“Day is night and night is day in this, your city, your home,” he said, pointing back toward the neon lights. “Vampires, if they existed, would love it here. Cats too.” He craned his neck at me pointedly. “It’s a great place for all nocturnal hunters.”
“What did you say?”
“I said hunters. Like you. Like me too, because I found you.” He jumped, performing a dusty heel click. “Eureka!”
Now, getting run over by my Jaguar XK8 coupe could hardly qualify as a discovery, but I wasn’t going to argue the point with someone obviously suffering severe mental trauma. Then again, I thought, studying his lopsided grin, maybe I hadn’t hit him hard enough. “Let me take you to the hospital. You really need help.”
“Aren’t you kind?” he said, tearing up, grasping my arm again. “Aren’t you special? I can just smell the uniqueness on you.”
I jerked away and stumbled as Ajax’s short lesson on pheromones flashed through my mind. I was suddenly very aware I was standing in the middle of the desert with a complete—and, apparently, completely mad—stranger. “Look, mister, I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s nothing special about me. Got it? You just need help.”
“You don’t think you’re special? How sad. So sad.” He shook his head, and really did seem dispirited by the thought. “But you are. You have special skills. Warriors’ skills. That’s why you’re being watched.”
“By whom?” I asked, though I already knew of two people. Ajax. And Ben.
“Power is knowledge, and knowledge is power. Know thyself. All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing…”
I’d have sworn on my life Ben and I had been alone in my father’s office, but we spoke the final words together. “…and a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
We both stared, the cold, dry night sharpening between us. He was no longer bumbling about. And I was no longer feeling kind. “Where did you hear that?”
He tilted his head at my threatening tone. “You must develop your skills. Realize your potential. Your power, indeed, lies in your knowledge, but right now you know nothing.”
I decided then I’d had my share of nutcases for one night. I turned my back and began to walk away. “You don’t know me, old man.”
His next words halted me cold. “You’re Joanna Archer, sister to Olivia, daughter to Xavier and Zoe. You have a birthday tomorrow, midnight, an auspicious one…” He waited until I’d turned back. “Auspicious, that is, if you live long enough to see it.”
And I was on him before I knew it, the lapels of his tattered jacket twisted in my fists, my face thrust in his despite the stench and craziness that lived there. “Who are you?”
He placed his hands over mine, and I felt the strength in them and was surprised by it. You couldn’t tell by looking at him, and that was something I should have remembered. You could never tell who a person really was just by looking.
“Your second life cycle ends today. Tonight, Joanna.” He lifted my hands from his lapels, gently, and returned them to my sides. “I’ve come to warn you.”
I shook my head, and wrapped my arms around my body, but kept my eyes on him as I backed away. “You talk in riddles, old man.”
“Ah, but you’re a straight shooter, aren’t you? An Archer, you are.” He made a motion like shooting an arrow into the night, and tilted his head, considering me. “Not just a hunter, though. A target too. The hunter becomes the hunted.”
The wind suddenly picked up, shifting so a breeze blew my hair across my cheeks, setting the hem of the man’s trench coat fluttering around his ankles. He lifted his nose, and his nostrils drew wide, then narrowed again. “Smell that? They know you’re here. But don’t worry. They know I’m here too.”
“I don’t smell anything,” I said, and I had no idea what he was talking about.
He tilted his head in that crazy way he had. “Because you haven’t been taught to recognize their kind. Close your eyes and think of once living things decaying in the ground. A pet rabbit buried then unearthed after a week. Fungus rotting on overripe fruit. Hot sulfur rising from a hole in the earth to taint the wind. Now try again.”
I turned my face into the wind just to humor him, and immediately caught a whiff of something that reminded me of sulfur. Possibly tin. A rusty can.
With the flesh of a long-dead animal sweating inside.
“Christ.” It smelled like Ajax, and I turned my head away sharply, only to find the bum regarding me solemnly. The look sent chills through my spine and into the soles of my feet. Someone this crazy shouldn’t look so sane. I pivoted to leave. Fuck this guy. He could just stay here with his riddles and delusions and rotting scents.
His voice rose, carried to me on the filthy breeze. “You were walking through the desert when you were sixteen years old, leaving your boyfriend’s house in the early morning hours, smelling of passion and love and hope, the same scent that clings to you tonight, in fact.”
My heart was beating so hard I wouldn’t have been surprised if it leapt from my chest into my hands. How did a homeless man who jumped in front of cars and smelled like a sewer know anything about my personal scent? How did he know about me? I turned to find him closer than I expected. So close I had to hold my breath.
“You were attacked by a solitary man who seemed to be everywhere at once,” he continued, dark eye boring into mine. “You were raped, strangled, and left for dead. You awoke with a broken memory beneath the scorching midday sun, and no idea of who you really were. Your memory gradually returned, but you never fully recovered your burgeoning sixth sense. You mended your broken body and turned it into a machine, a weapon, a warrior’s tool. Good thing too. You’ll need it now.”
“How do you know all this?” God, but I hated how small my voice sounded.
“I told you. I have my talents. You have others.”
“You mean, like a superhero?” If that’s what he thought, he obviously had the wrong girl; my life was a fucking soap opera, not a comic book.
The man pursed his lips and looked up as if reading the stars like a map. They were powerful pinpricks this far out in the desert, brilliant and spearing sharply from the sky in the clear night. “I can’t help you now, Joanna. It’s too early by a moon’s rise. I just came to warn you. If you survive, I’ll be in touch.”
Then he began trudging off in that halting gait, heading for the void of empty desert space. But he paused a moment later, and for the first time his body language was uncertain. “Joanna?”
I stared back at him and shivered.
“Make sure you survive.”
Funny, but that was the sanest thing I’d heard all day.
Sanity had been a relatively elusive state since my rape almost a decade earlier. The strange desert interlude with a man who had no business knowing about me brought back just how hard I’d fought since then for even a modicum of normality…though I suppose the novelty of being threatened with a serrated poker might have had something to do with it as well. Either way, both strangers had talked openly about things that had gone unspoken in my family for years, chatting as easily about my patchwork past as if they were asking me to pass the salt…
What’s wrong, Joanna? Seeing things that remind you of a sweltering summer night?
You were attacked by a solitary man who seemed to be everywhere at once.
You were beaten, strangled, and left for dead.
It was true, I had been. But as a rule—one meant to keep that hard-won sanity in check—it wasn’t the truth I generally chose to concentrate on.
After the attack, after I’d healed about as much as a person can heal from such a thing, and after I’d spent nine months in hiding, I did eventually finish high school. I wasn’t going to let myself be trapped, or further victimized by a man who’d already taken so much from me. My anger and fear were replaced by determination and the belief that just because someone tried to make you into a victim didn’t mean that’s what you had to be.