City Of Souls (8 page)

Which meant he was probably hiding even more.

Not wanting to fuel an already volatile anger, I veered course a bit. “He didn’t happen to tell you how to get to Midheaven, did he?”

Felix cursed under his breath. “You know Warren.”

Yes. He wouldn’t tell them anything he didn’t think they needed to know. And here was Felix, powerless to do anything to help heal the one person he loved above all others, his impotence palpable. What he needed was an outlet for all that pent-up anger. He needed to feel like he could help her, even if after the fact. I’d seen the same look on my boyfriend’s face years ago, right after I was assaulted, but in a way it was worse for Felix. After all, he was a superhero.

I bit my lip and considered him. His cover identity as perpetual college student and playboy fit him perfectly. I remembered Vanessa once telling me that Felix had Neptune in his Eleventh House, which supposedly meant he was dreamy and irresponsible, basically the complete opposite of a normal Capricorn. At the time, though, she’d been on a rant about him forcing her to track a possible Shadow alone while he danced the night away at a new technobar. Never mind that he’d found the Shadow at the same club.

“He’s impulsive, unreliable, and can’t be depended upon to even tie his shoes!” Vanessa had fumed, not entirely wrong. He often left his shoes untied. “He has no work ethic beyond seducing coeds out of their clothing, and you would think that with the goat as his glyph he’d have some sort of ability to see things through, but nooo!”

While all her accusations were undeniably true, Felix also had a laugh as lithe as his body and mind, and he could sense—and even alter—the mood of a room with his playful energy. I suspected his much maligned mischievous nature, like the frat-boy persona, was exactly what had attracted the serious-minded Vanessa in the first place.

And it might come in handy at Xavier’s. My view of the place was, after all, colored by familiarity and loathing. My energy would also be divided by having to hide that, so I could probably use an extra pair of eyes. Perhaps Felix would see something I could not.

Plus he was cute, a necessity for any of Olivia’s romantic interests…or conquests. Riddick would’ve been a better match—his cover as a successful dentist satisfied Xavier’s standards of suitability as a match for his beloved daughter—but Felix was the one standing in front of me. Xavier would probably just think Olivia was slumming again, the boy nothing more than another trivial pursuit.

Besides, it would be a good way for Felix to expel some of that pent-up fury.

“You’ll do,” I finally said, motioning him to the passenger side.

“Thanks,” he said flatly as he angled around the nose of the car. “I’ll do what?”

“I have to pay a visit to my other daddy. Or Olivia’s, that is. You’re going to come along as my plaything.”

He said nothing, but his sigh was long and drawn, his mutterings incoherent. Clearly it wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind. I shot him a sweet smile as I settled in next to him. “Oh, and we’ll go ahead and kill one of the Tulpa’s most loyal Shadow agents while we’re there.”

Felix’s head shot up then, and for the first time he looked like his old self.

I filled Felix in on the Archer household as we drove to the compound—the personnel, the layout…the strange little room shaped like a Tibetan burial mound.

He nodded impatiently before asking, “And Lindy Maguire? How do we get to her?”

Ah, Lindy. The woman who once massacred an ally’s entire family just because her leader said to. The Shadow so in love with the Tulpa that any woman seen as a threat met an inexplicable, early demise. If she’d known who I really was, she’d have killed me in my sleep years ago, and not just because I was one of the Light. Lindy Maguire and my mother had a well-documented, decades-old feud due to Lindy’s infatuation with the Tulpa. I’d long wanted Lindy taken out because of this, among other things, but Warren’s cooler head had prevailed.

“If we kill Lindy,” he’d said, “the Tulpa might send someone more attentive to watch over Xavier and his assets. And ‘Helen,’” he said, referencing her alter ego in the Archer household, “has never looked at Olivia as anything more than a dizzy airhead.”

No, like Xavier, she’d always saved her pointed criticism for me, Joanna. If Xavier had made my young life a living hell, Lindy/Helen had aided and abetted. I obviously hadn’t known then that she was an agent monitoring Xavier for the Tulpa, but I did now. And I was going to use that information to help bring down her beloved Tulpa.

But I’d go ahead and give the pleasure of killing her over to Felix.

