One of the less subtle ways was attached on the back, via the crystals.
I took it, studying the plastic backing Gregor had obviously pried away. “Another bomb,” I said, as my stomach dropped to my toes.
“More like a hand grenade, and one activated by a sound signal.”
“So she can hit a button in one location…”
“Or blow a dog whistle, whatever she has the receiver set for, and it’ll blow wherever she’s planted it.”
I licked my lips slowly, and gently held the grenade back out to Gregor. He laughed, and waved it away before tucking Sheila back under his arm. “I called Hunter immediately and he told me how to disengage it. See the wire next to the photo hinge? Plug it in and you’re live again. Thought you might want it.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “I don’t get it. She’s had plenty of opportunity to come after me herself. She could plant bombs around my condo, in my car, on my cat-”
Gregor winced, nuzzling Sheila. “Don’t say that.”
As if she’d ever be able to touch Luna, I thought, but gave Sheila an apologetic rub under the chin anyway. Our feline wardens could slice Shadows to bits. Of course, their canine counterparts could do the same to us. “All I’m saying is if the goal is to get to me, why is she going after an innocent? A guy who clearly has no knowledge of me or my world?”
“Because that apple didn’t fall far from the tree,” he said wryly, and Gregor would know. He’d been the one to drive a mace into Brynn DuPree’s chest. Yet before that, Brynn too had targeted an innocent man. She’d seduced a priest, conceived his child, and used that to blackmail him until he was as corrupt as she was. Though it wouldn’t surprise me to find Father Michael had been depraved long before Brynn DuPree had come along. The Shadows were experts in telling which humans had nefarious potential living beneath their skin. But Ben was different, targeted solely because I loved him, and I said as much to Gregor.
“And I don’t understand why she’s so fixated on me, anyway,” I added as we passed walls studded with mythological symbols and astrological shapes. “Why doesn’t Regan go after you?”
“That’s my girl,” Gregor replied jauntily. “Sugar and spice.”
I tilted my head. “You know what I mean.”
Killing Brynn had made him infamous on both sides of the Zodiac. The infamous man shrugged lightly. “She can’t come after me because I believe in luck, not love, and that’s something she doesn’t know how to twist.”
I frowned, halting in my tracks. “What do you mean?”
He turned to face me, and the stripe zinging through the hallways to light our way stopped with him. “I mean the one great lesson imparted to Regan before I could relieve her mother of her worthless life was to use a person’s love against them. She believed there was no room for love in a heroic life, so she broke her daughter of the habit immediately.”
“How?” I asked, jogging to catch back up as Gregor started off again. By my calculation Regan had only been ten when Brynn died. Most moms hadn’t even initiated the birds-and-the-bees talk by then.
“She made an example of Regan’s first love, of course. And by then he was already serving life in prison.”
“Oh,” I said slowly, realization dawning. Her father. That made sense. “What did she do?”
“Once Brynn realized Regan had feelings for her father, that she wanted to get to know him and have some sort of sustained relationship, she sent pictures of a young Regan to the man who’d been convicted of stalking children, replacing Regan’s introductory letter with a love note she’d penned herself.” Gregor’s mouth twisted in distaste, and he must have tensed because Sheila squirmed in his grip. “When he responded with a letter more suitable for a lover than a daughter, Brynn simply told Regan there was no such thing as pure love. It was a weakness, one that always came with strings attached.”
“Why would you do that to your own daughter?” I mean, Shadow agent aside, wouldn’t any mother want to protect her daughter from that sort of flattening disappointment?
“I asked her, you know.” He nodded vigorously at my surprised expression. “I did. Right before I killed her. She said, ‘You agents of Light worship the idea of love, but we Shadows kill anything we feel the slightest affection for.’”
“She loved him?”
He nodded. “She said she did. And he loved the church…could’ve loved Regan. One thing Brynn couldn’t ever abide was competition.”
I remembered that; Regan taunting me over defending my lover, saying bad habits were hard to break. Brynn had certainly succeeded in her quest to twist her lover, and her daughter. And now Regan was using my first love against me. “Effective,” I murmured darkly, but strangely not feeling a bit sorry for Regan. Go figure.
Gregor looked at me sharply.
“I didn’t say it was right,” I said, fingering the palm-sized frame I’d dropped in my pocket, “just effective.”
And it confirmed something I’d already suspected. If there was something Regan couldn’t have-a place in her birth father’s life, a love to share that life with-then she wasn’t going to let anyone else have it either.
“Do you have a rash?”
“Oh, yeah.” I glanced down. The skin above my V-neck T-shirt was red to the point of being raw. I must have been scratching it for a while now. “I might.”
He glanced at my chest where the doppelgänger had swiped at me, moving his eyes along the rest of my torso, pausing at my left arm where even I hadn’t noticed red bumps popping up over a new, and still sensitive, scar. “It’s spreading. You should have Rena make a salve for it,” he said, then grinned and imbued his tone with motherly censure. “‘I swear, sometimes you full-fledged star signs are worse than my initiates.’”
I grinned back. It sounded just like her.
But our levity dropped away when we reached the briefing room, where it was immediately clear there’d be no meeting today.
Tekla was there, but she didn’t note my arrival, nor did the others surrounding her. She was prone on the floor, and at first I thought she was crying, but then I saw she was only there for support. A keening rose from the circle, the bubble of people shifted as one, and I caught sight of Kimber, sobbing and splayed on the floor like a broken doll. The animist’s mask was lying on the ground beside her.
“I wanted to see my fate again…” Kimber was saying as Micah held her. Vanessa stroked her hair. “I didn’t think it would attack me. I didn’t know her ill chi lives in the mask…”
The her in question backed out of the room unseen and unsensed, ears roaring with blood while everyone else’s horrified attention remained fixed on Kimber. Even Gregor seemed to have forgotten me, and I placed his coffee on the ground outside the door before I ran.
My mind ticked with possible routes of escape: boneyard, cantina, locker room, other reality…no, no, no, no! Thankfully my movements were as rote as my thoughts, and I turned automatically to my sanctuary within the sanctuary.
Throwing open the door to the sparse, utilitarian room, I tossed my messenger bag on the large platform bed, but remained standing, palms to eyes, emptiness pressing in around me. I’d added little of myself to the room, choosing instead to leave it as it was when my mother lived here. The walls were white, relieved only by chunky end tables and floating mahogany wall shelves. Granted, there wasn’t enough room to do much more, but I could have added color in the form of a painting or photos or a rug overlaying the concrete floor. I could have added life in the form of a plant or a vase of flowers or mementos that would’ve truly made it mine, and I didn’t need a psychologist to tell me why I didn’t. The clothes I left hanging perfectly spaced in the closet-clothes not mine-told me I was in a holding pattern, a moratorium, waiting, still hoping she would come back.