Right?
Sighing, I climbed from the fountain and kept walking. Like I knew. Spotting a hedge of struggling boxwoods lining the glossy, stamped sidewalk, I trailed my hand idly above them as I passed. A gentle pulse from my mind, then a moment where I could almost feel green in my fingertips, which throbbed as I forced energy downward. Bright leaves unfurled beneath my palm and the trunks wobbled then stilled, their roots strengthening. Birthing plant life from nothing-it was a skill, and mark, of Light.
“See?” I muttered, mollified by the show of power. I wasn’t a hindrance to my troop. I could control my temper. I could thrive as a superhero. I could help…at least when I wasn’t screwing up. I sighed again.
Besides, others could call me what they wanted-Joanna, Olivia, Kairos, Archer-what really mattered was how I saw myself. “Warrior.”
That word was the only thing that’d enabled me to keep moving through a world after the attack on my life as a teen, and in a world where much of the population had been larger and stronger and faster than me. It let me maximize the strength I did have, and had me honing abilities other women-and even men-never considered necessary. It’d taken years of intense martial training, but after a time I’d turned my weaknesses into weapons.
And that was before I became a superhero.
As for the Kairos designation, well that’s where things got a little more complicated. Being the underworld’s “chosen one” sounded wonderfully auspicious…until you realized it was all a big mistake. My mother, an agent of Light, had been sleeping with the Tulpa-getting in close, looking for a way to kill him-when a quick trip to the drugstore confirmed she was the proud new owner of a pregnancy stick sporting two pink lines. She was lucky I hadn’t popped out with fangs and claws.
For reasons known only to her, she then kept my existence from both sides of the Zodiac, so my metamorphosis into an agent a year ago had completely shaken up the landscape of Las Vegas’s paranormal war. Sure, I was reportedly destined to bring ultimate victory to whatever side I fought for, but that was tied to bringing certain signs, or portents, to life. So far I’d managed the first three through trial, and mostly error. The fourth one, though? I’d fumbled that completely.
As Drake had taunted, I’d inadvertently injured a changeling, Jasmine Chan, who was absolutely essential to our continued existence. Changelings were mortals who lived and died as any other, except for their childhood years, when imagination and belief extended to things unseen. Each side, Shadow and Light, had changelings who kept the secrets of the Zodiac, and passed them on to the next generation, while making sure mortal kids knew and believed in us as well. Those little minds were like fuel cells providing our troops with extra energy to fight the opposing side. Obviously the ability to suspend disbelief-to believe in superheroes-generally passed along with youth, which was why even the changelings eventually had to forget us entirely.
It was now time for Jasmine to do this; in short, it was time for her to grow up, but she couldn’t-or simply wouldn’t-which had effectively put the brakes on any flexible new minds reading and believing in our stories. The fear was that if I didn’t figure out how to fix Jasmine soon, our troop would gradually weaken. Our alternate realities would fade away, our portals would close, and we would cease to exist altogether.
But now, finding the elusive Skamar, and getting her to tell me how to “walk the line,” would supposedly help with that. I wondered why Warren wouldn’t instruct her to help me prior to this, or why it took the loss of our safe zones to light some sort of fire under his ass. Meanwhile I waved my hand over a cluster of star jasmine, which bloomed so fully, so immediately, that the air was honeysuckle sweet in seconds. I smiled.
See? I hadn’t broken everything. And over the past year I’d gotten used to the “superhero” designation too. It was my job and calling, and despite its dangers, and my repeated screw-ups, and the sacrifices required of me, it was one I’d begun to love.
Any warrior would.
5
Setting out to find Skamar and actually doing so were two different things. She’d been at war with the Tulpa essentially from the moment she’d been “birthed” or fully realized in this world, so she didn’t have a home, any contact information, or even the ubiquitous cell phone. Still, randomly wandering the city was the least effective way of finding someone in short order. So the next morning, under an unseasonably warm sky, I headed to the one place I knew I could leave word that I was looking for her.
The parking lot of the pink-stuccoed strip mall where Master Comics was housed was only half full when I drove by, but I parked a few blocks away at a day spa Cher had once dragged me to, and walked back.
Although none of the Shadows knew about my Olivia Archer cover identity, I still felt exposed just waltzing up to the building in the middle of the day. Perhaps I should have taken the added precaution of approaching via a portal. It wouldn’t necessarily have kept me from being spotted by an observant Shadow, but the black and white camouflage might get me past the inattentive.
“Too late now,” I muttered, reaching the storefront. I visually tagged two portal entrances-one alongside a sewer grate, and another above the passenger side of an abandoned car-options if I had to flee, priceless in a world where I suddenly found myself with too few.
Oddly, I also found the entrance locked. I glanced around, but the OPEN sign was bright orange against the glass front, and the hours of operation hadn’t changed. I gave the door another tug, and when it didn’t budge, found a sliver of space between a Green Lantern poster and the ever-popular Spider-Man and peeked inside. The shop was teeming with children. I saw Kylee and Kade, two of the newest changelings, and Douglas, the little shit who used his body to shield the Shadows from harm when they were in the shop, but none of them looked my way. Even when I rapped on the glass, they just continued perusing comics and playing games too complicated for the mind of someone as simple as me.
“Excuse me.”
I glanced over to find a skinny kid staring up at me, arms so straight at his sides I wanted to tell him to fall at ease. He was watching me open-mouthed, as if mesmerized by a movie screen. As if, I thought with a degree of annoyance, he was watching a horror flick. Unwilling to continue with the absurd stare-down, I stepped aside, and he pressed his back against the glass, inching toward the door. I got a whiff of adrenaline and fear, but before I could grab the handle he slipped inside, cowbells jangled…and the door rocketed shut behind him. I stepped back, looked around, and tried to follow. It might as well have been a handle attached to a cement wall for all the good it did.
What was going on?
Squinting between Spider-Man’s legs, I saw the kid who’d slipped inside point to me, and a man’s head popped into view. I waved…with my middle finger.
Zane Silver scowled in reply. He was the shop’s owner…and though he looked like a nerd who got off on things like freeze-dried ice cream and collectible sock monkeys, he was really a seventy-three-year-old man trapped in time. It was that whole “great power requires great responsibility” maxim at work. He had the ability to mentally watch the events of our world and record them in comic book form-a gift, sure-but ever since he’d accepted the position of record keeper, he couldn’t resign until someone else took over the duty. Nobody’d been willing to in a good half century, so a retirement including bridge games and gumming his food was a long way off.
Drawing back, Zane then reappeared outside of what I’d begun thinking of as his command center, circling the counter grumpily to head my way. I rolled my eyes, straightened, and waited for him to let me in.