“Well, you don’t seem like the flowers and chocolate type.”
“Is that your professional opinion?”
“Honey,” he said, eyes narrowing as they fastened hard on mine. “Were I a celibate monk secluded from the fairer sex my entire life, I’d still know your type.”
“Really?” I snarled. So much for his lip service to everyone being unique; now I was a type. “Which is what?”
Angling forward, his chest touched mine. It was like setting a match to oil, and my nerve endings burned with it. “Mine.”
The warehouse door slammed behind me, and I heard voices talking, calling out, bantering, but I was afraid if I moved, it would be into him. I looked at his body again, running my eyes over it like water.
“We had an agreement,” I whispered feebly, hating my fluid emotions, the pull of both desire and anger, the reaction to his mere physicality.
And knowing how he affected me, Hunter winced like he was apologetic, bent…and ran his lips over my cheek. “Well, now we’re going to agree to disagree.”
I jerked away as Felix rounded the corner, followed by a girl with thick blond hair, dreaded and hanging halfway down her back. Each was carrying three boxes of pizza, and the scent of cheese and pepperoni presumably masked the emotion coming from Hunter and me because neither of them looked alarmed.
“I’ve got eats, yo, but I’m not paying for everyone-poor college student, remember?” Felix threw his pies on top of Hunter’s drawing table, and wiped his hands on his jeans as he shot us his wide, trademark grin. “Pony up the bills, kids.”
I batted my lashes and flipped my hair back over my shoulder. “Sorry, Felix. All I’ve got is my American Express Black, but Hunter will cover me.” I regarded him with a raised brow. “He gets paid in cash.”
12
In addition to booby traps, and bombs, and anything one would need to manufacture indestructible weaponry, Hunter’s workshop boasted a panic room. If Shadows ever found the warehouse, an agent could retreat here until backup arrived. It’s where we went after everyone else had arrived, chatting about nothing in particular until we’d all gathered in the weapon-and soundproof room.
An old-fashioned card catalog was shelved along one of the shorter walls, and another two drawing tables were pushed together as a center workspace. A blow-up bed, currently deflated and stowed in a giant cabinet, could be pulled out in emergencies, but the room was otherwise utilitarian, without even a chair to sit on. We spread out along its perimeter, and I leaned against one of the cabinets used for archival storage. This one held meticulous records of Shadow appearances and attacks, tracking their movements and dates, and triangulating their positions.
We also kept duplicates of the valley’s street maps here, the residential roadways as well as the main thoroughfares, though they differed from maps that could be bought at the corner gas station in one very significant way. These pinpointed the location of previously known portals, when they opened and closed, who accessed them, and where they led in Vegas’s corresponding flip side. These records were constantly updated, usually by Gregor, whose cabdriver persona gave him the most obvious pretext to canvass the streets, though we all kept daily logs of our encounters that went to Warren at the end of the week.
But the personality of the room, the thing that made it come alive despite a lack of warmth or personal effects, came from the flat stacks of hand-drawn maps in the climate-controlled case beneath the drawing tables. These historic depictions detailed the Las Vegas known to previous generations, all the way back to the early 1700s, and an independent agent who’d been tagging along with a desert expedition led by a Spanish scout. He was the one who’d dubbed this fertile swath of land “The Meadows.”
Of course, Las Vegas hadn’t become large enough to warrant a true troop until long after that; first came the fort that acted as a refuge for the original Mormon settlers, then the trading posts and railroads that brought saloons and prostitution and, eventually, the workers who’d labored over the Hoover Dam in the nearby Black Canyon. No, it wasn’t until the Second World War was over, and tourism turned a sole dusty boulevard into a flashy desert oasis, that the true battle for Vegas’s soul began. So the city grew, our troop formed, and the maps reminded us of how far we’d come, and in a way allowed us to pay homage to those who were here first.
Our generation’s map was splayed like a banner over one full wall, the population boom of the early nineties penciled beneath the expansion in the millennium and the mid-decade rise of the city as it began to spread up as well as out.
Warren rolled up the giant sketch currently splayed across the tables and stuck it in an upright file so that Felix could deposit the pizzas on the center tables. The rest of us fell on the food like we’d chased it down ourselves. The troop pecking order was made clear in the process. First Warren, then Tekla and Micah; Gregor and Hunter were followed by Vanessa and Felix, then came me, Riddick, and Jewell, with special allowance made for Chandra due to the time she’d served with the troop. The last to come forward was the girl who’d entered with Felix, who accented her blond dreads with a nose piercing, black nail polish, and quotidian black clothing. This was presumably Kimber, our soon-to-be Libra, and I inched over to give her room next to me, but she backed away to prop herself up by the door instead.
Tekla, who was only picking at her pizza, wasted no time in getting to the point. “Chandra told us about the changeling at Master Comics. How you broke her, halting the publishing of our manuals.”
I’d figured as much, though a part of me had held out hope that I could be the one to tell them. Yet the way Tekla said it, matter-of-factly and without an ounce of anger, and the way Warren went after a third slice of pie, reassured me it could be fixed. I glanced at Chandra and smirked. “Thanks. Partner.”
She scowled back.
“She also said she was the one to steal this.” Warren roused himself enough to pull Xavier’s mask from somewhere behind him, tossing it onto the drawing table next to the now-empty boxes. Nobody moved, though a shiver jackhammered its way up my spine as the mask stared up at us, a scream captured in its throat. Which was exactly where the pizza I was swallowing caught as well. I lifted my gaze and was startled to find a maniacal glimmer of barely contained excitement alive in Warren’s. “Why didn’t you bring it, or one of the many others hanging around that house, to us sooner?”
I forced myself to take another bite and shook my head. “These masks have been hanging in Xavier’s home for years. I told Chandra that.”
“And you never connected Xavier’s peculiar love of Tibetan art with the culture that created the Tulpa?”
Surprised, I looked over at Kimber like she’d suddenly sprouted another dreadlock. “And the fuck you are is who?”
Vanessa and Riddick, closest to Kimber, both took a step back.
“Okay, okay,” Warren said, moving into the vacated space, wary eyes on me, but addressing Kimber. “It’s not something that would be readily apparent to someone new to our troop. Olivia’s had her hands full these last few months.” That was the understatement of the year. “And she’s still learning. She just needs to be more vigilant in the future.”
“Oh, I will,” I said pointedly, noting that Kimber and Chandra had almost unconsciously moved closer together.
“For now,” Tekla said, from her corner, “tell us your version of what happened when you entered Xavier’s office.”
Warren looked like he was going to object, but Tekla shot him an arch look that had his mouth snapping shut, so I told them about the music and scent and smoke roiling in the air of the attached room I’d never before seen, then of Xavier’s strange behavior, and how when we spoke afterward he’d somehow looked…smaller. “I’ve never smelled anything like that before, but Chandra said it was his soul essence being sacrificed to another.”