“Don’t mind him,” Carl told me, once we’d retreated to the back room. “He gets like this when he’s blocked. The psychic energy builds up because it has no outlet, and messes with his mind.”
“He looks like he blames me for it.”
Carl scoffed, waving the worry away. “He’ll be fine once the images come rolling in again.”
“What about the rest of them?” I asked, glancing toward the twins, who regarded me warily from behind cupped hands, and Sebastian-the little bastard-who’d smirked in my direction, making a point to display his copy of the latest Shadow manual. Only Jasmine looked happy to see me.
“Oh, them?” Carl said, gesturing back into the store. “Yeah. They totally blame you.”
I sighed, thanked him, and left.
There was no next step, no place to go that was forward, and so I took a step back, and returned to canvassing Vegas’s empty streets as I always did when I needed to think. And somehow I found myself in that same filthy alley I’d chased a human predator into the night I killed Liam. It seemed like years ago, not weeks, that Regan had set me up, but nothing had changed here. I headed past broken-down boxes and splintered crates, neither sensing nor smelling anything out of the ordinary…until I did.
He was slumped beneath a pile of broken crates, the clothes on his chest and the wood above him charred black with what appeared to be someone’s failed attempt to burn the entire mess. Not that the man would have minded. Even with bloat and rot distending his face, and the maggots wriggling in his eye sockets to make the corpse look possessed, I could see the burn marks around his mouth. If I were inclined to investigate further-which I wasn’t-I was sure I’d find his private parts equally seared by disease. He’d been dead before someone left him to this alley grave, tossed here like the rest of the refuse, the halfhearted attempt to burn his remains only dehumanizing him further.
I looked at the shredded skin and diseased flesh and moldering bloat that used to be a human, and my head swam with the same unhinged fury that’d had me driving a stiletto up between Joaquin’s thighs. Those fucking Shadows had decided to play God, and someone who’d once cradled dreams was now splayed on the ground like he’d never mattered.
And someone else, who’d tried to protect me in what was probably the first bold and chivalrous act in his life, was now captive to Joaquin; a fate, I could attest, that was even more terrifying than this.
And a third someone-young, hopeful, and vibrant-had died while tasting what had probably been her first kiss, the one that should have been the sweetest. Instead it had taken her life before it’d truly begun.
All this destruction, and here I was, skulking in the alleys of my ravaged city, feeling ashamed of what I had done? While I was caught in limbo, neither belonging in the world I’d grown up in, nor yet the heroine the manuals prophesied I was to be, Joaquin and Regan and the Tulpa were stamping out lives for no other reason than to make a point. You can’t protect them all. You can’t even protect yourself.
My head was suddenly buzzing as I tasted decay, the darkness on the stifled alley air, playing the part they’d chosen for me. I punched the wall beside me, sending shards of plaster and brick crumbling to the ground. Pull this string, and the Archer acts this way. It was stupid, fruitless, but I punched again. Pull this one, and she’ll jump as you please. They were able to do this-not just with me, but with all the agents of Light-because we held fast to a moral code that said killing was wrong, protecting human life was our highest duty, and we did it on a level playing field. But we weren’t even playing the same game. And that’s all it was to the Shadows.
I closed my eyes, let the rot of another human I’d failed to protect seep into my pores, and extinguished the Light inside me like a snuffed-out taper. I let all the anger and pain and helplessness I’d been feeling since Marlo’s death pour out of me in a piercing shriek, a cry so raw the rats went scurrying back into hiding. The wind ceased to breathe. Shadows arched over me.
Strings snapped inside me.
How dare they make me feel like I had to hide-any of them! How dare they treat me like a rogue agent! And how dare I think the only solace I could find would be in these shadowy alleys, like I should be ashamed…or at least more ashamed than all those who chose not to act. Who knowingly put themselves before the innocents. All this time Warren had insinuated-and I’d believed-that I’d have to choose one side over the other, I thought, breathing hard. When really, all I needed to do was be.
I thought about the Tulpa, how only after he’d cut the ties between himself and his creator had he truly come into his own power. I had that ability inside me. I had self-will. And now that my ties had been cut with the troop, I had a place to start.
And so, as I slipped from the alley, I walked off the map I was supposed to follow, and strode into a void as vast and unknowable as the midnight desert. A cursed battlefield it might be, but I was done warring with myself.
And, I thought, striding down the center of the abandoned street, I was no longer anyone’s puppet.
24
It was the last place I should have gone, a move so bold I was stupid to even consider it. And the first thing I noticed once inside the cool, dark enclave of Olivia’s apartment was Luna’s absence. She wasn’t in any of her usual spots; beneath the couch, behind the fake ficus I’d bought to replace the real one I’d killed, or curled up on a dining room chair waiting to pounce on my feet as I walked by. I stuck my head in the laundry room on the way to my bedroom, knowing her penchant for lounging on clean clothes-and mine for leaving them there-but there was nothing.
“Come on, Luna,” I said, peering in the closet before dropping to my knees to peer beneath the bed skirt. There was no sign of struggle, no foreign scent marring the space, and I knew a Shadow couldn’t have entered without Luna ripping them to shreds, so I decided she was probably just making me pay for leaving her under the neighbor’s care for so long. That’s why it took a moment before I realized the shoes I saw pointing my way from the other side of the footboard belonged to a man…and they were on someone’s feet.
I stood and swung at the same time. There was a blur as the man dodged my blow and my follow-up roundhouse kick, and I whirled, ready, to find two pairs of sharp eyes trained on me. Only one pair was filled with amusement, and it wasn’t Luna’s.
“I take it this is Luna,” Hunter said, stroking the spiky fur to calm the cat until she leaned against him. Her eyes closed, and a deep purr resonated like distant thunder in the dim room.
“You’re an asshole,” I told him, relaxing.
He kissed Luna on her little egg head. “You shouldn’t let her talk to you that way.” The cat purred louder.
I narrowed my eyes. “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting,” he said, leaning against the dresser. He looked odd propped up against the frilly knickknacks and toiletries littering the vanity-a dark smudge against a sea of white and pink. “By the way, you’re out of milk.”
“Waiting for me?” I asked, mimicking the pose, minus the cat, on the four-poster bed.
He shrugged. “For you, for a Shadow to stop by and try to kill you. For anyone. Anything.” He bent and gently dropped Luna on the bed, where she immediately began grooming herself. When he lifted his gaze back to mine, the answer was plain on his face.
I put a hand to my mouth to withhold the gasp. “They kicked you out, too.”