The Scent of Shadows

all pretext of civility. “Or, fine. Why don’t you pretend that you have a sense of humor?”

“I could,” I said, nodding slowly, “but then I’d have been laughing from the moment you walked in the door.” See? My sense of humor was as broad as anyone else’s.

“Bitch.”

I drew back at the venom in his voice, surprised my words had cut so deeply, so quickly. Then again, a fuse that short had probably been lit long before I came along. “What’s wrong, Ajax? Things not going according to plan? Let me guess. Here you are in Vegas on some sort of pilgrimage, to forget for one weekend exactly how disappointing your life has turned out, and now mean, spoiled Joanna Archer is screwing it all up. Is that about right?”

I have this ability—I like to think of it as a gift, really—to see clean through to people’s sore spots. I hone in on a bruised psyche and press. Not nice, I know, but then Olivia was the Miss Congeniality in our family.

Ajax’s reptilian features had rearranged themselves as I spoke, and he now looked like a glowering python. “Thanks for the psychoanalysis, babe,” he spat, “but all I really wanted from this weekend were a couple of easy lays.”

This, I assumed, was where I was supposed to throw my wine in his face. I didn’t, though. I liked Chateau Le Pin, and took a long, considering sip of the vintage ’82 I’d made him buy. “And what? Your mother wasn’t available?”

Ajax’s head jerked like I’d struck him, and suddenly a different man sat there. It was like the still picture I’d imagined before, a person comfortable in his skin. A warrior living up to his name. Surprisingly, I was the first to blink.

“You like to argue,” he said, and it wasn’t a question. “You like to fight.”

He was right, I did. But suddenly I wasn’t exactly sure what I was up against.

“Insult my mother again,” he said in a ragged whisper, “and you’ll find yourself in a fight for your life.”

And just like that a bolt of lightning seared over the gilded room, arching across the beveled ceiling to snap like fangs between us. The air was a live wire, crackling so the lights, wall sconces—even the candles—flickered as if flinching, and an invisible force funneled around us, sucking all the energy in the room toward our table and leaving me breathless. There, in the eye of that storm, I watched the flimsy skin layering Ajax’s bones melt away, altering his face into a slab of bone, teeth, and cavernously slanting eyes. His smooth skull grinned at me across the table, eyes aflame, while a banshee’s howl sprung from the gaping mouth.

I was half out of my seat before I caught myself, before I blinked…and the bony, aging banker returned, staring at me benignly. Nobody else in the room had moved. Nobody screamed. Classical music pulsed softly from artfully hidden speakers, and the steady thrum of conversation and clinking utensils blanketed the unnatural howl still rebounding in my mind. The table wasn’t marked or singed, and the vanilla taper winked softly between us.

Ajax chuckled, his voice rumbling like thunder in his thin chest.

I stared at him, but it was as if an invisible curtain had risen between us, and I sensed nothing of his thoughts. No bruised ego, no unveiled sore spots to push. My little intuitive gift, it seemed, had abandoned me completely. I did know one thing, though. The bumbling tourist act was just that—an act. The man who sat before me was cruel, possibly insane, and most assuredly dangerous.

“What’s wrong, Joanna dear? Seeing things? Something, maybe, that reminds you of a sweltering summer night? Shadows lunging at you from the desert floor, perhaps?”

A tremor inched its way up my spine, and for the first time in a long while I was at a loss for what to do. I was a frozen hare beneath that gaze, and Ajax simply waited, like a skilled predator.

I could call the maitre d’ or security, I thought. Have Ajax eighty-sixed from the restaurant and casino, never allowed to return again. Though I wasn’t sure what reason I’d give. That I was having a bad time on this date? That the man before me had just flashed me with his freakin’ skeleton? That a monster lurked beneath his flaccid, aging exterior?

Or that he knew something about me no one had a right to know?

