City Of Souls (23 page)

It took minutes for the world to right itself, our breaths interloping to tug us back, together, inhale by exhale. I pressed my cheek against the cool concrete wall, spotted a bull’s-eye across the distance of the shooting range, and still breathless, I smiled.

We dropped to the platform bed tucked in the crow’s nest after that…it was either that or fall over, but the rightness that had slid over me upon climax enveloped me again as I nestled in next to Hunter. I was sore from the give and take, the aggressiveness and the surprising desperation in our lovemaking. I was also feeling the effects of my fight in Midheaven, and the passage both there and back, but nestled into the crook of his left arm, staring up at a ceiling of faux stars, I sighed, and every muscle relaxed.

Unlike Solange’s planetarium, this ceiling offered up a faulty version of the night sky. Hunter didn’t only track constellations, but “frozen stars,” dead ones, black holes. I’d wondered at that once, thinking it strange, but right now I had no energy to even care. I fit so well at his side, and was so relieved to be safe and home—not to mention out of those chaps—that I immediately began to drift off.

“How do you feel?” Hunter’s voice reached out to me like a breeze, hesitant and shifting. It was a similar question to the one he’d asked the last time we’d been tented beneath this improbable sky.

What do I make you feel?

At war with myself, like there’s something lacking…and violence…

I knew my answer had been hurtful, but at the time it had also been my truest reaction to the shock and sadness of having witnessed Ben and Regan together. Though rephrased, by asking the question now, Hunter was again opening himself to that hard answer, obviously hoping it’d changed.

My hesitation spooked him. He edged away, turning his back to me, but I caught his hip with my palm and spooned his body with my own, feet and knees and hips and chest an echo of his male strength. So complimentary, I thought, drawing closer. It made me honestly wonder why we were so often at odds.

While he remained silent, waiting, I traced the tattoo on his back with my fingers, trailing the shadowed side of the yin/yang symbol before running my index finger along the dueling words on each side: fear and desire.

“You make me feel…”

You make me feel like touching myself in the dark. You make me feel like whispering your name for no reason. You make me wish to put need and lack and violence behind me.

He turned to me, determined to face whatever I was going to say.

I offered up a watery smile, my fingers going tentative on his arm. I whispered, “I feel like me.”

Like I could be me—the good and the bad, the fabled and fallible, the Light and the Shadow—and still look in the mirror without shame. The jerk of his head revealed his surprise, but his relieved sigh told me it was the answer he’d been seeking. I stroked his arms, feeling the fine hairs there, the soft skin, the hard muscle underneath. I’d go back to Midheaven, I thought, like he could still hear it, and risk soul and powers and life for you alone.

He shifted toward me again, taking me in his arms. “It hurt.” It wasn’t a question. He knew, through the aureole. Still, the words made me feel small. I recalled what memory the aureole had shared, and closed my eyes.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Was it…that woman? The one in the aureole memory?” He was going to say “the beautiful one.” The hesitation was in his voice. I suppose it was indiscreet to say something like that when another woman was in your arms. But it was my memory…and Solange
was
beautiful.

“It was all of them.” They’d all been working together there, I now realized, as much of a troop as we were over here.

“What did they take?”

Now I really wanted to hide. How was I supposed to know? I hadn’t even had time to catch a second breath upon extinguishing that candle, much less worry about the triangles I’d so freely gambled away, what they represented, what I’d lost. I remembered the personality traits, stubbornness and fear, things that made people irrational—freeze when they should act, act when they should be still—yet they were also tools that could save a person’s life. Each trait on the human spectrum overlapped to zigzag like the locked pieces of a unique puzzle.

Then again, what about Solange’s words?
Who armored you? Who is protecting your soul?
Was someone protecting me? Had I possessed some sort of armor while there? I honestly didn’t know—not that, or what my passage to Midheaven had cost me. I just hoped it wasn’t a corner piece.

“I don’t know,” I finally sighed, so softly it disappeared into the black space between the winking stars.

“I’m sorry.”

And somehow that made it better. Not okay, I thought, turning into him again. But better.

