City Of Souls (29 page)

In a newer section of town, their tract home was virtually indistinguishable from those around it, but the small figure reclining on the gentle slope of terra cotta tiles helped me locate it, as did her scent: dried berries, Bonnie Bell, and Bubblicious. Slipping into the concealing shadows offered up by the cloud haze and the overgrown fronds of a giant pepper tree, I leapt to the roof as quietly and quickly as I could.

Even so, Jasmine didn’t look surprised when I dropped down five feet from her. She only waited, as I did, to see if anyone else in the household had heard. When it was clear no one had, she turned her great dark eyes up to me. “I knew you were coming.”

“See me?”

She frowned, hesitating, then shook her head.

“Smell?” I asked, because ever since I’d displaced a portion of her
chi
with my own, she’d been gaining some of my more desirable abilities. This was part of the problem. Jasmine thought she was becoming a superhero and she refused to give up those powers.

“Not until you got close,” she admitted, tucking a lock of black hair behind her ear, the color shiny and rich even in the fractured light.

“Then how?”

“I felt it. Like I…sensed you.” She put a hand to her belly. “Do you know what I mean?”

I did. The second I’d reached her side I’d felt a corporeal recognition, like my veins ran in her body, my blood pumping in her heart.

I dropped next to her, huddling close in the cool air as clouds began to roil and pop in the distance. Neither of us was immune to the elements, so I was relieved when she didn’t object, and not just because of her body heat. She’d been prickly with me since we’d butted heads over her unwillingness to pass on her changeling status to her younger sister.

Her appearance had altered since I’d last seen her, though. Her dark hair now graduated sharply into an uneven bob, and was streaked on the left side with pink and blond. Her clothes were equally chaotic, blacks and plaids with thick military boots, and she had her backpack next to her, like she regularly waited on the rooftop for her bus. It was still Hello Kitty pink, but the cute icon’s eyes had been taped over by dual X’s, making the round mouth more resemble a scream.

The scent of eastern herbs and western medicines wafted from her open window, but I didn’t look her over for signs of injury. Jasmine hadn’t suffered physical injury when I’d failed to give her back the whole of her borrowed aura. No, it was her younger sister, Li, who was living proof that I truly had screwed it all up.

I bent my head to my knees, resting for a moment.

“Where have you been?” she finally asked. “I felt weak, like when you have the flu and can’t lift your limbs…but I felt it in my mind too.”

That made sense. The link between us probably didn’t extend to different words. Entering Midheaven must have severed the connection between us, halving both her
chi
and mine. “I had to go somewhere else.”

I explained to her about Midheaven and the pipeline, that I was searching for Jacks and a way to heal her, though I skipped the part about the dead changeling. I ended with an account of my return, including that Regan was again in the Tulpa’s good graces. “Skamar has kept the Tulpa too busy for him to get to you, but Regan has been following me everywhere. It’s not inconceivable that she might end up here.”

Her round face scrunched up. “So what are you doing now? Dropping the bread crumbs?”

“I’ve changed up my routine, smartass,” I said tightly. “And I was thinking you could go somewhere safe until all of this is over.”

She wrapped her arms around her knobby knees, turning away. “I can take care of myself.”

I shifted, crouched in front of her and waited until she met my eye. “Jas, I can’t protect you. I have no conduit, half my natural power is being filtered into you, and there’s no safe zone for me on this side of reality. That means if Regan gets tired of trying to pick up my trail, she’s going to come after the people closest to me, and hello
chi
-sharing superhero-wannabe, that’s you.”

She said nothing, just stared straight ahead with her jaw clenched stubbornly, expression unreadable.

I tried again. “Look, I just wanted to come check on you and Li. Make sure…”

Jasmine read the fear in my hesitation, and swooped in for the kill. “Make sure she’s not dead?”

I ran my hand over my face. “Jesus, Jas.”

She scoffed, then jerked her head in the direction of the lighted window. “See for yourself.”

I hesitated. “Parental units?”

“Both at work. They need the insurance.” She stared up at me, her gaze challenging. “Go on.
Superhero
.”

