Cheat the Grave

I reached forward, unable to resist running my finger over the images. “What does it say?”

“It foretells the Kairos’s birth in this city. That here she would be raised, survive attack, go into hiding, and discover her true destiny upon metamorphosis in her twenty-fifth year.” He waved his hand over the open pages. “This legend on these pages was why he sent us here when our own battles were deemed lost.”

I shook my head, and the mescal took hold. I shook it harder to regain my vision. I couldn’t play savior to this man, or anyone, anymore. I’d tried it before, and look where it had gotten me. “Look, I did some of those things, it’s true. The commonalities are even uncanny…” How many other women in Vegas had done all that?

And how could every depiction on these panels ring so true and right in my marrow? “But you’re too late. Maybe if he’d had the full issue, or the one printed after this, he might have seen that.”

“You are the Kairos.”

“I am a mortal.”

“You underestimate your strength.”

“Understandable…since I have none.”

Carlos remained unmoved. “Did you read the text on the final full panel?”

“It’s in Spanish.”

He held out his hand. “Then I will read it for you.”

Cradling the manual like a prayer book, Carlos cleared his throat and began to read from the blurb on the inside cover in a strong, clear voice, his accent transposing beats in the sentence, like it was music. “‘Light returned to the valley, where the meadows had long been falsely lit, to lure and fool the unwary. But with this true light came genuine hope. Balance seemed possible…right up until the Great Sorrow. This event marks the onset of the Fifth Sign: the Shadow binding with the Light.’”

His deep, dark eyes blazed expectantly.

“More fucking signs,” I muttered, and poured myself some more fucking tequila. I took another sip of my liquor, holding it in my mouth so long it numbed my gums and swelled my tongue. Carlos obviously thought the fifth sign was my willingness to work with the yahoos making like Tony Montana behind me, but that wasn’t possible. I swallowed the warm tequila with a grimace. I was no longer Light. Or Shadow. I was no longer Joanna, or really Olivia. I was not a daughter. I was not a weapon. I was not the Kairos. I leaned my elbows on the table and said as much to Carlos.

“And that’s where I come in.” Carlos finally leaned forward, forearms on the edge of the table, fingers twirling his shot glass, though not a drop spilled. “I can teach you the tricks and trade of being a rogue. The power in being powerless. The Kairos is not meant for only Shadow or Light. She is preordained to be the deliverer of us all.”

I leaned forward as well, meeting his dark, pretty, zealous gaze with a cynicism earned by listening to too many zealots. “Carlos, you seem like a…nice man. Fairer than any I’ve met in my recent past, that’s for sure. But you’re too late. Even if I were the Kairos-obviously untrue-I’m not anymore. I gave up every drop of my power and aura and life force- chi, whatever you want to call it-to save a mortal child. There’s more power left in the bottom of this bottle than there is in my entire body.”

“I have total confidence in you.”

“That manual did nothing in my hands,” I pointed out, important because they once had. All written histories burst to life and color, “Pow!” and “Bam!” exploding from the panels in brilliant bursts when in the hands of an agent. Carlos shrugged, unmoved, and even in my increasingly drunken state, I knew why before he spoke.

“Because you’ve become an independent.” It hadn’t come to life in his hands either.

“You mean a rogue,” I said, raising a brow, testing him.

“I mean a part of this valley’s prophesied revolution. The woman who will rise from ash to become the leader of a new world order.”

“Gee, why does that sound familiar?” I tapped my chin like I was really considering it, then brightened. “Oh, yeah-because I already did that. And failed.”

Carlos only lifted a dark brow. “Tell me. What is Warren’s stated agenda for the agents of Light? Defeat the Shadow agents for good? Annihilate them from the valley?”

I shook my head. “Balance. He said a true and continual balance between the two sides will allow mortals the greatest choice in their own lives.”

“Yet he continues to seek the Shadows’ destruction.”

“As they seek his.”

“There is no balance when destruction is the goal. It’s like adding a fat kid to your end of the seesaw. The other side is forced to overreact.”

“There’s no other way with the Tulpa.” The leader of the Shadow side had long made it known that any Light in the valley would be exterminated. His position was as inalterable as Israel versus Palestine. The only way to stand firm against attack was to preempt it yourself.

“Ah, but there is. True balance in life comes only when there is total freedom of choice…from either side.”

Carlos sat back so suddenly my mortal eyes only picked the movement up in panes. “Let me ask you something. What do you see when you look at me?”

My eyesight blurred as it trailed his features; cinnamon face, hair a soft, black blot. “You’re the Latin archetype. The one they write songs about.”

“Thank you,” he said, beautiful smile widening. “But I meant, what do you see of my intent? My nature?”

“Oh.” I flushed, but then chalked it up to the drink, and shrugged. The idea of a flirtation or romance was about as attractive as a harelip. “Well, you’re Light. I’d be able to tell even if I hadn’t been an agent. I bet even lifelong mortals flock to you.” Especially the women.

His smile went closed-lipped, modest and knowing, and he lifted his chin, angling his eyes over my shoulder.

“And what about Tripp?”

“Clearly Shadow. Even Fletcher and Milo would have been easy to spot.”

“Once, you would have been right. But things are different when you’re reduced to gray, and that’s what being a rogue truly means. We walk the line between both sides, accepted by neither. We are all gray.” He laughed then, which made no sense to me until he explained, “That’s what we call ourselves. Grays.”

“So what about me?”

“Born gray,” Carlos replied immediately. “A natural blending of Shadow and Light.”

“Natural?” I laughed so loud and long that disapproving mumbles rose between my decidedly unfeminine snorts.

“What, you had to work for the ability to enter the sanctuary of the Light? Or bring to life the glyph on your chest? To leap to rooftops? To survive man-made weaponry?”

“I had to learn,” I remembered, thinking specifically of the way my glyph, a bow and arrow, burst to life in glowing brilliance upon my chest when in danger. That didn’t happen anymore.

“A different thing altogether.” He waved the protest away. “And now you have the added ability to walk the line between superhuman and mortal.”

I began to scoff, but he cut me off with a lazy flick of his wrist. “Oh, I can tell you think you have nothing by the way you carry yourself. There is a fatalism about you that says you expect to be attacked and killed and there’s noth ing you can do about it. But do you know what I see when I look at you?”

“A pin-up with attitude?”

He didn’t smile. “I see a woman with everything.”

“I’m not the Kairos.” I said flatly.

He surprised me by agreeing. “Not right now.”

“So what can I be to you?” What exactly was Carlos after?

“You can be saved. Join our cell, or at least consider it, and I promise our full resources in protecting you from Sleepy Mac.”

“You’re rogues. You have no resources.”

He lifted a brow. “You didn’t know of our existence until now, right?”

I bit my lip. True, nobody in the troop had mentioned it. And Warren was obsessed with the subject. If he thought a splinter group of former agents was living in his domain, he’d blow the whole place up.

I glanced back at Tripp, Milo, and Fletcher. These people-Shadow, Light, gray and super-