Hunter was certainly accomplished, but Zoltan and Mace were before my time so I didn’t know anything about them. Stryker, though, had been ambushed and murdered in the process of metamorphosis-no longer an initiate, but not yet a star sign-and I wondered if she’d thought of that.
Instead of mentioning the dubious honor of being aligned in fate with Stryker, I changed the subject. “So you must be the Libran initiate, am I right?”
Marlo nodded enthusiastically. She was only a couple of years younger than I, but her sheer excitement made her look much more so. “I’ve been training for a few weeks now. Hunter says I’m making great strides. He’s already designing a weapon he says will play on all my strengths.”
I raised a brow. You didn’t need super senses to tell she’d already developed a super-sized crush on our weapons master. She’d probably grown up idolizing all the older troop members, I told myself. Plus she and Hunter had both been born and raised in the Zodiac. They might make a good match in the future, probably a great one. Libra and Aries were opposites on the Zodiac wheel.
So why was jealousy shooting through my blood like warmed quicksilver?
“That’s great,” I told Marlo, and quickly crossed to the panel with an outlined rendering of a centaur on it. It glowed, reassuringly bright, and the tension drained from me as I looked up at it. As I glanced around at the eleven other emblems circling the room, most lit like mine, satisfaction coursed through me. Most of these signs had been dark when I’d first come to the sanctuary, dead like Stryker’s. The troop had been systematically “depleted” by the Shadows…Zane’s fancy way of saying murdered. But we were back up to ten members now: the Libran sign waiting for Marlo to mature enough to undergo metamorphosis, and for Tekla to either take up the Scorpio sign or pass it on. So far she’d refused to do either, and Warren seemed content to let her contribute solely from within the sanctuary.
I pressed the button next to the slats just below my sign, and spoke my password clearly and directly into the opening. Nothing happened.
“Wha-?” I slapped my palm against the metal panel, and cursed. “Not again.”
Repeating my password met with the same results. I sighed. The panel, actually a door, and the words, really a combination, were the only thing between me and the panel’s contents. Sometimes I hid things in there, and every once in a while I opened it to find a gift-some small trinket like a photo or article of clothing-though nobody could explain how or when it’d gotten there.
More often than not, however-especially lately-this happened. Which meant it now contained some important object, one that would eventually be helpful to my fight in the Shadows, if only I could get to it.
I went ahead and pushed the disks I’d carried with me through the slats, waiting to hear them thunk to the ground on the other side. I was met with only silence. “What kind of superhero can’t get into their own locker?” I muttered blackly, jiggling the latch below.
“Try giving it an offering.”
I turned to Marlo, who was busy spoiling the cat splayed on a stamped concrete star. She’d kept her distance, but was watching me carefully. “Sorry?”
“An offering,” she said, standing, wiping cat fur off her black trousers. “They can be testy sometimes. You might have to bribe it.”
“I’ve already put something in there.”
“Yes, but that was probably to keep it safe, right?”
“That’s what a locker’s for.”
She shook her head. “You need to give it something that’s the opposite of safe. These things are tools. You must be approaching a growth spurt in your education. Feed it something it can use to assist you in the future, and it’ll trade you whatever’s inside for that info.”
I’d have to go back down to the barracks and find something there. “I don’t have anything.”
“Here,” she said, turning away. “Try this.”
I watched her stride over to the Libran locker, and cocked my head. “You have a locker already?”
“Yeah…sort of. Well, no. It doesn’t really lock yet, or recognize my imprint, or respond to my voice…” She ducked her head like she was afraid I’d laugh, but I didn’t. I knew just how she felt. She pulled out a pad of paper and a pen from a duffel bag at the foot of her locker, and handed them to me. “So, anyway. Just write something about yourself and stick it in there, but make sure it’s something you wouldn’t want anyone else to know. Maybe a secret hope or desire. Something worthy of trade.”
“Worthy of trade,” I repeated, looking at the pad she’d pressed into my hand.
Her head bobbed rapidly. “Whatever’s in there is important enough that you have to work for it. The harder it is for you to access, the more useful it’ll be to you later.”
“Then why make it so hard to get?” I muttered.
“Because that’s how life works,” she said, shrugging it off in a way that made her appear even younger. “The most vital object lessons are the only ones worth striving for.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “You’ve been talking with Tekla, haven’t you?”
“Just try it,” she said with a shy smile. When I didn’t move, she started. “Oh…right. Uh, let me know how it goes.”
“I will. Thanks.” I waited until she’d gone and then glanced at the cat. It returned my look before lifting a leg to clean itself.
Turning back to my locker, I slapped the pad against my thigh. “Something worthy of trade.”
Well, there was the way I’d broken into the boneyard, but Warren already knew about that, or my run-in with Regan, but I wasn’t about to admit that to
I wrote the admission down, folded the paper, and slipped it between the slats of the locker. Nothing happened. So I wrote another note-
“Just testing,” I said. I kept thinking. Something I wouldn’t want anyone else to know. Well, that was easy. All my secret thoughts revolved around Ben Traina. How I didn’t want anyone to know how much he still occupied my waking hours. How my body warmed at the thought of him. How I’d broken into Warren’s cabinet in the record room and reviewed the file I knew he’d keep on Ben because of his past association with me.
I smiled bitterly at that last thought. Warren kept tabs on every aspect of his agents’ lives, easy since he watched most grow up in the sanctuary, and assigned them their identities once they began working on the outside. But then there was me. He was still puzzling out my past piece by piece, slow going since he didn’t trust my account not to be influenced by emotion, or some other agenda he didn’t name. And digging into my past meant digging into Ben’s.
After the attack on me, after Ben decided he was at fault for being unable to stop it, he responded by marrying someone safe-someone who wouldn’t sneak across the desert on moonlit nights-then blamed her for not being me. Warren’s notes indicated he’d been repeating his childhood, treating his new wife as his father had treated his mother, though I could’ve told him that.
I remember thinking I’d have argued with Ben as I studied those files. But the six-year-old records Warren had filched from a mortal shrink’s office indicated that this other woman hadn’t.
So Ben gave his sweet, breakable wife a divorce-even though she said she didn’t want it-and also gave her half of what he owned at the time. Fast forward a few years, and she was remarried-a banker this time, not a cop-and living in southern California with three dogs, two kids, and another on the way.
But this wasn’t about Ben, I reminded myself, tapping my pen against my bottom lip. This was about me, my neuroses. So I slid my back against the cold, unyielding metal, dropped to the floor, and began to write.
