City Of Souls (24 page)

“But it didn’t, and that which doesn’t kill you…”

It took all my self-control not to roll my eyes. I’d collected quotes as a teen, mental touchstones, wise words in an unpredictable world. But I hated clichés, and I certainly wasn’t going to spout empty bravado. I nestled in more tightly to the pocket Hunter created for me. I wasn’t feeling particularly brave. “Makes you weaker?”

“Leaves loose ends,” Hunter muttered, his voice stirring my hair. Despite my worry, it stirred other things as well. Sick, I thought, shaking my head slightly, but every bruise had been worth it.

Warren scowled, crossing his arms as his eyes darted between the two of us. “Might be a second chance at redemption.”

Something niggled at me, like a secret whispered in the dark. Someone had just told me something, but who? I leaned against Hunter and remembered his silhouette in sleep. I looked at Warren and the whisper echoed faintly.

“Why would I go back?”

Warren glanced at the maps beside him, then back at Hunter. There was something vaguely threatening in the action. “Hunter, would you mind leaving the two of us alone?” It wasn’t a question.

Hunter remained where he was for about a year under Warren’s direct gaze, before gently easing me forward to stand. A light brush of his fingertips trailed my belly as he crossed in front of me, and then he was gone. Warren and I said nothing for a long time; he allowing no indication of what he thought of this new development, and me making it clear I didn’t care either way.

Finally he leaned back on his elbows, crossing tattered boots at the ankles. “Hunter caught me up on what happened to you in Midheaven. As much as he could, that is. Is it true that it felt like you were gone only hours?”

While a week had passed here. Nodding, I pushed myself up on the stool. I recounted the conversation I’d overheard in the pipeline, that though still broken, Regan was once again back in the Tulpa’s good graces. That she’d been hiding in the pipeline, she still had my conduit, and that she was going to try to bring me to the Shadow leader alive. “She’s been following me everywhere, in both my daily life as Olivia and as the Archer. I know she followed me to Master Comics.”

He watched me with dull eyes, looking less surprised by this knowledge than I thought it warranted.
How about this, then, Warren…

“She also claims to be tracking me with the help of someone in the troop. An agent of Light.”

“A bluff.” Warren shrugged, immediately dismissing the claim. “Not possible.”

He let that, and the surety with which he said it, sink in. His tone said he was in charge and I should be glad that he was. He must have realized how imperious it was because he shrugged one shoulder and smiled. “Tell me what you can about Midheaven.”

What I could. He knew, then, that I couldn’t tell him everything. But I frowned anyway, wanting to accommodate him. I saw a skeleton with a bowler hat. I saw inky masculine shapes and bright feminine ones. Images zipped by, a very few lingering like mental balloons in my frontal lobe, but when I opened my mouth, they slid away, leaving me with nothing but a fleeting sensory reminder. I shook my head apologetically.

“It’s okay,” Warren said, like he’d been expecting it. “You only remember the people and things linked to your own time and place. Like the man and woman you mentioned to Hunter. Harlan Tripp and Solange?”

I’d figured that out for myself, but I still shook my head. “I remember more than just them. I remember it all. But trying to verbalize it is like trying to tell a story without a subject or object or any linking verbiage.” I sighed. “But you already knew that too, didn’t you?”

He shrugged again. There were worlds to interpret in that one movement. “Midheaven’s vibration doesn’t register over here. It’s why the place is considered myth and why Zane can’t write about it in manuals. It’s a place that becomes known to you only when it’s time for you to know it.”

Warren hasn’t told you anything, has he?

I couldn’t shake Solange’s taunt from my head. He hadn’t. And I’d lost a third of my soul, power, time, and nearly my life. For what? To learn things he already knew? To feel like I was going crazy in my own mind? Or crazier?

Since I was having trouble voicing my own thoughts, I decided to pry out his. “Let’s play a little game, Warren. I’m going to start a sentence, and since I can’t finish any thought that contains knowledge gleaned in Midheaven, you’re going to finish it for me.”

Before he could protest, I started.

“Jaden Jacks is…”

“In Midheaven.”

The answer I was looking for was
Light
. I shook my head. “Jaden Jacks is…”

“A rogue agent like Harlan Tripp, who has also been gone a very long time.”

