Cheat the Grave

aided me ended up dead.

I was also a tad distracted. Chalk it up to fatigue-mental relief that Mackie was, literally, tied up for the night-or just plain laziness. Whatever, when the man passed by my alcove the first time, I remained seated with my back to the steel door and didn’t really note it. My mind was spinning with deepening questions about Arun Brahma, mushrooming ones about Tekla, and flashing visuals of Caine’s raptur ous death. So when the man backed up, I dismissed it as drunkenness or forgetfulness, and closed my eyes. But when he came to a stop in front of me, so close the gravel under his boots pinged off mine, I sighed and opened them again.

He was burly, wide-legged, and bald. His pocketknife swung open with a resounding click. “Give me your pocketbook, bitch.”

I reached into my handbag and pulled out the heavy iron gun. “Give me yours.”

He backpedaled, tripping once, until he’d returned to the mouth of the intersection. I shot the wall to his right, spraying red brick just because I could. I probably shouldn’t have wasted the ammo, but his holler was gratifying as he disappeared in the same direction he’d come, footsteps fading like slap shots. Survival in the land of mortals, I thought, crossing my legs as I dropped the conduit to my lap. “Like a day at the spa,” I muttered, closing my eyes.

And that’s when something changed in me. It was like a caterpillar cocooning up in a self-made shell, or a woman’s gestating body. I didn’t move at all on the outside, but inside there were subtle shifts, excess cells altering to make room for something new. I realized then it wasn’t Warren or the troop or even the Tulpa I’d been struggling against. I was simply a woman who took up arms. Even before the Zodiac troop came along, I was someone who shoved back harder when pushed. I felt the pain of all the things taken so incrementally from me, and piled them like bricks to build my defenses in this world.

I wasn’t like Caine, that was for sure. I wasn’t so un-feeling that another person’s touch was a novelty, or that it made me seek out sensation in an abnormal manner. I was a city girl who’d been attacked at a young age, who survived it only to be caught up in more violence. Yet I’d survived that too.

Time to start acting like it.

No one else stopped by, but an hour later my phone trilled next to me. I pushed to my feet like I’d been wait ing for it all along, and maybe I had. Because even before I lifted the phone to my ear, I knew who it was. And the new me, the old me, the only me, answered back. “When and where?”

The “when” was immediately. The place? A plant nursery where overzealous residents used mulch and shovels and hard labor to fight the desert’s natural inclination to starve every resource from the soil. Climate be damned, we wanted our petunias.

In the morning hours the corner adjacent the nursery was occupied by day laborers, mostly Mexican, willing to work for cash with a landscaper or resident in search of someone strong and willing to haul colored rock into pretty formations. Xeriscape was environmentally responsible, but the installation was a bitch.

But in these hours before morning, the street front was empty, the silence broken only by a car whizzing by on the interstate. I had a cab drop me across the street at a modest shopping center housing a hopeful independent coffee shop, a doomed independent bookstore, and a thriving nail salon. After the cab left, I crossed the street, circled the building once out of habit, then tried the giant iron gate at the nursery’s back. The green paint was peeling from the cold bars in strips, and though the gate was closed and chained, its padlock hung free. I unwrapped the chain, dropped it to the ground, and entered.

The bulk of the nursery sat in darkness and shadows, the damp and greenery making it even cooler than the surrounding night air. I didn’t try to hide-an agent’s hearing was as good as their sight-and it would have been hard to slip in unnoticed anyway. Gravel crunched like beetle backs with every step. Yet it was still a good place to meet. The rioting scents of competing flowers and fauna masked errant emotions, and the green netting draped above like an oversized mosquito net held it all in.

I followed the main trail to the front of the building where the cashier’s stand and dark office were locked tight. Squinting, and whirling around myself, I then took a smaller path through the annuals, the section putting on a bright, brave face despite the scarce winter showing. Then, from a nearby stand of Italian cypress…

“A bit petite, isn’t she?”

A second cypress answered. “I thought she’d be larger than life.”

“Nah. Just in the manuals.”

The cypress shifted. “How can you look taller in a comic book?”

I leaned closer. “Hello?”

“It’s because she’s not a real superhero,” the first cypress explained. “She just plays one on TV.”

Snickers rose, and I crossed my arms. “Can you guys please stop talking about me like I’m not here?”

There was silence, then shuffling, before two men appeared. The first was bald, and had eyes like black opals and skin to match. He was the more wiry of the two, and his partner was as bright as he was dark. So blond, in fact, he damned near glowed next to his counterpart. Together, they were an eclipse.

“Sorry,” said opal eyes. “We thought you’d be taller.”

It was the same thing Caine had said. I glanced down at the cleavage busting from my business suit. “Yeah, it’s my height that people usually comment on first.”

“Heard you were a smartass.”

I shrugged. Better than a dumb one.

“I don’t care what she looks like,” announced cypress, the bright. “Or if she’s smart. I can still smell it on her.”

“Leave her be.” Tripp emerged then, an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips, hat drawn low.

I resisted the urge to smell myself, and angled toward him. “Well, it’s been a long day and I had to wait for your call under a loading dock.”

“It took time to secure this place first,” Tripp explained, but the second cypress was still inching my way.

“Not that,” he said, his voice deep, but oddly warbling. “The Light.”

He said it like I had leprosy.

“Fletcher is right. You still smell like one of them.”

I looked at Tripp meaningfully. “You’re all Shadows?”

“Former,” he said, knowing exactly how I felt about that. “This is Fletcher. That’s Milo.”

Milo raised his chin. “Like you’re a former agent of Light.”

“Discards, then.” I glanced at the two men, not a bit like each other…but not like me either. And not like Caine, born independent. These men had been raised in a Shadow troop, and if Las Vegas’s, then they were old enough to have once worked for the Tulpa.

Shaking my head, I turned back to the gate.

Tripp caught up, closing the expanse between us in one step. “Where ya think you’re going?”

“I don’t know.” But I wasn’t bedding down with Shadows. I kept walking.

“Ain’t nowhere Mackie can’t find you.”

I said nothing.

“And Warren won’t help.” He pulled the strange cigarette from his lips, licked them, replaced it. I shuddered, remembering how the smoke felt pressed against my pores. “If he even knew you were talking with us, he’d kill you himself. That’s truth.”

Hastening my pace, I reached into my pocket for the phone Warren had given me. I had a brief, insane urge to dial his number to ask him. Hey, Warren. If I took up with a splinter group of rogue agents, would you slay me on sight? Oh, they’re all Shadows too, but they told me that no longer counts. I laughed, humorlessly, imagining his response.

“So would the Tulpa,” Tripp continued, easily keeping pace.

“And Mackie and Helen-and still every Shadow agent in this city.” I halted and pointed back at the ones watching me. They’d held back, but I knew they could hear my every word. “So many ways and people to kill me. Why should I give them the pleasure?”

“They’re not the ones swingin’ at you.”

I angled a hard glare at Fletcher and Milo, then glanced at the mesh roof obscuring the winter sky. I felt like one of the plants trapped beneath that net, caught someplace unnatural, and likely to wind up in the hands of someone who would treat me carelessly.