Sleep visited in a series of images, none of them as pleasant as the reality that fatigue had me leaving behind. The first time I’d endured scorching heat and twisted poker games it was because I’d been trapped in another world. This time they were only bearable because even in unconsciousness I was aware of Hunter’s solid form next to me, that I was safe in my world, that I was home. I tossed during the next few hours, murmuring the names of men so washed out they looked made of dust, until Mackie’s skeletal visage, stretched in a furious scream, had me startling into full awareness. Hunter’s lips at my temples slowed my breathing to a normal rate, but when I turned to him again, limbs and lips seeking, it sped up in short time.

He entered me slowly this time, a calmness that hadn’t been there before riding over the both of us like we were still dreaming. Buoyed by it, we rode the waves of sliding limbs and twining tongues, and our long, slow climaxes were like ripples from stones dropped deep inside of us. He fell asleep, still inside, muscle gone lax atop me, transferring his strength to my bone. I lay there for a quarter of an hour, enjoying the weight, then shifted so we fell apart, again two separate people.

Hunter didn’t stir. His attention to me throughout the previous hours, plus whatever he’d endured in the days before that, had exhausted him. I ran my hand along the length of his body as I watched him breathe, and swore to never return to those tunnels. Entering them was like inviting in oblivion. One step in and you were enfolded in darkness. Much safer to stay on the outside, I thought, even with faux neon lighting up beneath a bulging sky.

He slept on his side, facing me, head resting on one arm, the other flung out as if reaching for something. I trailed my fingertips along his jaw. I loved the ability men possessed to expend all their energy in sex, and drop off like the dead directly after. I envied it a bit, but it also made me smile. I smoothed the dark hair from his forehead, feeling the silkiness rub, ghostlike, against the marble smoothness of my fingertips, and let myself begin to drift again as well.

Pounding at the steel bay door brought us both lurching upright.

“It’s Warren,” Hunter muttered, climbing over me so he was momentarily tenting my body with his own. I had a flashback of him lingering there, but by the time the slick, white-hot thought took hold, he was already pulling on his jeans and running a hand through his tousled hair.

“How do you know?” My voice was scratchy and raw. I cleared it and reached for the bottled water on the floor.

“That’s his knock. Here.” He threw me a sweatshirt, rolling his eyes when I put it to my nose and sniffed. “It’s fine. Don’t turn on a light until you’re dressed. Unless you want to be showcased like a burlesque dancer.”

It was early, predawn, and I nodded groggily as he rejected the ladder in favor of leaping directly to the floor twenty feet below. I groaned, feeling stiff and achy as I swung my legs over the side of the bed. My briefs and chaps were still downstairs in the firing range, but no way was I putting those back on. I fumbled about until I found an extra pair of sweats in a basket under the bed, answering Warren with a grunt as he yelled for me to meet them in the panic room. There was a metal desk lamp across from the bed, and I flipped it on once dressed to begin the hopeless task of trying to untangle my hair as I stretched. Gawd, I was stiff.

I felt the belly ring pull as I lifted my arms, and lifted my shirt to make sure it was okay. It was…but bruises surrounded it.

Bruises
. “Oh my God.”

Fingertips dotted my skin in angry red brands, the memory of rough embraces marking every rib. I shot a glance downstairs, but the light was on beneath the panic room door, the two men already engaged in conversation. I twisted around to find my lower back already deepening in color, more places littered with livid color than not.

And this had resulted from a little charged, consensual sex? Okay, a
lot
of charged, consensual sex. At least now I knew which power Shen had taken. I dropped back to the edge of the bed.

“Regeneration,” I whispered. My ability to heal. I lowered my head to my palms, my palms to my knees. And now, like any human, I could be injured if struck by a bullet, sliced by a knife, hit by a car. Forget conduits. A mere slap from a Shadow agent would be dangerous.

All of a sudden, in a world of near immortals, the tiniest thing could kill me.

