Cheat the Grave

teeth, “He said that sort of fallout is the least of your worries. Besides, you’ll learn right quick, a rogue takes sanctuary where they can find it.” She gestured around the jet void of the room like it was a plutonium palace.

“The cell has been in this sink for a good decade, and I can tell you straight up there’s no freer place. Certainly not in the fiery world you just journeyed from.”

I braced my elbows behind me, refusing to be put down again. Staring with eyes nearly as wide as hers, I shook my head. “So I was really there?”

“Of course. It’s all here, I can just follow your body to see where you’ve been.” And she grabbed. I made a strangled sound as those tensile fingers pinched something vital, rubbing the organ like it was a spa specialty. Whatever massage she’d done had turned my skin to putty, stretching and pulling it to allow access by those strong, knowing fingers. I dizzied as she slid her fingers along the kidney-shaped mass, and though it didn’t technically hurt, it was as foreign as first time sex. Then I burped up a surprising dry wad of sand, right onto the cloth covering my chest. My mouth remained hanging open, though shock kept me from letting out the scream leapfrogging through my brain.

“I can tell from touch whose daughter you are as well.” She grabbed for another internal organ with those searching fingers, but I blocked, pushing her away. I didn’t like my insides being fondled like cuts at a butcher’s shop. Yet Io was as strong as she looked. She nailed me with that unblinking gaze, held both of my hands over my head with only one of hers, and found my pelvic bone with the other. Damn near wrapping her fingers around it, and far less gently this time, she gave it a little tug. “This tells me you’re Zoe Archer’s daughter, born of both Shadow and Light, also of deceit, which is the real shadow clouding your life.”

She let go and, just as abruptly, resumed the gentle massage. Sweating, I dropped my head back and whimpered. Buttersnap slobbered all over my right cheek.

“You know my mother?” I asked when I finally found my voice.

“Felt your imprint in her once,” she confirmed. “Along the backside, though.” And this time, when she slid her fingers under me, she ran one right up the connecting vertebrae. “Right there, see? That’s her.”

And an entire concert of near-forgotten scents filled my nose. It was the mixture of emotions one would expect when remembering an absent mother, lemon-bright happiness accompanying a memory of bouncing on a knee. It was herbal also, fresh as green paint, as she instructed me on how to ride a bike. Then ginger hair swung over one shoulder as she bent over my homework, taught me to thread a needle, tie a knot…make a fist.

Make a fist? Where had that memory come from?

The question, though, was chased from my mind by an earthy musk, almost masculine, my mother’s strength as I recalled her standing up to others-teens who drove too fast on residential streets, women who snarked at each other over tea. Xavier, when he dared to malign me.

“God.” I was surprised into tears. It’d been so long since I breathed in that scent. Of course, I’d never experienced it so strongly before, but Io was right-sometimes the body knew what the mind did not, including how very much I missed Zoe Archer. I nearly lunged for another whiff, but the dog was back, bearskin breath obliterating the lemon-herb musk.

“And here, just below, is your daughter.” And she scooped up my womb firmly, but gently, still encased safely beneath my skin, which wrapped around it like warm stretched dough. I opened my mouth to object…and another scent and memory I’d not had in over a decade careened through my consciousness. A newborn’s wail, unmasked before they whisked her from the room. It was accompanied by a simple scent-wet and without hooks, just a smooth slide into my gut. Ashlyn. The accompanying memory, buried like a time capsule, was of perfect hands and legs flailing, a brief brush of warm pink skin against my thigh as the umbilical cord was cut. Experiencing it again was so powerful I almost said her name aloud.

“Stop,” I whimpered. “Please stop…doing that.”

Her hold lessened, though she didn’t release me entirely. “What? Making your mind remember things your body holds as its secrets?” She shook her head, pressing more firmly again. “A woman should know her own body, at the least.”

A burst then, powdered rose blooming as her fingers inched higher. “Feel this, where the base of the fallopian tube sits? That tells me the whole world is going to know about your hidden little gem pretty soon too. You were late to your second life cycle, but this one here takes after your Momma.”

The second life cycle. Puberty. When the rest of the supernatural world scents a future agent coming into the first of their powers. It was what had caused the first attack on my life as a teen by a Shadow agent.

I shook my head side to side, causing the dog to wag his tail. “She’s not my daughter.”

“Oh, okay.” She pushed with her pinky finger. Again I heard the newborn wail.

“She’s not. Never was. She was placed with another family at birth.”

She pulled her hands from beneath the sheet, then cocked them on her hips. I wrapped my arms around my middle, not daring to touch my stomach, feeling hollowed out, and strangely empty. “Baby, that child was comprised of your cells, conceived in your body, and nourished with your blood. Once she’s been in you, she’s always of you. Same with you and your Momma. You see the connection? That’s why our world is matriarchal. Every person, no matter how powerful, is dependent on the matriarchal link.”

“Not the Tulpa.”

“Which is why he’s so hard to kill.”

Hard? I thought, with an inward scoff. Impossible was more like it. More impervious to attack than the beast next to me.

Io leaned forward, so close violet light sparked in her hair. “And it’s also why he hates us all, Shadow and Light.”

Now that was a new thought. Was that why she, a ward mother of Shadows, had left the Tulpa’s compound?

But I couldn’t follow the thought to conclusion, not right now. I was suddenly a stranger in my own body and surprised to find those links Io spoke of, ones I’d tried so hard to forget these long years-were still there. No matter what I did, their mark was inside me, like some sort of injury.

Same as everyone else, crybaby. I thought again of the first Shadow agent I’d ever met and battled, Ajax. His mother had defected to the Light side, leaving him embarrassed, outraged, and haunted by the betrayal. But if what Io was saying was true, he’d been dependent on the link as well, as attuned to his mother as a concert violinist’s ear to the string. He’d used it to find her, and when he did, killed her. I glanced back at Io, shuddering and wondering if she’d unlocked those secrets in his body, and somehow helped him.

Io was holding her palms over me, not touching my skin, though heat from her hands radiated into my body, like flat lasers searching for signs of life below a bleak sky. She tsked, shaking her head. “Your chakras are blocked. Your spleen is almost entirely comprised of black bile. How do you even walk upright? You need to start allowing yourself to feel the things that have shaped and formed you, my girl. The ones that have de formed you. Once you accept them, you can present your new shape to the world.”

My mind winged over my long ago rape, my mother’s abandonment, my sister’s death, my ejection from the troop. My deformities. I paused a little too long on the thought of Hunter, probably because of his appearance in my not-dream, and whisked a tear away. Disconcertingly, Buttersnap ate it from my new fingertips.

“You need to make this old world conform to your new curves.” She tilted her head up at me, even though she was working below, and gave me a conspiratorial wink. “A confident woman’s body…a most dangerous terrain.”

I nodded like I understood, but I really just wanted her to look away.

“By the way, he’s over here. Want to feel him?”

“The Tulpa?” I shook my head. She could feel my father in me. How gross was that? She’d probably wrap her hands around the organ telling his story and come away with acid fingertips.

Io stared at my face, observing every pore with those unblinking eyes. “Well yes, him too. But I meant the other. The one you been trying to tell yourself is not meant for you.”

And she pushed without permission, moving aside ribs and lungs with a necessary gentleness. She could kill me, I realized, with a mere twitch of her thumb. My heart pulsed in her palm, faster when I realized she was cradling it, and then it expanded, opened to her. Opened to me too.

I smelled a doused campfire, wet wood and tobacco, soapy suede, sunset heat. I closed my eyes, dizzied, and breathed in Hunter-the way he was when he moved inside of me, when he bent his head to mine, when he met me