“Jaden Jacks is…”

Warren sighed. “Watch your temper—”

“Jaden Jacks is!” I pounded the wall so hard I felt the reverberation through my fist. Shit. I was going to have to relearn how to walk through this world as a mortal. I closed my eyes, fought not to rub my hand or wince, and calmed myself.

When I opened my eyes, Warren was watching me like I was crazy. “I should have known this would happen.”

“What, Warren? That I’d come back with a tattoo of the sun hennaed on my belly?” I asked bitingly, coming off my stool, pissed because he could have prevented all my losses. And because they’d been for absolutely nothing. “Or that I’d return with more questions about Jaden Jacks, agent of…”

I didn’t complete the sentence, I refused, but its start let him know exactly what I was driving at.
Light
.

“Jaden Jacks is in Midheaven,” he repeated. “And Harlan Tripp can help you find him.”

“That’s not what I hear.”

“Then someone is lying to you.” He straightened at my arch look. “And, no, it’s not me. Because I’m the one who put him there.”

I shuddered involuntarily at that, both at the way he said it and the thought of being forced through that passage. Of having to remain in that heat with Boyd and Bill and Mackie and a drink that slowed your senses to an impossible crawl. All because Jacks had broken a changeling?

I
had broken a changeling.

I shook the thought free. Jacks had knowingly killed one. “You put a lock on the entrance, didn’t you?”

That indeterminable shrug again. He’d known that changeling was dead and he’d sent me in anyway!

“Goddamn it, Warren—”

“I do
not
have to explain myself to you!” he roared with such force that it rocked from the small room, and I imagined it ping-ponging off the warehouse walls. “Do you understand me? You may be the Kairos, but I am the leader of this troop!”

I swallowed hard, clenching my jaw. “Nothing short of death will make me go back there.”

“We need to heal our changeling. Our troop. Our world.”

There was hope in his eyes when I searched their dark depths again, a rabid hope that I’d do this thing without arguing, and the manuals would be written, Jasmine would move on, Li would be whole. Like my disappearance was a magic wand waved over the landscape of all these lives, making everything all right.

“Jacks killed that kid.”

“By choice. Which means he knows an alternative.”

“Then
you
go.” I sighed again, not caring if fear and exhaustion perfumed the room like the fields of Grasse.

Warren’s scuffed boots appeared in my sightline, and I raised my head. His deep brown eyes bore into mine. “How do you feel now?”

“Fine,” I said through clenched teeth.

“Jo.”

“It feels like there’s a piece of me missing here,” I put a hand over the sweatshirt, the hennaed sun beneath and what a more metaphysically inclined person would call my sacrum. My other hand, just my fingertips, went to my head, touching gently like it was an open wound. I didn’t know why—it didn’t make sense—but I softly added, “And here.”

“But do you feel lighter? Like something has been yanked up by the root?”

I swallowed hard. “How do you know that?”

One side of his mouth lifted. “Your scent, Jo. You smell lighter. There’s less Shadow there. That’s all it took from you, don’t you see? Your Shadow side.”

Is that what Solange had meant by me being armored, then? Was my Light side somehow being protected? But she’d talked about my
soul…

“I don’t want to go.” Even if he was right.

“Then Li will die.”

“Don’t lay that on me!” I yelled, even knowing that it was true, and that was my fault. “There has to be another way.”

“And we’ll be working to find it while you’re there.” He was composed again; my rising emotion seemed to calm him. He put a hand on my bruised shoulder. “Do it for your troop.”

I shook it off. “Your troop,” I muttered, because that much was clear.

Warren looked away, sighed, then paced to the door. Did he deem me a lost cause? Not quite yet. He turned, hope still alive in his eyes. “We still have a little time. Keep thinking and you’ll see I’m right. For now, it’s good to have you back. Chandra has been working in your stead. Kimber has been trying…not that she can do much.” He shook his head, almost in disgust. “I’d send her back to her family if I could. She’s miserable, and we need someone stronger.”

Of course Kimber was miserable. Warren was horrible at hiding his feelings. He wanted to throw her away because of her weaknesses, get someone else to fill her sign. I self-consciously tugged Hunter’s sweatshirt over my bruised wrists.

“Meanwhile, stay away from Regan. No matter what she’s told the Tulpa, she may kill you out of spite.”