The panic room was entirely different than the last time I’d seen it. Obviously Vanessa was long gone, but the tank with the healing gel was also absent, along with all the hospital equipment. Pushing the door open, I blinked against the bright light, and at the weighty silence. I’d been too preoccupied by the chinks in my paranormal armor to note the hissing murmurs that’d accompanied my careful climb down the crow’s nest ladder—to be honest, I was on the verge of tears—and I wiped my eyes, pretending to rub sleep from them and acclimate to the fluorescent light. I knew the moment Warren and Hunter scented my mood. I couldn’t contain it fully. My grief at this lost power, the stolen ability to heal, was felt as keenly as if someone had died.

I silently admonished myself to pull it together, and studied my surroundings—not looking at the men—hoping that would ground me. The small, sterile room was suddenly depressing in its austerity, and though not normally claustrophobic, I knew that if I were trapped in here, I’d be begging for someone to kill me within days. The cure that was worse than the proverbial disease.

There were rations tucked away, additional sources of heat and light, although sieges meant something different to Zodiac agents than they did to even a mortal paramilitary troop. Those could last weeks, not mere days. Back in the late nineties, New York’s agents of Light had endured one lasting longer than the time it took to conceive, gestate, and birth a squalling child. Learning from that, our troop had installed a side bathroom with a small shower while constructing this one.

Hunter’s memory, which the aureole gifted me with earlier, had shown scattered papers, and there were indeed two maps lying side by side over the centered drawing tables. I tucked my hair behind my ear and bent over them, rubbing my arms, aware that Warren and Hunter were still eyeing me. The maps turned out to be identical, the original pristine but its twin copy marked up in a completely nonsensical fashion. What the maps detailed, however, was clear.

“The flood system?” I said as Hunter came to stand at my side. I heard his deep inhalation as he tried to ferret out my mood. I held my own breath and didn’t look at him. Instead I wondered how long he’d been studying this. Multicolored markings zigzagged and crosshatched the second drawing like an enthusiastic toddler’s art project.

“This is it in full.” I did look up then. His hair was disheveled, and bare-chested, he looked warm, but his eyes were shadowed. Not at all the sinking softness he’d turned on me hours before. I couldn’t tell if it was in reaction to my shuttered mood or in response to whatever he and Warren had been discussing. “Joanna was helping me chart her path into Midheaven.”

Warren gave him a look that said he knew exactly what I’d been helping him with, and we both shifted our gazes to the floor like teens caught after curfew.

“Where the hell did you get it?”

“The Flood Control District.”

Warren quirked a wiry brow. “They just handed you a map of the entire underground system?”

“I told them I was doing a story on the homeless living in the tunnels. Do you know that floodwaters can rise in there at the rate of a foot per minute?” When Warren only stared, Hunter shrugged and went to sit on a corner stool. “What? Your undercover identity is what gave me the idea.”

The strained silence between the men elongated, and I glanced back at the maps.

He’s already mapped the place out.

This was what I’d seen him working on in the shared aureole. The emotion accompanying it had been exhaustion and determination. But exactly what was he doing? The bright intersecting lines gave no clue.

Warren took Hunter’s place at my side, using a fingernail to trace the entrance I’d emerged from all the way to its intersecting point. All lines, I noted, met in the middle. So there really was only one entrance to Midheaven. “Did you make sure everything was as you found it?” Warren asked me.

“Sure,” I said sarcastically. “I even dusted. Right after I lost my powers and before being ambushed by Regan and the Tulpa.”

Warren’s head slowly swiveled my way. “Powers?”

I scrambled to think, before deciding to turn the blame on him. “Well, something was jerked from me upon entry, and it felt pretty powerful. What else could it be?”

I stared at him, daring him to tell me he knew he was sending me to a place that would strip my soul in three tries.

His gaze lingered on my face, and then he ran a hand over his spiky hair. “Well, it won’t be as bad the second time.”

I look at him like he was stoned.

He gave me the same once-over.

“Uh-uh.” I shook my head and backed up until I was leaning into Hunter’s knees. He opened them, giving me harbor in between, and I nestled in tight. Warren’s eyes flickered at the intimacy, but he said nothing. Both things gave me courage. “Not me. No way. That place is evil. The passage alone felt like it was going to kill me.”