The Neon Graveyard

The Neon Graveyard

The Final Sign of the Zodiac

Vicki Pettersson

Dedication

To Shirley Landberg—thank you for always saving me a spot at your kitchen table.

Contents

Prologue

Y
ou need to know two things about the Las Vegas I inhabit, and the first is this: It is drawn down the middle as if by a line of coal, a gray delineation separating good and evil, right and wrong . . . Light and Shadow. I’ve crossed that line many times now, fighting for life, delivering death, sometimes unsure why I was doing either. I’ve acted nobly in times of great danger, and fearfully when trust would have served me better. Whether super or mortal, and I’ve been both, I’m about as fallible as they come. Yet given the circumstances—given the damned year that I’ve had—I think I’ve done pretty well. I can sleep at night. Or I would be able to were it not for the second thing that you need to know, and that is this:

Another world exists beneath this infamous sea of neon, below the cracked flats of the Mojave, below my birthplace and home. Though I can only visit it in focused dreams now, I once journeyed there, leaving behind the sun-baked asphalt and hard-packed terrain, slipping through the cracks of the city, and into the snaking tunnels that devoured and delivered me to a world closer to the earth’s core than our own. It’s a world ruled by women, and open only to those considered super: heroes, villains . . . it doesn’t matter. This middle terrain doesn’t care if your duty is to save lives or take them. It just wants you to enter. But it’ll demand a prime cut of your everlasting soul in return.

I know. It sounds like fantasy.

So now I’m mortal again, and can no longer access that underworld, yet I still hold the knowledge of the place inside me, along with everything it contains. And as long as I do, my midnight hours will be spent mentally canvassing it for my captive lover. The father of my unborn child. The man I think I could love in any world without lines or boundaries or end.

That’s why my waking hours are spent trying to bust my way back in. I’ve been working it out, you see. Thinking hard. And though I’ve more to lose now than ever, I’ve more to gain as well. In other words, it’s time for me to draw my own damned line. I’m not running anymore. Not taking one step backward. Not giving one small inch. This time I’m the one doing the chasing.

And God help anyone who gets in my way.

1

“G
il! Your team takes the right flank. Fletch and Milo, you boys go left. Hold tight until my signal, okay?”

Eight rogue agents in tan fatigues slid away, single file, at Carlos’s command, looking like paramilitary rebels who’d gotten lost in the wrong desert war. The blustery spring day hovered over the stony Mojave, the sky’s wide blue face a violent stamp, matching the troop’s mood. The men’s bodies appeared edged in contrast, as flinty as the rock face at my back. It’s probably just me, I thought, blinking hard. I was so used to concealing myself with night that everything struck by full daylight appeared unnaturally stark.

“And Gil?” Though I barely heard Carlos’s low hiss from his position next to me, Gil’s head immediately popped back into view. “Draw them in close.”

My heart bumped in my chest, though I couldn’t make out Gil’s whispered reply at all. Gareth, the youngest, knew it and piped up helpfully from my other side. “He said they don’t exactly have a choice.”

To his left, Vincent strained forward. “Damn, they’re fast.”

We returned our gazes to the ravine below, where the Shadow agents who patrolled the Las Vegas valley, and now ran its supernatural underground, were currently studying our abandoned camp.

“And that can work in our favor.”

The three of us turned to Carlos with raised brows, but he only lowered his binoculars and peered over the cliff, into the ravine. “We need them a little reckless. And we can create recklessness by getting close enough for them to instinctively chase. We’ll break them apart after that.” He kept his hard gaze arrowed straight ahead. “Separate one sheep from the pack.”

That’s all we needed. Settling into the thought, I trained my gaze on the one I wanted. Lindy Maguire. The Shadow leader’s loyal majordomo, a woman who’d acted as warden to the prison of my youth, and the first Shadow I’d ever met—though I hadn’t known it at the time. Planted in the Archer household to run the mansion, the estate—the entire mortal family living there, including me—she’d masqueraded for years as a housekeeper when not openly fighting for control over the valley’s mortal population.

She was Shadow incarnate, her rotten attitude a perfect reflection of the blackened bone, cracked nail beds, and charred tissue lying dormant under her fleshly disguise. I couldn’t scent emotion anymore, not like when I was an agent of Light, but if I could, Lindy—and all the Shadows gathered in that distant ravine—would smell like disease. An invasion as insidious as pus thickening in a wound, a walking, talking plague, miasmic and born for no other reason than to lay waste to anything that was kind and good.

But Lindy Maguire had one giant weakness. She was as lovesick and loyal to her leader as she was dismissive and disdainful of mortals. That made it all the more poetic, I thought with an inner smile, when not just one but
two
of the mortals she’d been charged with watching had turned out to be agents of Light.

