the gag. “And what did the power you stole from me taste like?”
I was referring to the chips I’d lost to him over a game of soul poker in Midheaven-two odd triangular symbols, their meaning still unknown to me. Not that it mattered much now.
Spitting a stray bit of tar from his tongue, he scoffed. “I won it from you.”
“Then traded it away.” For some alone time with a woman.
“Tell me you blame me.” And he said it so defiantly I really wanted to. But I couldn’t. Ruthless barter was the way of that world. Come to think of it, it was the way of this one. “That’s what I thought. And now that that’s settled…you’re going to help me.”
“Why, Harlan Tripp,” I said, in my sweetest southern drawl, “why on earth would I deign to assist the likes of you?”
No amusement this time. He leaned forward, still seated, but far closer than I ever wanted him. In a voice rumbling like a far-off streetcar, he whispered, “Because I know who you are. Your father killed my entire family, outlawed me, and sent me on the lam. The only thing that kept me going in that seventh level of hell was the thought of killing him, his sycophants, and everyone else who done me wrong.”
I lay silent for a long moment, trying to scent the heat of his bitter fury, and feeling only the warmth of that strange cigarette’s smoke. If I could move I would have waved it away, though I had a feeling it would cling to my hands with its deceptive warmth.
“Tripp,” I finally said, licking dry lips. “You and I are not on the same side, got it? Never have been, never will be.”
I could appreciate the idea of a world unpopulated by the Tulpa and his Shadows-after all, my birth father had tried repeatedly to kill me, too-but even were I still an agent with powers beyond a mortal’s, still in possession of a lineage marking me as special, I would never work alongside a man like Harlan Tripp.
A ghostly smile flashed on his ruddy stubbled face. “I will tear off long, precise strips of your flesh with these pliers,” he whispered in a lover’s voice, and holding up the sharp tool, “until you are.”
I swallowed hard, but said nothing. Letting a Shadow know I was mortal was a direct invitation to the grave.
“I’ll start with your eyelids.”
I didn’t need to smell my fear spiking, I could feel my heartbeat screaming. But Tripp’s responding grin was short-lived. Inhaling sharply, head swiveling toward the glass door, he dove for me and began roughly working away my ties. They were belted around the entire case. Apparently he’d been serious about the pliers.
“Done it now, haven’t you?” I said, as he cursed, my relief making me punchy…though I wasn’t out of this yet.
“What are they? Two blocks away? Three?”
I tried to remember how far off I could scent another agent. Three was my best effort. The most senior of agents could double that distance.
“I’m better than that, missy. I haven’t smelled pure Light in so long, I could pinpoint them on a map.”
It was a dig, but all I could think was, Pure Light. “They’re not Shadows?”
He frowned, like I’d spit in his eye.
Even as my heartbeat bumped faster at the thought of seeing my old troop, the look gave me an idea. “Let me take care of them.”
He was scrabbling at my ties, growing more anxious, and an edgy Shadow was a homicidal one. “Don’t fuck with me, Archer.”
“Just hide. I’ll distract them. I’ll tell them you’ve already left.”
Tripp stilled, stared, and sucked in one long breath.
I held his gaze. “It’ll be the fastest way to get rid of them, and it’ll throw them off your trail too.”
He dropped his odd, handrolled smoke on the floor and stomped on it as he angled his gaze toward the door. He either had to leave me there or kill me. Even I could tell there wasn’t enough time to untie me. “Why would you?”
“I like my eyelids where they are,” I said wryly. “Besides, they’re not coming here for me.”
Either the ticking clock or my genuine bitterness decided it for him, because he soon nodded. “Chisel me, woman, and so help me, I’ll find a way to kill you. Even if it’s my last act ’fore death.”
“I know.”
He backed away, disappearing into the shadows.
“Take my ID with you!” I hissed after him, because if Warren thought even a rogue Shadow knew my cover identity, he’d alter my memory, my mind, and my life altogether. It wouldn’t have anything to do with my general safety either. He’d do it only to protect the troop.
So I took a steadying breath after Tripp and my belongings disappeared and resettled my head on the hard glass top as if napping there. Then I waited in silence, mere moments from facing an entire cadre of superheroes. The agent of Light. The troop that had abandoned me completely.
4
“What are you doing here?”
Warren’s query, flat and suspicious, wasn’t at all what I’d practiced responding to in the mirror of my barbwitted dreams. Still, I did my best work on the fly.
“Shopping,” I said, turning my head to the wide-open door where eight agents of Light fanned out like a palm frond. Warren was centered like the sun, and the others were planets revolving around him. I gave them all a sweet smile from beneath my unyielding ties, then focused on my former leader. “What do you think, the pearl necklace or the choker?”
“Joanna.” His impatience, immediate and unearned, had my hands clenching at my sides. I studied the craggy, sun-scorched skin I knew so well, and the hardness in his eyes I was beginning to know better. He was dressed in his favorite cover guise, a vagrant in a trench so tattered only his demeanor was more frayed. The last time I’d seen him was at the entrance of a swiftly flooding tunnel. He’d just locked a fellow troop member in another world with a calm ruthlessness, and had been thinking of abandoning me to the Tulpa to save his own skin.
“I’m thinking pearls,” I continued, fighting the memory in order to keep my voice light. “Every high-powered female executive should own a set.”
I glared at each agent in turn, the men and women who had once feared me for my dual-sided nature, who’d overcome it to accept me as one of their own, and who now regarded me as distantly as if we’d never met. Studying each carefully blank gaze, I tried to figure out who had left me the warning not to go out tonight.
Perhaps Vanessa, I thought, staring at the subtly exotic woman. We’d been the closest. She looked both beautiful and strong in her long black silken scarf, worn since her hair had been shorn weeks earlier. She’d secured this one with an antique silver brooch, an iron bolt pinning the black silk to the side. Other than the hair, which was still growing out, she’d otherwise recovered fully from the attack that claimed digits and limbs from her flesh. A sharp corner of the glass cabinet dug into one of my calves, and my sarcasm reared.
Maybe it’d been Micah. Healer wasn’t only his position in the troop, it was his calling. He might have an interest in preventing my injury…if he still cared. I found the seven-foot man standing to the left of Warren in shadows that so obscured his features I couldn’t read whether any concern for me lie on them. But Riddick was next to him, and with a jolt I realized Micah wasn’t in the shadows. They were in him. This time it was the physician who sported some kind of injury, a realization doubly shocking since agents always healed from attack unless struck by a conduit.
But how did a man as fair as Micah turn dark? Not black, no, because that was natural, and this was anything but. It was as if grit and soot strained at his pores, his skin acting as barrier, like a cement truck that had to keep moving so the ash or brick or burnt lime-whatever was inside of him-didn’t still and set.
My gaze lingered too long, and he inched back. I jerked my gaze away, automatically wanting to give him privacy and to cover for us both, and studied the others instead. Riddick was ginger-haired, tight-muscled, and driven, but had yet to gain the experience that would make him into a dangerously seasoned agent. Jewell, next to
