I jerked away, my hands automatically clenching into fists. “Thanks for lumping me in with a murderer.”
“I didn’t. I lumped you in with the other person Warren loved and still killed out of duty.” His eyes were half shut with fatigue and drink, but what I saw of them was calculating and too knowing for my liking.
I looked away, staring at the storm flailing at his false window. It suddenly felt like I was out in it. Warren wasn’t doing that. Was he? Look for faults, waiting for me to screw up?
“Look.” Hunter sighed. “I want to help you. I’ll keep your identity, your daughter, and your moves against Joaquin hidden. I can do that, you know. I can be your secret keeper.”
He said it like he meant
“In exchange for what?” I managed, falling back on my trusty sword of sarcasm. “My bed?”
Because the mention of Warren’s rogue father had been a veiled threat. So had the reference to Ashlyn, whom Hunter knew about because of the aureole, but Warren did not. Venom coated my words, anger boiling in my core. I thought my Shadow side must be peeking through; there was just a hint of smoke rising in the thundering air, possibly a deepening of my eyes, though I’d have to look in a mirror to know for sure. I didn’t want to do that.
And I didn’t want to admit Hunter would be a great ally. He had more patience with me than Warren, and seemed able to face those black holes in me that even I could not. Like now, I thought wryly, watching him stare at me. Even at a time when I was afraid to face a mirror.
“I didn’t say you should barter your body,” he said carefully, reading my mood. Then he licked his lips. “Just… share it with me.”
Don’t you just love semantics?
I studiously kept my eyes off his lips…and his hands, and his eyes. And the rest of him too. Because even though I could use an ally, what I didn’t need right now was a lover. Unfortunately they were being offered as a package deal. I lifted my chin and steeled myself against the offer, the need. The understanding.
“I still love him,” I said flatly, and had to watch Hunter wince. He didn’t recover as quickly as he would’ve were he sober-a stab of pain, then disappointment blazing in his eyes as the next arrow of lightning flashed through the room-but eventually his expression closed.
“Which is why you should let him go.”
He knew all about Ben, of course, had learned about him and more when we’d swapped memories and emotions through the magic of the aureole. And I could see why he wanted to feel it again. I’d never felt more understood than in those brief moments. I’d never been less alone than when Hunter had seen the Shadow in me and hadn’t shied away, but accepted it and my thoughts as his own. I knew, in exchange for helping shoulder his own mental burdens, he was offering to do the same now.
But he was in a self-destructive mood.
“And letting you into my body as well as my mind is going to help with that?” I said, forcing a note of detachment into my voice that I didn’t really feel.
He shrugged, offered me a rare if lopsided grin. “Can’t hurt.”
“You know
But I swallowed hard. I’d enjoy having him inside me, that much was true. You didn’t have to know Hunter when he was sober, and in save-the-world superhero mode, to know there was a world of possibilities waiting in those arms. Even now, with him smelling of booze and staggering slightly, his focus was like the sun through a magnifying glass.
And me, I thought, shifting my feet, just a little ol’ bug.
“Sleep it off, Hunter,” I said, my voice more callous than I intended as I turned from him and opened the door. I escaped into the light and sterility of the hallway, blinking hard, because this was what felt unreal. It was a too- abrupt end to the violent music of the thunderstorm, and the heated tension between Hunter and me as we faced off in the near dark. I turned back a second too late. He had followed me to the door, and when I looked up the lust in his gaze had been shuttered, and all that remained was the cold depths of the emotions he was trying to escape.
“Look, I’m sorr-” I started, but the door clicked firmly shut in my face, and the silence of the hallway rose to a buzz in my ears. I finally got my feet moving, my footsteps filling the silence. By the time I reached my room, I was breathing in time to them, a steady beat despite my own erratic heart, as the possibilities Hunter had spoken of died around me.
I made my move on Joaquin the following night. I’d have gone the previous dawn, but I slept badly after fending off Hunter’s advances, dreaming of making love with Ben while another man watched through a rain- streaked window. I dreamed I was back in my old body, which would’ve made me happy if I hadn’t realized someone else was inside my dreaming flesh as well, curled around Ben, sharing it-and him-with me.
It also seemed poetic to attack Joaquin in the hours he’d first attacked me. It was the same time of year, and the same desert sage rose to perfume the air in the predawn hours, when decent people were still sleeping off the hangovers of the night before.
So I used my daylight hours to rest, and to plan. There were detailed maps of the city archived in the record room adjacent to Tekla’s astrolab, and I spent half the day there, poring over photos of street maps, imagining and reimagining scenarios of approach, infiltration, and escape, and staring at the home of the man who’d affected my life more than any other since the one who spawned me.
I used the photocopier to make duplicates of the residential streets and his home, and sat down to study them, thinking I really should make more use of this room. I knew the arteries and thoroughfares of Vegas as intimately as I knew the veins webbing my wrists, but there were other Vegases in the journals and books and registers here- line-drawn depictions of the original settlements-Indian, Spanish, Mormon-and those primitive roads lay like ghosts beneath the alternately beautiful and stark streets I knew. Someday I’d like to know them all.
“Later,” I said aloud, and shut off the lights as I exited the room. First I had another man to make into a ghost.
16
If you head away from the Strip on the I-95, past the old wash and the clusterfuck known as the Spaghetti Bowl, you’ll end up in a tony and relatively new suburban master-planned community, where housing prices reflect the desirability of the area, and residents make sure the distinction is known. As you make your way up Summerlin Parkway, the mountain ranges that once lay so far from the center of town begin to butt up against rows of communities plotted to provide developers with the greatest return per square foot. The uniformity of the houses also provides neighbors with added anonymity; nobody knows exactly who’s being rude when they drive directly into the garage of the house looking much the same as theirs, closing the door with nary a how-dee-do.
It was in one such neighborhood, pressed against a mountain-a hill compared to the ranges hovering over the valley, but mountainous nonetheless-that Joaquin’s nondescript home rested. Of course, Joaquin would like that. The blending, I mean. Physically he was that way as well. Most people would pass right over him; just a tallish man with shadowed eyes, pale skin, and hair a bit too long to be fashionable. But just as the bones beneath that benign exterior were blackened with decay, what lay in that house was coiled and waiting to strike.
I pulled up half a block from his lot to study the darkened windows of a detached home, light beige and single- story, with shuttered windows and a security gate over the front door. The front yard was xeriscaped-what a good little environmentalist our Joaquin was-and it blended perfectly with the houses on either side of him. I’m sure he enjoyed walking among the mortals he stalked, waving to a future victim on his way back from the mailbox, or petting the dog of a man whose wife he’d already marked as his own. I winced to see a tricycle trapped next to his mailbox, the thought of Joaquin living next to children instantly icing me over.
Stepping from my car, mask fixed firmly over my eyes to conceal my identity as Olivia, I had an arrow already notched in my conduit, held ready at my side. The street was deserted, but I’d already decided my approach would be from the hillside. The desert side, I thought, peering into the darkness. Just as he’d once approached me.
Nothing smells as fresh and clean as the night-laden desert air. The dusty floor was packed solid under my feet, the star-flecked sky swung wide overhead, and I moved lithely among bramble, boulders, weeds, rocks, skirting the jutting cacti poised like spiny sentries all along the hillside. As a kid I’d taken many such forays into the desert night, the complete dark and stillness adding to the thrill of the illicit outings. Joaquin probably thought of this
