Below, Vanessa glanced impatiently at her watch. Kimber still fondled her unfinished conduit, looking younger and friendlier and dreamier than any future Shadow killer should. I couldn’t blame her. Her metamorphosis was scheduled two weeks from now, and it was the event an initiate looked forward to from the time they first learn of their preternatural destiny. I glanced at Hunter, thinking I should’ve told Warren about his call boy identity. If he was telling the truth, and Warren wouldn’t care, there was no reason not to mention it. Except I owed him. He’d kept my Joanna identity from those who didn’t already know it, as well as the bigger secret Warren knew nothing about-my daughter.
So I sat back in the crow’s nest and watched Vanessa finally yell at Kimber, who reluctantly handed the weapon back to Hunter before disappearing through the bay doors. Then I sucked in a deep breath filled with the warmth of toasted fruit, so heavy and round I wanted to take a bite. The scent of Hunter.
He glanced up at me sharply before he relaxed, and a languid smile visited his face. I’ll be your secret keeper, he’d once said to me. But he’d said it with heat, looking at me the way he was now, meaning that and so much more.
“I’ll be your secret keeper too, Hunter,” I murmured, pushing away the memory even as it rippled through me. “But that’s all.”
14
I used my Shadow manuals often. Most had belonged to my first enemy, the man who thought it was fun to attack little girls on steamy desert nights. I now possessed them because our diminutive, assessing, and steady troop Seer, Tekla, had gone apeshit on his putrefied ass, literally shredding him to bits, saving my life…and saving a bit of herself in the process as well. The next week Joaquin’s extensive stash of meticulously organized Shadow manuals had somehow shown up in the sanctuary, though whether he’d bequeathed them to me, knowing I’d continue the work he’d started-finding a way to kill the Tulpa-or whether they’d somehow been appropriated on my behalf, I still couldn’t say.
I also didn’t walk around advertising my possession of them, not with the third sign of the Zodiac looming over our heads like a giant question mark. So I waited until the next day, when most of the others had been called to clean up Shadow activity on the East Side, before pulling an armload of them from my locker, and taking them with me back to the barracks for some late night reading.
It was in one of these that I found an account of the last time the Tulpa had sent his agents out via “message-by-minion.” He hadn’t been kidding about the missive’s hold over his troop. The manual depicted his investigation of one of his own, a Shadow agent named Tripp who’d balked at orders to murder his own family. Instead he’d warned them, and they all rabbited. Their effort to escape the Tulpa, a plan that revolved around some rumored underground for former agents, was foiled by a long-forgotten confidence in the Shadow Gemini, whom he’d told about his safe house in nearby Mount Charleston. Though the Gemini was, in truth, a genuine ally, after a month of no food or sleep or the ability to eliminate bodily functions, his will was thoroughly broken.
The family’s slaughter a week later-three generations of Shadow Aquarians-had shaken the foundations of that side’s Zodiac. It was a brutal act even by the Tulpa’s lofty standards, and the final panels showed a meeting-sans Tulpa-swearing it would never be allowed to happen again.
It must have pissed off Joaquin too, I thought as I left my room, because the manual was dog-eared, and he’d even scrawled in the margins, using that strange hieroglyphic alphabet I’d seen lining the walls of his underground cavern. These, however, were punctuated with giant exclamation points.
So why would the Tulpa impose a message-by-minion again, and once more risk alienating his own agents?
“The doppelgänger,” I murmured, sinking to the floor outside another barracks’ door and rubbing at my chest where the woman had scrabbled for my heart. My wounds had healed, but every so often it was as if dozens of ants marched beneath my skin, tiny legs scrabbling over muscle and tendons, and below it, my beating heart. I pulled my hand away, and attempted to push that image out of my mind.
But what was it about her that spooked him so much? The message-by-minion, the knee-jerk willingness to kill me just because we smelled similar, the offer to work together to eradicate her existence…it all spoke to a fear far greater than his hatred for our troop. Greater, even, than his paranoia at my ascension as the preordained Kairos.
What could he find so threatening about her existence?
“Must be my lucky day.”
I glanced up, already smiling as Gregor approached his room in the barracks, dropping the manual back into my shoulder bag as I stood. It was just after dawn now, and the troop was trickling in. Though he’d be going to bed soon, Gregor held the day’s first cup of coffee in his one arm because he first had to attend a meeting about the night’s mission in the debriefing room. He showed neither surprise nor alarm to find me waiting for him, just motioned me aside with his head so he could reach inside and gather his warden, Sheila. She went everywhere with him on this side of reality, and she bounded from the room to rub up against his legs before flicking her black tail dismissively in my direction. I could have sworn she was also deliberately trying to trip me up as we wound our way through the sanctuary’s concrete halls. Cats.
I’d given Ben’s address to Gregor after my run-in with Regan at the bar, and had asked him to stop by, poke around, and see if she’d planted any more bombs. Gregor was more objective than I was, and could canvass Ben’s home with perspective, a practiced eye, and without leaving behind an olfactory trail. I couldn’t trust myself to do the same.
I’d tried to be patient, but I was obviously anxious to know what he’d found. Fortunately, he didn’t make me wait. “So I did a drive-by on the mortal’s house and saw nothing unusual. I returned later when I was sure it was empty and found this.”
He handed me a slip of paper with Rose’s name and address. I’d been looking hard for a secondary location where Regan stayed outside her troop’s sanctuary, so this would’ve been a Eureka! moment…if I wasn’t so sure it was a setup. She’d given me an address in the past. Going there had nearly killed me. “She must think I’m an ass to fall for the same ruse twice.”
“Doesn’t hurt for her to throw it out there. If you’re looking so desperately for the complex hoax, you might fall for the simple one.” Gregor’s hoop earring glinted as he handed me his coffee cup and bent to lift Sheila. Completely devoted to Gregor, she was purring before he’d even scooped her up. She regarded the competition, me, with cold assessing eyes. “She was probably also feeling reckless. Pissed off to find so many bugs planted around the place.”
I smiled back grimly. Placing the listening devices around Ben’s home had been a cheap and silly mortal’s trick, but they’d seemed to annoy her, so I’d had Gregor do it again. The possibility of falling for something stupid went both ways.
“Thanks, Gregor.”
“I also found this.” He balanced Sheila on his shoulder and rustled in his jacket pocket, coming out with a photo of Regan in a crystal-studded, heart-shaped frame. She was in Rose mode, so there were enough visual cues to suggest a likeness to me without fully reviving me in Ben’s mind. It was one of the Shadows’ more subtle ways of luring in their mortal prey.