I stiffened, and the room got very still, very quiet. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about Xavier. The Tulpa. Joaquin.” Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “You’re saying we should destroy them before they have a chance to do the same to us, but what else do you want? Vengeance perhaps? We’d understand if you did.”
My jaw clenched involuntarily, and I forced it to relax before whispering. “No. You wouldn’t understand.”
She tilted her head to the side, still birdlike. Still watchful. “I too have lost someone dear to me. And at the hands of the Shadow Aquarian.”
Yes, I wanted to say, but after Joaquin murdered your son you’d been safely cocooned in this sanctuary. I’d had to go it alone in a world of Xaviers and Joaquins and Tulpas.
“Are we done here?” I asked Warren, heading to the door before he could answer. I didn’t look at Tekla at all.
“Olivia. Olivia!” His voice followed me out and into the hallway, and I heard the uneven gait of his limp, a pronounced slap-and-drag, as he ran to catch up to me. “Jo.”
My real name stopped me. I turned to face him in the sterile hallway, my face as blank as the concrete walls. “Why?” I asked him harshly. “Why wait for the Shadows to strike first? Why not head them off?”
Warren suddenly looked as tired as he did grave. “I want peace.”
“And I want them all dead.” The words shot from my mouth, and I looked away before Warren could see how much I truly meant them.
He ran a hand over his face and sighed. “If you just trust me, and wait, I swear you’ll have your revenge. Xavier’s a mortal, and your hatred of him is petty, and must be let go. But,” he said, before I could protest, “the Tulpa will pay. Joaquin will pay.”
I searched his lined and sunburned face, and inhaled deeply to be sure he was telling the truth. I’d have taken him at his word months before, but Joaquin’s words had wormed their way into my brain, and now I had to wonder.
He lies to you. He doesn’t want you to know the extent of your powers. He thinks you’ll turn on him.
And I looked at him then, really looked at him; seeing past the lank and greasy hair, the face that was usually grime-streaked and the body normally draped in a beggar’s clothes, and I saw the man who led this city’s fight against evil, one who’d tricked me into this lifestyle because it suited his troop’s needs, but who’d also held my hand in those early days, saved my life, and told me about my fucked-up parentage.
Including the fact that my mother was still alive.
But he asked too much, I thought, turning away from him so he couldn’t see the tears stinging my eyes. I’d joined his troop, learned the truth about my mother, and took up the star sign she’d abandoned in order to keep me safe. I’d accepted that she didn’t want to be found, and agreed not to look for her. For now. I’d given up a life that may not have been perfect, but it’d been mine. I was dead to all those who’d known or ever loved me, and the things I loved, like photography, were dead to me.
I’d even stayed away from Ben.
And even if Warren was right about the Tulpa-and he’d really stopped targeting the agents of Light because of me-he was dead wrong about Xavier. He hadn’t seen the way the man had treated me, or the rampage he’d gone on after my mother had left. Warren didn’t know about the piles of clothes he’d burned, the jewelry he’d given to the maids, or the pictures he’d made Olivia and me cut up while he watched.
And he’d especially watched me.
Because even though Xavier knew nothing of superheroes, portals, and paranormal battles, the timing of my mother’s disappearance hadn’t been lost upon him. His eyes burned hard and hot into mine as he slammed album after album down in front of me, studying my reaction like I might know where she’d gotten to. Like it was my fault she’d gone.
“Not like that, Joanna!” he said, wrenching the scissors from my hand so the photo I was halfheartedly holding fluttered to the ground. “If you want people to respect you, and not walk all over you”-because, of course, the rape had been my fault as well-“you have to destroy them utterly! You have to obliterate them from this earth. Like this.” And he cut and cut until my mother’s face lay like confetti at our feet.
Joaquin had nearly killed me just because I was Zoe Archer’s daughter.
Xavier had made me feel guilty because of it.
And the Tulpa had been behind it all.
So they’d all pay, I thought, smiling in spite of myself. With their lives, their money, their power. With whatever they valued most.
“Okay,” I finally lied, turning back in time to see the relief flooding Warren’s face. “Tell Tekla I’ll start tomorrow.”
He nodded, satisfied with that, and turned from me to limp away. I watched him disappear back into the astrolab, and waited until the door shut behind him. I’d stay in the sanctuary and train like he wanted, but I’d do it for my own reasons. I needed to be stronger and smarter from now on, so I’d push myself, study my lineage and the legacy of the Kairos, and I’d learn what I needed to from Tekla. So that soon, very soon, I could go after Joaquin myself.
The smart thing would be to retire to my room for the rest of the evening. It would give me a chance to calm down, give Hunter time for a cold shower, and nullify the possibility of running into Chandra…which was the last thing I needed right now.
Naturally I did no such thing.
Instead I slipped along a corridor where a red neon stripe skated along the floor, lighting my way, marking my forward progress while simultaneously dimming behind me. I ran my hand against the wall, letting symbols for horoscopic glyphs, planets, polarities, and the four elements appear and disappear beneath my touch. With the floor glowing beneath me like I was starring in some old Michael Jackson video, I halted in front of a solid concrete wall, flicked my wrist, and the wall folded back to reveal a gilt-glass elevator. When something sleek rubbed against my left calf, I jumped and looked down to find a tawny feline glaring up at me, poised on her back haunches, eyes locked on mine.
“Come on, then,” I said, and the furry little warden followed me in before the doors whisked shut behind us.
I glanced down at the cat once the elevator started its descent. She was sitting primly, facing forward like me, her tail curled tightly about her, as self-contained as if she were alone in the steel box. “You don’t think I’m acting like a rogue agent, do you?” I asked her, because of course that’s what had been left unsaid in the astrolab. It’s what Tekla meant when she claimed I was jeopardizing the troop, why she’d insisted I stay in the sanctuary. It was the reason neither of them wanted me out there on my own. They hadn’t needed to say it in order for me to feel it. The possibility was as real to them as my joining the Shadow side, and they were constantly on guard against both.
Thing was-and I’d never say this aloud-I wasn’t entirely unsympathetic toward the plight of the independents. Most, I’d discovered, were simply agents displaced by unrest and unbalance in their own cities. Well, I certainly knew what that was like. And often they were all that was left of a troop decimated by the opposing side. I mean, what were you supposed to do-where were you to go?-when life as you knew it no longer existed? When the family you’d been raised with had been targeted and murdered, one by one? I knew what that was like as well.
So it didn’t seem fair to me that every independent was labeled a rogue and forced to retreat to towns or suburbs too small to warrant concentrated attention. Not only was that mind-numbing for a cast-out urban dweller, but to take on and survive enough opposing rogue signs to make a name for oneself? Those were odds even the most hardened Vegas bookie wouldn’t touch. Gathering enough allies to build another troop? Near impossible. Most small towns didn’t have enough of a human population to warrant one. And though it was possible for independents to join a city’s already established troop, it was rare. Most Zodiac signs had been ancestrally filled for generations, and the battle to keep the signs within a given family’s lineage was fierce. Warren, I thought wryly, would know that better than most.