the shelves within two weeks, depending on how quickly Zane could process and translate the storyline. The aforementioned boy-who-would-be-normal, Carl, was the series penciler.
“What the hell do you want?”
I jerked so quickly I dropped my comic, and frowned less at the sudden appearance of the kid who’d addressed us than at his tone.
“Excuse me?” I asked, bending to pick up the comic as I took in a beanpole body, wild hair, and fists hinged on bony hips. He was looking me up and down like I was rabid, and Chandra snorted again behind me.
“I said what are you doing here?”
“Well, I wasn’t looking for a dressing-down by a twelve-year-old,” I said, straightening.
“You must be the Archer,” the boy sneered, eyes cataloging me again. “Smart mouth, wall-to-wall tits-” Chandra snickered beside me and he whipped his gaze to hers. “And you’re the pretender. You probably followed her to a safe zone so you could take her out without anyone reading about it later. Crazy bitch.”
I’d have laughed but the little fucker was already on my nerves. “And you are?”
“Your worst nightmare.”
“Sweetie,” I said in my most condescending voice, “you clearly haven’t read about my nightmares.”
He feigned shaking with fear. I thought about throwing him over my knee and giving him the spanking he fully deserved, but knew how the episode would be depicted in the manuals. We may have violence, crime, and gore, but it was still primarily an American adolescent audience. Gruesome death was fine. Sex, verboten. “Where’s Zane?”
A new voice bloomed from the back of the shop. “I was giving a tour to the new changelings.”
Zane lumbered from the tunnel leading to the storeroom that doubled as his personal library. His apartment was located above the store, and between those three crucial amenities he never had to leave Master Comics. If his social skills were any indication, I thought as he passed by me with a grunt, he probably never did.
“New changelings?” Chandra asked, sidling up to the register. “Is it time already?”
He stared at her until she removed her hand from the glass case, then rubbed a rag over the whole thing. “It flies when you’re waiting to take over a star sign, doesn’t it?”
“What is it, asshole hour in here today?” Chandra asked, turning to me.
“Two-for-one special, apparently.”
Zane made a face, but before he could reply, a handful of children tumbled from the tunnel and into the shop. I didn’t recognize any of them, but they had no such problem, and they crowded around us like superhero groupies, firing questions as they grabbed at our clothing.
“Hey, Archer,” he said, pushing the younger kids aside, and smiling at my obvious relief. “Didn’t know you cared.”
Neither had I. But even though he was a hopeless mess socially and fashion-wise, he was both knowledgeable and helpful, and had been a good friend to me. “New changelings?”
“’Fraid so. Nobody older than nine.”
I looked around for a couple of bald heads. “The twins?”
“Lost to the horrors of puberty,” he said dramatically. “Their voices started cracking and they shot up an inch in one month. A week later it was as if they’d never known us. These five are the next batch, preordained to continue serving the Zodiac by spreading the legacy among others of their kind!” He grinned when I rolled my eyes at his rhetoric, and pointed out each of the children. “This is Dylan, Sara, Kylee, and Kade. That’s Douglas over there.”
Chandra and I nodded at each of the kids, who’d finally calmed, though Dylan was sucking hard on an inhaler, eyes wide. Beyond keeping the secrets of the Zodiac, changelings held a special place in our mythos. If agents from opposite sides of the Zodiac happened to appear in the shop at the same time, they turned into peacekeepers, using the ability to physically morph into a living shield-and the clever use of fangs-to deter the opposing sides.
But even they eventually stopped believing. I noted the absence of Sebastian, the changeling who’d acted as protector of the Shadow agents, and glanced again at Douglas, still sneering at me from the far corner of the room. “Sebastian’s replacement?”
“Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, huh?” Carl grinned, but I dismissed the kid now that I knew he was naturally antagonistic to the Light, and began searching for a little girl whose adoration of me bordered on idolatry, and whose natural inclination to help the Light, and me in particular, had proven priceless. I was already regretting not getting to say good-bye when she suddenly sauntered in from the hallway. I took in her crisp schoolgirl uniform, stumpy black pigtails, and smiled in relief. “Jasmine. You’re still here.”
She was followed by a smaller version of herself, a round-faced, glossy-haired, pixielike child who perked up as soon as she saw me.
“Yeah,” Carl said, nervously looking over at Zane. “We were going to talk to you about that.”
I motioned for him to hush and waved the two girls over.
“What’s up, Jas? How’ve you been?”
She looked up at me from beneath dark lashes. “Do I know you?”
“Oh, Jasmine,” her miniature replica said, voice trembling with excitement. “This is the Archer, esteemed member of troop 175, paranormal division, anti-evil, and preordained savior of the Zodiac!”
Jasmine whirled around and smacked the smaller girl upside her head. “I swear, if you don’t stop with that superhero shit I’m going to beat it out of you.”
The younger girl rubbed her head, fat tears welling in eyes as big as moons. “But, Jas, you’re the one who told me about the legacy of the Kairos and how the portents signaling her chosen side’s ascendancy over their enemies were already under way.”
“Yeah, I also told you the tooth fairy was real. Sucks to be eight.” She raised her hand to smack the girl again, and I grabbed her wrist, spinning her toward me. I let her jerk away, and she crossed her arms over her chest and proceeded to glare at me with unconcealed disdain.
“Jasmine. What’s happened to you?”
Zane cleared his throat behind me. “Why don’t you read the manual she’s featured in and find out?”
A changeling featured in the manuals?
I turned in time to catch the comic he’d flung at me, fumbling it against my body before drawing it away to study it. My picture was on the front, drawn in black and white against a livid red background, and I scowled at Carl-he’d drawn me top-heavy again-before flipping to the last page. Why read it? I’d lived it. It was just a question of where this issue ended.
Yet the last page was blank, as was the one before that. I skipped back until I finally found some text, Carl’s bright panels coming to life a third of the way into the issue. The new changelings oohed and aahed as they realized they were standing in the room where I’d first confronted my then arch-nemesis, Joaquin, but the panels ended abruptly, right as Jasmine was seen taking on her changeling form. I closed the manual and waved it at Zane. “How about finishing it first?”
“It is finished.”
Alarm skirted through me, and I scented a fresh wave of it springing from Chandra as well. “You’re not going to write the series anymore?”
Surely I’d misheard. That would mean disaster for my troop, and Zane would probably be drooling and babbling incoherently by week’s end. I’d seen what happened when he was blocked before. It wasn’t pretty.
“Of course I’m going to write them.” He held his hand out, motioning for me to return the manual. “Why should my head explode because you refuse to make amends?”
Power-hungry asshole, I thought, rolling it up and slapping it back into his palm. Was that what this was about? I’d asked Jasmine to use her shielding abilities to help me outside the confines of the shop last month, something Zane instructed the changelings never to do. “So you’re going to keep the kids from reading the manuals just because you’re holding a grudge?”
“I’m not the one keeping them from reading them,” he said, and tossed me a second comic. “You are.”
I snatched it out of the air, and the kids crowded closer, necks craning. But I looked down to find this one entirely blank. It was bound like a traditional comic, but even the cover was a glossy white sheet. “What’s
