The Scent of Shadows

talk in riddles, old man.”

“Ah, but you’re a straight shooter, aren’t you? An Archer, you are.” He made a motion like shooting an arrow into the night, and tilted his head, considering me. “Not just a hunter, though. A target too. The hunter becomes the hunted.”

The wind suddenly picked up, shifting so a breeze blew my hair across my cheeks, setting the hem of the man’s trench coat fluttering around his ankles. He lifted his nose, and his nostrils drew wide, then narrowed again. “Smell that? They know you’re here. But don’t worry. They know I’m here too.”

“I don’t smell anything,” I said, and I had no idea what he was talking about.

He tilted his head in that crazy way he had. “Because you haven’t been taught to recognize their kind. Close your eyes and think of once living things decaying in the ground. A pet rabbit buried then unearthed after a week. Fungus rotting on overripe fruit. Hot sulfur rising from a hole in the earth to taint the wind. Now try again.”

I turned my face into the wind just to humor him, and immediately caught a whiff of something that reminded me of sulfur. Possibly tin. A rusty can.

With the flesh of a long-dead animal sweating inside.

“Christ.” It smelled like Ajax, and I turned my head away sharply, only to find the bum regarding me solemnly. The look sent chills through my spine and into the soles of my feet. Someone this crazy shouldn’t look so sane. I pivoted to leave. Fuck this guy. He could just stay here with his riddles and delusions and rotting scents.

His voice rose, carried to me on the filthy breeze. “You were walking through the desert when you were sixteen years old, leaving your boyfriend’s house in the early morning hours, smelling of passion and love and hope, the same scent that clings to you tonight, in fact.”

My heart was beating so hard I wouldn’t have been surprised if it leapt from my chest into my hands. How did a homeless man who jumped in front of cars and smelled like a sewer know anything about my personal scent? How did he know about me? I turned to find him closer than I expected. So close I had to hold my breath.

“You were attacked by a solitary man who seemed to be everywhere at once,” he continued, dark eye boring into mine. “You were raped, strangled, and left for dead. You awoke with a broken memory beneath the scorching midday sun, and no idea of who you really were. Your memory gradually returned, but you never fully recovered your burgeoning sixth sense. You mended your broken body and turned it into a machine, a weapon, a warrior’s tool. Good thing too. You’ll need it now.”

“How do you know all this?” God, but I hated how small my voice sounded.

“I told you. I have my talents. You have others.”

“You mean, like a superhero?” If that’s what he thought, he obviously had the wrong girl; my life was a fucking soap opera, not a comic book.

The man pursed his lips and looked up as if reading the stars like a map. They were powerful pinpricks this far out in the desert, brilliant and spearing sharply from the sky in the clear night. “I can’t help you now, Joanna. It’s too early by a moon’s rise. I just came to warn you. If you survive, I’ll be in touch.”

Then he began trudging off in that halting gait, heading for the void of empty desert space. But he paused a moment later, and for the first time his body language was uncertain. “Joanna?”

I stared back at him and shivered.

“Make sure you survive.”

Funny, but that was the sanest thing I’d heard all day.

Sanity had been a relatively elusive state since my rape almost a decade earlier. The strange desert interlude with a man who had no business knowing about me brought back just how hard I’d fought since then for even a modicum of normality…though I suppose the novelty of being threatened with a serrated poker might have had something to do with it as well. Either way, both strangers had talked openly about things that had gone unspoken in my family for years, chatting as easily about my patchwork past as if they were asking me to pass the salt…

What’s wrong, Joanna? Seeing things that remind you of a sweltering summer night?

You were attacked by a solitary man who seemed to be everywhere at once.

You were beaten, strangled, and left for dead.

It was true, I had been. But as a rule—one meant to keep that hard-won sanity in check—it wasn’t the truth I generally chose to concentrate on.

After the attack, after I’d healed about as much as a person can heal from such a thing, and after I’d spent nine months in hiding, I did eventually finish high school. I wasn’t going to let myself be trapped, or further victimized by a man who’d already taken so much from me. My anger and fear were replaced by determination and the belief that just because someone tried to make you into a victim didn’t mean that’s what you had to be.

So I did normal things. I went to college, and majored in photography and art. I pushed my mind just as I pushed my body, stretching myself socially before I had a chance to freeze or petrify, and turn into something hard and brittle and dead before my time.

And I forgot, or told myself I forgot, about the child.

It also became important for me to escape Xavier’s gilded cage, that architectural behemoth so falsely resplendent on the outside, but with the moldy invaders of sorrow and blame that’d moved in after my attack. So I lived in a dorm, I had a roommate who kept a record of the men she slept with on a wall calendar. I joined a sorority—okay, only for about a minute, but still—and I pushed myself to date, making sure my gut reaction, that first impulse to withdraw and automatically say no, was kept in check. That’s when I made my rule: never say no. Of course, I sometimes cursed myself and the rigidity of that rule—I’d lost count of how many groping hands I’d had to wrest away—but fending off drunken frat boys was a cakewalk after what I’d been through.

And I’d been extremely careful not to wall myself off, which was why Ben’s comments about hiding behind my camera had touched such a nerve. Okay, so I stalked the city streets when I should have been home preparing a meal for a husband and two-point-five brats. Big deal. But I’d found, in the shadows of this city—my glittering town of dollar buffets and neon dreams—a lack of judgment about such things as what was normal. When I took my camera to the streets, nobody cared about my past or my name. When I tiptoed through the shadows of ugly alleyways, looking into faces that stared fearlessly and openly back at me, I could stop striving and pretending to be whole. And I could just be whole.

But now some bum who thought he was a comic book hero was telling me someone was going to try and attack me again. Worse, there were reasons, despite the man’s incoherent rambling, to believe what he said. One, I already had been attacked. Pretty good sign. Two, our conversation had smacked of more than obscure riddles and hidden meanings. It’d mirrored Ajax’s, if not exactly, then in word choice and content. They both claimed to know me from my scent. They both declared I was special in some way. They each said I was still being watched.

Thirdly, other than my name, family, and past, that scruffy, stinking vagrant had spoken of details nobody knew, some of which I’d purposely forgotten myself. The clincher was, he knew the words I used to describe myself, words that defined who I’d become, filling the holes left in my psyche by a young girl’s inability to defend herself.

Weapon. Warrior. Hunter.

Because despite all my hard work to become a whole woman, and a relatively open one, I was still keenly aware that he—the attacker—had never been found. He never saw the inside of a cage…at least not for what he’d done to me. And he was still out there. I felt it in my ancient fractures. I heard his voice every time dusk set along the Strip.

But I had a place here; in this world, this city, these streets. I’d made it for myself through grit and determination, and I wasn’t going to give it up now just because an anorectic psycho and some deranged bum had knocked haphazardly into my life.

No, I swore, speeding home on the neon-slicked streets. Not me. Not without a knock-down, drag-out, fuck- you fight.

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