I sighed in relief. So he wasn’t going to push me into Midheaven, and he wouldn’t lock me in the sanctuary either. Giving me a choice might be an obvious ploy at slowly gaining my acquiescence, but it was the least of all evils. Still, he’d admitted to locking Jacks in Midheaven, and he’d sent me in as well, knowing what the passage would demand of me. He had his reasons—he was the troop leader; he was Light—but both decisions tasted of pure, uncut ruthlessness. So was it true that he believed I’d given up nothing but my Shadow side? Again, how could I tell? How could he?

“Who else have you seen since your return?”

“Just Hunter.”

He bit his bottom lip, mind working like a calculator. I could practically hear it clicking away.

I raised a brow. “Is that a problem?”

“Of course not.”

I nodded, then looked at the ground. “Look, about this…about Hunter—”

He held up a hand. “Please. The less I know, the better.”

My thoughts exactly.

“As for the others…” He just shrugged. “They probably won’t be as…incurious.”

I wanted to tell him that the others didn’t need to know of my relationship with Hunter yet, if ever, but then a shout sounded throughout the warehouse, Felix’s unmistakable whoop as he scented out the where, who, and most of the what of the previous night’s events. I closed my eyes with a low groan. When I opened them again, Warren was wearing an ill-concealed smile.

“You might want to put on something a little more appropriate,” he said, taking in Hunter’s crumpled sweats. I couldn’t really see the point as I could still hear Felix, now grilling Hunter in a playful tone. Even Warren rolled his eyes as he turned away. “Besides, it’s time to train.”

I wavered on my feet, and had to brace myself against the wall. I couldn’t train with these people! They’d kill me just deflecting one of my blows! But Warren left the room before I could think of an excuse, and almost immediately, Hunter stood in the doorway, looking more hesitant than I was used to.

I straightened, rubbing a hand over my face as I shot him a distant smile.

“What did he say?” He asked.

“He wants me to go back to Midheaven. He says Harlan Tripp can tell me how to find Jaden Jacks.”

Hunter stiffened as he eased toward me.

“I told him no.”

Surprise froze on his face. “And he was okay with that?”

I tried for bravado, hoping the effort would actually lend me some. “What’s he going to do, force me to give up pieces of my soul?”

“Good for you, Joanna.” But as he reached for me, I could tell what he meant was,
Good for us
. I’d told Hunter I wouldn’t leave again, and though I’d meant emotionally, I decided now that it would hold true for this world too. And I definitely wasn’t going to tell Warren about Ashlyn now. Even if the Tulpa did know of her. Don’t ask me why, but it somehow seemed the lesser danger. How messed up was that?

“Hunt, about these maps…” I pulled back, wanting to ask what he was doing or planning, and what he so clearly didn’t want Warren to know. What they were arguing about. Why?

“It’s not clear?” he finally asked in the wake of all these unasked questions. I shook my head. “I was trying to find my way to you, Joanna. Once it was clear where you’d gone, I decided to come get you. I wanted you back. Safe and sound.”

His hands fell again over my back, reminding me of the bruises there.
Sound
. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against his chest. I wasn’t that…but as he pulled me close, dropping a kiss to my temple, smoothing back my hair with his smooth fingertips, I almost felt safe.

Then he spoke again. “C’mon. Let’s train.”

And he pulled me to the door, not knowing that what awaited me on the other side was the exact opposite of safe and sound.

“We have to drop back ten and punt, my friends,” Warren was saying as Hunter and I joined the rest of the troop in the shooting range. I scanned the cavernous room, quickly noting who was there and who wasn’t. Vanessa was absent, of course, probably given over to Chandra’s care since Micah was here, and a quick scan told me that Kimber had been omitted again. Dammit. My first thought had been to stick close to her, the weakest in our troop, during this training session. Though perhaps her absence was for the best. Her dislike of me had shifted into unconcealed hatred, and she would have probably used the opportunity to settle scores.

Not, I thought, something I could currently afford.

I turned back to Warren as I leaned against the plastic screen Felix, Jewell, and Riddick were clustered in front of, and fought to keep my thudding heart in check. It was beating too fast, and, though they didn’t seem to notice, I glanced back to find Hunter—arms crossed, one brow lifted—staring right at me. I jerked my head and turned away. Tekla was to the right of him and, though she had her eyes closed, she was always aware of her surroundings. Shit, we could probably communicate by mental telepathy, and she’d still know it.