“What are you, a fuckin’ encyclopedia?” I heard a smack, and a pained exclamation from the smaller man before he came into view, rubbing the back of his head.
“I’m just sayin’. I’ve been reading the books the professor gave us-”
“
“-and it’s really interesting. Did you know they enjoy lifelong bonds with their mothers?”
“Yeah, well, I shoot mine a card on Christmas and her birthday. Guess we’re not all that closely related after all. Let’s go.”
“Shouldn’t we look around a bit more?”
“Be my guest, Dr. Dolittle, but I’m not missing the playoffs for no fuckin’ monkey.”
Dolittle, seeing his point, sighed and followed.
I remained where I was a few minutes after their boot-clad steps faded away, more alarmed by this than I would’ve been a few months ago. I’d watched enough of the Discovery Channel to know that labs and chimps meant experiments. Experiments meant science. And science was what the supernaturals used to augment their magic to more easily manipulate the mortal world. So what was a lab full of primates-primates that most closely resembled humans, I now knew-doing in a casino on the Las Vegas Strip? And why were soldiers-mortals, sure, but armed nonetheless-guarding them? Somehow I thought I could rule out coincidence as a viable option, but maybe Hunter would know what was going on. I’d ask him later…or perhaps I’d come back again on my own.
For now, however, both guards and monkeys had to wait. I was in search of a Shadow.
3
Once I was sure the guards had gone, I bounded up the empty stairwell, straightening my clothes as I walked and tucking my conduit back out of sight.
It didn’t take long before my presence was known, and reported, among the employees. The Valhalla Hotel and Casino was one of the newest and most extravagant resorts in Las Vegas, and Xavier Archer the savviest, most respected, and feared entrepreneur in town. Thus walking around in Olivia Archer’s skin was akin to the queen of England strutting around Buckingham. Employees practically genuflected in front of the woman they assumed was the sole heiress to the Archer family fortune.
Yet I knew something they didn’t. Xavier might have held the title of president and CEO of Valhalla, but he did so by my true father’s will and whim. Though we had yet to prove it, the agents of Light believed this was where the Shadow organization was headquartered, and where their conspiracies-operating under the guise of a little innocent gaming-were plotted and set into motion. That my biological father tried to kill me here last winter was proof enough for me.
I shut out the memories of that last encounter as I strode through the pit. Sure, I was walking around the lion’s den, but this time I was doing so with claws and fangs of my own.
Dozens of gazes weighed on me as I crossed the casino floor, and I could practically hear the whirring of machinery as every eye in the monitor room followed my progress. If I’d ever in my life considered striving for fame and fortune, my time spent in Olivia’s skin would’ve had me reconsidering that career goal.
I plastered an expression of vacuous cheerfulness on my face, moving as quickly as I could without looking hurried, and added an extra bit of sway to my hips as I walked. Meanwhile I searched for the olfactory thread I’d memorized while racing down the streets. I was like a voluptuous, blond bloodhound.
Twenty feet later my eyes fastened on a sectioned-off area of the casino. Bingo. If I’d had a tail, I’d be on point. Renovations were ongoing in most Strip properties, and I skirted the craps pit to edge along the curtained area, scanning the signs updating tourists on the latest and greatest improvements. The Great Hall of the Gods was, apparently, getting an aquarium. One that, I recalled Xavier saying, would make Monterey look like a wading pool. At two hundred million, it had better.
And though it was new, it smelled like a few fish had been rotting too long in the tide pool. Another specimen Monterey didn’t possess, I thought, wrinkling my nose. Shadows.
I exited through the main entrance before I could be stopped by some solicitous casino host, knowing the Eye in the Sky was still trained on me as I strode through the porte cochere. Once on the Boulevard, I circled the block, ducked behind a line of perfectly edged shrubs, jumped an eight-foot wall, and approached again from the back.
Everyone thinks Las Vegas casinos are impenetrable, that any place with security cameras, trained personnel, and mountains of hard cash would be as hard to get into as Fort Knox. Mostly, they’re right. You can’t walk right into a stripfront property and wander any way your fancy dictates. That’s a given.
But what’s also a given is human error. Not to mention sheer boredom. You spend forty-plus hours a week, year after year, in the same smoke-filled, sensory-overloaded environment for an unimpressive hourly wage, and try to maintain a semblance of genuine interest. It’d be hard to feign curiosity under those circumstances, never mind a state of urgency. This was what I was counting on when I approached the aquarium’s guarded back door, and I wasn’t disappointed.
It was nearly midnight, probably about five hours into the guard’s shift, and he was slumped next to the door, near catatonic. As a bonus, he had a prohibited MP3 player that I could hear pumping gangsta rap from ten feet away. I slipped in the door half a foot away from him, and he never knew I was there.
The aquarium’s main room was cool and humid, silent but for the humming white noise of the tanks. Concrete walls were bathed in an eerie blue glow from the exhibit’s thick acrylic windows, and sea life from jellies to sharks floated obliviously content through beds of fresh seawater. Most of the tanks lined the walls, but a few transparent cylinders spiked through the center of the room, holding the more delicate fish. I turned around myself, thinking of those action movies where the thick glass cracks to send stingrays and water and kelp and plankton over the hapless hero as the bad guys get away. That thought in mind, I pulled out my weapon, as well as a mask that I slipped over my head. Then I dropped my bag in the corner.
“Too late for that, Archer of Light,” came a woman’s voice, and then bell-like laughter came at me from everywhere. “We already know who you are.”
“Know it,” Liam’s voice boomed out at me from the opposite side so that I turned toward it, “but can’t believe it.”
Shit. There were two of them.
“I told you she’d follow.” The woman again, but closer. I whirled again. How had I missed the second aura? And why was I still scenting only one Shadow?
“I thought she’d be harder to catch.”
“You haven’t caught me yet,” I said, getting more and more nervous as the calm banter continued. Where the fuck were they?
“Patience, Olivia…or can I call you Joanna?”
My jaw clenched as I slid toward the center of the room, back against a circular tank housing glowing pink jellies. I was confused; they were obviously close, but the glyph on my chest had yet to engage. I tapped at my cleavage, wondering if the thing was working. In movies and comic books, glyphs were represented by large lettering on the superhero’s clothing. In reality it was like a brand under the skin, undetectable until it started glowing, and only then in the presence of enemy agents, a sort of preternatural alarm system.
So if the Shadows were so close that Liam’s scent was clogging my pores, why wasn’t my glyph glowing now?
“Are you okay, Archer?” the woman said, this time from my right. “You look a little confused.”
I frowned, edging around the cylinder. How were they seeing me?
“Don’t have this place mapped out, do you? Of course, once we knew you were posing as Xavier Archer’s daughter, we knew you’d have studied Valhalla’s floor plan. That’s why we picked the aquarium. That’s why we waited until it was nearly completed to lure you here.”
Alarm skirted through me. They’d known who I’d become, and they’d waited. And I, walking around in Olivia’s skin, hadn’t known that they’d known. The woman, feeling the bump in my adrenaline, laughed.
“What’s wrong? Wondering if the Tulpa is going to show up and finish what he started?”
Liam chuckled now too. God, he sounded like he was practically on top of me. “It’s a sad day when a father
