City of Souls

“We got you cake.”

I felt my brows wing up to my hairline. “Cake?”

“For your birthday,” Warren said, coming to stand at my side. He was the only one who sounded even remotely enthused about it. “You didn’t think we were going to let our Kairos’s big day pass without notice, did you?”

“Cake,” I repeated dumbly, thinking I might puke if I tried to take a bite.

“You can say thank you,” he muttered, pushing past me. I watched him go, frowning, then met Micah’s eyes. He rolled his. Good to know I wasn’t the only one who didn’t feel like celebrating.

“Thank you,” I muttered, following him around the table to join Gregor on the other side. Gregor put his good arm around me and kissed the top of my head. I felt a little better after that.

But almost immediately Vanessa appeared in the doorway, eyes wide, and face ghost white. Though her mouth worked open and shut, nothing came out. Warren quirked his head and took a step forward. “Van-”

“Vanessa! Get in there!”

A whimper escaped her throat and her fear hit us all with the full force of a cyclone. Felix yelled again behind her and I drew back at the strain in it, so different than the reunion I’d witnessed only moments before.

Warren headed that way. “Felix? What is it?”

Felix came into the room so slowly it looked like he was freeze-framed. Vanessa whimpered again. A gurgling laugh sounded somewhere behind him.

“Um, Warren?” Felix inched to the side once he’d breached the glass threshold to reveal my conduit shoved into the small of his back. Behind it was Regan DuPree. And behind that, I thought, mouth going dry, shuffled Hunter Lorenzo, wrapped tight in his own whip.

Regan pushed Felix through the doorway, and Vanessa jolted like she was going to leap forward, but she held herself, knowing an arrow would pierce either her or Felix before she could take a single step.

Regan looked much the way she had the last time I’d seen her, skin unraveled in vertical strips from head to toe, blackened at the edges, revealing bone. She was wrapped in dirty gauze from neck to ankle, thrift shop clothing donned atop that, but neither concealed the thinning of her ribboned skin. The flesh had corroded, and the stink I’d been tracking all over this city was worse. In the confines of the kitchen, it made bile stick in my throat.

She gave us all a tattered smile, her mouth winging upward in jigsawed pieces to reveal spaces of gum, oozing and receding from the bone. She knew how macabre she was, how grotesque, and she played it up under the full glare of the fluorescent lights. “And what are the agents of Light celebrating tonight, huh? I mean, what could you all possibly have to celebrate?”

Nobody answered or moved. She was dead, the knowledge of her inability to escape this room now that she was in it drawn across her gaze like a toddler’s scrawl, but she was suicide-bomber dead. The question was, who did she intend to take with her?

That scribbled gaze fell on me.

“Just tell us what you want,” Hunter said, again showing why-though he was the one closest to death-he was the one everyone looked up to. Warren might be troop leader, but it was Hunter who acted when the rest of us wouldn’t. He spoke while everyone else remained mute. He’d been out there canvassing the city for Jasmine while we huddled in safety.

And what did he get for his troubles? A mummy-worthy wrapping in his own conduit, barbed spears from the whip burrowing into his flesh.

Regan’s head swiveled unsteadily on her neck as she turned to look at him, her smile opening up, red-tinted pus oozing to stain her lips.

“Oh, I believe I want the same thing you do, my friend. Some good, old sat-is-fac-tion.” She drew out the word, like in the song, and pushed Felix with the tip of my crossbow. He backed away slowly because she still had Hunter, and she pulled him along behind her as she sauntered into the center of the room. Crossbow still aimed at Felix’s heart, finger on the trigger, her gaze fell down. “Mmm. Cake.”

“How did you-”

The weapon swung Riddick’s way, so close it crossed his eyes and his mouth fell shut.

“Shh,” Regan said, reaching forward. “I like cake.”

Felix took a step back, toward Vanessa. Regan sensed the movement-the tiniest breeze probably felt like a sandstorm when you’d been skinned-and directed the bow back his way.

Warren held up his hands. “Everyone hold still.”

Keeping her hands steady, Regan leaned down. Her tongue was divided in four separate slices, but each found a bit of birthday cake, and though the white frosting disappeared in her mouth, I was able to follow its journey down her throat.

“Mmm,” she hummed, straightening. “See, now that’s satisfying.” It was unclear whether she meant the cake or having the entire troop at her mercy. She turned back to Hunter. “Have you tried this yet, my friend?”

Why did she keep calling him that? My friend. It was the exact phrase she’d used in the pipeline with the Tulpa…

My new friend.

My sharp inhalation brought Regan’s gaze back my way. “Ah,” she said, sounding satisfied. “And now you see.”

She was the person he’d been meeting with in the Shadow manuals, the hidden contact lurking in the dark. The one he’d been talking to weeks ago when he said everyone should be allowed their greatest desire.

And her desire, her satisfaction, was in seeing me realize it. Me, also, on a hook. Betrayed. Brokenhearted. All of the above. Regan was only satisfied when destroying other people’s loves, their futures, their possibilities. Her mother had done this with her father, turning him into the worst sort of criminal. Regan had tried to do the same with Ben.

And she had apparently succeeded with Hunter.

Suddenly, little incongruities began to add up: how Regan had slipped past Hunter during the chase in the pipeline. How, in her current state, she’d ever managed to get her hands on him now.

Oh my God, I thought, the realization hitting me afresh. He’d been working with my greatest personal enemy for weeks! And he still made love to me. I let him lay his head on my shoulder, find rest in my arms. We were lovers, and friends…and now enemies too.

“Joanna.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t even look at him.

Regan laughed, a tattered chortle, and dug my conduit into the cake, licked frosting from the tip.

“I see nothing,” Warren interrupted, brow furrowed. “I see a rogue agent trying to bargain her way into a better situation.”

“Then let me elucidate.” Regan chuckled, and yanked on Hunter’s whip. “Your star superhero here has been working with me. I give him what he wants, he gives me what I want.”

“Bull.” Riddick looked at Hunter with the same sure expression he always had.

Hunter gazed straight ahead, looking at no one.

“It’s true,” Regan continued, shrugging so the flesh on her shoulder wobbled. “How else have I eluded you for this amount of time? I mean, fuck!” Her face went wide with the enraged word, and literally split. Part of her tongue darted out to lick the blood on the side of her mouth. “Even I can smell myself. Yet I continue to get away. Slip through holes in your defenses. Disappear into the wild night.”

Still staring at Hunter, Riddick finally winced, like it was painful. He clenched his jaw when he saw me looking, and turned to face Warren.

I didn’t blame him. Even I, having long known that Hunter was up to something, that he was meeting with someone he shouldn’t be, that he had a secret identity and agenda, had never fathomed that his contact had been Regan.

And he’d slept with me after what she’d done to me, to Ben. He entered me while helping this… this walking carcass. This being I hated so very much.

The shock sizzled in my brain, clouding it, making it heavy on my shoulders. I felt the additional weight of Hunter’s gaze. He knew that with every passing minute I was putting more and more of his betrayal together. Right now it seemed endless. A long road, and I was riding in a car that would never stop.

“Is this true?” Tekla spoke up from the far corner of the room, and though her arms were folded across her