“I told them it was you, you know,” he said, picking at his dry-aged Black Angus. “They didn’t believe me, they said it was too obvious, but I knew. I could scent you the moment you walked in the door.”

I forced myself to focus on that. “Scent me?”

“Yes. You smell like the desert sage in full bloom after a summer storm.” He wrinkled his nose before turning haughty again. “But you don’t even know that, do you? You haven’t been told who you are, or a single thing about your lineage. In fact, I’d say you’re about as helpless as an abandoned babe without a tit to suck.”

He laughed, and leaned in even farther, closing the short distance between us. I battled the urge to run from the room like a screaming child, and sat my ground. As he’d said, I was a fighter.

“Now, I’m going to give you something else to psychoanalyze, Joanna Archer. It’ll probably be one of the most important things you ever learn, so pay careful attention.” He licked his lips, eyes steady on mine. “Pheromones. Do you know what they are?”

Thrown by the change of topic, I nonetheless forced a nonchalant shrug. “A chemical. A scent animals give off to attract others of the same species. So?”

“Not only the same species. Different species as well. Opposites. Enemies.” He let the last word linger on his tongue, slipping the syllables out the same way a priest would slip the sacrament in. I stared at those thin lips, wondering where he was going with this, where I fit in, and how I’d made an enemy out of a man I’d never met. Could he really be that sensitive about his mother?

“See, Joanna, you have an extra component to your biological mix. It’s weak, true, not yet fully developed, but it’s there. Like a rose not yet grown from bud to bloom. Or…” Here he paused to draw in a deep breath, then exhaled slowly as if he found it sweet, “…like the invisible note of fear a fox leaves behind as it flees a chase.”

My pulse points began to trip, hot and fast. Anorexic demon or not, he did not want to get me started on hunting and being hunted. I’d nearly a lifetime of experience of being one or the other, and there was a chip on my shoulder about it the size of a small state.

“See, I’m like the hound, anxious to get on with the chase, and with a nose so precise I could drive you to the end of the earth.” He smiled serenely. “Guess what that makes you?”

“The hound master?”

The humor fell from his face again, and thunder rumbled along the walls. This time I was prepared, though, and didn’t flinch. Ajax opened his mouth to say something, but changed his mind. Instead, he took a slow sip from his glass of wine, swirling it languidly in its crystal bowl. I watched, transfixed by a single bloodred drop studding his pale bottom lip. The lips moved.

“Lesson number one. Know thy enemy.”

And he blew outward. Blended with the lacy texture of aged Bordeaux was a scent so fetid it brought bile to my throat. It was toxic decay, a concentration of acidity and rot rising so sharply the fumes burned the lining from my nose. I coughed, covering my lower face, but kept my eyes on his while trying to process what my nose was telling me. It was Ajax. He was somehow emitting, or spewing, his essence onto my senses. And my nose, never this sensitive before, told me he was dead inside. Decomposing, even as we sat there.

“Now you’ll know me forever…both where I go and where I’ve been.” He smiled again, and his grin was as rancid and spoiled as his fermented breath. “Even the mere thought of me will conjure my scent in your mind.”

I forced myself to swallow back the last of the bile.

“It’ll be a link between us,” he continued, winking obscenely. “My gift to you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, palm still cupped over my mouth, and I didn’t, but I could suddenly smell him everywhere. Why hadn’t I been able to moments before? And how could everyone else consume food in a place that reeked of death and decay?

“You don’t know, do you? And that’s going to make it all the more precious when I kill you.” His fingers twined, untwined. “I just love to kill the innocent.”

Slowly, I lowered my hand from my face. I’d been called a number of things in my adult life, but innocent had never been one of them. Neither, for that matter, had passive. Folding my arms across my chest, I let my fingers curl into fists. “And how, exactly, do you intend on doing that?”

“With my right hand,” he said, pleased I’d asked. “And the serrated poker beneath my jacket.”

He lifted one side of his coat, and my breath lodged somewhere between my throat and chest cavity. Sure