“Age hasn’t made her any less dangerous,” I told Felix now. Shadows were scary enough when acting out of duty, or because they simply liked wreaking havoc, but Lindy was even more brutal because of her obsession. “But we have the advantage here, so just keep your eye out, your emotions dampened, and your hands hidden.”

Felix glanced down at the shiny, smooth surface of his fingertips, where his prints were missing. “The biggest ‘tell’ in our paranormal identities, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said with a wry smile. “And Lindy, ‘Helen,’ will be looking.”

Once admitted through the guard gate, I cruised up the serpentine drive, kicking gravel as I skidded to a stop between the mansion and an eternally running fountain. Excess, I thought, staring up at a matching marble staircase, was a word Xavier Archer defined. And why not? He’d literally sold his soul to attain all this. He should make the most of it.

It was surprisingly windy as we climbed from the car, reminding me of the powerful gusts that held the valley captive every spring. They bit into the flesh now that it was winter, and we rushed up the white marble steps, ducking beneath a portico to ring a bell that chimed for miles. I rubbed my arms through my T-shirt and gave Felix a closed-mouth smile, knowing he was wondering what it was like to be raised with all this space and falsely winking splendor.

It’d been an emotional haunted house.

How appropriate, then, that the door swung wide to reveal the woman of the hour…and one of the primary people who’d made it that way.

“Pulling butler duty now too, Helen?” I stepped inside quickly, hiding the way Felix stiffened beside me. Neither of us had expected the Shadow to open the door. “Where’s Deluca?”

My voice bounced back from the ornate vaulted ceiling. It was important that I act as breezy and unaffected by my surroundings as Olivia always had. “Helen” caught and catalogued every action. At least now I knew why.

“He’s taking some time off,” she answered stiffly, nose high, skin sallow, and expression as disapproving as ever. All that was alive on her were those beady, assessing eyes. I met them openly. “I’m forced to take up his post.”

“Didn’t he recently take a vacation?” I asked, tilting my head so blond curls fell over my shoulder.

The visual cue that I was nothing more than a ditz, a nuisance, had her relaxing enough to shut the door behind us. She had yet to acknowledge Felix. Good. “This isn’t a vacation. It’s…a little more than that.”

I raised a perfectly waxed brow. Ralphie Deluca hadn’t taken a leave of absence in the twenty-odd years he’d been employed by the Archer estate. I paused long enough that “Helen” registered my deliberately blank look as impossibly vacant.

“Ah, well. This is my boy—” I broke off, pretending to stumble. “This is my friend, Nathan.” I took Felix by the arm, pulling him close. She’d think I was trying to pull a fast one on my father again by dating someone unsuitable, and would run to him with the news as soon as I left. Olivia’s flighty, unstable reputation would remain unsullied. “Nate, this is Helen…um, So-and-so.”

Helen surprised me by addressing Felix directly. “I anticipated your arrival, Mister…?”

“Stewart. Nate Stewart. Nice to meet you, Mrs. So-and-so.”

My laugh rang, genuinely. Felix liked getting his digs in too.

“But how’d you know I was coming?” he said before Helen could take offense. It was one of the traits that made him so likable, and it kept stoic, severe Helen off balance. “Olivia and I hooked up this afternoon rather…spontaneously.”

He let the memory of something hidden and secret ring in his voice. I flushed at the intimation in it, shuffling my feet. Wow. Those coeds didn’t have a chance.

Helen colored as well, before clearing her throat. “Well, it wasn’t
you
, precisely. Our Olivia seems incapable of traveling anywhere solo…” She left the sentence incomplete as she motioned for us to follow her into the sitting room. “I’ve prepared refreshments. You may wait here for her business with her father to be concluded.”

It didn’t surprise me that she wasn’t going to let my new friend near Xavier’s office. The last time she had, a valuable mask had temporarily gone missing.

“Actually, Nathan is looking to find a job at Valhalla.” I motioned toward the offices, and Felix half rose from the settee he’d just sunken down onto, his abject confusion perfect for the moment. “We want to ask Daddy if we can work in the gift shop together.”

Xavier wouldn’t concern himself with minor personnel decisions, but Olivia would have been able to get away with it.

“No, Olivia.”

“But it’d be fun,” I protested with a little foot stomp. “Nathan’s great at getting people to buy things they don’t need. He could sell shot glasses at an AA meeting.”

