Cheat the Grave

to each of the four walls. Tripp motioned me forward with a jerk of his head, though he remained behind with Fletcher and Milo, making like the mafia of old. It helped me feel at home as I wove my way to the center table.

“Jose. Mescal por mi amiga. ” The man lifted only his voice, the rest of him utterly still and fixed on me, as if he was a lizard I’d surprised in Red Rock Canyon. Or, I thought as I sat, a rattler. “Unless you’re a margarita girl?”

I was. Rocks and salt, but when in little Baja…“Tequila is fine.”

Jose, obviously the owner, brought the bottle. I studied his fingertips as he filled my shot glass, and he smiled- either missing the direction of my gaze or pretending to-and replied in soft Spanish at my nod of thanks. I waited until he’d disappeared to wince at the fat pink worm floating along the bottle’s bottom.

Glancing back at Carlos, I lifted my brow, an invitation to explain why a mortal would be serving a rogue. His lips were a soft heart beneath a thin, Errol Flynn mustache, and he licked them before giving me another answer entirely.

“My name is Carlos Fernandez. I became a rogue at age fifteen by entering the city of neon with my mother, an agent of Light in La Ciudad de Mexico until the Shadows overtook it in the nineties.”

I remembered, though obviously not in the same way Carlos did. World events and paranormal activity were invariably intertwined. Victory by the agents of Light or Shadow made its mark on the mortal population, though all the humans knew was that in ’ninety-four the peso had plummeted, sending the country into despair. The chasm between the haves and have-nots widened like the grandest of canyons, and things had only worsened since then. I’d be surprised to hear if there was even one agent of Light left in any major Mexican city.

Carlos spun his shot glass in his hand, making no move to drink as he watched me from across the table. His dark hair was cropped close, but you could still see a bit of a Caesarean curl. His eyes were light brown, the simple tabletop tea light catching deeper flecks of color like grains trapped in amber. Though darker, with long sable lashes, his gaze put me in mind of Hunter. The same patience lurked there.

Or maybe it was the same calculating spark.

“My father, determined to fight the enemies of Light to the last, sent us ahead without him. He was forced out a year later, finally leaving that dangerous place to travel to us, and this safe one.” Another slow slide of his tongue over his bottom lip, like he was trying to seduce me, before he blinked. “He lost his life in the weedy meadows after which this city is named. Almost immediately.”

I froze, unsure what to say. I sensed a drama involving me, but like a person wrongly accused, wasn’t yet sure how. Carlos, still reclined, pulled a card from his shirt front pocket as he spoke and slid it toward me. I leaned forward, frowning as I recognized the small square format. It was a trading card so old the stock paper was thinned and frayed at the edges, and worn so finely in one spot I could almost see the grain of the paper.

The black and white photo showed a man wearing tight jeans and an unstructured blazer winging open to reveal a mesh tank top as he leaped through air. Very eighties. His conduit was some sort of mallet, and his name, troop number, and city were scrawled in Spanish across the card’s bottom. His vital stats were on the back, similar to a ballplayer’s, and identical to the cards featuring superheroes sold in comic book shops all over the world. Gently, I handed the card back.

Carlos took it between two fingers and tucked it back in his pocket. It was probably the last of his father’s trading cards in existence.

I glanced back up into his face, noting the resemblance now, especially those darkly expressive eyes. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

He inclined his head, and lifted his shot glass from the table, allowing the edge to kiss his lips. I echoed the movement as he said, “Your mother had him killed the day after he arrived.”

I sputtered homemade tequila over the glossy tabletop. Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I bent my head and cleared my throat of its burn before letting out a huge sigh.

“I guess here’s where I say I’m sorry, and while I have no control over my mother’s actions now, never mind back then, I’m sure none of that matters. You’ve clearly been planning your vengeance for a long time. I expect you’ll kill me in the same way she murdered your father. You latinos have deep poetic leanings.”

“We do?”

“Yeah. Ever the closet romantics.” I shrugged. “So what will it be? Decapitation? Pull out my guts? Boring ol’ slice of the arteries?”

His amusement vanished and I was sorry I’d asked. The reminder of his father’s death was obviously still painful, and it only occurred to me belatedly that it might be better not to know how I was going to die. “He was ambushed while seeking sanctuary in the Strip-front cathedral.”

“The Guardian Angel?” I’d heard it’d once served as a place for rogues to connect with one another, but that was long before I’d come along. Warren had made sure of that.

“That’s right.” Carlos drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “She could have warned him not to enter, but she didn’t. Two agents of Light chased him out. They ambushed him in the brush surrounding the springs. Let his blood run where the natural streams once had.”

I swallowed hard. He made the Light sound as brutal as Shadows.

Carlos pursed his lips as he stared through his glass of amber liquid. “He was impossibly fast, my father. They’d never have caught him if he’d known Las Vegas like you…or me.”

“Is that how you’ve evaded Warren for so long? Because you know the city?” Its pockets and hidey-holes. How else could a rogue survive?

“That…and I’m even faster.” He slumped lower in his seat, but the movement didn’t look sloppy. His long- apparently speedy-legs sprawled like a desert spider taking hold of a rocky crag, and the top of his white shirt flared to reveal the hard lines of a smooth, honeyed chest. If I wasn’t currently so put off by male agents of Light, I might have been moved.

I turned in my seat, glancing back at Tripp and the others, but they hadn’t moved. Swiveling back, I found my glass again full. Carlos smiled. “Um, just so I can firm up my plans for the evening…you’re not going to kill me?”

“No.” He sipped.

So did I. “Why?”

His soft lashes curled up as he lifted his gaze, making him look angelic as he nodded at Jose. The owner silently crossed the room, lifted a bright orange sombrero from its peg, and removed a picture box hidden underneath. He then presented this to me as he would a menu, and the two men exchanged words in the smooth cadence of their native tongue while I flipped a clasp on the shadow box’s side and opened it up.

“Cuidado,” Carlos said, but the warning was unnecessary. My gasp told him I knew exactly what I held. Knew too who was depicted on the inside cover: me, my image drawn upon the manual…and done so long before I’d ever been born.

The book wasn’t inked, only penciled, and wasn’t even a proper comic, having been drawn well before the format’s Golden Age. The pages were bound together with a peeling yellowed glue, and every brushstroke had a sense of age to it, a style as easily discernible to the modern eye as a Pixar movie versus Bugs Bunny’s debut.

At least the subject matter was familiar. A woman cloaked in shadows, running through a tunnel while glancing over her shoulder. Her face was indiscernible, her body long and muscular and absent of the pinup features commonly associated with females in comics. Despite the shading, I knew this was me. The old me, though, Joanna, before my transformation into an action figure with body parts more important than the whole. The drawing perfectly captured how I moved, or at least how I felt when I moved.

Adding to its accuracy, and its mystery, this had clearly been sketched by someone used to the strong, serious lines of cartography or botanical drawings. I felt like I was holding a piece of art worthy of Sotheby’s, and flipped through it quickly to find the attached story. A jagged tear interrupted, though, and disappointment ripped through me as well. Some point in the manual’s storied past had found it rent in two. I glanced up to find Carlos watching me with sympathy, and knew he’d felt the same loss upon seeing the tear.

“How old?” I managed, my voice a mere creak.

“Closer to the first manual than anyone I know has ever seen. My father must have had it for years, maybe since he was a boy. He obviously knew what it was.” Carlos rubbed his bare chin thoughtfully. “He hid it under a pew in the cathedral just before the attack which took his life. It was an agreement between my mother and him. Her idea. She wasn’t as fast, but she was smart.”