My mother had been right. You could taste the Light in another person, like bubbles on the tongue, and you could smell a person’s soul on their breath. I glimpsed Hunter’s strength, the sweet ardor of his physical essence and the surprising gentleness of his inner spirit. I continued to breathe, allowing our breaths to mingle so that I drew him up, in, and knew that somewhere in his unconscious state he was doing the same with me. In doing so, he was experiencing far more of me than any man ever had.
I allowed it, seeking the connection that would allow me to pass not only my knowledge and memory and experience to him, but my power as well. My kiss became a prayer, my breath a shield. I cupped his cheek with one hand—my touch now a weapon, shared—and closed my eyes to pour myself into him.
And the filmstrip began.
Some memories take only a moment to burn into the gray matter, but their images are imprinted forever. The horrific death of his parents came to me in dull and numbing flashes, viewed from the eyes of a boy watching helplessly from the corner. Shadows were spinning around him, but he was too small and helpless to do anything but watch. I heard his vow, buried beneath hot tears and his parents’ broken limbs, that he’d never be weak again.
The equally sad but still sharp death of my sister was my painful contribution. It came in the one image of that night I recalled above all others; her pinwheeling through the night, calling out my name in bald desperation.
Other memories passed in such blinding flashes they set my skin to prickling. Hunter making love to a slim dark woman, a lone tear sliding over his cheek.
My final night with Ben, a storm cloud breaking like a shot overhead.
The birth of a daughter, and a heart awash in more love than it had ever known or expected.
The birth of another, unwanted, unnamed, and untouched before being whisked away.
Had I not known what memories I’d lived and what I had not, I wouldn’t have been able to tell which belonged to me. As it was, we alternated our lives’ greatest hits in bright flashes, trading knowledge, secret desires, longing and regrets, along with our greatest loves and our most poignant sorrows.
Then a turn into such sudden blackness it was like being pitched down a roller coaster and careening off its tracks. A shiver went through my body and quaked into his. I showed him a hypodermic needle flashing, and Greta’s death powering through my limbs. Breathing the memory outward, I gave the aureole up like a gift, and Hunter took it, his subconscious greedy in a way I knew he’d never allow when fully awake. He sucked the power away, and it pulsed through our mouths, our lips moving, our tongues intertwined, the memory a lead line weighted to our hearts, loins, and heads. He grew hard beneath me. I opened my eyes to find him watching me with his soul—wondrously, thankfully, lovingly—and my body responded. My heart did too.
You’ll be safe now. I’ve shielded you as you shielded me.
But the Shadows will scent you.
So I’ll have to kill me another.
His hips rose beneath mine, and I pressed into him, forgetting myself in the strong mingling of power and limbs and dreams. The raw sexuality pulsing between us surprised me—what had started out as a chaste kiss now burned torridly between us—but it wasn’t as surprising as what I sensed him thinking next.
Brave, brave Joanna…
Shocked, I pulled away. Breathing hard, I watched his eyes flutter, heard him groan in protest and satisfaction. Then he fell still.
He knew my name. A bell chime, like a warning, sounded behind me as the elevator hit home. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, but sensed nothing of Hunter. There was only me now. Alone.
He knew my name, I thought again as the doors slid open.
And that comforted me. I rose, knowing I might die, but that somebody would remain behind to remember me. Someone who really knew me. After Olivia’s death, and the loss of Ben, I hadn’t believed anyone else ever could.
Placing a final chaste kiss on Hunter’s lips, I left him lying spent and sprawled in the corner against the wall, and didn’t have a bit of guilt. I had given him enough.
I entered the elevator, pushed the button, and lifted my head as the doors whisked shut. The cart began its ascent. Toward Warren, I thought. And toward my next, and possibly last, kill spot.
28
I wondered if this elevator would have opened to me only a month ago. There was no doubt I was operating in an alternate reality. Ions and electrodes bumped along my skin like blind bees, and a metallic taste rose to fill the back of my mouth. There was enough supernatural energy up here, I thought, to fuel a nuclear power plant.
I’m coming Warren, I thought, touching my breastbone. There was no answer, and I began to wonder if it were all in vain. Then, suddenly, there was no time left to wonder.
The elevator chime sounded like the report from Notre Dame’s bell tower. The doors sliding open were the hiss of a snake. My conduit was pointed at a mirrored image of myself, and my trigger finger pulsed. The doors began to close and I stepped into the foyer at the last moment. And they whisked shut, trapping me.
The Tulpa’s anteroom was immediately visible, just beyond a great marble staircase leading into a sunken chamber flanked by four Roman pillars. An identical staircase rose directly across from me to disappear beneath a pair of oak doors carved with mythic symbols, none of which I understood. That, I immediately decided, was where I needed to be. I simply had to cross over this innocuous-looking sunken chamber that lay in between. A chamber, I noted, with a vast mirrored ceiling.
“Only in Vegas,” I muttered, and took a step forward.
An invisible door slammed open and hard-soled footsteps pounded on the marble. I braced, conduit in front of me, and two men rounded the corner and stopped cold, apparently surprised to see me. Everything on them matched; their suits, their earpieces, their expressions, all the way down to the guns held at their right sides.
I breathed a sigh of relief. Mortals. I tucked away my conduit.
“Hit her!” the second one said, drawing his short club.
“Don’t hit me,” I said, and thrust out my lower lip.
“Hit her!” he repeated, stepping forward.
The first guard regarded him like he was crazy. “I’m not going to hit a girl.”
He was looking at his partner as he said this, so he never saw my arm swing across his cheek. The slap of my open palm reverberated in the air, and his head ricocheted backward, but he rebounded quickly and snapped it back to level me with a look of pure hatred. “Bitch!”
He still didn’t touch me, though.
“I’m a bitch?” I asked innocently.
“Fucking bitch,” he snarled.
I smiled sweetly. “Then why are you the one who just got bitch-slapped?”
Even gentlemen had their limits. He lunged, as I knew he would, and I used Hunter’s baton to strike his wrist, sending the gun clattering uselessly across the foyer. The second man was already aiming at me, his gun chest level, point-blank. Superhuman or not, that was going to hurt. But his hands were shaking. I ducked below his sight line, darted in, and came up under those hands. My left knee came up with me.
Two quick strikes; groin, which had him doubling over, and chest, which sent him pitching down the steps. His trigger finger convulsed, sending an errant shot to ricochet off marble, but I’d already followed him into the sunken room, leaping the last three steps to send a final knee flying into his face. I let him fall, and whirled with his gun in my hands. The barrel sank between the eyes of the first man, who’d followed me down the steps. I withdrew my conduit and pointed at his chest. “Shoulda hit me,” I told him.
His mouth worked, wordless as a guppie’s, his broken wrist forgotten at his side.