Cheat the Grave

handle the antique ones left by my mother, and as a mortal I shouldn’t be able to do either. My fingers skimmed the trident at my hip, which steadied my breathing. Once I was sure my emotions wouldn’t leak from me, I slipped back around the partitions, leaving Buttersnap to patrol the memories in the shooting range. I simply wasn’t up for it.

But then I spotted the secret passageway. Recessed, the alcove was practically invisible to the eye’s quick scan, and as yet unseen by Tripp. Glancing back at him, still studying Hunter’s drawings like they were key to discovering the Ark itself, I quietly crossed the room, pushed on the hinged panel, then slipped inside.

The small stairwell was as claustrophobic as any other narrow, dark space, the trapped air pressing in on me to amplify my footsteps and breath. I chided myself for having the nightmarish thought of something waiting for me at the top of the staircase, and climbed as quickly as I could, ignoring the noise I made as I clamored to the top. Feeling around blindly at the passageway’s end, I pushed open the simple shuttered door and stepped into the crow’s nest, a tiny alcove overlooking the entire warehouse.

“Masochist,” I mumbled, shaking my head. Because if the room downstairs was a reminder of how much I’d opened myself to Hunter, this one was head-on collision. It was small, holding nothing more than a bed beneath a slanted roofline and a cheap press-wood desk. I sighed, then slumped to the edge of the bed, giving up any pretense of strength…or interest in anything beyond what was left of Hunter in this world.

Were I still an agent, I’d be able to scent him everywhere, as Tripp undoubtedly could. As it was, I pressed my face to the pillow propped atop the unmade bed-a pathetically girly, lovesick, and patently unexpected thing for me to do.

“God, Hunt.” And I allowed myself a moment to do what I previously hadn’t when thinking of the man who’d abandoned this world for another: grieve.

So it is a soul connection.

Was it? I asked myself, remembering Trish’s words, uttered just before Solange annihilated the water room. And if so, how could he leave me for her with so much remaining between us? I’d dodged the thought for weeks, cringing every time it poked its head into the light, but I couldn’t dodge it now. I had fallen in love with the man, perhaps on first sight…most definitely in this workshop. I’d been so sure he felt the same that the shock of his betrayal still crashed over me in unexpected waves.

I leaned back and gazed up at the roofline angled close over the simple bed. Stars shone there, glued, but still glowing in his rendition of a makeshift sky. “Fucking pitiful.”

I hated looking at what I’d lost instead of what I’d managed to save. I had life. I had a troop again…or at least a pseudotroop. I had a purpose, and if not a real chance of killing the Tulpa or avoiding Mackie’s blade, then at least hope. If I began counting my losses, my mind could quickly become an endless game of Russian roulette.

Sniffling, I lifted Gareth’s bag from my shoulders and rifled through it until I found the manual I wanted…the one I knew would be there all along.

Dark Matters. With my heart caught in a syncopated beat, I stared at the cover featuring Hunter as Jaden Jacks. Funny, but if you’d told me even two months ago that Hunter was tiny, I’d have scoffed. Maybe it was just his presence; he was a man who knew his own body and mind, one who took over rooms just by entering them. Or maybe it was that he was a superhero, one the other agents of Light had looked up to… until they’d looked away. One thing was sure…my unswerving attraction to him had been there from the first.

In any case, Jaden Jacks was a Wrestlemania sort of giant-bronzed skin, bulging biceps, bleached military hair, squared jaw. The man I knew was all of that, though coiled in a tighter frame, along with straight mocha hair and eyes like honey over toast. Though the eyes had been the same, I realized, staring down at them now. I should have caught that when first encountering Jacks, but had been so overwhelmed by his physicality I hadn’t.

I pushed my back against the wall, but got a flash of Hunter reclined in the same place, covers draped across his naked thighs so artfully he should have been sculpted. Clearing my throat, I shifted back to the edge of the bed like some prim old maid and opened the manual to find out if becoming Hunter had been as unwilling a transformation as my own into Olivia .

But Dark Matters didn’t begin there. Instead it began with what had made the makeover necessary, and that began with the death of his parents.

I knew it had been violent; it was a death I’d experienced as though it were my own via the power of the aureole. However, what that shared magic hadn’t shown, what it’d neglected to play out in my mind like some sort of mental horror flick, was the brutality of the attack upon them. They’d been beset by the entire Shadow troop one fateful Fourth of July. They’d done well for themselves until the second wave of Shadows hit. Then they’d gone under, fighting back-to-back, until they were flattened. Hunter had watched the whole thing from his hiding spot beneath a car. He was five years old.

The Shadows left. The child emerged. And so did another one-one who was three years older, one from the shadows. One who was of the Shadows. And Solange spared his life.

Holy shit. A relationship begun in childhood? A life-debt that practically predetermined a connection? I scoffed, shaking my head. I’d never even had a chance.

Flash forward more than twenty years after that tragic beginning, and those eyes I’d recognize anywhere were dull and brittle, like burnt-out bulbs in a man ready to tune out, turn off, and shut down. The thought bubbles blooming overhead indicated he was jaded about humanity’s desire to be helped, and bitter over giving his life over to people who rarely lifted a finger to help themselves. This, more than his appearance, made him alien to me. The Hunter I’d known was a hero through and through. His life was spent in service to humanity, preserving choice for them through unceasing battle with the Shadows.

But you hadn’t known him at all, had you?

I resumed my reading, feeling like a voyeur but unable to look away.

Solange first approached him in a bar, intent on com pleting the task she’d neglected when they were both children: end his life. She seduced him at the height of a desert storm, but whatever she saw in the final flash of heat lightning, as her tomahawk was poised overhead, had her withholding her killing blow…and had him doing the same. They made love instead, and then they made a pact…public enemies, private lovers. For months he’d had an affair with a mortal enemy, one this manual revealed in embarrassingly erotic detail.

Was that why he could accept the Shadow in me? I thought, flipping pages faster and faster. Was it how he could look past my father’s mean influence and unwanted lineage, and say there was nothing wrong with me?

And why he believed my Shadow side could ultimately be overcome?

I blinked, shocked to find tears staining the pages, and slapped the manual shut. I knew the rest of this story anyway. They’d had a child together. She’d fled to Midheaven.

And I was wrong about the connection between us.

My soft thoughts of us together weren’t memories…they were recurring deaths. I hadn’t been made love to him like the woman on these pages, like a goddess. The time he spent with me had been a lie and dream. And when I was awake? I was alone, trapped by mortality.

I tucked the manual back in the duffel, glanced back up at the stars scattering the ceiling and reaching to touch what he’d called a frozen star. They were really black holes. Dead stars. He tracked them along with the others, he said, because they had the shortest lives. For some reason Hunter had been attracted to dark things. Like me.

Like Solange.

I’ve been searching for Sola for a long time, he’d said, before leaving me for her.

It was enough to harden my thoughts to him once again. Because he’d admitted this after making love to me, after convincing me that being vulnerable wasn’t synonymous with being weak. After I’d allowed his voice to wash through me, filling crevices and hollows I hadn’t even known were empty.

I gazed at the wrongly marked sky, the version of true love they shared, until my vision blurred. Then I pushed from the bed and rejoined Tripp downstairs.

17

“I’m going to take a few of these for you,” Tripp said, gathering together drawings, careful not to look at me.