“They’re linked,” Micah repeated.
I thought of Warren, the way he’d left that afternoon; agitated, angry, afraid.
“Oh, my God,” Micah said, realizing the same thing. He lowered his head into his hands, Gregor’s blood staining his temples and forehead and ears. “Ajax has been one step ahead of us the whole time.”
I conjured the image, my last, of Warren striding down the hall, trench coat billowing at his ankles, the need to do the right thing driving his limbs. My heart sank as I looked at everybody’s face. If this was a game, I thought, clutching my gut, we were one move away from losing it all.
23
Felix and Micah helped me back to my room, where Greta lit candles and some spicy incense to thicken the air, and gave me a pill to block the connection between Warren and me.
“You need your rest,” she told me as I swallowed it, feeling both relief and guilt as I did so. “Concentrate on building a mental wall between Warren and yourself. Protect your thoughts and feelings from those who are probing at him to get to you. That’s more important even than blocking the pain.”
Easy for you to say, I thought, eyes following her from the room. But the smoke from the incense interceded after that, floating between the synapses in my brain, taking the edge from my worries.
“Warren would want that,” Rena added, and I glanced over to where she sat in the corner, rocking in a chair she’d brought in from her own room. “You can bet he’s doing the same.”
The destroyed craters where her eyes should have been had turned to black pools in the candlelight. All her other charges were tucked in bed for the night, and she’d offered to tend to me while what remained of the troop convened in the briefing room. I knew what they were doing; talking about me, around me, but—once again—not to me. I wondered hazily which of them would cast the deciding vote…and how soon before I was kicked out of the sanctuary. Sacrificed for the sake of their leader.
“You should be meditating,” Rena said, as if that would solve everything as she leaned back in her chair.
“The meditation exercises aren’t working,” I told her, managing to work up a snarl, but paid for it when my intestines filled with fire.
“That’s because you’re not doing them,” she said lightly as I pressed back into my pillows, writhing until the burning subsided.
When it finally felt like all I had was a mean case of heartburn, I glanced back at her with watery eyes. “They’re going to vote me out, aren’t they? They hold me responsible for Warren’s capture.”
She shook her head, but it was a defeated rather than reassuring gesture. “No, Olivia. The Shadows orchestrated this, just as they’ve orchestrated every heartbreak we’ve ever had to endure.” She dropped her head back, seeming to deflate where she sat, before adding, “And Warren did this too. He always does.”
This last bit was said with a sort of long-standing resignation, and I’d have tried to read her aura, but I was too tired, groggy with the smoke rising in the air between us, and too afraid it would cause me more needless pain. I also wanted to ask what she meant, but was afraid I’d get more mumbling about Warren’s secrets—as Micah had done—or protestations that it wasn’t her story to tell, as Greta had claimed. So, instead, I asked a different question.
“How’d Warren get his limp?”
Her rocker creaked to a halt. I swallowed hard, but didn’t fill the silence lengthening between us. Rena had seen Warren through his first life cycle; if anyone knew about him and his past, it was she. And though there were larger questions than this niggling at me, this one seemed innocuous enough to start with, so I waited silently for her to tell me what she would.
“His father gave it to him.”
I’d jolted, causing fire to light along my spine. It reminded me that sudden movements were a bad idea, but I’d been expecting anything but that. “But…but only…”
“Conduits can leave lasting disfigurement, yes.” She grimaced, rocking harder. It didn’t look comforting. “Have you noticed Warren doesn’t carry a personal weapon?”
She went on, though she couldn’t see my nod.
“He wouldn’t touch the Taurean conduit after his father used it against him…and after he, in turn, used it against his father.”
And what she told me next was more than I’d ever have guessed about the man who was so absurd one moment, so serious the next.
Samson Clarke hadn’t been the first choice for his generation’s Taurus. Another agent, a woman named Mia, had possessed that star sign, though Samson gained it after the Shadows ambushed her in a drainage tunnel leading to the Las Vegas wash. He avenged Mia’s death over the next few years, taking out two of the Shadows who’d trapped her in that tunnel, and helping his peers kill a third. Meanwhile, he’d taken up with the younger sister of the Arien Light, and Warren was born shortly thereafter.
The birth of a son, rather than a daughter, had been a disappointing blow to Samson, one he never hid from the scrawny child growing up, literally, in his father’s shadow. Never one to let a little thing like monogamy stop him, Samson cast Warren’s mother aside and set his sights on someone who’d already proven herself capable of producing a daughter. The leader’s mate. When she rejected him outright, rather than deciding it had anything to do with him, or her distaste for the way he’d so faithlessly treated Warren’s mother, he decided it was because he wasn’t powerful enough for her. Yet.
Rena sighed, and if she had eyes, they’d have been unfocused, looking through the present and the smoke from the incense filling up the room, while vividly reliving the distant past. “So he tried to take the position of troop leader for himself.”
But Samson Clarke talked in his sleep. Warren, who’d been charged with straightening his father’s room and tidying his belongings at the end of each day—including sharpening his conduit—discovered the details of his plot over a period of several days. His fear of his father’s wrath, plus a desire to please him despite the years of neglect Samson had shown him, kept him from saying anything to the other star signs. But on the night his father attacked the troop leader, Warren suddenly discovered the courage to stand up to Samson…and nearly had his legs cleaved out from under him for the effort.
“The leg wound is a reminder of the night he killed his father,” Rena told me, her voice carefully absent of emotion, “and, though he doesn’t ever say it, it’s also a reminder that he failed to save the real troop leader.”
And yet the others still rewarded him with the Taurean star sign, and later with the troop leadership, ironically giving Warren what his father had been so desperate to possess.
I laid where I was, mind still hazy from the incense, but more numb from the telling. Warren’s own father had betrayed him. After a moment more I found my voice, though my mouth was sandpaper dry. “Why couldn’t Samson just have worked for the title of troop leader? He was obviously a good agent. Couldn’t he have made it there, eventually, on his own?”
“He wasn’t lineally qualified,” Rena said, her chair squeaking beneath her as she rocked. “He was born an independent.”
“A rogue agent?” I blurted before I could stop myself. “I mean—”
She smiled wryly and waved off my stuttering. “He absolutely personified the term.”
Because though the Shadows had technically killed Mia, Samson Clarke was the one who’d pointed them her way.
“Ah, Olivia,” Rena sighed, when my horrified gasp filled the room. “Just because agents of Light are…super, other,
And he’d wanted it enough to go from merely wishing for leadership to maiming his own son.
I thought of the way Warren nearly snarled each time someone mentioned the independents. “It’s why he
