gratified to see his movements actually appeared nervous. Even superhumans were human. “Fifteen minutes until the light splits.”
Felix clapped his hands together. “So let’s go kick some preternatural ass.”
“On my signal, cowboy,” Hunter said, earning a scowl. “Once you’re through the chute, move aside because I’ll be coming up fast. Vanessa, take the left flank. Olivia, you go up last.”
“But—”
“Last,” he repeated. “They won’t sense you so maybe they won’t see you. Besides, when was the last time you felt Warren stirring inside of you?”
I thought about it. It’d been a while.
“I don’t want that connection severed. He may be too weak without you.”
“Thanks for your concern,” I muttered, earning nothing more than an arched brow.
“Whatever you do, don’t hesitate. These bastards are fast.”
“Not as fast as we are,” Felix said, earning a high five from Vanessa. He rubbed his hands together, his boyish enthusiasm turned deadly.
“Wait,” I said, suddenly nervous. “What if I accidentally shoot one of you? I mean, what if I can’t tell the difference?”
“Can’t tell the difference between Shadow and Light?” Felix scoffed. “Impossible.”
“It’s too late to worry about now,” Hunter said, and motioned Felix forward to stand on a large X. Raising his left hand, Hunter placed his right on a chrome lever. “Felix, go.”
With a whoosh of air, he was gone. Hunter took his place and, without hesitation, or even a backward glance, shot from mid-crouch up the chute.
Vanessa flipped open her conduit, the blades of the fan locking violently in place. Then she whipped it shut again, holding it ready in her right hand. She looked straight up, back slightly bowed, like she was beseeching the heavens. Throwing back the lever, she whispered a final word. I couldn’t hear it, but I read her lips, and it was, indeed, an invocation. Stryker’s name.
And suddenly I was alone.
I swallowed hard, and tried to think of my mother—what would she think if she could see me now?—but she and all of my other soft memories had been locked up tight, and to access them now would mean revealing my light to the world. I touched my chest where Warren’s second heart had, until recently, resided, but he too seemed to have abandoned me. Or did he think we’d abandoned him? The thought put some resolve into me. I didn’t know what I was about to face, but at least I knew why.
Finally, I knew why.
Slipping the shield over my eyes, I let Greta’s fresh death course through my blood, and the other death I’d caused poked its head, Butch-shaped, above the murky swamp of my darkest thoughts. I let the images surface, and my palms itched as I recalled slicing a tongue, severing hands, pushing a syringe. I let the darkness swirl inside of me, upsetting the hate that had settled like silt on the bottom of my soul. Hand on my conduit, I mainlined adrenaline and stood as the others had, on the giant X, knees bent in anticipation. Then I threw back the lever, and my body was shuttled into space.
They were fighting before I ever made it up the chute. I could hear them, their cries tunneling past me as I rose to the surface, the wind screaming in my ears, my eyes and temples cool and untouched beneath the shield. If the breath wasn’t being whisked so rapidly from my body, I would have sighed in thanksgiving.
My arrival above was announced by nothing more than a hiss, and that masked by the combat around me. I crouched atop the Slipper and took a quick inventory. The boneyard was awash in shadows. And Shadows.
Felix had been right—it was physically impossible not to discern the difference between the two. Agents of Light were like overgrown fireflies, zigzagging in the air, easy targets were they not so damned fast. Stars trailed in blinding streaks behind them, the air sparkling in their wake. The Shadows—trailing smoke behind them like downed bombers—had the best chance to nail one by anticipating their moves, striking the air marked before them. But the agents of Light anticipated this too.
I watched Felix swivel, a maniacal shooting star, all lithe limbs and bowing core, a frustrated Shadow warrior roaring murderously behind him…then crying out again as he was struck from the back. Vanessa wheeled away, trailing off-pink lights like a whipping tail, the smoke of a Shadow warrior obscuring them as he followed close.
Then I saw Hunter. Suspended ten feet in the air and dropping fast on a Shadow, his loose hair flew madly about his head while his whip wheeled behind him. I knew then why they made him their tactical leader. Black stars, glittering silver in the predawn light, were camouflaged, like a trick of the eye, and his whip struck out like a feline flicking a deadly tail.
But the Shadows weren’t exactly sluggish, and there were more of them. I picked two off with my conduit from the top of the Slipper—piercing one to a giant letter N, and catapulting the other through the air to drop behind the one-dimensional outline of a martini glass. Still, I considered these kills nothing more than luck since neither they nor the rest had seen me yet.
The Neon Boneyard was quickly becoming a cloud of smoke and flame. I scurried to the ground, taking cover behind a rusting depiction of a slot machine, and waited for an opening in the melee. Problem was, most of the fighting was taking place in the thick of the smoke. I decided to wait it out, take only a sure shot but when the yard finally cleared again, my breath caught and held.
All movement had ceased. The remaining warriors, both Shadow and Light, were frozen in place, chests heaving, a weapon at every back. They looked like a human Scrabble game, one piece linked to another by conduit; brutal hinges on the verge of swinging open at the slightest provocation. Hunter’s whip was lashed around the neck of a woman dressed like a prostitute, but who had the creamy complexion of an eighteenth century debutante. He had only to give one great yank for the barbed hook to cleave her larynx from her throat.
But there was another Shadow behind Hunter, and he had an ax arched over Hunter’s head. Felix had him covered, an edged boomerang cradled on his windpipe, but a normal-sized woman with an abnormally large machete had lodged her grip beneath his breastbone, and his other hand was clutched beneath it to keep the weapon from sliding and rending him in two.
Vanessa had her steel fan arched across the woman’s neck, but the first woman—Hunter’s whore- debutante—had circled around, and had a slim steel brand poised just beneath Vanessa’s left eye. I was the sole independent actor, but I was afraid to move. Nobody else moved either.
“Give it up,” Hunter said, sounding unafraid.
“You have an ax resting at your temple and you’re telling me to give it up?” The man behind him laughed, but it died away as Felix shifted his boomerang, nestling in closer. Like a snake eating its tail, I thought, watching the circle of people. The beast was going to destroy itself.
“You’re surrounded,” Hunter told him.
The man laughed. “Not true, Ram-head. The Tulpa claims we’ve already killed off five of your star signs. There’s only three of you here, the Libra’s captured, and Micah is probably still helping Gregor scoop his bowels from the floor.” The Shadow women began to snicker. “That leaves no one.”
Hunter stole their laughter for himself. “What? And the Tulpa’s never lied to you before?”
The man’s smile fell. Light flashed beneath his skin, his bones burning briefly, then he was himself again. “The Tulpa tells us all we need to know.”
“I see. I suppose he didn’t think you needed to know we planted ten initiates in the boneyard before you ever arrived.” He was good. Even I couldn’t sense the lie.
“Perhaps he didn’t know,” Felix said, the usual cockiness in his voice somewhat strained. Who could blame him with a machete at his heart?
“You’re bluffing. The Tulpa knows all.”
“So when this cactus sign explodes behind me, he’ll know it?”
That was my cue. I cocked an arrow back in my compact bow and took aim.
“We’ve been camped outside your doorway all night. If there were even one initiate out here we would have found him by now.”
I fired a shot past his head, the arrow whistling past his hairline before imploding the pictorial sign on impact. I was moving again before it hit. The Shadows cringed.
