City Of Souls (17 page)

“I broke something. That Shadow knows how to fix it.” Except that he hadn’t fixed the changeling, I now knew. Jacks had killed him.

“He is good with his hands,” she said wistfully, and it was clear she wasn’t talking about tools. “But I haven’t seen JJ in years. Your lantern’s been locked.”

I shook my head. “I didn’t have any problems getting in.”

She shrugged. “Then someone unlocked it.”

“So…” Jacks wasn’t in Midheaven? I’d lost power, and he’d been in Vegas all along? “Well, do you know where he might be?”

“Is Warren Clarke still the leader of Light?”

That surprised me into momentary silence. “Yes.”

“Then I suggest you ask him.”

“How would…” I never finished the thought. My mind raced, searching for a time when a manual or even Warren had mentioned
Jacks
and
Shadow agent
in the same sentence. Coming up blank, I realized I had just assumed, and Warren had let me. “You mean…”

“Jaden is Light, dear.”

My dizzy-headedness wasn’t due to heat or drink or spinning stars. Everything I’d believed had just realigned into a different, unrecognizable pattern. I could understand Zane not telling me—he was the record keeper and had a cosmic obligation to remain a neutral force between Shadow and Light—but Warren…

All this time he’d let me act on the assumption that Jacks was a Shadow. “This is making me sick to my stomach.”

Solange immediately sat up, pushing the button so our slow spinning came to a stop. The heavens above ceased their movement.

“It’s that god-awful drink,” she muttered, and bent over, returning quickly with a simple gold flask. “Here. Wash it away.”

I sniffed. Water. I took one sip, then found myself guzzling it. The cloying finish of the drink downstairs disappeared, and my head cleared. Sheepish, I pulled the flask away before I emptied it. Solange smiled and waved at me to hold onto it. “It’s okay. I have more.”

By the time I finished the water, the nausea had faded.

“Warren hasn’t told you anything, has he?” she said softly as I closed my eyes. “He just sent you into a whole new world without even mentioning what this place is and does.”

I whimpered. She leaned me back again, like I was a child.

“You’ve spent many years at war with yourself. That’s why you’re gray.” She pressed a finger to my skin, looking at it like she expected to come away with soot on the shiny tips. “Toxins ooze from your pores. You doubt who you are and your place in that world. But here, you can embrace all your contradictions.”

“Like you do?”

She nodded as she leaned back, shutting her eyes, beautiful in repose. “I choose to be. Myself. In the moment. With the person I’m with. It’s simple, really. Anyone can do it.”

And there
was
something about Solange that was authentic. Maybe that’s why she was so beautiful. Maybe I was looking at the best
her
, the
most
her. That sort of comfort with oneself was rare.

I certainly wasn’t there yet.

Which reminded me…”I need my power back.”

“Why?” To her credit, Solange only cracked an eyelid. “No, really. Why?”

“Because it’s a part of me. I entered the world wholly and I want to leave the same way.”

“Nobody can walk through the world unchanged.” She nestled farther into the inky darkness. “Besides, the moment is all that matters. Control that and you control all. That’s true power.”

I found her lack of sentiment unnerving, and her dismissal of the people and events that marked and made a person was ruthless. Yet her eyes were soft when she turned her face back to mine.

“You look tired,” she said, voice honey-rich. “Maybe you’re coming down with something?”

That’s certainly what it felt like. My head pounded and my limbs were heavy. My skin ached and the nausea from before threatened again. Even Solange’s soft hand stroking my forearm was an irritant. Only the enveloping silk was welcome. A thought visited me:
But superheroes don’t get sick.

“The water…”

The water…drugged…too late…

My eyelids were heavy, my limbs numb. “Oh, no…”

“Oh, yes.” Her words were sharp, her fingertips silken as she stroked my cheek. My eyes fluttered shut.

“I drank…”

“What you were given. Silly girl.”

And I nose-dived into sleep, the universe pulsing around me.

