His expression held the same resolute calm it had when I’d left him at the warehouse, though it sat on his face like a sunken stone, like he’d settled something for himself inside. He was obviously in a building of some sort, but it had been drawn intentionally obscure, and all that was visible was yards of concrete and four slim windows that allowed a full moon to fall on that disturbingly peaceful face.
“People should have their greatest desires,” he told someone, and his voice lifted from the pages to wash over me, causing chills to break out along my spine.
I looked up, but Gregor had turned his attention back to the road, and clearly hadn’t heard. Disturbed, confused, and inexplicably sad, I flipped the manual shut just as dusk split down its thinning middle, and we rocketed through the wall and into the boneyard. The dust from our impact into an alternate reality hadn’t even settled before a strange pulsing glow seeped into the cab. For a moment I thought the Shadow manual had fallen open again, the recorded events springing to life once more on my lap. Yet in the next, I realized the light was coming from outside the vehicle, and I automatically reached for a conduit I no longer possessed.
I glanced at Gregor to find him half-turned, observing me again, but this time with an air of expectation, not curiosity. I frowned my confusion, but he merely smiled and jerked his head toward the center of the boneyard. Pushing open the cab door, I stood, then cautiously edged toward the glare. A few yards in, I entered a clearing of pulsing, streaming, gas-infused light. And Light. I turned around myself in the middle of the clearing to find agents gazing at me from varying vantages, their smiles as bright as the dilapidated signage they were perched upon.
Except none of it looked dilapidated with bright, flashing bulbs and streaming neon tubes, a carnival of the city’s history: Aladdin’s lamp, the marquees from the Frontier and Maxim, café arrows…and the Silver Slipper looming over them all. Its chipped paint flashed in the puncturing glow of hundreds of bulbs, the first time they’d been lit since 1988. It took my breath away.
My lower jaw had just swung shut when I saw Dylan and Kade waving at me from the tail of a neon yellow shooting star. The other changelings were fanned around the clearing’s perimeter, some with other agents, others with initiates of the same age, who’d obviously been let out for the night. But why?
“Wha-?”
Reaching my side, Gregor put an arm around my shoulder. “Now, Vanessa!”
A mishmash of individual lettering from the Dunes, the Landmark, the Hacienda, and the Sands sprang to life across from me, and my breath caught on a surprised, and touched, sigh. “Oh.”
Welcome, Joanna.
“Oh,” I said again, tears stinging my eyes. “It’s beautiful.”
“Skamar’s not the only one in possession of her true name now. We thought it good cause to celebrate.”
I sniffled, unable to say anything. But he was right. I’d felt it inside, like an inaudible click, as soon as the troop had learned I was Joanna beneath Olivia. It had been the power, the magic, the alchemy of being recognized.
A part of me was concerned, I admitted, watching the young initiates swing from the old Stardust constellation. They streamed past me, glowworm faces flashing with their laughter. If the secret of my identity was out among my troop, would it be long before the Shadows learned of it as well? After all, we’d been infiltrated once, and despite Chandra’s actions, she was still bound to be discontent at her displacement in the troop. And, of course, there was Kimber to consider. I scanned the boneyard, not finding her. She was a new and certainly antagonistic X factor.
Zane had also made more of a point than I’d wanted to give him credit for-Regan was still out there. She knew me as both Olivia and Joanna. The question was, would she use that knowledge as a bartering chip with the Tulpa, or would she come after me herself?
“Hi, Archer…I mean, Joanna.”
I looked down, smiled, and sank to my knees. “Li. How are you feeling?”
“I’m okay.” The makeup Chandra had made her had evened out the cracked egg aspect of her face, and she almost looked healthy in the fresh autumn night. She was dressed as a black cat, and it was all I could do not to reach out and scratch her behind the ears. “Aren’t the lights beautiful?”
I looked around again, catching sight of Jasmine talking to Rena, ward mother to our initiates. Even Jas looked impressed tonight…though she was wearing a typically angsty T-shirt that read, this IS my costume.
“They are,” I agreed, straightening.
“I don’t think I could ever live in a place of darkness.”
I sighed as I looked back down at her. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”
Kylee and an initiate named Elena arrived just then, pulling at Li’s arm, chattering excitedly about a maze that’d been turned into a haunted house for the night. They were both in costume, both superheroes, and they rushed away so quickly, she barely managed a backward wave. Seconds later, thrilled screams of terror rolled over the boneyard. I smiled grimly, knowing I had to help Li, and soon, but for tonight she was happy and safe.
“Happy Halloween, Archer.”
My brows winged up to find an Autobot Transformer. I tilted my head. “Carl? Is that you in there?”
Earth’s protector nodded.
“I thought you didn’t dress up for Halloween.”
He shrugged. “It’s not every day you get to turn into a semi.”
“This is true. Though I’m not sure how safe all this is.” I jerked my head toward the boneyard’s perimeter.
“Oh, the mortals…the other mortals, I mean…they can’t see us. Tekla put up a shield. Didn’t you notice? It isn’t storming inside the boneyard.”
I did now that he mentioned it. The serenity hovering over the boneyard wasn’t due solely to my surprising contentment. Only Tekla could shield such a large space from the fallout of battling tulpas. Yet one thing remained unsettling. “I don’t see Hunter.”
“Hot date,” Carl muttered, watching one of the initiates glow with more than a little envy. “You know how those working men are.”
I suppose I did, though of course the question remained: what was he working on?
Not your business, quipped a voice loitering inside me. Besides, it was probably best he wasn’t here. I needed time and space to figure out who I was now that Ben Traina wasn’t taking up so much real estate in my head. And my heart. Immediately filling that space with another man was a mistake…and wasn’t even possible. Maybe in time it would be, but only if that person fit well and wholly with the woman-the superwoman-I was today.
And that was my most pressing problem. Ambivalent in my self-awareness, I was no longer the person I used to be but still unsure of who I was to become. It was as if I was still composed of two halves: the mortal me, who’d used logic and determination to power through life, and the new one, who had to accept there was a place for magic alongside the practical. I was surrounded by people who could conjure plants and storms and walls using nothing more than thought; I could do the same. My birth father had been wrought into being by the same applied mental power, and my mother had just spent the last decade creating a being that could take him down.
Yet whenever I considered these things together, along with my future, my destiny as Kairos, I had trouble seeing from here to there. It was like the fourth sign. Delayed, yet to be revealed. And there was no path to follow, no book to read, no great teachers who’d come before me, leaving scripture like bread crumbs trailing behind them. My path to becoming me, I now knew, would have to spring wholly from myself.
But for now, in this exact moment, Li was safe, Ben had a chance at a normal life, Regan was defeated, the Tulpa was on his heels, my mother had succeeded…and for the first time since Olivia’s death I had people who knew me. It was with a surprised jolt that I realized I was relatively happy. I really had a place in the Zodiac now, in this world, and whether anyone liked it or not, no one could question it. I had an identity.