I glanced down at the photo on the table before meeting Warren’s eye. “Where is she?”
“Your mother?” He shrugged, though his shoulders had stiffened. “In hiding.”
“But she’s alive? You’re sure?” and when he nodded, I said, “But you can’t tell me where?”
“I don’t know where. Nobody does.” He paused, as if caught between two thoughts, but his expression quickly shuttered and he hurried on. “If the Shadow Archer knew where Zoe was, he’d be after her in a shot.”
“He hates her that much?”
“He hates us all, but yes,” he said softly, eyes filled with some memory. “He hates Zoe even more.”
I wanted to know why. What had she done to incur such long-held wrath? But more important right now was my third question. I took a deep breath. If Zoe had married Xavier to infiltrate the enemy’s key organization, then what had forced her to leave? I looked at the man in front of me—both crazed and sane, open and guarded, helpful and hard—and the only one who might know. Then I asked him the hardest question of all. “Was this man, my real father, responsible for the attack on me when I was sixteen?”
Warren opened his mouth, shut it again, then swallowed hard. “Yes.”
Even expecting it, the truth hit me like a lead bar. Squeezing my eyes shut, I pinched the bridge of my nose between forefinger and thumb and shook my head. My blood father had had me attacked. Raped. Left for dead.
“My mother slept with this guy?” My voice cracked.
“He didn’t know you were his daughter. He still doesn’t. It…it’s complicated,” Warren said, in what was, perhaps, the understatement of the year. “And it’s not my story to tell.”
I stared at him for a long while, then nodded and returned my attention to the table. “Okay, just one more question, then. What’s the worst that can happen? To you, I mean. What would happen if these…Shadows won? If they succeeded in wiping out your troop?”
Warren’s Adam’s apple bobbed at the thought, and the other man shifted uncomfortably on the bed. They shared a look, a whole conversation passing between them in that short glance before Warren turned back to me. “Chaos, Joanna. Sodom and Gomorrah stuff. What do you think happened there? What happens whenever all lusts and baser evils go unchecked? Every man for himself. Society disintegrates, mortals become enslaved to their baser emotions. And the Shadows? They are their captors.”
I stood still and silent for another good minute before saying anything. At last I returned to the photo I’d thrown down in front of him and pointed to Zoe, the woman I’d once thought lost to me forever. “This man, this Archer, has cost me my mother.
“My sister,” I continued, moving my finger to Olivia, who really was.
“And my innocence.” I pointed to myself, then picked up the photo and handed it to him. “This city is all I have left.”
Warren looked at it for a moment before glancing up. “You realize you’d be entering a whole new realm, don’t you? A different reality. More than one, actually.”
“My reality’s already different.”
“We kill these people, these Shadows, Joanna. That’s what you’d be signing up for.”
People like Butch and Ajax. People who sent madmen after little girls in the desert. “I got it, Warren.”
“And do you think you could kill your own father if given the chance?” I nodded once. “In cold blood?”
“I’ve trained my whole life for it,” I said, and even though I’d always told myself my training had been for defense, this was the truth.
Finally, after what seemed like forever, Warren nodded. “I can give you that chance.”
“And so the hunter becomes the hunted.” I smiled wryly as I threw his own words back at him, and held out a hand to shake. “You’ve got yourself a heroine.”
Warren ignored the hand. Instead, with tears suddenly springing into his eyes, he leapt from his chair and plowed full force into my arms. I staggered backward, and the other man, silent all this time, caught my eye over Warren’s shoulder and shrugged.
“Okay, okay,” I said, pulling away. “Sheesh.”
“Did you hear? The first sign has come to pass,” Warren said, turning to the other man. “She’ll do it. She’ll join us.”
The man simply nodded. He was beefy, but not in the hard way that Butch had been. More like Santa Claus, I supposed, if Santa had lived in Vegas.
Warren turned back to face me. “This is our witness from the troop’s council. He’s just here to make sure you’re joining us of your own free will, and haven’t been coerced in any way.”
I looked at him blankly. “You’re joking, right?”
“Under any direct duress from me, I mean.” He smiled self-consciously, wringing his hands. “I didn’t twist your arm or knock you around or anything, did I?”
“No.” I turned to the man. “He didn’t.”
“Good enough for you?” Warren asked impatiently. The man nodded and rose. Ah, there was the difference between him and Santa. He was nearly seven feet tall. “Oh, but where are my manners? Micah, this is Joanna. Jo, Micah.”
How did I know he wouldn’t have a nice, normal name like Bob or Joe? “Nice to meet you,” I said, holding out a hand.
Micah, the behemoth, finally spoke. “I hope you still feel that way when you wake up.”
“Wake up?”
The blow came from the side, and caught me on the back of my neck. My legs folded neatly beneath me, and as my eyes rolled into my head I saw Micah looming above me with a steel baton in his hand. I had only a second to think he was faster than he looked before Warren caught me beneath the arms, his lips close to my ear.
“Remember,” I heard him say, “we all become who we need to in order to survive.”
Then his voice, his image, and his scent all swam away on a final wave of incoherence and mercifully dulling pain.
10
The dreams a person has while unconscious are not the same as when they’re asleep. They’re more like something from a Bradbury novel, a carnival ride with ominous portents and sinister beings waiting to take siege of your soul. My dreams were like that now, shadowy, one slithering into another, carrying snatches of oblique conversations I’d never had and images of faces I’d never seen.
“More to the left,” I heard someone say urgently. “That’s not how it is in the picture, see? It has to be perfect.”
A masked face loomed over me, eyes concerned and considering, before it drew back and fluorescent lights blinded me again. “She will be perfect.”
No less unnerving were the tattered flashes of things I had seen, but combined in new scenes and settings, like a horror film saddled with an alternate ending.
There was Olivia, eyes shooting open to pierce me from her deathbed on the ground nine stories below me. Her skin was bleached white, and all of her blood had pooled in a heart-shaped lake around her broken body. Her gaze wide and imploring, she posed the one question I couldn’t answer.
“Why am I dead?” I struggled to reach out to her, but was whisked away, her parting words ringing in my ears. “Why me and not you?”
Xavier caught me from above. His grip was steel around my biceps, and as much as I thrashed I couldn’t escape him. He dragged me to him, opening his mouth wide to swallow me whole. “Zoe left you too.”
Then I was running, fighting for air as I fled through a dark desert night. I felt the sharp sting of tumbleweeds against my shins, my ankles turning over on themselves as I ran blindly into boulders and stones, barely keeping out of reach of an unseen fleet-footed pursuer. He—and it was a he—didn’t speak at all. Instead his voice invaded my brain by other means, slithering inside, not so much a snake’s hiss as the rattle of its tail. “I should have killed you the first time…”