Fire greeted me on the other side of wakefulness; innocuous flames dancing atop a tiered cake, twenty-six candles burning in celebration. There were symbols on the cake, ones I should recognize, but my knowledge of them lay like words on the tip of my tongue; both there and not until their meaning dissolved. I panned backward, as you do in dreams, to find myself standing in Saturn’s Orchard, the training room and dojo in my troop’s sanctuary. Pink and white paper streamers hung fifty feet from the pyramid’s hollowed apex, and the mirrored walls that normally flashed star signs across their surfaces picked up the girly color, lightly hued at the tip, depth graduating in degree until reaching a toothaching fuchsia at the base. It was clear I’d walked in on a birthday celebration, and from the plastic crown nestled atop her head, and the wide, clownlike grin stretching Chandra’s face, I knew it was hers.

This, I realized with a start, was her twenty-sixth birthday. More than a quarter century spent in our troop, but with no star sign to inherit, and still no metamorphosis to make her “super.” I looked for any sign of bitterness or resentment, because as long as I was in the troop, Chandra would always be relegated to sidekick status, no matter how old she grew. Her dark eyes landed on me, and though they remained blank and unseeing, the too-red lips of that clown smile widened. She gave me a “howdy-do” wave, then turned to mill with her guests.

My entire troop was there, and though no one else wore a painted-on smile, they were all grinning and silly, and had been celebrating for a while. Shot glasses littered the glasstop table holding Chandra’s cake, and a full Scotch bottle was being passed from hand to hand, though it never seemed to empty. As with most drunken social gatherings, it wasn’t long before the universal, and unanswerable, questions began to fly.

Is there a God? Who’s right, the Creationists or Darwin? What is the human position in the Universe?

“What is it,” shouted Micah, staggering dangerously from his seven-foot height, “that makes the world go round?”

People began blurting their answers like they were blowing on party horns.

“Money!” Kimber said, and threw a wad into the air.

“Not true!” said Tekla, pointing a stern finger at her before toppling into a chair and passing out.

“Spoken like someone who has it,” Warren put in, slurring every syllable. He was dressed in his undercover bum attire, which he rarely wore in the sanctuary. He raised his arm in a silent toast when he saw me looking. He wasn’t holding a glass, though, because he didn’t have a hand.

I jumped, mouth falling open, but he shrugged and found a shot glass with his other hand. Draining whiskey, he then offered his own answer to the question. “Power runs this world, of course. People will spend their last dime to acquire it. Just look at me,” he said, spinning to show off his tattered trench.

“Power won’t satisfy you when you’re lying alone at night,” Felix said, one arm draped over Kimber’s shoulder, the other over Vanessa’s. “Sex rules the world, my friends. That’s why people want power. People want different sex, better sex, more sex. It’s the only valid reason to acquire money in the first place.”

“You’re all wrong.”

The place fell silent. A spotlight landed on Hunter. He was completely naked and totally aroused. Nobody commented, or even seemed to notice. They were as attentive as a roomful of reporters at a press conference, heads cocked in concentration as they tried to decipher his meaning. Vanessa had even taken out her pocket notebook, pen poised at the ready. But Hunter was staring straight at me, and he walked my way in a warrior’s beat, stopping so close I felt the heat of his breath on my lips.

“Love,” he said, putting a hand to my cheek, “is what makes this crazy world go round.”

Again, awareness that this was a dream washed over me—Hunter would never say that—but the kiss that followed certainly made my head spin. I reached out—wanting deeper, longer, more—but Hunter pulled back, palm on his lips, blinking rapidly as he looked back at me. Shocked, he whirled on his heel without another word, and the spotlight faded.

“What do you think, Jo-livia?”

I was still gazing after Hunter, who walked right through the pyramid wall and disappeared, and I had to work to turn my attention to Felix, and his unanswerable question. After a minute I shook my head. “I can’t remember.”

“That’s okay, babe,” he said, and he was suddenly standing before me, as near as Hunter had been when kissing me. I backed away. Felix and I weren’t close like that. We were only friends, and he knew it. One side of his mouth tilted in understanding. “Memories are just silent promises you once made to yourself. The moment is all that matters. Here.”

Chandra’s birthday cake suddenly appeared between us, Felix struggling to steady it on a silver platter more appropriate for medieval feasts and giant banquets. We balanced it between us, and approached Chandra, now seated on a throne and dais, the plastic silver crown lopsided on her head. When we came to a stop in front of her, she tilted her head to the other side, the soullessly blank eyes remaining fixed on me, that obscene smile never wavering.

