Cheat the Grave

I nodded. “Like become mortal?”

She glanced at me sharply. “That was your choice.”

“Ah, but look who I had as an example.” A friggin’ superhero. And one who’d given over all her powers to save me. So had there really been an alternative? Was there any way I could have simply allowed a little girl to die in a flooded tunnel while I stayed relatively safe, and very much alive?

Sure, I thought, huffing lightly. But as Zoe Archer’s daughter, I think the guilt would have eventually killed me.

Zoe, not one to take any criticism without a fight, argued back. “But you had an advantage I didn’t. You spent your formative years outside the troop. I, on the other hand, was raised inside it, groomed for a position in the Zodiac, primed and nurtured to become the Archer of Light.” She laughed humorlessly. “I mean, I had no idea you could actually bleed just by knocking into something, or that it would hurt to stub your toe, or get a paper cut. I even had to alter the way I had sex-”

“Too much information,” I sang, cutting her off.

She smiled thinly, as I wanted. God, there was history behind us. There was so much to ask her, so much to say. A part of me wanted to rail, to ask questions I’d agonized over all through my teen years, while I was punching nylon bags and sparring mitts. But now didn’t feel like the time for hard words, and I wasn’t as angry with her standing next to me. I remembered my back against hers as we faced off against Mackie and the Tulpa. How we’d clung to each other when uniting against Warren.

No. It wasn’t anger at all. It was sympathy. And sadness. And a boatload of understanding. Life was not a straight shot. It veered dangerously. Sometimes all you could do was hold on tight and hope for the best.

“Do you want to know the hardest thing of all?” Zoe asked, voice soft as she frowned into the distance again.

“Worse than the physical weakness, far worse than the loss of powers, was the emotional isolation. Always before, I’d been a part of something. I’d acted independently, of course, going undercover for months without contacting the troop, but that was different. I was doing it for them. It counted, and they were counting on me. But all of that disappeared along with my powers. For a while I wished I was dead rather than mortal.”

She winced at how the truth sounded when spoken aloud.

I winced because I understood. “And now?”

Shrugging, Zoe tossed me a lopsided smile. “I’ve mellowed with age.”

I whistled through my teeth. The woman who’d pulled a bazooka on the Tulpa, and put a round through Sleepy Mac, was “mellow.” Yeah, and I’d been a natural blonde.

“I like it now, though. Mortality, I mean. The anonymity is almost soothing. What I do can’t be recorded, and doesn’t really matter. Not on a global scale.”

I quirked a brow. “You mean outside of little things like creating doppelgangers, plotting the Tulpa’s downfall, watching over me, and acting in support of the rogues who wish to overthrow both the Shadow and the Light.”

“Yes. Outside of that.”

I smiled hesitantly, wondering if it should be this easy after so many years. Sure, she was my mother, but she was so many other things too. So many other people. It was hard to be sure who I was talking to: Zoe?

Suzanne? The Archer? A legend? My mother? Someone Warren once loved? Someone else entirely?

But looking at her shifting her weight in the early morning light, I decided it didn’t matter. Right now she was just a woman standing on the street…and one who was saying good-bye.

So my questions could wait a bit longer. I’d probably kick myself for it later, but I decided to treat her as gently as I’d like to be treated, and as too few people had bothered to do in the past. Besides, there was too little time as it was.

“What will you do next?” she finally asked, dark hair swinging over one shoulder. She looked nothing like the golden goddess at the wedding. Even her stance and carriage were different. I wondered if she’d miss being Suzanne.

I rattled off my to-do list. “Figure out how to cash in on some soul chips. Build an army. Free the rogues from Midheaven.” Retrieve my boyfriend from the arms of another woman.

She tilted her head. “Even those who don’t want to be free?”

“Everyone wants to be free,” I said, still thinking of Hunter.

“Don’t be so sure,” she cautioned, sighing. “And your fight won’t be solely against the Shadows this time.”

No, it would also be against the Light.

Maybe.

Because now everybody knew Warren hadn’t just been treating me like shit, but jacking with the whole of his troop. Knowing them as I did-good, smart, strong people-and remembering Vanessa’s shocked face in particular, I still hoped they’d call him on it. Either way, something had to give. He’d said in the tunnels that nothing was changing, but he was wrong. It already had.

“Well, no self-respecting democracy was ever born without a solid fight,” I muttered, trying to keep my voice light.

“True. Just plenty of bloodshed.”

I shot her a wry look. That wasn’t helpful. Besides, true freedom was worth fighting for, both as a group and an individual. My work now was to gather people around me who believed that. I might be mortal, but I’d returned to the paranormal world. All in, more than ever before.

“I could use some allies,” I said, shooting her a sidelong glance. “As many as I can get.”

Something old and lethal sparked in her eyes as she con sidered it-and I knew she too remembered standing atop that dais, back-to-back, weapons primed, adrenaline running like napalm in our blood. She smiled at the memory, but slowly the light in her eyes died. “I have another task now. I’m more focused on the good of a particular individual than a whole troop.”

“Ashlyn,” I said, and we both pretended my voice didn’t crack.

She nodded, then said brightly, “But you have Carlos. The rogues can provide you with more protection than I can. I, uh, don’t have much left.”

I didn’t argue or agree. Both would be true.

“She knows about me, doesn’t she?” I said instead, remembering the look the girl had shot me from the parted curtains of her bedroom window.

“Not you in particular, no. But us. Them,” she said, motioning out into the world, the underworld. “I couldn’t let it happen again.”

Meaning allow a young girl to enter her second life cycle without training, knowledge, or defense.

“I’ve been putting her through an augmented form of training.” She sounded almost sheepish about it. “Don’t tell her adoptive mother, okay?”

I gave her a flat look, which caused her to grin. I also tried to work up some jealousy just to see if it lived inside me, or at least some pique that she’d spend so much time and energy training a young girl while I was out there figuring it out, mostly through error, on my own. But the anger wouldn’t come. I guess I was mellowing too.

“Subversive, as always.”

“It’s when I’m at my best.”

I smiled. Yes. That was my mother.

“I’ve missed you.” The words slipped from me, and the welling tears were equally unexpected. I choked them back, a proud woman crying in front of a proud woman, waiting until I could again look her in the eye.

She stared at me, my mother’s eyes still locked in Su zanne’s face, fighting not to blink lest her own tears fall.

“I was here all along.”

What broke inside of me then was primal, like a child’s need to cling to something warm and soft. A fractured wail escaped me even while I told myself to shut up. I bent at the waist to hold it in, then at the knees, curling into myself even as I ordered myself to stand. And my mother, my mother, Zoe Archer-once the Archer, agent of Light, who’d nearly toppled the Tulpa, and who had a mind strong enough to form doppelgangers and control other people’s tulpas-she tented herself over me, wrapped her arms around what was both my and Olivia’s body, and held me together.

It bloomed then, an unexpected lemon-herb mixture that had nothing to do with supersenses and everything to