“Oh God.” My eyes found Li at the same time Jasmine’s did. I was vaguely aware of Regan’s laughter-laughter and footsteps as she ran from the storeroom-but I bolted in the opposite direction, and dropped to my knees next to Jasmine, who’d been closer and had gotten there first.
“Wait, Jas!”
But she was already turning her sister over. “Li, how many times do I have to-”
We both gasped, momentarily stilled by the china doll cheek scored with three deep claw marks. It looked like she’d been attacked by a pit bull. Her beautiful skin hung in tatters, and blood pooled on the floor around her. Even once the bleeding was staunched, even when the furrows were stitched back together under a surgeon’s gentle hand, the child would be scarred for life.
But when she looked up at me, there was none of the loathing I expected in her watery gaze. There was no room for it with pain and fear and hope all jostling for space. “I did good, right? I protected you?”
The lump in my throat turned into a mountain. “Yeah, baby. You did great.”
She smiled with the good side of her face. I turned to Jasmine and found the piercing accusatory glare I deserved.
“Happy?” she asked, voice breaking.
God, no. I certainly wasn’t that. “I-I didn’t know.”
My voice cracked and a tear slid down the cheek that mirrored the injury to Li’s…except mine would heal. Jasmine looked at me in a length of charged silence, and for a moment I saw something akin to pity flickering behind her gaze, but she snuffed it out in the next. “Whatever.”
“I’m going to fix it.” I reached for Li.
“You’d better.” Jasmine said in a voice round with fury and disbelief. “Hero.”
But there was only one heroine present, and I lifted her in my arms and gently carried her from the storeroom.
11
I drove Li and Jasmine to the emergency room, and left only after their mother had arrived, assuring her all medical costs would be covered by the Archer Children’s Foundation. She thanked me repeatedly for “saving” her baby’s life from a vicious dog’s attack, while Jasmine sat in a plastic chair, swinging her feet back and forth as she alternated text messaging on her cell phone and glaring pointedly in my direction.
I wanted to tell her it wasn’t my fault. I hadn’t expected the Tulpa to attack, and I didn’t know how the injury had been transferred to Li instead of me or even her. But intentionally or not, I really had broken something vital to the balance of the supernatural system, and now not only were the manuals not being written, but a seven-year-old’s life had been permanently affected.
It was too late to return to Master Comics. The shop was closed and I’d received instructions to meet the rest of the troop at eight o’clock to examine the mask Chandra had stolen from Xavier’s. It was seven-thirty now and I still had to get across town in the rush of Friday night traffic, but at least it gave me time to think of a way to tell the others about Li, as well as ponder the smorgasbord of trouble now filling my plate. Okay, so it wasn’t all bad news. I’d learned the doppelgänger’s appearance had spooked the Tulpa enough to have him willing to bargain with the Light. I’d also learned Regan’s left eye wigged out when she was nervous, that she was overly sensitive about turning into a walking corpse, and I could best her in hand-to-hand if I played my cards right.
The news about Hunter having a side gig as a sex worker wasn’t what one would call good, but he always had a reason for what he did, and surely he had one for keeping it from the rest of the troop. Since I was exceptionally curious as to what that reason was, it was convenient to find myself swinging in front of the warehouse that served as his workshop with almost a quarter hour to spare. We were meeting here because we weren’t sure what would happen if we tried to take Xavier’s mask back into the sanctuary with us. Anything related to the Shadows was instantaneously incinerated as it slid down the secured chute leading to our hidden underground lair. I shuddered as I recalled the sole time I’d attempted entry without donning my protective mask. In contrast, we didn’t know if this mask was inherently evil-though there was something determinedly not right about a piece of wood that came to life and sucked out a person’s soul essence-but we couldn’t risk it being destroyed before we had a chance to examine it further.
Hunter’s workshop was as safe a place as we could hope for on this side of reality. It wasn’t a designated safe zone like Master Comics or the Downtown Cocktail Lounge, and was technically accessible by mortals and Shadows alike, but Hunter had the place so booby-trapped, the unfortunate Shadow who attempted a break-in here would be skewered, rotisseried, and served up to his or her enemies faster than you could say, Would you like fries with that? I’d seen him construct a weapon out of nothing more than toothpicks and twine, but the devices buried about his workshop were more than that; they were lethal works of art. Hunter did like his toys.
The steel bay door was open on the easterly side, and I assumed all alarms, traps, and missile systems had been turned off, so I pulled my Porsche to a stop next to his Ford Mustang, noting they were the only two cars here as of yet. Also convenient.
Clicking the alarm on my car, I glanced at the red Mustang and wondered if he used it for his security cover or if it was the ride for his side gig. What did a call boy drive on a date, anyway? And why, I asked myself as I shook my head, should I even care?
The workshop was housed in an isolated commercial district where the Strip’s biggest names in magic stored their props. Burton, Copperfield, Penn and Teller; they all had storage buildings the size of airplane hangars, so if our place ever was broken into, the templates and drawings and odd contraptions could be explained away as yet another magician’s illusionary trove of tricks.
What it was, however, was a place to plan, design, and test the weapons we used against the Shadows as we vied for control over the valley. The conduits designed to complement a specific agent’s talents, temperament, and training were conceived and honed to lethal perfection here. However, that was a relatively rare task-agents, with any luck, tended to live a long time-so the rest of the time it was a place to run sims and defensive programs meant to counteract our enemies’ machinations. Even the tools used to clean up a location affected by a paranormal battle were contained in raw form and made here. And Hunter’s hands crafted them all.
I’d once heard the Eskimo languages had dozens of different words for the concept of snow. Agents, I decided, should have the same extensive linguistic flexibility for the qualities of smoke, because the scent I inhaled upon entering the warehouse wasn’t the Shadow stench of incinerating flesh and hot ashes, and it wasn’t the suffocating fallout that had squeezed all the air from the molecules in the pseudo black hole the Tulpa had created downtown last weekend. No, Hunter’s scent was more natural, like the wisps rising from an isolated forest campfire, when the breeze was up and there was no other person for miles around. I located him by inhaling the heady mixture of clean sweat and a spice as identifiable as a sliver of ginger on the tongue, and my belly flip-flopped inside me. It’s true what they say, I thought, rounding the corner to find him shirtless, bent over a sliding table. Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire.
And this man was scorching.
He wasn’t overbuilt like a gym rat; his physicality was more raw and far less self-conscious than that. He was sleek in the fashion of panthers and fast cars, built for performance, with latent power almost quivering beneath that compact frame. Still, the first word that would spring to mind if you ever saw him backlit, in silhouette, would be man. I especially liked the way his shoulders rounded, how they rolled high and smooth, like statues on display, clearly the force behind his fist. I’d seen him pummel through a concrete barrier with a careless backslap, and couldn’t help but compare that to the way I fought. I had never solely used the torque of my shoulder. I used my wide hips, my long thighs, my agile mind. As a woman, my whole being had to be the force behind my fist.