“Yeah, something like that.” We tapped our cups together. Chandra scowled, dipping her face in her own cup. The others also seemed well on their way to being truly shit-faced, but my own drink seemed to be turning on me, the sweetness now cloying in my mouth. I pushed my cup away and turned to Hunter. He was the only one not drinking. He was also the only one who hadn’t answered yet. I raised a brow.
“Director of Security,” and before I could ask, he added, “Valhalla.”
I gaped at him, and now my mouth went dry. “You’re trying to infiltrate the Archer organization? Like my mother did?”
The drink might have been making me a little slow, but I immediately recognized how easy it’d be to act as a liaison between the Light and Shadow sides if he literally worked for the Tulpa’s organization.
“Not trying,” he said, steepling his fingers. “I’m doing it.”
And I didn’t know if that was a jab at my mother or at me. He tossed me a half smile, also unreadable, but was clearly pleased at my obvious confusion.
“Someone has to,” Chandra said.
“Chandra,” Micah said in a warning voice. I sighed inwardly, but was careful not to let my fatigue show. I was getting better at hiding my emotions too.
Chandra’s mouth quirked slightly at one side, but she gave no other sign of having heard him, and unlike Hunter and me, she wasn’t trying to hide anything. Her eyes were swimming with drink, but that wasn’t all. Deep pockets of hatred and resentment covered her entire psyche. I didn’t even have to probe to see the mossy plum color radiating sickly around her. In her eyes I hadn’t just usurped her place in the Zodiac, I’d stolen it out from under her. And her dreams of becoming this troop’s Archer floated, dead and bloated, on the surface of her gaze whenever it lit upon me.
I caught Vanessa, her own silent gaze imploring me to let it go, so I stood, ostensibly to retrieve the other pitcher of alcohol, and with the half-drunken hope that when I returned with it, Chandra would do the same, or at least have found something more interesting to look at. But she was still there, sneering as women had sneered at Olivia so often before. Judging as they had. She held out her cup for me to serve her, then had the nerve to say, “Your mother failed us all when she deserted her star sign. And look who she deserted it for. What a waste.”
The contents of the pitcher I was holding—fruit bits, sweet and sticky, citrus-infused alcohol, ice chips—were poured over her head. It was my turn to sneer, but she was standing and had slapped the satisfaction off my face before I even saw her move.
“Girl fight,” I heard Felix say.
“Superhero girl fight,” I corrected, and wheeling back, steered an elbow into her temple. The force of my action turned me around on myself, so I followed it up with a backward elbow to the nose. Chandra staggered, as surprised at this as I’d been at the slap, but she didn’t fall, and the drunken brawl was on.
She lunged, but Felix was quicker, intercepting her just as neatly as Hunter stalled my own forward motion. Chandra and I both struggled and cursed, continuing a bit just for form’s sake, though neither of us had a chance of getting loose.
“Ladies, ladies,” Hunter said, sounding bored.
I slammed my head back against him, satisfied when I heard him grunt. Petty, but pleasing. And he let me go.
“I am finished apologizing for who I am,” I said, jerking away from him and whirling to face them all. Chandra wasn’t the only one who needed to know this. I was breathing hard, and I knew my aura had turned red with anger. “Your discomfort with me is your problem, not mine. Got it? I know who I am.”
And I did. I could be beautiful without being soft, and I could be tough without being bitter. Without becoming Olivia, without experiencing the world through her body and eyes, I would have never realized this on my own. I folded my arms across my chest and silently dared them all to speak.
“Finally,” Micah murmured from his corner, lifting his drink.
“Yeah.” My eyes flickered to meet his. “Finally.”
A gurgle sounded in my stomach. Then a rising of heat in my gorge. Suddenly, I shuddered, and my intestines seized. Pain wracked my body, and I screamed, collapsing and clutching my loins. A searing pain shot from my thighs to my chest, paralyzing my lower back, and I whipped forward. God, what was in that drink? The thought swam away as another series of slashing incisions, like hot pokers, scored my flesh. I felt singed and sliced as I curled into myself, my rasping cry dying out in breathless pain.
“What’s happening to her?”
I gave an uncontrollable twitch, then puked vodka, citrus, and blood.
“Jesus!”
“Olivia! What’s wrong?” Felix was there, but his outline blurred above me, tears and agony ruining my vision.
My organs felt skewered, like they’d been ripped out from inside me. I had to be dying, I thought. I hoped. “God,” I cried out, and this time arched backward as an invisible blade bumped along my spine.
“It’s inside. It’s my insides…” I looked at my hands, which had been clutching abdomen and thighs, expecting to see them drowning in blood, but there was nothing. Surprise had my mouth closing momentarily. The pain abated, no longer acute, but the spasms and heat lingered. A groan spiraled out of me, filling the cantina.
Micah had reached me at some point, and I regained my sense of self long enough to realize he was cradling my head in his lap, his physician’s hands searching, inspecting my ribs and stomach and legs, and finding nothing.
“It’s not me!” I doubled over again, a fresh wound cutting me open from sternum to pubic bone. It wasn’t me, of that much I was sure. This was a power outside myself, outside this room too. Still, waves of nausea built again in my stomach. I took a deep breath, but the air was metallic with the taste of blood. I groaned, writhed, and finally, near unconsciousness, lay still.
“It’s okay. Just stay where you are, take a minute.” Micah shifted, turning to the others, though I couldn’t see them. “Somebody go get Greta.” There were footsteps, then the report of the door.
“She’s not bleeding.” Hunter’s voice, laced with concern, which would’ve been gratifying if it didn’t scare the shit out of me.
“Maybe she drank too much.”
The pain had subsided, but the echo of it was still in my bones. I swallowed hard against the vomit souring my throat and the brighter scents of pain and fear.
“Maybe she’s allergic to the masking pheromones?”
“No, I tested the solution on a small patch of skin before I applied it. They’re a perfect match.”
It didn’t feel perfect, I wanted to say, but a tongue of swollen sandpaper inhabited my mouth. It was as if I’d been denied drink for a week instead of imbibing only minutes before.
Then the roil in my gut again, a tight coil of fear that wasn’t really mine. I couldn’t understand it. It was like the core of my body belonged to someone else. I managed to sit up with Micah’s help, his large palm warm and supporting on the small of my back.
“Maybe she—”
The door to the cantina swung open with a resounding bang. A figure was silhouetted in the shadows of the hall; a man of great bulk, middling height, and only one arm. The dim lights of the cantina made him appear a ghost, and bent at the waist, he wavered like one as well.
“Gregor!” Vanessa abandoned me for him. “God! What happened?”
“Ajax,” he managed, before bending over himself. My body froze, even my shuddering stopped for an instant, and my eyes darted to the hallway behind him, half expecting to see Ajax there, the tip of his flaming javelin already pointed at my heart. “He found me last night, just after dusk. I don’t know how…I didn’t do anything…I didn’t—”