“Make a wish,” she said, screwing up her lines…and doing it in the Tulpa’s voice. Then, just as I realized they were really sticks of dynamite, she extinguished those twenty-six candles. Blood coated my face and body, and with the heat of my father’s scorched laughter raining down on my shoulders, my dream blew up. I woke.

Screaming.

Sweating, I sat straight up in the rickety mine cart. My mouth was sandpaper dry, probably from breathing hard, though at least it was still dark and cool. I was back on the second floor, no longer lost in the stars.

“That’s odd.” Solange’s voice was tight. I swiveled to find her seated at a rough wood table, tweezers in one hand, a loupe in the other. She was frozen over a microscope, a bright lamp hanging from a ceiling rope and casting her honeyed skin lighter. The windows along the wall were muted, notable only against the inky blackness of the wall.

She still stared at me with dark, liquid eyes, though she’d changed into a pale strapless dress a shade lighter than her skin tone. Her feet were bare, toes peeking from beneath the silk folds, and her only adornment was still the gold earrings hanging like petite chandeliers, winking from her ears. She was also wearing a deep frown. “Diana was supposed to check for protective charms.”

And she rose like she was going to battle.

I scrambled to my feet, suddenly not wanting to be anywhere near her.

“I have to go.” I also had to pause to be sure my knees were steady before stepping over the cart’s side. Then I had to pause to be sure they were
my
knees. My unreasonable, if instinctive, fear was suddenly eclipsed. “What the…why the hell am I wearing chaps?”

“Shit-hot leather chaps,” Solange corrected, a smile broad in her voice. They were shit-hot. That and skintight, with studs securing them to my sides, and a woven belt with thick silver meshing that caught even the meager light. The mesh overlaid a batik-stamped pattern like a tiny chain-linked fence, and the result—though two-toned—was a complicated pattern that was both fierce and feminine.

It was echoed in the halter top.

I don’t
do
halter tops, I thought, though my cold dismay melded into horror as my eyes turned to my jewelry. I’d been wearing none upon entering the Rest House, but now I looked like some sort of Bedouin experiment gone bad. It wasn’t that the jewelry was ugly…there was just so much of it; armbands like thick silver snakes and wrists cuffed as if fettered with aged, thick silver and secured with a pin closure. I fingered heavy hoop earrings with a row of teardrops, and a choker that felt like a shackle. Rings studded every other finger in sharp points, more brass knuckles than ornamentation. I turned toward one of the windows to study my superimposed image…and found an entirely different person looking back at me.

My short black hair was slicked back and secured at the nape, with a single cornrow framing my face and threaded with silver. A rose the size of my palm was tucked behind my right ear, a bloodred punch against all the monochromatic costuming. It matched only my lips, currently drawn into a frown. The tar black shadow edging my eyes winged to my brow line.

Which also mirrored the black henna sunburst flaring from my now-pierced belly button. How long had I been out?

At least I still had my boots, I thought, sniffing. And the chaps were perfect for my knife harnesses. I caught myself halfway through this last thought and shook my head. A bell, apparently woven into my cornrow, jangled, further clearing my senses. “Where are my clothes?”

“By now? Probably incinerated. Don’t look at me,” Solange said when I spun back around. “Diana paid a visit while I was changing. There’s your wallet, by the way. Tell me, how do you feel?”

Like an odalisque escapee from a goth harem, I thought, gingerly touching my belly ring. But I had a feeling she wasn’t merely interested in my health. I was just happy she seemed to have calmed. Picking up my wallet, I returned it to my bag. Studying the rifled contents, I muttered, “They went through it.”

“Of course. They knew you wouldn’t just tell them who you are.”

I flipped the bag over my shoulder and fumbled for the door at the sole blank wall, hands searching for the knob.

“Who armored you?”

I turned back. “What?”

She went from sitting at that table to standing in front of me, and I swore I hadn’t blinked. “Who. Armored. You?”

“I don’t know what—”

Something slapped me. But Solange never moved. “Who armored you?”

“Please,” I said before I could help it…

“Who, who, who—”

She flanked my every side but I still hadn’t seen her move. Then she was gone and I knew she was behind me. The scent of whipped rose wafted over my shoulder, and I stood so still I stopped breathing.