flipped open, flickered once, and registered Greta standing there. Its back arched immediately, every hair standing on end, then it hissed and lunged for her with tiny, unsheathed claws.
Greta smacked at the bottom of Rena’s cupped hands and sent the kitten flying.
Hunter lunged, catching the flipping body just before it touched concrete. Greta ran for her office, Gregor tripped her up, and she sprawled like a spineless scarecrow.
“The birds were an excuse to keep the cats away,” I said when the shouts in the hallway had finally quieted. “Her office and her room are the only places she can’t fully mask her true scent.”
Greta rolled, eyes dry. Wide, but with madness, not fear, they locked on me with unfettered hatred. Bilious blackened color, like smoke, pooled to surround her body. One by one she studied the others as if coming face-to- face with them for the first time. “Your precious leader will be dead by morning.”
“We should send you up the chute,” Felix said. “You deserve to fry for what you’ve done!”
Greta spit in his direction, not bothering to hide her Shadow side now. She reeked of maggots and rotted eggs, a fetid blend that literally spilled from her pores.
Vanessa advanced on her, nose wrinkled in disgust, eyes fired with fury. “Maybe we’ll just let her loose in the cat ward. Her and her little lovebirds.”
“I raised your father,” Rena said, shaking her head. “He’d be so disappointed.”
“He’d be used to it,” Greta retorted, but I don’t think anybody felt sorry for her.
“But there’s no way he’d—” A sharp pain slashed through my chest and I bent, legs buckling. My mouth opened in a soundless cry as I hit the floor, and Hunter tried to lift me, but I resisted, needing to feel the ground beneath me, anchoring me. “They’re hurting Warren again.”
Greta started to laugh. “The Tulpa knows you’ve found me out! They’ll kill him now…and it’s all her fault!” She pointed at me.
Warren screamed in my brain, agony wracking us both, but nothing came out of my mouth. Then a sickening spiral, down, down into myself, and I knew that Warren, wherever he was, had passed out. That didn’t stop Ajax. He laughed, and the sound resonated in my mind. A boot-shaped sole slammed into my kidney, I retched, and Greta’s laughter joined his when my jaw cracked with a finishing blow, even though nothing had been touched on the surface. I gave thanks that Warren was unconscious, but shuddered knowing he’d have to wake again.
Around me the others were trying to figure out a way past the Shadows in the boneyard.
“Even if you figure out a way to hide your marks,” Greta interrupted, sneering, “and you
“Bitch,” he murmured.
“—it’ll be too late for Warren.” She bared her teeth, and it was hard to see where kindness had ever lived on that face. “You’ll never get to him in time.”
It was the last thing I heard for a while. The questioning and confused babble continued ruminating up and down the hall, and the voices laughing and groaning in my head fell into the background. I tuned them all out, but at length became aware of a dull but insistent tapping. I pried one eye open to find Tekla pointing at me from the other side of the glass again. Only I got it this time. She wasn’t pointing at me. She was pointing at the glass.
“You’re all lost,” Greta was screeching from her position across from me on the floor. “Hear me, Archer? They’ve already won!”
There was the report of flesh meeting flesh, a palm arching across Greta’s face. Then Chandra’s voice, as angry as I’d ever heard it. “Tell us where he is!”
She cackled. “I won’t, no matter what you do, and I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing I did my job! You’re all marked! Do you hear me? Targets! You’ll never even reach his kill spot.”
Warren stirred inside me. He was alive, and if I wanted him to stay that way, I knew what I had to do. As my fingers searched, found my conduit sprawled next to me, the tapping on the window ceased. Forcing myself to keep my hand steady, I pointed it.
“Hey, Greta,” I said, and watched the satisfaction fall from her face as she turned to find herself staring down the pointed shaft of my arrow. “I’m not marked.”
I shifted and shot fluidly, and though it was the first time I’d fired this weapon, it was as if I’d been born to the motion. Greta shrieked and ducked, though she’d be lying in her own kill spot had I still been pointing it at her. Instead, the arrow cleaved through the window of Tekla’s cell, shattering the glass into hundreds of tiny pieces that fell like diamonds onto the hallway floor. Tekla’s face appeared a moment later, but her voice came first.
Warren’s voice.
“Come to Paradise, the Hall of the Slain, also the dwelling of those who never die. Where virgin warriors guard the gates of eternity. The palace with five hundred and fifty doors. Where dead warriors feast, where gods abide.”
“What is he saying?” I heard someone ask.
“Valhalla,” I said, and sunk back to the ground. “They’re holding him at Valhalla.” And I doubled over as Tekla cried out, Warren’s skull splitting inside of me with a blow meant to silence him forever.
25
Tekla, it seemed, had always spoken for the others. Before Stryker’s death, and Greta’s betrayal, she had been able to see, via flashes and images, when an agent of Light was walking into danger. It had been a marvelous, if disconcerting, gift. It was during one of these moments, Micah surmised, that Greta must have bound herself to Tekla, and thus began the downward spiral of Zodiac troop 175, and of Tekla herself.
The past six months had stripped her of her voice, and like a rewound tape, she began spouting all she’d seen while locked in her five-by-eight cell. It would take a while to catch up, but time was something we didn’t have.
Warren’s voice had fallen quiet inside me, and I didn’t need a psychic to tell me that Ajax was behind the stillness. I felt it as clearly as if I possessed the Sight. He’d silenced Warren to try and keep us from tracking him further, but hadn’t killed him outright. No, that was still the carrot dangling on a stick.
Which meant there was only one thing to do.
“Find a way to get me up the chute without frying,” I told Hunter, “and I can find Warren.”
A short argument ensued between those who thought I should stay put versus those who believed I shouldn’t, but ultimately what it came down to was this: the others were marked, and I wasn’t. I was linked to Warren, and they weren’t. And, finally, if I really was Warren’s beloved Kairos, I couldn’t be killed today, or anytime soon.
But if he was wrong? I thought as I headed back to my mother’s room in the troop’s barracks. If I wasn’t the person they all thought I was? Well, then they’d need Warren far more than they needed me. He was the troop leader. He could train the next generation. He could find the true Kairos.
But that didn’t mean I’d go down without a fight.
Sliding open the closet doors, I decided my mother had the fiercest wardrobe ever. Literally. Arranged on evenly spaced hangers were tops, slacks, and single-piece stretch suits in varying weights of silk, spandex, and leather. The uniformity came in two colors only, black or charcoal gray, with a hand that shimmered at the touch. This material, Warren had explained, would not burn through at the flaring of a glyph.
“Olivia would tremble with jealousy,” I murmured, running my fingers over the fine material. I wasn’t exactly steady myself, though that was probably nerves rather than reverence. After all, when my mother suited up, she at least had an idea of what she’d been about to face. I simply assumed I was facing the worst.
With the thought that this ensemble would be featured on the next series of Light and Shadow comics, I picked a long-sleeved V-neck T-shirt and fitted cargoes. Though comfortable enough, they fit me like they’d been sprayed on. I didn’t recall my mother being quite as curvy as Olivia, but then I didn’t remember her ever wearing a leather bra either, and here it was.
I dressed and looked at myself in the mirror. Other than my hair, which floated around me like a wavy bleached cloud, I looked like a shadow. A smudge on reality. Fitting, I thought, since that’s what I’d be.
Standing before the small square mirror, I slicked back my hair and rolled it into a tight club. I found a pair of chopstick combs, similar to the ones the Chinese used to secure their own glossy locks but sharper and steel-
