“No,” I replied, gathering my shirt in front of me, “but you might charge me by the hour, and we have a long night ahead of us.”
“Ah, the bitch is back,” he said wryly, but didn’t defend himself as he cleaned up, lifting the wires from the bowl with metal tongs, depositing them in the toolbox as promised.
“I’d like to look through the panic room,” I said, ignoring the fat spears of guilt stabbing at my chest, and the spicy evidence of our lust hanging heavily in the air, threatening to choke me if I took too deep a breath. I took one anyway, looking right at him so he knew my mind was in control here, not my hormones, and told him how I wanted to study the map of breaches the doppelganger had made in to our world so far.
The change in topic worked, or so I thought. He dumped the toxic solution into the floor drain, sprayed and wiped it clean with a red shop rag, and nodded slowly to himself. I didn’t expect anything more, so I turned toward the panic room…and was ambushed by his next words.
“You should let Micah erase his memory,” he said, and I froze in my tracks. The statement was bolder than his flirtations, and blunter than I’d have expected.
“I don’t want him to forget,” I said just as bluntly, without turning.
Because Ben would have to forget it all-me, our past, our potential future. All memories would stop the night I was attacked a decade ago, and Micah would rebuild a history for Ben that had me languishing in a forgotten childhood…and one that didn’t include me in his adult world at all. I would cease to exist for the last person on earth who’d truly known me as me. “We have a child together.”
“And you think that’s reason enough to hang on?”
I still didn’t turn around. “I do.”
“You sound obsessed.”
“I don’t expect you to understand,” I said, and though I did turn my head and meet his eyes, it was a dismissive gesture, my mind made up. “Why should I have to lose him just because I’ve found my true self?”
Laughter barked out of him, his bluntness turning cruel. “Because that’s what we do. We live
Like Hunter gave a shit if life leaned a little easier on Ben. Superhero, I well knew, didn’t mean saint. “I won’t ever accept it.”
I turned away before he could respond-because what I was saying was
18
I remained locked in the panic room for most of the night, knowing-sensing-Hunter on the other side of the door, my mind flitting unbidden to the warmth that’d seeped from his body into mine before I’d pushed away. Again. After refocusing on the reams of maps for what must’ve been the hundredth time, I finally recognized that Warren’s tight handwriting wasn’t going to reveal any additional secrets to me just because I was the targeted double.
Yet there was an additional key located to the left of the map, where yellow, red, and green dots spelled out suspected activity, but this was in Hunter’s slanted script, probably marking for Warren his suspicions about how and where the doppelganger would cross into our terrestrial plane next. The known entrances were yellow, and seemed to be mapped down to the square foot. The red dots represented places Hunter believed were most susceptible to the doppelganger’s future breaches, and the fewest dots, represented by green, were a mystery entirely. No matter how long I stared at them I couldn’t decipher their meaning, and after the way we’d parted, I couldn’t exactly go out and ask Hunter.
I followed the green dots once more with my finger, tracing them in what appeared to be a written chronological order, then gave up and left the room long enough to brew a pot of coffee, to make a call to the hospital to check on the mortal woman, and take another from Warren-whom Hunter had phoned after our nonargument-before returning with a high stool to sit while I tried to predict where the doppelganger might pop up next. The red dots ran right through the center of town, one right in the middle of Valhalla itself, which I thought was poetically ironic.
I finally found a secondary key to overlay the primary map. It contained all the suspected locations of Shadow entry into our alternate reality, though why Warren wanted that studied was beyond me. I pored over the maps so long my eyes blurred, and eventually even the insistent throb from the injury to my thigh couldn’t keep me awake.
Hunter’s predawn rap on the door had me jolting from my slumped position before I even knew I’d fallen asleep. He’d given the steel door an extra hard knock and I cursed him as I wiped drool from the map, then gathered up my things. I collected the copies I’d made and rolled them to fit in my bag along with my mask and manual-feeling a sharp pang of loss that I wasn’t also carrying my conduit-then put the originals back in place before whipping open the door.
Hunter’s eyes only grazed mine before he wordlessly whirled toward the south bay. I followed him into a cool predawn glow punctuated with the city’s fading lights. He waited as I buckled up, eyes hidden behind mirrored lenses, thoughts and emotions equally veiled. We found Gregor, and crossed realities in a hard, cold silence.
Yet we didn’t part ways once inside the sanctuary, instead heading straight to the lab. Chandra was already there, partitioned off from the rest of the room and bent over her baby, an ornamental rock garden composed of the same porous sandstone that gave the nearby Red Rock Canyon its name. She was dressed in sweats, her hair haphazard at best, as she measured from three pails of grit, sand, and peat for layering among the sandstone crevices. A steaming cup of joe was perched on a rocky red outcrop, but I could tell it hadn’t hit her yet. She even snapped at Hunter before he explained about Regan, the compound, and the tracking device, though he left out the details of my run-in with her the previous night, which had me softening toward him all over again.
Toying absently with the ornamental grass fountaining from the terraced slope, Chandra confirmed it was indeed possible to bury a tracking device in a synthetic blend of tinted putty, and though expensive and time- consuming to design, the technology had been around for some time. At least among the supernaturals.
“Get undressed,” Chandra told me, switching shoes as she jerked her head toward the sterile half of the lab, and regarding me like I was the biggest ass she’d ever met. It was hard to argue. “We have to be sure it’s entirely gone.”
Hunter left without another word and I disrobed again, though unlike his examination the night before, Chandra’s clinical stare left me cold. She wore gloves as she scraped my skin, and said nothing more. As chagrined as I was that she knew I’d been played by Regan once again, I was still relieved to know the cause of Regan’s near-constant presence. A tracking device I could understand. I could even respect the balls it’d taken to trick me into accepting it. It was certainly preferable to thinking she’d developed some sort of ability to be omnipresent in my life.
“I attributed the itching to the doppelganger,” I told Chandra, speaking aloud while I worked it out for myself. “She scratched my chest, and that’s where I first felt the tingling.”
“Because you applied more makeup there than anywhere else.” She paused, fingers light on my arm, before continuing without meeting my eye. “It makes sense you’d be focused on that instead of your arm or leg.”
I caught myself before I drew back in surprise, but Chandra felt my muscles tense beneath her touch. She kept her eyes on her work, double-checking my arm as I continued to stare. Had she just stood up for me?
She cleared her throat. “Where were you when you felt the device go live?”
“Write it all down. We’ll triangulate your locations. Maybe Regan has positioned herself, or at least the
