking with her scent.”

“It’s fine,” the other man countered sharply, and they both fell silent.

The cab began moving again, but this time my view of the freeway was blurred by fresh tears. The “it” Warren referred to was really a “she.” I wondered what the headlines would read in tomorrow’s paper. Teen Dies In Botched Hold-Up. Or, Tragedy At Quik-Mart. One thing I was certain it wouldn’t read was Novice Superhero Destroys Yet Another Life. Warren and his friends would see to that.

I sniffled involuntarily at the thought, and the tall man—the one I’d seen leap to face Ajax across the aisle dividers—turned to me with a small, sympathetic smile.

“Here,” he said, holding out my duffel bag. I swallowed hard, took it, and clutched it to my chest. The first man had turned too, but there was no kindness in his face. He rolled his eyes at my tears and turned back around.

“And Ajax?”

“The usual,” came the answer. “Smoke, mirrors, all that Shadow shit.”

The kind man was still watching me. I wanted to tell him to turn around, but right now he seemed to be the only friendly face in the cab. I tried to look nonthreatening. He held his hand out over the back of the seat. “I’m Felix.”

“Here we go,” the other one muttered.

Felix smiled. “So you’re the new Archer. We haven’t had an Archer in the Zodiac since your mother.”

I lifted my hand. “I’m Jo—”

“This is Olivia,” Warren interrupted, and I flushed, feeling his glare.

I dropped my hand back in my lap and turned away from them both. The other man in the front seat mumbled something I couldn’t quite hear, but I had the distinct feeling it wasn’t complimentary.

“Shut up,” the driver said, and we all did.

There was a sense of urgency to the way the cab maneuvered through traffic, around—and in one case over—barriers, and something about the way the light shone through the windshield really did make the city seem divided in two.

“Are we going to make it?”

“We’ll make it, but someone else is going to have to drive.”

“You’re staying on this side, Gregor?” Felix asked. The others also seemed surprised.

“Just until dawn. Someone has to watch the city. Besides, nothing interesting is going to happen with her,” he said, jerking his head in my direction, “before morning.”

“That’ll be a nice change,” I murmured to no one in particular, though Warren grunted.

“Be careful, Gregor. We don’t know if they have intel on you or not.”

“I think if they did they’d have gotten to me by now. I’m not exactly the strongest of the star signs.” Gregor held up his right arm for my benefit. It ended just above the elbow. “I found a lucky penny today, though, and I have my trusty rabbit’s foot. I’ll be fine.”

Warren turned to me. “Like I said on the phone, you can only make the crossing at the exact moment where light and dark are divided evenly in the air. Something to remember if it’s midnight and you’ve been tracked. You’ll have to survive for six more hours before seeking sanctuary.”

“Gawd,” the man up front crossed his arms and mumbled, “she doesn’t even know that?”

I shot forward in my seat, feeling the anger rise in me again. So far I was a complete failure as a superhero, and had a pretty dubious self-image as a human being, but I still had a grasp on my pride, if a tenuous one. “Look, mister, I don’t know who you are or what you’ve got against me, but I’ve never seen you or any of your Kryptonite- fearing buddies before Warren over here jumped in front of my car—”

“Was run down, technically.”

Felix turned to Gregor. “I don’t fear Kryptonite. Do you?”

“So let’s get something stick straight between us. I didn’t ask for this. I’d be more than happy to never know anything about crossings or metamorphoses or any of this other weirdo, paranormal bullshit, but here I am. So get over it. Apparently I have to.”

The man had turned in his seat and watched me through slitted eyes. There was something odd about the texture of his anger; odd, and familiar at the same time. I felt like I should recognize him, or one of the components that made him him, but I didn’t.

At the end of the long silence that followed, Gregor eased the car over to the side of the road, shifted to neutral, and swiveled in his seat to face me. “Olivia, this is Chandra. She’s one of our best blenders in the chemistry lab. She made your new signature scent for you.”

She.

I felt the anger drain from my face and body, along with the color. I did a mental head slap, thinking the familiar thread in Chandra’s genetic makeup was her sex. Female. Hello.

It was definitely one of those days.

“I’ll drive.” Chandra flung open the door.

“Well, that was the wrong thing to say,” Warren muttered as she stalked around the cab.

“Chandra hates being mistaken for a man,” Gregor explained as he opened the driver’s side door, but his eyes were laughing again. And at least I knew I wasn’t the first to have done so. Unfortunately I also knew women. They rarely forgave a slight like this, and Chandra didn’t seem terribly forgiving in the first place.

“Don’t wait up for me, kids,” Gregor said, exiting the car.

“Call if you’re gonna be late,” Warren said.

“Nag, nag, nag.”

The doors shut behind Chandra, and she slammed the car into gear.

“Shit,” I heard Felix mutter.

“Got your belt on?” Warren asked. The car revved, tires squealing and spinning over gravel before finding purchase and jolting forward. I was thrown back into my seat, my gaze fixed straight ahead, but from the corner of my eye I saw Gregor’s diminishing bulk in the sideview mirror. However, the solid concrete wall standing twelve feet before us seemed a more pressing issue.

“Women drivers…” Warren said, sounding weary.

Perhaps the car could fly, I thought as the wall loomed closer. Or maybe the wall moved or disintegrated or we’d disappear right through it like it wasn’t even there. But then Warren braced himself beside me, and I knew that wall wasn’t going anywhere.

We struck it going at least sixty-five miles an hour. The impact propelled me into the seat in front of me, and the angry screech of metal kissing concrete married burning rubber and dust-filled air. Bricks scraped against the sides of the car, slamming atop the roof before we came to a halt as violently and abruptly as any normal car would. When I opened my eyes, however, I saw the shell of the cab was undamaged.

“I hate that part,” Warren muttered, unbuckling.

I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth and came away with fresh blood. “What the hell was that?”

“What?” he said, raising a brow. “You thought crossing over to an alternate reality would be easy?”

“You’ll get used to it,” Felix said, smiling as the doors swung open. “Helps if you have a cocktail first.”

“You mean I’ll have to do that again?”

Chandra smirked at me through the rearview mirror. “Welcome to our world,” she said, and got out of the cab.

Bitch, I thought, watching her stalk away through debris.

“Come on,” Warren said, waving me along. I sighed, shook my head, and went ahead and followed him into his world.

I stepped from that cab in the same way other adventurous humans once stepped onto the moon. A small