City of Souls

Shadow agents couldn’t read the manuals of Light, and vice versa. It kept a sort of cosmic balance between the two sides. But I could read both sides, I thought irritably, because I was both. This had caused the Shadow manuals to be altered somewhere-there were fewer thought bubbles detailing what a featured Shadow agent was planning; more once they’d already acted-so I didn’t see why Zane couldn’t just throw me a bone.

“I’m trying to bring it back in to balance,” I said.

He shrugged. “You fucked up and now karma is weighing down the scales in the Shadows’ favor. You’ll have to find it yourself.”

“Why don’t you just kill Jasmine?” Kade said snottily.

I took a threatening step toward him instead.

Wide-eyed, he backed straight into Dylan, who landed flat on his butt. I smirked. His voice cracked as he yelled. “What? Like you haven’t thought of it. You’re half Shadow! You live for that shit, right?”

“If your mother could hear you now,” I muttered, because I hadn’t thought of it. It would have never occurred to me…but now it was in my mind. I turned back to Zane, who was watching me closely. “Is he serious?”

“See! She’s interested!”

“Shut up, Dylan.” I glared over my shoulder. He fumbled his inhaler. “I’m…curious.”

“It’s simple, Archer. Jasmine’s like a leech, sucking your power from you in long, slow pulses. If you want to reunite your split aura in your body, along with all the powers she’s been siphoning off, then she’s gotta die.”

It wasn’t the first time these kids had said that. They knew of Jaden Jacks and the changeling he’d injured, though the report of the child’s death was more of an assumption. The kid and Jacks hadn’t been seen since, not even in a manual, and that was odd. Full-fledged troop members couldn’t leave the valley. It was one of the maxims that ruled our existence.

“Jas knows it, too,” said Dylan. “That’s why she doesn’t come around here anymore. Well, that…and because she’s spending time with Li.”

Li. I swallowed hard. Li, who was eight years old, and clamoring to take over Jasmine’s position. Li, who’d somehow been injured when the Tulpa had attacked me. Li, who was deteriorating by the day because of that injury, and would continue to do so until I figured out a way to fix her sister.

And that’s when the manuals had stopped being written. That’s what was keeping the fourth sign of the Zodiac from coming to pass.

“Look, I don’t want to kill Jas.” Or her little sister. “I want to find the manual that shows how Jacks healed his changeling, or find Jacks himself. Barring that, I need to find Skamar so she can tell me how to ‘walk the line.’”

I muttered this last bit, rolling Warren’s words over in my mind, still having no idea exactly what they meant.

“What did you say?” Zane asked sharply.

“I said I need to find Skamar. If I leave a message with you, can I be sure she’ll get it?”

“Skamar’s in hiding. She needs safe zones to recover from her battles with the Tulpa, and you’ve done away with those.” I opened my mouth to object, but he was already waving that subject away. “But go back to the part after that. About walking the line. Who told you that?”

I tilted my head, caught by his sudden interest, and his seriousness. “My troop leader.”

He lifted a brow. “Warren Clarke?”

“No. Jabba the Hutt. He also said to tell you he needs an octogenarian to help round out his criminal empire. You may have a future yet.”

Zane scowled. I was about to write off his question, but then I remembered how anything that happened in Las Vegas’s underworld ended up in a manual within two weeks. I continued staring at him until the silence elongated uncomfortably between us. From the expression blanketing his face, I knew what he’d say even before the question was out of my mouth. “You know about Midheaven too, don’t you?”

“Of course. I know everything relevant to our world.”

I’d asked him once before if he thought Midheaven was a myth. At the time, though, I hadn’t had Warren’s permission to do so.

“Let me guess. You can’t tell me anything about that world, right? Some sort of cosmic checks-and-balances, right?” That would be right in keeping with the same powerful law that prevented the changelings from telling their favored troop members about the opposing side’s actions. The same reason the little sickos who favored the Shadows knew, but couldn’t tell, of my Olivia Archer cover identity.

“I can’t tell you,” he confirmed, with a shrug, “but not because it’s forbidden. Midheaven’s energy doesn’t register over here. That’s why it’s not in any manual. It’s another world entirely.”

“But one Warren now wants me to enter.” Because he knew, or at least thought, that Jaden Jacks was over there? Or that Jacks could tell me how to fix Jasmine? It would make sense. Zane clearly didn’t know what had happened to the kid, and as he’d said, he knew everything that happened in this world. But how was I going to get to Midheaven if I couldn’t find Skamar in order to learn how to walk this “line”?

“It has to be because of the safe zones,” Zane was muttering, shaking his head like he was perplexed. “He’d never reveal its physical existence otherwise…”

Yeah, what about that? I fisted my hands on my hips. “Why?”

“Because it’d be better if it didn’t even exist,” he said in that eerily serious way that made me want to giggle and shiver at the same time. “Midheaven is a pocket of distended reality. It’s distorted, and a place for people- usually rogue agents-to hide. It serves as a way to escape detection as they made their way into the valley.”

“Ahh…” Now it was making sense. Rogues were agents, either Light or Shadow, who’d been cast out of their home troops either due to personal infractions or political unrest. In other words, if their troop was disbanded or destroyed. If that happened, they were free to leave the city they’d formerly served and become independent agents. They officially became rogues when they entered another largely populated city, where another troop already resided. There could only be one star sign for each position on the Zodiac, so even entering a city with a full Zodiac was seen as a challenge. We had orders to slay them on sight. That’s why Regan was no longer a threat. No one on either side of the Zodiac would stand up for her now. “So Warren didn’t tell us about Midheaven because of the rogue agents.”

“He didn’t tell you about it,” Zane said direly, “because it’s a twisted place, and it twists you in return. You go in one person, you come out another.”

“Experience shapes people,” I countered.

“Midheaven strips them.”

Shaking my head, I decided this was already turning into an infinite circle. Find Skamar to find Jacks to fix Jas and restore our safe zones. Yet I needed a safe zone in order to find Skamar and Jacks, to fix Jasmine and restore those safe spaces. “What a clusterfuck.”

I hopped to the ledge, already considering my next step-beyond the one that would have me leaping thirty feet to the alley floor-when Zane, still in zealot-geek mode, stopped me.

“Don’t you want to hear the song?”

I looked up at the bright, wide sky, wondering when the minutia of this world was going to stop bitch-slapping me. I stepped off the ledge and turned.

“I love songs,” said Kade. Dylan hit him. Anxious to get on with the business of saving the world, I’d like to have done the same, but Zane was already clearing his throat, straightening formally, and widening his stance. Then he began crooning like he was headlining at the Sands with a half-full martini in one hand.

Beneath the neon glowing bright here

Lies a land of starry skies

Look below dear, not in the middle

But kill the rushlight in two tries.

“Wow,” I said, and he shot me a rare smile. “Put on a button-down shirt and a few gold chains and you’d have yourself a career.”

His face fell. “Shut up.”

“No, seriously. You’re not half bad.”

“It’s not funny!” He began pacing, fat face clouded and red. “You’ll memorize that if you know what’s good for