“Are you okay?” he asked, then sighed, relieved, at my nod. “Where’s Hunter?”
“Gone.” I said nothing about knowing Hunter’s true identity. In fact, I just stared at Warren, the niggling I’d felt in the kitchen and at Midheaven’s entry shifting into a full-blown tingle. It would be nice, I finally thought, if he would finally share something, any truth, with me. Instead he pushed past me and went to look for himself. “I said he’s gone.”
“And Regan?” he asked, leaping to peer over the ledge. His voice echoed back like it was trapped in a drum. “Oh.”
After a moment of hesitation-I think he was trying to climb up without touching the Shadow’s remains-he disappeared. Curious-though perhaps a better word was wary-I followed. There wasn’t a whole lot of room with Regan’s body still sprawled on the floor, but I kicked her aside so I could see what he was doing. “What’s that?”
“A new lock,” he said, securing it over the small latch. He’d been carrying another lock? In his pocket?
I thought of Harlan Tripp, his body set to a slow boil for eighteen years. “Hunter is over there.”
I waited, and finally realized he wasn’t going to answer. And I knew then what he was doing here, why he followed…why he allowed me to follow Regan and Hunter in the first place. He’d already planned to trap Hunter on the other side of that entrance, just as he’d trapped everyone else before. He wasn’t here to save me as much as he was tying up loose ends. Namely?
The man I’d started thinking of as my boyfriend.
“You set him up,” I said as he turned to me. “You found out Hunter was acting in tandem with Regan, but instead of confronting him about it, you turned around and made her a better deal.”
I could practically hear his offer. Betray Hunter, Regan, and I’ll give you a shot at the Kairos. He’d had an opportunity to remove Regan from this planet, as a threat, and from my life. And he’d chosen to use her as a means to another of his hidden ends instead.
I said, “You were once adamant about none of us going into Midheaven. You said it was twisted, and that it twisted people in turn.”
“And now you see that I was right.” He motioned for me to follow him.
I didn’t move. “Yes, but you refused to even acknowledge that it existed. And then you sent me there. So why did you open it up now?”
Warren tilted his head. “Because I saw what Ben did to you. How sad you were, how screwed up. I don’t want you distracted again.”
I ignored the sad and screwed-up remarks because they were inarguable. What I did take exception to was his determination that Hunter was a distraction.
He sighed heavily and shook his head, like I was a teenager putting on a good pout. “It’s for your own good. Now let’s go.”
I looked back at the lock. “Take it off. It’s agonizing over there.”
“No,” he said flatly, and dropped back into the pipeline. “And here. You forgot this.”
He threw something up at me, and I fumbled as it hit my chest. My mask. I tied it over my eyes where I was so Warren wouldn’t see my hands shaking, my face crumpling. I heard his slap-and-slide gait as he moved out of the way, and I dropped down into a low crouch. He kept walking, still expecting me to follow, but I didn’t move.
“You know, superheroes never talk.”
He kept walking. “What?”
I spoke more loudly as I stood. “In the comics, I mean. You’ve got panels and pages of villains who get all this great dialogue, but the superheroes have to sit in silence and brood, you know?”
“What are you talking about?”
I took a step forward. “I’m talking about those not-talking superheroes.”
Now he sounded annoyed. “And?”
My eyes began to heat beneath my mask. The red glowed prettily off the wet concrete walls. “Let’s chat.”
He turned slowly, just his head, his body tense beneath his flowing trench. “About?”
“How about Hunter? How you knew all along of his callboy cover, that he was hunting for a dark-haired woman. For Solange.” I flashed back to Warren and Hunter arguing in the panic room, and how the weight of the argument hung in the air when I’d arrived. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied by my inability to heal, I’d have sensed it then. “And you also knew that Hunter was Jaden Jacks.”
His gaze was dead, his shrug an afterthought. We were both done with pretense. “Of course. I’m the one who gave him his new identity.”
“How did the others not know?”
“Ask Ben,” he said with a wry smile, because he knew I couldn’t. Ben’s memory had holes in it the size of moon craters. And Warren was intimating that he’d done that to his entire troop, without their knowledge, as well. He’d made them all forget about Jaden Jacks, just as I’d suspected. His smile made me want to puke.
“You keep things from me.”
“I tell you what you need to know.”
“You use me,” I said in a harsh whisper, and my eyes turned into red flares behind my sockets.
“Calm down, Joanna. You don’t want to call the Tulpa here, do you?” His strained voice told me he didn’t want me to. I calmed my breathing and swallowed down the acidic heat, but it continued to burn in my chest, so my eyes teared up. My emotions were too close to the surface, I knew, so I took another moment, let my breath out slowly, and eventually managed to dampen them.
When I was done and had nodded, he motioned for me to walk with him. I did, but only because I was dying to hear his excuse. “Jaden Jacks-or Hunter, if you’d like-once fell in love with a Shadow. It blinded him, and cost an innocent child, a changeling, his life. Of course, that’s how I knew Hunter would glom onto you. You’re just his type.”
A Shadow. Flawed.
Don’t believe him…there’s nothing wrong with you…
I shook my head. “Just to be clear, then…you sent me to Midheaven knowing it would hurt me.” I didn’t tell him about the power that I’d lost. I didn’t dare now. “And that it would take away pieces of my very soul?”
“Yes.”
I nodded, like this was a reasonable conversation to have. “You want me to hurt?”
He turned on me so fast I almost ran into him, and now it was his eyes that were sharp with passion. “I want you to give yourself over entirely to the troop. Like your mother did. Like I have!” He pounded his chest once, then heaved a great breath. “Don’t you see? I must strip you down to nothing so I can build you into the Kairos, the strongest being in the history of the Zodiac!”
Horrified, I looked at him. “I’m a person,” I whispered.
“You’re a weapon,” he shot back immediately, but at least he was cognizant of how he sounded. My sudden tears must have shamed him, or maybe they just pissed him off, because he explained the rest. “Regan was stalking you. She would have taken the opportunity to kill you if given the chance, no matter what the Tulpa wanted…as evidenced by her appearance at the kitchen tonight. So I got you out of the way for a while. It was for your own good. Besides, you’ve no room for righteousness. You knew Hunter was up to something too, and you never told me.”
More clarity arrived: I’d been following Hunter, but Warren had been following me. “I had no idea he was working with Regan.”
But a thought came quick on the heels of that, flitting through my mind like debris caught in a flood. “Not like you.”
Warren stood so still he could have been a statue at Caesar’s Palace. Then he thrust out his hand. “Give me your conduit.”
I laughed so bitterly it barely escaped my throat, but I handed the weapon over. What did it matter? I’d lasted this long without it. Besides, Warren had already proven I was no match for him. He was always one step ahead, plotting and planning and pushing us all about. I followed close when he began walking again. “You’re the one who let Regan know we were at the kitchen today, not Hunter.”