“I mean, no, your friend must remain here.”

“The office is big enough for all of us.”

“Your father’s not in his office.”

My mouth snapped shut in surprise. At last, an emotion I didn’t have to fake. Xavier might have turned into a recluse, but he lived in his office.

He siphoned away his soul there
. I suppressed a shudder.

“So where is he?”

“His suites.”

“He has suites?” Felix asked, picking up a scone and taking a bite. “Sweet.”

I smirked. “She means his bedroom.”

Felix turned on his heel. “I’ll be with the cookies and tea.”

Clown, I thought, letting my smile show. But what a clever clown. While I kept Xavier busy, he could take care of Helen. “Divide and conquer” I could practically hear him thinking as he kicked up his Pumas.

So I blew Felix an air kiss, and Helen guided me to the elevator reserved for Xavier’s personal staff. Except there was no one bustling about, changing linens or dusting or vacuuming, and the secretary’s wing was eerily quiet. What the hell was going on?

“Helen,” I said, peering into one of the kitchens.

She kept walking.

“Helen!” I ran to keep up, my heels clacking off the Italian marble. “What’s going on around here?”

“Mr. Archer is making changes.” She punched the elevator button. The doors slid open silently. “These reductions in staff are just…preparations.”

“For what?” I asked, joining her inside the steel box.

She spared me a glance through the mirrored doors as they closed. “For his death,” she said, and the emotion of my genuine shock perfumed the air.

After the attack on my life when I was a teen, my mother’s subsequent abandonment, and long after my early adolescent irreverence dried up into an ashy ball of hate and bitterness, the household staff of the Archer estate continued to treat me like one of the valuable antiques, to be looked at and cared for, but not touched. If the gardener or one of the maids asked how I was, it was done in that tone of disinterest reserved for strangers. I think it actually startled some of them when I moved.

And then there was Lindy.

I’d done some research since discovering my lifelong housekeeper was also a Shadow agent. At first I was merely awed that my mother had been able to live with a woman who could scent out the tiniest aberration in emotion. But then I realized that if Lindy had been here back then, my mother would have found a way to let Warren know, and get him to take care of her long ago. So somehow Lindy had taken over the life and identity of the original Helen, who
had
been a mortal…and was probably now dead.

One thing I knew for certain. Lindy McGuire loathed Zoe Archer, and the hate that could fuel two women for decades could only have one thing at its molten core: a man.

Because in contrast to the apathy the Tulpa showed Lindy, he’d fallen for my mother like a felled oak. Twice. The first time had been twenty-seven years ago, when Zoe got close enough to ferret out the identity of his creator, then killed that man in the hopes that it would kill the Tulpa as well. This “closeness” had also led to my conception, another reason Zoe fled. As I grew in her womb, her body had begun recklessly kicking out the pheromones that would mark her as Light.

The second time she’d conned him was after giving up her near-immortal state in order to save me. I’d survived the attack on my life…and so had my baby. Premature, the infant clung to life like she knew herself the successor in a long line of stubborn women, but then she’d been abducted from her adoptive parents on the day she was born, almost lost to the Shadows. Zoe Archer—having given all her power to me, and more vulnerable to the Tulpa than she’d ever been before—went after her granddaughter, and reclaimed the child despite her mortal flesh, embarrassing the Tulpa in the process. Again.

This, I thought, was what burned the Tulpa the most. Not only did Zoe betray and dupe him, she’d done it as one of the mortals he scorned.

Yet in between those bookend betrayals, when my mother had lived under this roof, she’d been seen as nothing more than the trophy wife of a mortal casino magnate, with two daughters and an unbreakable Wednesday morning tennis mixer at the Las Vegas Country Club. This proved that most people saw only what they expected to see. Even archvillains.

As for Xavier, after she disappeared he gutted the rooms they’d shared and built a new wing with all new furnishings, one dramatically devoid of any feminine presence. Helen wasn’t even allowed to put fresh flowers in the sitting area, which was why the half-dozen bouquets perfuming the foyer shocked me. I slowed, eyes lingering on the get-well cards sent by employees and acquaintances as we moved into the main bedroom’s sitting area. There, a foursome of club chairs sat unimaginatively before a crackling fire, a peculiar scent rising from the flames, like herbs had been baked in with the kindling.