I glanced at the window almost fearfully, but dusted myself off and stood. Jas was right; I needed to look for myself. To prove I could look in the bedroom of a dying child as clear-eyed as I could face down a rotting Shadow agent. I’d look, even if it scorched my soul.

But peering into that room wasn’t at all like facing fire. It was like dropping into an endless pool of water without first taking a breath.

She lay facing away from the window, tiny body outlined beneath her pile of blankets. Her dark hair was a black hole against the white pillow, tangled strands that had once been glossy with good health now dulled. Her breathing appeared even but indistinguishable over the machines monitoring her vital stats, and though hidden behind privacy screens, they were like another presence in the room.

I was just breaching the surface of seeing all this for the first time, and aching for breath, when she turned. Her eyes, so similar to Jasmine’s—if you didn’t count the blood vessels weaving over the whites—found mine like she knew I’d be there. As if she’d been waiting. The hope in that gaze, displaced in a face that was little more than skin smoothed over bone, crashed over me like a wave. The vessels seemed to have dried up inside her body, the percentage of water needed to fuel a human being half what it should have been. The three marks across her charcoal cheek, where she’d taken a hit from the Tulpa on my behalf, were jet black. Her lashes had all fallen out. The weave of hair tangled across that pillow shifted…a wig.

Li didn’t have the strength to wave—the tiny hand faltered on its way up—but she smiled and it was achingly beautiful.

The strike of a match behind me sounded like an arrow slicking through the dim sky, and I flinched before I saw Jas’s amused profile outlined behind cupped hands. She deliberately didn’t look at me, and I grabbed at that momentary privacy, letting my face crumble as I bent my head. This was an image I’d never be able to erase, no matter how many worlds I hitchhiked my way into.

Mind stunned, I moved away from the window. Jasmine silently handed me the cigarette as I hunched next to her, even closer this time, as if she could warm me. I sucked in smoke, before handing it back to Jas. She took another drag, her smooth features lighting up prettily behind the orange glow.

“Jasmine—”

“No.”

I wanted to wring her scrawny preteen neck. “Why? Just pass on your post to Li! Give her changeling status. Move on as nature intended.”

She whipped her gaze to mine so fast I jerked back. “Because passing the post on to Li isn’t the cure-all you think it is. Your
chi
will still be divided, just in her body instead of mine. The Zodiac will still be unbalanced. Your manuals will still unwritten.”

“Jas—”

“I said no. And don’t ask me again either. I don’t want to be that, okay?” She motioned to Li’s window, scattering ash. “I want to live.”

I glanced at the sky. The day was strong enough now that rays of light had crept through the cloud breaks to find our bodies. They trailed out in stingy pockets, shifted, and tried again. “You don’t know that maturing will kill you.”

“You don’t know that it won’t.”

True. But if I didn’t come through, one of these sisters was going to die a death that would accomplish nothing. It might buy the agents of Light a little more time. Maybe slow the downward spiral in power that so aptly mirrored Li’s deteriorating health. But it wouldn’t get the manuals written, or transfer a vast amount of power to Skamar. It wouldn’t save my shiny, irreverent city from what amounted to a cataclysmic electrical storm raining down like God’s wrath. Only one thing would do all that.

We fell silent again. Jas smoked and brooded. I bit my lip and worried. Clouds roiled and moved across the sky like scattered gray silk; beautiful, if you didn’t know it was the result of massive cosmic destruction.

After another moment, Jasmine flicked the spent cigarette over the roofline. “Look, it’s not that I don’t want to help her, okay? I want Li to get better…”

But if Jasmine gave over the split
chi
that would enable Li to heal and take her place as the changeling of Light, she might break in turn.

“Would you switch with
your
sister?” she asked suddenly, voice rising with emotion. “Be dead in her place, if it means she would live?”

“Yes.”

I wasn’t trying for a politically correct answer, or even to convince Jasmine that she should do the same. But yes, I would have done that for Olivia. In an instant. I would do it still.

“That’s because her death was quick,” Jasmine scoffed, flipping her backpack over her shoulder. “It was violent, yeah, but it was a moment’s choice. Not a choice moment after moment.”

I saw what she meant. She was envisioning herself lying ashen against those white linens, sweating out her body’s nutrients, being drained of her vitality.

“You’re saying it would have been easy for me?”

