“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. Good for her.
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 him, was the same age, and they’d grown up in the sanctuary together. While she was a second daughter and had never expected to inherit her star sign, she almost wore the responsibility better. Having it unexpectedly thrust upon a person often made them more vigilant and serious, as I well knew.
I couldn’t figure any of them keeping Warren out of the loop, though. If any knew about Mackie and his quest to kill me, if any cared- and I thought it likely there was at least that between us-they’d have told him. Unless one of them had opened the gateway to Midheaven, accidentally let the demon spawn out, and was too afraid of Warren to fess up. Though agents’ actions were regularly recorded in comic book form, thus a matter of public record, this wouldn’t be if it could upset the balance between Shadow and Light.
So had one of them planted the old conduits for me? Maybe…though wouldn’t it have been easier to show up on my doorstep, hand me my crossbow, and bid me good day? I thought again of the fury I’d once seen blanketing Warren’s face. Maybe not.
“Joanna.” Tekla now, their Seer. Though the smallest, staturewise, she was arguably the strongest of them all. She watched me as carefully as I’d studied the others, her odd, birdlike stillness making me nervous, as always. She read the stars and skies, and carried the Scorpion sign fiercely in memory of her son. A mother wasn’t supposed to outlive a child in any world, and since reclaiming the star sign, Tekla had been more daring and vigilant and aggressive than the others. Warren loved it, but I could have told him there was a fine line between nervy and nutty.
I continued on like I hadn’t heard her. “Of course, there’s high-powered like me, and then there’s high-powered like you. There’s a difference between mortal power and those who allow it, isn’t there?” I struggled with the restraints any one of them could have broken through, and had the satisfaction of hearing someone moan. It sparked something dormant and dark inside of me.
“Riddick, untie her. Joanna, this isn’t about you.”
“Of course not.” Gritting my teeth, I wondered what my anger smelled like. “If it was, you wouldn’t be here.”
Riddick, coming close, looked like he was holding his breath. It pissed me off even more. “Hello, ‘friend.’
How’s life treating you?”
He didn’t respond or look me in the eye, but his strong fingers fumbled at my ties. I snorted.
Warren cleared his throat. “Gregor, Jewell. Check the rest of the building.”
“Harlan’s not here, asshole.” I added the insult because it would get his attention. “Don’t you think I’d have said so first thing?”
“But he was,” he said so accusingly it was as if I’d invited the attack on my life. “We can smell him.”
That’s the part I focused on. “Can you?” I replied sweetly. “How interesting. I can’t.”
And I didn’t realize how furious I still was about that loss-about all of them-until the sharp words were out of my mouth. I’d been finely ground under Warren’s ambitious heel, and I was as bitter as a glass of Campari.
“And you don’t know where he went?”
I stared, buying time by taking in his scruffy hair-longer than when I’d last seen him-and the trench he’d abandoned a few months earlier, but had apparently reclaimed. Security blanket, I thought snidely. But I also tempered my emotions, knowing he’d scent out a lie as fast as I could tell it. So I scrounged up my annoyance as a cover. “I know where he was. On a party bus filled with mortals, including my best friends.”
Warren’s opportunity to turn a barbed phrase. “Your best friends?”
“Oh, that’s right,” I said, pretending to muse over Cher’s relationship to Olivia, not me. Never mind that I’d been forced to care for them and see to their safety over the past year. Someone here should have since taken up that slack, but in their efforts to avoid me, no one had. The memory of Cher’s soft arm falling to the ground was what finally put me over the edge.
“What I meant to say was”-and here I yelled, muscles straining as I rose against my bindings-“he attacked the only friends who stuck by me after I lost everything!”
My voice was scratchy from the strangling, but louder than I’d raised it in weeks. And it felt good, using the only power left to me. It also surprised the so-called superheroes surrounding me. Even I had no idea this much raw anger simmered so close to the surface. Sure, I was resentful that every fresh morning brought with it a wave of renewed rejection, but this was the kind of fury that had once had my eyes burning black in my skull, my breath coming from me in waves of noxious hate.
It was my father’s anger, and that, at least, I harbored still.
Felix’s face was taut and drawn into the middle, as were Micah’s mottled, sooty features. Tekla’s remained unreadable, though she too had fallen superstill. Riddick’s powerful hands briefly fell to his sides, and Jewell had begun crying, though she wiped away the tears before Warren whirled to see. Vanessa didn’t bother. Though Warren gave her a warning under his breath, she defiantly continued to stare at me. I stared back as relentlessly, but didn’t soften anything. Sense my pain and your betrayal as I did. Scent it like a chalk outline stamping the air. Feel its abrasion erupting behind your eyelids at night.