“They’re gonna be suspicious.” Built like a sprinter and just as jumpy, Oliver stuck a cigarette into his mouth, though he didn’t light it. Our enemies would be able to scent it, even from three-quarters of a mile away.

I bit my lip because he was right. It wasn’t like us, rogues, to bait either of the valley’s ruling troops in raw daylight.

“Nah, they’re gonna be hungry,” Carlos corrected, flashing teeth like a wild dog, and he was right too. The Shadow leader was undoubtedly putting some not-so-gentle pressure on his troop to find, and kill, me. I was reputedly the only thing or person left who could be used against him, my father.

A tulpa.

Turning from the chaotic scene below, I pressed my back against the warm rock face, sucked in a deep breath, and looked up at the sky, trying to calm my nerves. I was as mortal as those I’d once fought to defend. Moreover, I was pregnant, a state that—once I’d gotten over the surprise of it—I had simply decided made me more dangerous, not less.

Still, it was one more reason we needed to act now.

“
Wedita?
” Carlos had caught my thoughtful gaze, and concern brimmed in his great brown eyes. “You okay? We can fall back if you want.”

“Don’t coddle me, Carlos.” I rechecked my weapons—a saber with a sidearm, an antiquated silver trident, a knife with its victims’ souls living in its blade—then turned back toward the ravine. Though it was still early spring, the sandstone was warm against my palm. “We’ve got them this time.”

“There’s Tariq,” Roland said, binoculars pressed against his eyes, chin resting on striated limestone. “And Harrison. I hate that fucker.”

Carlos shot him a hard look. “Don’t be a hero,
comprende
?”

“Nah,” Roland scoffed. “Those days are behind us, right Vincent?”

Cracking his knuckles, Vincent didn’t even blink. “I was never a hero.”

“Don’t be a villain either,” Carlos said, shooting him just as sharp a look. “Joanna’s gotta make the kill.”

“Yeah, yeah.” The glance the former Shadow angled at me was hard, but accepting. Not so much an I-don’t-trust-you look as it was a puking-doesn’t-count-as-a-weapon-got-it? look.

Yet the voice that popped up behind me was unmistakably honed. “Up for it, princess?”

Jared Foxx, the newest rogue, was sizing me up as I turned. Big deal. The other grays were still doing the same with him, proven when Vincent—all beef, all Bronx—turned on him. “Don’t mess with the mortal.”

This time I didn’t mind the coddling. My real battles lay in the future. Foxx wasn’t worth it.

“They will,” Foxx said, jerking his head back at the ravine. “So if she’s going to spook or go girly on me, I’d rather know it now.”

“Why?” asked Neal, next to Carlos. “So you can run first?”

I glanced between the two men. You didn’t have to know either of them particularly well to know there was a history between them. Both were from San Francisco, though while Foxx had been Shadow, Neal was formerly Light.

“Fuck you, Saito,” Foxx sneered, hissing. “Your family hid behind their foremothers’ kimonos. Some lineage.”

Neal lifted his chin. “And yours never gained enough strength to be considered real warriors.”

The response was fast, I only caught a whip of wind as Foxx raced by, but Carlos intervened. One hand on each man’s chest, he yanked, then pushed, sending them both to their knees. “Enough! We’re on the same side. Not Light. Not Shadow. Gray now. Got it?”

I looked at the rest of my troop. Fourteen men in all, including those who’d just slunk away, and all but Neal and Carlos had been Shadows. Yet out here we were rogues, each cast from a troop, like me, or run out of a city, like Carlos. As such, we walked the line between both Light and Shadow, accepted by neither, hunted by both.

Yet I was the only woman, and for what we sought, that was key.

“Light, Shadow, gray . . .” Foxx lowered his square, stubbled jaw, and jabbed a finger my way. “What I’m asking is if she’s yellow.”

Again I didn’t see the movement, only felt the gust as Vincent whipped by. Though the fist that met Foxx’s jaw would have flattened me cold, he took the blow like a heavy bag. Then, black Irish eyes fired, he staggered, and reared up for more.

“Fuck all of you! I know all about her! This
heroine
.” Foxx’s bloodied mouth turned up, souring on the word. “Joanna Archer. The supposed Kairos.”

“You mean you’ve read about me in manuals.” I remained leaning against the rock and quirked a brow, alert but calm. “Yet reading isn’t knowing.”

“Yeah? Then here’s what I
know
,” he said, facing me full-on with that dark, steady gaze. Vincent growled a warning next to him. Foxx didn’t even blink, but his mouth twisted. I kinda wanted to twist it right off of his face. Knowing he could scent it, I let my defiance ride the air like oil floating atop water.

