His gaze lingered on my face, and then he ran a hand over his spiky hair. “Well, it won’t be as bad the second time.”
I look at him like he was stoned.
He gave me the same once-over.
“Uh-uh.” I shook my head and backed up until I was leaning into Hunter’s knees. He opened them, giving me harbor in between, and I nestled in tight. Warren’s eyes flickered at the intimacy, but he said nothing. Both things gave me courage. “Not me. No way. That place is evil. The passage alone felt like it was going to kill me.”
“But it didn’t, and that which doesn’t kill you…”
It took all my self-control not to roll my eyes. I’d collected quotes as a teen, mental touchstones, wise words in an unpredictable world. But I hated clichés, and I certainly wasn’t going to spout empty bravado. I nestled in more tightly to the pocket Hunter created for me. I wasn’t feeling particularly brave. “Makes you weaker?”
“Leaves loose ends,” Hunter muttered, his voice stirring my hair. Despite my worry, it stirred other things as well. Sick, I thought, shaking my head slightly, but every bruise had been worth it.
Warren scowled, crossing his arms as his eyes darted between the two of us. “Might be a second chance at redemption.”
Something niggled at me, like a secret whispered in the dark. Someone had just told me something, but who? I leaned against Hunter and remembered his silhouette in sleep. I looked at Warren and the whisper echoed faintly.
“Why would I go back?”
Warren glanced at the maps beside him, then back at Hunter. There was something vaguely threatening in the action. “Hunter, would you mind leaving the two of us alone?” It wasn’t a question.
Hunter remained where he was for about a year under Warren’s direct gaze, before gently easing me forward to stand. A light brush of his fingertips trailed my belly as he crossed in front of me, and then he was gone. Warren and I said nothing for a long time; he allowing no indication of what he thought of this new development, and me making it clear I didn’t care either way.
Finally he leaned back on his elbows, crossing tattered boots at the ankles. “Hunter caught me up on what happened to you in Midheaven. As much as he could, that is. Is it true that it felt like you were gone only hours?”
While a week had passed here. Nodding, I pushed myself up on the stool. I recounted the conversation I’d overheard in the pipeline, that though still broken, Regan was once again back in the Tulpa’s good graces. That she’d been hiding in the pipeline, she still had my conduit, and that she was going to try to bring me to the Shadow leader alive. “She’s been following me everywhere, in both my daily life as Olivia and as the Archer. I know she followed me to Master Comics.”
He watched me with dull eyes, looking less surprised by this knowledge than I thought it warranted. How about this, then, Warren…
“She also claims to be tracking me with the help of someone in the troop. An agent of Light.”
“A bluff.” Warren shrugged, immediately dismissing the claim. “Not possible.”
He let that, and the surety with which he said it, sink in. His tone said he was in charge and I should be glad that he was. He must have realized how imperious it was because he shrugged one shoulder and smiled. “Tell me what you can about Midheaven.”
What I could. He knew, then, that I couldn’t tell him everything. But I frowned anyway, wanting to accommodate him. I saw a skeleton with a bowler hat. I saw inky masculine shapes and bright feminine ones. Images zipped by, a very few lingering like mental balloons in my frontal lobe, but when I opened my mouth, they slid away, leaving me with nothing but a fleeting sensory reminder. I shook my head apologetically.
“It’s okay,” Warren said, like he’d been expecting it. “You only remember the people and things linked to your own time and place. Like the man and woman you mentioned to Hunter. Harlan Tripp and Solange?”
I’d figured that out for myself, but I still shook my head. “I remember more than just them. I remember it all. But trying to verbalize it is like trying to tell a story without a subject or object or any linking verbiage.” I sighed. “But you already knew that too, didn’t you?”
He shrugged again. There were worlds to interpret in that one movement. “Midheaven’s vibration doesn’t register over here. It’s why the place is considered myth and why Zane can’t write about it in manuals. It’s a place that becomes known to you only when it’s time for you to know it.”
Warren hasn’t told you anything, has he?
I couldn’t shake Solange’s taunt from my head. He hadn’t. And I’d lost a third of my soul, power, time, and nearly my life. For what? To learn things he already knew? To feel like I was going crazy in my own mind? Or crazier?
Since I was having trouble voicing my own thoughts, I decided to pry out his. “Let’s play a little game, Warren. I’m going to start a sentence, and since I can’t finish any thought that contains knowledge gleaned in Midheaven, you’re going to finish it for me.”
Before he could protest, I started.
“Jaden Jacks is…”
“In Midheaven.”
The answer I was looking for was Light. I shook my head. “Jaden Jacks is…”
“A rogue agent like Harlan Tripp, who has also been gone a very long time.”
“Jaden Jacks is…”
Warren sighed. “Watch your temper-”
“Jaden Jacks is!” I pounded the wall so hard I felt the reverberation through my fist. Shit. I was going to have to relearn how to walk through this world as a mortal. I closed my eyes, fought not to rub my hand or wince, and calmed myself.
When I opened my eyes, Warren was watching me like I was crazy. “I should have known this would happen.”
“What, Warren? That I’d come back with a tattoo of the sun hennaed on my belly?” I asked bitingly, coming off my stool, pissed because he could have prevented all my losses. And because they’d been for absolutely nothing. “Or that I’d return with more questions about Jaden Jacks, agent of…”
I didn’t complete the sentence, I refused, but its start let him know exactly what I was driving at. Light.
“Jaden Jacks is in Midheaven,” he repeated. “And Harlan Tripp can help you find him.”
“That’s not what I hear.”
“Then someone is lying to you.” He straightened at my arch look. “And, no, it’s not me. Because I’m the one who put him there.”
I shuddered involuntarily at that, both at the way he said it and the thought of being forced through that passage. Of having to remain in that heat with Boyd and Bill and Mackie and a drink that slowed your senses to an impossible crawl. All because Jacks had broken a changeling?
I had broken a changeling.
I shook the thought free. Jacks had knowingly killed one. “You put a lock on the entrance, didn’t you?”
That indeterminable shrug again. He’d known that changeling was dead and he’d sent me in anyway!
“Goddamn it, Warren-”
“I do not have to explain myself to you!” he roared with such force that it rocked from the small room, and I imagined it ping-ponging off the warehouse walls. “Do you understand me? You may be the Kairos, but I am the leader of this troop!”
I swallowed hard, clenching my jaw. “Nothing short of death will make me go back there.”
“We need to heal our changeling. Our troop. Our world.”
There was hope in his eyes when I searched their dark depths again, a rabid hope that I’d do this thing without arguing, and the manuals would be written, Jasmine would move on, Li would be whole. Like my disappearance was a magic wand waved over the landscape of all these lives, making everything all right.
“Jacks killed that kid.”