“I’m saying take a look at all the good things you’ve experienced since then, and then wipe them from your mind. I’m watching Li, and as much as I love her, my mind keeps drifting to the things I don’t know—the people I’ll never meet, the career and maybe family I’ll never have. I don’t…I don’t want to die a virgin.”

“The first time sucks anyway.”

She shook her head, unamused. “What about all my other firsts? Don’t I have a right to those either?”

I glanced up at her. Sometimes I forgot I was talking to a girl whose prom was still years away. It was easy to forget that these kids were as divided in their lives as we were…at least up until it was time for them to grow and age and live as mortals. But…”What about Li’s?”

“Why are hers any more important than mine?”

I looked at her with her crossed arms and forced pout, and remembered what it was like to be that age. Not long after that I would be attacked, and my life as irreparably damaged as Li’s. But at Jasmine’s exact age I had lived for the day, by the day, my future unwinding in front of me like a long hopeful road. “Look, Jas, I’m working on it.”

She turned to me. “So let me help.”

“It’s mostly grunt work,” I lied. “Not even any fighting,” I lied some more. “Just hours of sitting there, staring at nothing. Like a stakeout. You’ll be happier waiting here.”

“But I’ve never been on a stakeout before!”

“That’s because you’re thirteen. You need to survive a few slumber parties first.” She turned away again, and I sighed. “Look, I just don’t want you to return to your mother with pieces missing, you know?” One Chan sister down was enough.

“Then protect me. You can move faster than a speeding bullet, right?”

“I can move faster than a speeding softball. I haven’t really tested the bullet theory yet.”
And I could barely protect myself.

“Oh.”

“Look, just watch out for oddities or, you know, walking corpses. Stay safe.”

She blew out a breath that lifted her hair from her forehead. “Don’t talk to strangers, yeah, yeah. Got that memo…”

My cell phone vibrated in my pocket, and I pulled it out, hoping to see a message from Hunter. I didn’t recognize the number. The voice, though? That was unforgettable. I rose to my feet on the slanted rooftop, staring off into the blue haze. “What do you want?”

“You. On your knees before me. Your skin shredded so finely it looks like angel hair.”

I motioned for Jas to get behind me, get inside, get away, and scanned the perimeter of the house. Everything and nothing moved beneath the roiling, mobile sky. Yet Regan couldn’t openly walk the streets in her condition. “So you want to be twins?”

“That’s right. Except for your sense of humor. I fucking hate that.”

I started to reply.

“I have to wonder, though, if it’s something little Ashlyn inherited.”

I drew a blank, my mouth stuttering shut. I decided to wait to see where she was going with this.

“Ah, that finally shut you up. Now…” She took a breath so deep it gurgled in her cracked chest. “Sit back down so we can talk.”

I angled my head, squinting at the house across from us. “Where are you?”

“Sit your ass down.”

I checked to make sure Jasmine was back inside, and sat. How traumatized would the kid be, I wondered, if I took an arrow to the heart on her rooftop?

“That’s better.” Regan paused, letting me wonder how she could see me, obviously enjoying the attention. “I was wondering when you’d check on your changeling. Nice of you to care.”

Her admonition, and her ability to see me, made me want to leap from the roof. I kept my voice even with great effort. “Your point, Regan? Because the cloud cover seems to be clearing up, and you’re not going to be able to catch a cab in your condition this far past Halloween.”

There was no way she could be there. Unless she’d arrived in full dark and planned to exit the same way. In a neighboring house? Looking out through a window? In that box tree hedge across the street?

“I’m tired of waiting for you to return to your penthouse,
Olivia
. Or show up at Valhalla for your shift—nice touch there, by the way—or to stop by and check on your former mortal lover.”

“That will never happen,” I said, which was true enough. Let her think I didn’t care. As long as I stayed away from Ben Traina, he was safe.

“Which is why I’ve had to come to you.”

“Changelings are out of bounds. You can’t touch Jasmine.”

“Oh, dear. You are fucking retarded.” Laughter wheezed from her again, and I clenched my jaw. “Your little ‘Wonder Twin’ doesn’t interest me. After all, there’s another little girl out there, with little bits of Joanna floating through her bloodstream.”