Cheat the Grave

halfway, then kept coming. My heart beat faster, my palms begin to sweat, my mouth parted, and I swallowed hard.

Then I thought of him pursuing Solange. “Dreams are the only place that man, that scent, exists.”

But even as I said it, I heard his dream voice-wrapped in hot tobacco and suede-calling. Oh my God. What are you doing here? I’ve been trying-

Trying to what? Say he was sorry? Forget me, maybe? Trying to come back to me?

No. I’d seen his face before he left for Solange, and Midheaven. He was resolute in what he wanted, and that was her. What he’d probably been trying to do ever since was sever this so-called soul connection the other women had been taunting me over. We’d shared a unique magic once, called the aureole. For a brief time he’d known my thoughts and I’d shared his. Swapped them as if we’d lived them. Took individual experience and made them our own.

Solange was obviously angry about this, so he was working to appease his wife.

Fine. I’d happily agree to cutting the cord if it meant her calling off Mackie.

So I didn’t care if he resided in my body like Io said. Like I’d just scented. Those campfire logs were really driftwood disappearing around a river bend. The heat of sunset was the end of our affair, and my job now wasn’t to remember, but to excise him. If I just kept moving, maybe he’d work his way out like a splinter under the skin.

Io finally put my heart back in its place, like tucking an egg in its nest.

“Are we done?” I asked. This emotional prodding was worse than the dream. Buttersnap licked a tear from my cheek. This time I let her.

Io smoothed damp hair from my forehead and offered me a surprisingly kind, and yes, motherly, smile. “I know you feel weak right now, but you know what Carlos would say?” She straightened and donned a perfect Mexican accent. “Don’t underestimate the lowly. You’re a night crawler now.”

And a gray. Frowning, I glanced back up at Io. “What does that mean?”

She smiled, and held out a strong hand. “Why don’t you come see for yourself?”

14

Much of the Zodiac world was hidden beneath the known one. Midheaven was locked in the water and sewage system built to relieve our bowl-like valley of the seasonal floodwaters. The sanctuary where agents of Light were born, raised, and trained to battle Shadows was hidden below the Neon Boneyard, where the famous signage of Las Vegas’s yesteryear was put to rest. The Shadows too had a place of sanctuary, though it had yet to be revealed to me. Following Io, I wondered about that. Surely Warren knew, or at least suspected its location. Had he said nothing to me, and ordered the others to do the same, because of the Shadow in me? Had he trusted me so little from the beginning? Did he think I’d go knocking on the door and ask to join their troop after he so thoroughly tossed me out of his own?

I wouldn’t, of course. Accessing the sanctuary of Light had nearly killed me the first time I tried it, and the only way I could safely pass the security system unharmed was by donning a mask Hunter had designed to shield my Shadow side from the system’s defensive light. The undoubtedly painful necessity of trial and error aside, I had no desire to experience the Shadow side’s equivalent, or hang out with a bunch of rotting, homicidal demons in my copious spare time.

But it was obvious from Io’s unblinking, wide-eyed stare that the Shadows made their home belowground as well. A mutation like hers wasn’t created in a vacuum. Basic biology demanded a reason, use, and purpose for everything in the world, and following this former Shadow ward mother-alongside a warden that would have eaten me whole a scant few weeks earlier-I couldn’t help wonder at mine.

“What do you think?” Io asked, motioning with one great arm at the remnants of nuclear fallout like it was her own Buckingham Palace, half turning to me as she continued walking.

I thought it looked like the place had been bombed, but kept the snarky comment to myself. “You said the cell has only been here a decade?”

Because despite the postapocalyptic feel, the bunker was rather homey if you didn’t mind living like a mole. Though the passageways were narrow in some places and wide in others, hollowed out shelves housed scentless white candles, and the walls beneath these were caked in mounds of wax. The ground was worn smooth, and looking up, I noted the ceilings had been sanded into roundness. It was as cool as a wine cave, though not cold, which I found surprising. Winter nights were as fierce in the desert as the summer’s heat, the flat Mojave terrain welcoming of extremes.

In addition to the candles, cables ran along the passageways, metal hooks securing them into place, though where they started and ended, I didn’t know. There were also objects cemented in the walls-pens, stones, medallions, broken pottery, silver rings-certainly nothing that would be out of place in a trash heap, though each was fastened with obvious care. I wiped my sore fingertips along a Scrabble tile caked in what was probably fallout, and Io paused, answering my unasked question.

“Every rogue carries a sort of talisman from wherever it is they’ve escaped. That’s Melania’s. She…she wasn’t here very long.”

I frowned at the tightness in Io’s voice, but she’d moved on. “This is Cedric’s. He fled the valley last year. And you know who this one belongs to. See the flag?”

A patch from an item of clothing, the colors dropped vertically in green, white, and red. An eagle devouring a snake atop a prickly pear cactus. “Carlos.”

I felt rather than saw her nod. “Most agents don’t even know they’re carrying around pieces of the lives they’ve fled. It’s an unconscious impulse, a way of staying connected to the home and family they’ve always known. But when they truly become a member of the cell, they’re able to give up the old.”

She looked sharply at me here and I looked sharply back. I had no such object to release. I was still home.

“Don’t worry,” she finally said. “Carlos doesn’t force the issue and there’s no ceremony to mark the occasion. When the time is right, each rogue simply picks out a spot on the wall that feels right and claims it as their own.”

I gazed along the length of rough hallway, gaze catching on dozens of talismans. “How many rogues are here?”

Io shrugged. “The cell shifts as people come and go, though each member changes the makeup of the whole. Even when they’re gone, they leave a bit of themselves behind.”

“Are there really that many displaced agents in the world?” Warren had made it seem there were only a few… and those were alone, broken, dangerous, or crazy.

“As long as there’ve been societies, there’ve been people on the fringe of them.” Io motioned me forward and we entered an anteroom that dipped dangerously in the middle, blown out rubble still trapped in the bottom of the bowl. A wire net crisscrossed the opening, ostensibly to keep people from falling through, but I shuddered, thinking it could just as easily be someone, or something’s, cage.

“A sink within the sink.” Io jerked her chin at the hole. Her tone was dismissive, so I relaxed enough to turn my attention to what was by default the most interesting part of the room.

“More talismans?” I asked, though the objects in here weren’t embedded in the walls, just piled along them. The wall candles were planted haphazardly by necessity, and the shadows they cast caught the strange objects in bumpy relief. It was light enough to see that everything was burned, twisted, melted, or savagely mutilated, and would have been unrecognizable if they hadn’t been so patently mundane.

There were car doors, ripped from their hinges, with shattered windows and bubbled, peeling paint. A scorched tabletop missing all of its legs. Steel girders so gnarled they couldn’t support their own weight. Giant slabs of concrete, plaster, an airplane propeller, front doors, and a mishmash of smaller debris caught in jars like fireflies made of rubble. The place was packed, floor to ceiling, with the scorched remains of every material known to man.

“It looks like Ali Baba’s junkyard.”