City of Souls

But trying to verbalize it is like trying to tell a story without a subject or object or any linking verbiage.” I sighed. “But you already knew that too, didn’t you?”

He shrugged again. There were worlds to interpret in that one movement. “Midheaven’s vibration doesn’t register over here. It’s why the place is considered myth and why Zane can’t write about it in manuals. It’s a place that becomes known to you only when it’s time for you to know it.”

Warren hasn’t told you anything, has he?

I couldn’t shake Solange’s taunt from my head. He hadn’t. And I’d lost a third of my soul, power, time, and nearly my life. For what? To learn things he already knew? To feel like I was going crazy in my own mind? Or crazier?

Since I was having trouble voicing my own thoughts, I decided to pry out his. “Let’s play a little game, Warren. I’m going to start a sentence, and since I can’t finish any thought that contains knowledge gleaned in Midheaven, you’re going to finish it for me.”

Before he could protest, I started.

“Jaden Jacks is…”

“In Midheaven.”

The answer I was looking for was Light. I shook my head. “Jaden Jacks is…”

“A rogue agent like Harlan Tripp, who has also been gone a very long time.”

“Jaden Jacks is…”

Warren sighed. “Watch your temper-”

“Jaden Jacks is!” I pounded the wall so hard I felt the reverberation through my fist. Shit. I was going to have to relearn how to walk through this world as a mortal. I closed my eyes, fought not to rub my hand or wince, and calmed myself.

When I opened my eyes, Warren was watching me like I was crazy. “I should have known this would happen.”

“What, Warren? That I’d come back with a tattoo of the sun hennaed on my belly?” I asked bitingly, coming off my stool, pissed because he could have prevented all my losses. And because they’d been for absolutely nothing. “Or that I’d return with more questions about Jaden Jacks, agent of…”

I didn’t complete the sentence, I refused, but its start let him know exactly what I was driving at. Light.

“Jaden Jacks is in Midheaven,” he repeated. “And Harlan Tripp can help you find him.”

“That’s not what I hear.”

“Then someone is lying to you.” He straightened at my arch look. “And, no, it’s not me. Because I’m the one who put him there.”

I shuddered involuntarily at that, both at the way he said it and the thought of being forced through that passage. Of having to remain in that heat with Boyd and Bill and Mackie and a drink that slowed your senses to an impossible crawl. All because Jacks had broken a changeling?

I had broken a changeling.

I shook the thought free. Jacks had knowingly killed one. “You put a lock on the entrance, didn’t you?”

That indeterminable shrug again. He’d known that changeling was dead and he’d sent me in anyway!

“Goddamn it, Warren-”

“I do not have to explain myself to you!” he roared with such force that it rocked from the small room, and I imagined it ping-ponging off the warehouse walls. “Do you understand me? You may be the Kairos, but I am the leader of this troop!”

I swallowed hard, clenching my jaw. “Nothing short of death will make me go back there.”

“We need to heal our changeling. Our troop. Our world.”

There was hope in his eyes when I searched their dark depths again, a rabid hope that I’d do this thing without arguing, and the manuals would be written, Jasmine would move on, Li would be whole. Like my disappearance was a magic wand waved over the landscape of all these lives, making everything all right.

“Jacks killed that kid.”

“By choice. Which means he knows an alternative.”

“Then you go.” I sighed again, not caring if fear and exhaustion perfumed the room like the fields of Grasse.

Warren’s scuffed boots appeared in my sightline, and I raised my head. His deep brown eyes bore into mine. “How do you feel now?”

“Fine,” I said through clenched teeth.

“Jo.”

“It feels like there’s a piece of me missing here,” I put a hand over the sweatshirt, the hennaed sun beneath and what a more metaphysically inclined person would call my sacrum. My other hand, just my fingertips, went to my head, touching gently like it was an open wound. I didn’t know why-it didn’t make sense-but I softly added, “And here.”

“But do you feel lighter? Like something has been yanked up by the root?”

I swallowed hard. “How do you know that?”

One side of his mouth lifted. “Your scent, Jo. You smell lighter. There’s less Shadow there. That’s all it took from you, don’t you see? Your Shadow side.”

Is that what Solange had meant by me being armored, then? Was my Light side somehow being protected? But she’d talked about my soul…

“I don’t want to go.” Even if he was right.

“Then Li will die.”

“Don’t lay that on me!” I yelled, even knowing that it was true, and that was my fault. “There has to be another way.”

“And we’ll be working to find it while you’re there.” He was composed again; my rising emotion seemed to calm him. He put a hand on my bruised shoulder. “Do it for your troop.”

I shook it off. “Your troop,” I muttered, because that much was clear.

Warren looked away, sighed, then paced to the door. Did he deem me a lost cause? Not quite yet. He turned, hope still alive in his eyes. “We still have a little time. Keep thinking and you’ll see I’m right. For now, it’s good to have you back. Chandra has been working in your stead. Kimber has been trying…not that she can do much.” He shook his head, almost in disgust. “I’d send her back to her family if I could. She’s miserable, and we need someone stronger.”

Of course Kimber was miserable. Warren was horrible at hiding his feelings. He wanted to throw her away because of her weaknesses, get someone else to fill her sign. I self-consciously tugged Hunter’s sweatshirt over my bruised wrists.

“Meanwhile, stay away from Regan. No matter what she’s told the Tulpa, she may kill you out of spite.”

I sighed in relief. So he wasn’t going to push me into Midheaven, and he wouldn’t lock me in the sanctuary either. Giving me a choice might be an obvious ploy at slowly gaining my acquiescence, but it was the least of all evils. Still, he’d admitted to locking Jacks in Midheaven, and he’d sent me in as well, knowing what the passage would demand of me. He had his reasons-he was the troop leader; he was Light-but both decisions tasted of pure, uncut ruthlessness. So was it true that he believed I’d given up nothing but my Shadow side? Again, how could I tell? How could he?

“Who else have you seen since your return?”

“Just Hunter.”

He bit his bottom lip, mind working like a calculator. I could practically hear it clicking away.

I raised a brow. “Is that a problem?”

“Of course not.”

I nodded, then looked at the ground. “Look, about this…about Hunter-”

He held up a hand. “Please. The less I know, the better.”

My thoughts exactly.

“As for the others…” He just shrugged. “They probably won’t be as…incurious.”

I wanted to tell him that the others didn’t need to know of my relationship with Hunter yet, if ever, but then a shout sounded throughout the warehouse, Felix’s unmistakable whoop as he scented out the where, who, and most