“Or I can take care of it for you. We can take care of it,” he corrected.
“Can you bring her back?”
“No.” His voice and expression gentled and the kindness softening his doe brown eyes almost killed me. I looked away. “But we can make sure the world doesn’t find out about what happened tonight. That’s our job. To protect the people of this city from those who would hurt them as Butch hurt Olivia. To make supernatural events appear normal. Ever hear the saying, ‘What you don’t know won’t hurt you’?”
“I’ve never believed that.”
He gave a slight shrug. “That’s because you didn’t know any different.”
I stood gingerly, testing my legs, and returned to the dresser to study the woman I saw there. If she’d looked unfamiliar before, she looked downright foreign now.
“They were setting me up,” I finally said, gazing at Warren through the mirror.
He nodded. “That’s what they do.”
“And what about you? Is that what you do?”
“We work to counteract their acts, yes. Usually we’re a bit more successful than this.”
A bitter laugh escaped me. I closed my eyes.
“Look, I know it’s a lot to take in. Shit, it’s a lot even if you’ve been raised in this lifestyle, and there’s more yet”—he held up a hand when my lids flicked open—“but you have a decision to make, and you have to make it quickly. We need you, we want you in our organization, but you have to come willingly.”
A superhero, I thought numbly. Good versus evil. Shadow agents. Paranormal battles. “I don’t know.”
“Okay.” He blew out a long breath, and for the first time I saw the signs of fatigue weighing on his browned face and sunken shoulders. “Okay,” he repeated, “there is one thing I can do for you.”
I stared at him through the mirror.
“You have twelve hours before your scent returns. One thing about turning a conduit on its owner, it’s such strong magic that you can wander this earth like a ghost. That’s called the aureole. Neither mortals nor agents will be able to discern your presence unless you’re standing right in front of them. It’s a gift. Like you don’t even exist.
“My team can hold off until just after dawn. That’ll give you time to make a decision. Use it. Think about what I’ve said. You can refuse the offer, but once you do there’s nothing we can do to help you.”
I nodded at last. “Thank you.”
“I’ll wait here. Come back to me with your answer, or consider coming back to me as your answer. Otherwise…” He shrugged, and looked truly sorry. “You’re on your own.”
9
Even as a girl Olivia had a way of moving—through a room and through life—without settling very long in any one place, or at least never long enough to allow anything to really touch her. Some people thought her distracted, others called her flighty, but from a young age, watching her, I had named her Magic.
Wasn’t it magic when a woman could maintain her childlike innocence long after her childhood was over? Or believe that tragedy was an anomaly and the world really was a good place? Or that all people, despite past deeds, were essentially good, and could be redeemed? No, no matter what happened—to me, to her, to our family—the hope in her eyes had never dimmed, and the surety in her smile never faltered.
Of course, Olivia knew the effect she had on others. On men, in particular. I think she believed if it made someone happy to look at her, her job was to give them something fabulous to look at. Despite my disagreement, I was proud of her, and proud to be related to her. She was a pure light. A beacon as bright and compelling to others as a flame was to a bunch of flimsy-winged moths.
Only one other person had burned that brightly in my life. But for reasons I never understood, Ben Traina had preferred the dark.
I stumbled through the grid of familiar side streets, my eyes swollen and sandpaper dry, images of Olivia flailing in death caught like debris beneath my lids. My fatigue was so great it felt like a bowling ball was weighted on my shoulders. All the years of sweat and training and preparation had boiled down to this: I’d been useless under pressure. I’d been helpless, ineffective, deficient…and, as a consequence, Olivia was dead. Olivia was dead.
Olivia was dead.
Veering away from the Strip and the garish, flashing lights canvassing the sky, I crossed into the shadows, where apartments could be rented by the week, trash bins overflowed onto the sidewalks, and alleyways were tagged with scrawling obscenities. I noticed a vagrant asleep on some folded boxes and, thinking of Warren, stopped and leaned over him. I knew he was awake by the shallowness of his breath and by the way he shivered with the cold. I could even smell the dirty blade clutched in the fist he used as a pillow. But the man didn’t stir. He had no idea I was there, and the thought made me want to cry. Even here, among the darkest shadows in the city, I couldn’t hide from the person I’d become.
That was when I knew. No matter how long or far I walked, there was no escaping this new reality. The scents of both the living and dead would continue to reach out to me, and meanwhile I would leave nothing of myself behind.
Spotting a cab idling beneath a lamp post on Spencer Street, I crossed to it at an intersection where the night was deep enough to hide the condition of my clothing and the smudges of fatigue stamped beneath my eyes.
“You on duty?” I asked, bending to address the driver through the open window. He jumped like a catfish yanked from the water.
“Shit, lady! You scared the bejesus out of me!”
“Sorry.”
He nodded once, gruffly, swallowed to regain his composure, then stretched to see around me. “You alone?”
I nodded.
“Well, you look harmless enough.” He jerked his head toward the backseat. “Where you goin’?”
I climbed in, read him the address from the back of the card Ben had given me earlier—God, had that only been this evening?—and tried to continue looking harmless. The driver glanced back at me every once in a while, as if to reassure himself I was still there, but he didn’t try to talk, and the silence stretched between us, like the lights that elongated and snapped through the windows as we skimmed along the surface streets.
I wondered how harmless he’d consider me if I told him I knew he’d just finished a cigarette, and that less than an hour before he’d eaten a hot dog, with relish and mustard, along with a Diet Coke. Prior to dressing for work, he’d also had a quick, nonsweaty bout of sex, presumably with the woman whose ring he wore on his left hand. I looked at the dashboard and the license holding his name and photo. Ted Harris had a dog, but no children. He also had a gun tucked beneath his seat.
I could smell all of it on him.
“I think this is it,” I said. He jerked at my voice.
We pulled up to the house and I paid him with bills Warren had pressed on me before I left the motel. A homeless man with a wad of twenties in his pocket, I thought, shaking my head. Only in Vegas.
“Can you wait? Just in case no one’s home?” I asked, handing him the money through the open window. He took it gingerly, careful not to touch my fingers.
“Sure, lady,” he said, but I didn’t need to see the way his eyes flickered to tell it was a lie. I could smell the perspiration trailing down his neck. Sure enough, as soon as I started up the driveway, the wheels of the cab screeched from the curb and I was left in a cloud of burning rubber and exhaust.
I tried not to take it personally.
The house was not one of the newer tract homes, with their pastel stuccoed exteriors and five feet of space between one neighbor and the next. Ben couldn’t have lived that close to another family, I don’t think. He wasn’t even that close to his own family.
No, this was one of the boxy wood-paneled homes that’d gone up in the seventies, before land was so valuable the builders halved it, then halved it again, and Ben’s sprawling lawn and towering pines were a testament to that more generous era. Though paint could be seen peeling from the faux wood shutters, the window boxes were full of perennials, bright despite the winter chill, and the smell of fresh mulch—clean and damp and musky—reached out to me as I passed colorful pots of bronze and orange mums, dual sentries standing guard at the bottom of the concrete porch.