“You’ve been in hiding your whole life.” His chin lowered as he started my way. “Masquerading as a mortal until you turned twenty-five—”

“I
was
mortal until then.” At least, as far as I’d known. My mother had hidden me well, so my arrival on the paranormal scene had been a surprise to all.

“After that, you allowed yourself to be turned into your dead sister just to stay hidden from the Shadow side.”

Allowed myself to be turned into Olivia Archer? I almost laughed. I hadn’t even been consulted.

He was in front of me suddenly, that jabbing finger now poking at my chest. “I also know you’re gonna need a bigger weapon than your sharp tongue if you want to take down a senior Shadow agent.”

I drew down on him as fast as mortality would allow. Foxx wasn’t expecting it, so it was fast enough. “Like this?”

I tucked my soul blade almost lovingly beneath his chin, my breath hot and fast against his cheek as I leaned in close. His amplified sense of smell ferreted out the chalky thread of my resolve, which was enough to shove the issue of my mortality aside, and keep his ass still.

“Let me tell you a little secret about this knife. It’s not just another conduit. Not merely a weapon that can kill both mortal and supernatural beings. No, it can cut the life out of anyone, and stores those doomed souls in its curved blade. Sometimes the soul’s trapped energy gets so riled up that the tip glows, red as a hot poker. Other times, if you listen close, you can hear a scream bend along its shining edge.

“I sleep with this knife beneath my pillow, so I’ve heard the secrets those murdered souls have to tell. Their lost hopes and dreams. Their cries for justice. It reminds me of a music class I took when I was a kid. Everyone singing at the same time, individual voices raised and vying for attention, yet expressing the same lament. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to add yours to the chorus.”

He hesitated, then shook his head, barely.

“Then here’s a little something else you need to know about me, Foxx. Something the manuals apparently left out.” I pressed the knife tip against the blue-green artery in his neck, and waited until his eyes widened. No one else moved. “If I want you to touch me? I’ll invite you to do so. Until then, keep your hands to yourself, shut your hole, and hold the fucking line so I can shake off this mortality once and for all.”

I might not be the Kairos, dammit, but I was determined to be the savior of my own life.

Foxx’s body remained stiff for another long moment, weighted options flitting behind his irises. Yet whatever he saw in my return gaze had them all dropping away . . . though admittedly the magical blade probably had something to do with it. I was the only one who could touch it without burning my flesh. I was the only one of the grays who could touch any conduit at all.

Foxx apparently knew that too. He drew back slowly, which I allowed, and when he finally returned to his position at the south side of the slanted rock face, I tucked my blade away and turned back to the ravine along with the others.

It was Gareth who finally broke the silence. “Pregnant chicks, man. They’re so edgy.”

A chuckle rode the group like a breeze as everyone relaxed.

“It’s okay,” Carlos said, kneeling again next to me. “We want her edgy.”

“I’ve got all sorts of edges these days,” I murmured, focusing on the spot I’d been studying before. Shifting, I shielded my eyes with my hands. “Where’d Lindy go?”

A voice, hard as granite, thumped over my right shoulder. “I’m right here, you edgy bitch.”

“Shit!”

She swooped before I could duck, but not before the closer rogue agents formed a wall. I still ended up with the wind knocked from me, pinned against the rocky outcropping, but I was alive. And for whatever reason, Lindy allowed me to stay that way—backing off, at least momentarily. She fell into line with six ally Shadows, each holding a weapon, each eyeing me, and each levitating.

I frowned, and risked lifting my head a little. “You’re
levitating
?”

Lindy chuckled, her wiry gray hair flaring over her shoulders as she rose a foot higher. Impressive . . . though I hated to admit it. “Once again, the power has shifted. The Shadow side of the Zodiac is more dominant than ever. Thanks to you.”

Foxx flicked a glance at me, as if to say,
I knew it
.

Lindy spread her long, thin arms wide. “You should all be more careful. Those who hang around Joanna Archer tend to get”—she gave me a pointed, and somehow knowing, smile—“left hanging.”

I said nothing. Lindy was obviously taunting me about something, but the meaning was lost on me. Besides, talking wasn’t swinging, and verbal sparring was one area where we were still equals. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask, how’re the digs? I hope you haven’t changed the wallpaper. My mother loved it.”

Lindy’s mouth thinned. If there was anyone she hated more than me, it was my mother. Forced to sit by and watch as her leader chose another woman over her, they’d all had to eat crow when that woman was revealed to really have been a disguised agent of Light. Yet Zoe Archer was well out of reach now, so I—who’d also long fooled Lindy as to my real identity—naturally bore the brunt of her anger. “I like the hair,” she said, fighting—for a moment—like a girl. “Have to change it often?”