should’ve realized long ago that his disguise was that he was alive. Human.
“Nobody?” I asked, and let the darkness living inside me temporarily rise to the surface. It was little more than a parlor trick, but Joaquin swallowed hard, which gave me a glow of satisfaction. I increased the effect, and Sebastian hissed. I grinned at him and let my father’s face fade.
“Neat trick…if you weren’t hiding behind a child’s aura while you did it.” He’d recovered well, and motioned to the chair across from him. “Have a seat.”
I didn’t move. “Sitting would indicate an interest in talking with you.”
“Refusing would imply you’re afraid to do so.”
Which, from my mad scramble back in the hallway, he already knew. I crossed my arms and remained where I was.
He shrugged. “Back in the archives, eh? What were you searching for? Clues to your past? Some link to Mommy? Buried treasure, perhaps?”
I didn’t answer. He didn’t expect me to.
“Carl, you should get the Archer manuals number 3543 and 4721. They document Zoe Archer’s failure, as well as the many innocent lives she cost in her quest for notoriety. Amusing reads, both.”
“Forget it, Carl,” I said, my eyes never leaving Joaquin. “The Shadow manuals don’t interest me. Except as a tool for hunting their agents.”
“But how else will you keep from repeating history’s mistakes? Your troop leader obviously tells you nothing.” He was talking about my reaction to Jasmine, and how I hadn’t known her function as a changeling.
“Warren tells me what I need to know, when I need to know it,” I replied coolly, because Warren had actually mentioned it. It had just slipped my mind while staring into Jasmine’s sharp, elongated jaw.
“He lies to you,” Joaquin said flippantly, examining his fingernails like he was just making conversation. My eyes fastened on those fingers, and though I tried not to stare I couldn’t help it. I’d have known those hands anywhere. I’d felt the knuckles pummeling my bones, the fingers scraping my throat, the tensile strength in those palms pinning me to the desert floor. I had to force my gaze from his hands to concentrate on his words. When I met his eyes, he smiled, knowing what I’d been thinking. Dammit. “He doesn’t want you to know the extent of your powers. The truth is, he thinks you’ll turn on him.”
“That’s not true.” I shook my head, not allowing the thought, like a fly, to settle. “Besides, Warren saved me.”
And that was the truth as I knew it. I used it to anchor me while my nerves settled.
“But for what purpose?” Joaquin said, one brow raised in question. “To be a puppet for his whim? To string you along just so he can say you belong to him?”
That rattled me-I’d never thought of it that way before-but I put on a good front leaning against the wall of comics behind me. “You know what purpose, Joaquin. He believes I’m the Kairos. They all do.”
“Then why do they fear you?”
Zane, who’d been scribbling furiously throughout this whole exchange, looked up. I felt all the kids’ eyes on me, including the Sebastian-thing, and Carl next to me, who’d exclaimed softly at Joaquin’s words.
“They’re training me and teaching me to grow in power,” I said stiffly.
Zane’s pencil was flying again, scratching against a yellow pad, his tongue stuck out between his chubby lips in an obviously unconscious habit. He glanced hurriedly from us to his pad, back and forth, and I wondered which series this exchange would show up in-Shadow or Light.
Joaquin, following my gaze, glanced over his shoulder, then turned his face back to me. “Ah, the record keeper. A tedious job, if a necessary one.” He smiled at Zane apologetically. Insincerely. “He’s bound by two laws: to tell the truth, and to resist favoring either side of the Zodiac. But when you think about it, it’s not such a hard line to walk. He has the power to color our stories. He chooses the words and verbiage to describe our realities, our existence. Without him, we wouldn’t exist. Now that, my dear, is power.”
“What about me?” Carl muttered under his breath. “I’m the friggin’ penciler.”
“Power isn’t about inflicting your will upon other people’s lives,” I told Joaquin. “It’s the ability to control the impulse to do so.”
Joaquin clucked softly, shaking his head. “Spoken like someone who has none.”
“That’s not true,” I said softly. “Simply being alive is power.”
He blanched at the reminder that he’d failed to kill me, and it was my turn to smile. As I did, he tilted his chair back. “And snuffing out a life is all that power amplified.”
I felt my eyes grow empty and flat. It was arrogant to engage him in conversation, I realized, and we were both all too aware our words were being recorded. So I thought for a moment and abruptly changed the subject. “And is that what you have planned for the agents of Light? You think it’ll be easy to wipe us all out in one fell swoop?”
For the first time Joaquin looked unsure. He opened his mouth to speak, but I held up a manual of Light, one of the ones he couldn’t touch or read, and could only fathom what was inside. It was a red herring, contained nothing pertinent to this conversation, but he didn’t know that.
“Well, that’s a secret, isn’t it? Though it looks like you have some secrets of your own.” He tipped his chair forward and leaned his elbows on the table as he studied me. “Where is the rest of your troop, anyway? All still holed up underground? Did the revelation of the second sign scare them that much? Or don’t they know you’re acting
“They’re biding their time,” I shot back, assuring him…and perhaps myself. “As for the second sign, a battlefield’s only cursed for those destined to die there.”
“And you’re so unconcerned that you can while away your hours looking for buried treasure?”
Again, that buried treasure remark. I tilted my head, thought, and went with my instincts. “Like you, you mean?”
He scoffed, but I saw the way his jaw tensed first. Interesting. “I admit, I enjoy slumming here every once in a while. I find the neutrality of this place intoxicating. It’s a fresh slate, a blank page, if you will,” he said, motioning again to Zane. “A void where anything is possible.”
But I could tell from the way he dismissed it that there was more to it than that. “But that’s not why you’re here today.”
“No, it’s not,” he said, surprising me with the ease of his admission. His fingers began winding themselves around each other again, like little snakes coiling to strike. “One of my friends has been missing since last night. I lost his trail after he disappeared through a portal and never returned.”
“And you think he stopped by for a little game of Dungeons and Dragons with your flunky over there?” I said, causing Sebastian to snarl again.
“I think a place that caters to both sides of the Zodiac is a good place to start looking when your friends vanish without a trace.” He tilted his head as if he’d just had an idea. “Strange that you’re here today, of all days. You haven’t recently seen a male Shadow with blinding blue eyes, about yea tall, have you?”
“Zane’s the record keeper,” I said, wanting to keep last night’s events to myself for as long as possible. “Ask him.”
“You’re the only agent of Light who’s been trying to unbalance the Zodiac,” he said flatly. “So I’m asking you.”
“Well, I don’t make it a habit of kibitzing with the Shadow side. As you know.”
“So is that a no, little Archer?”
My jaw clenched. “A resounding one.”
“Liar.”
“I’m not. I didn’t kill your Shadow agent.”
Joaquin leaned back in the tiny chair, somehow managing to give an air of dignified composure. It had to be challenging for a walking corpse. Steepling his fingers, he stared at me over the top of his hands. “Funny, but I don’t remember mentioning he was dead.”
I froze and began cursing my stupidity before realizing I could just tell him. I could reveal Regan’s identity, tell Joaquin about her betrayal of Liam, and she’d be dead before the sun set this evening. The problem was, she’d either offer my Olivia identity in return for her life, or be tortured into revealing it, and that’d put me in a worse spot than I was now. As it was, I still had two weeks to kill Joaquin, find Regan, and to get it all done before Warren
