City Of Souls (31 page)

“You’ve only been gone half an hour,” he said, and glanced back down at the glass in his hand. He tipped it to one side, watching the liquid run down the sides of the glass, and missed the way I goggled. A half an hour on this side of the candle? My God, time wasn’t just altered over here. It was turned inside out. “But I was thinking about it.”

“And yet you hold a glass of death in your hands.”

He pursed his lips and shook his head. “Lady, I may not know how long I’ve been here, but I can tell it’s long enough that I have no place left back home. You think I’m not a part of this world just because I haven’t sipped from this glass, but I am. As much as I’ve fought against it, my energy has been bleeding out of me in a slow trickle. I am a leaky faucet.”

He looked me up and down, and frowned. “I don’t know who you are, and can’t even guess at your lineage and sign, but I know this: whatever I had in that world is long gone.”

We didn’t say anything for a long time. I knew what Warren would say about Tripp’s ennui.
Good riddance.
And before this conversation I would have thought the same. But knowing how long he’d been holding out the hope to return, I couldn’t help but admire his fight.

Tripp mistook my silence as implicit agreement. “See? I told you you’d like this place.”

“You’re wrong, Tripp. I chafe at certain things that go on in our world,” and I made sure to include him in that equation, recognizing him as more than just a thread in the fabric of this one, “but I don’t want anyone else to feel lesser just so I can feel more.”

Harlan looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time.

“Well, isn’t this a peach,” Bill interrupted, grin wide as he looked over our shoulders. Tripp and I turned together. “Two new songs in one day.”

The first thing I saw was Mackie lifting his head and arms. The second was a cloud of smoke billowing from my lantern in lapping waves, building an opaque wall as an acrid scent rolled across the room and threatened to make me sneeze. A bright flash, the daguerreotype capturing a new image, and suddenly a figure began taking shape before our eyes. It was obviously a man, broad-shouldered and thick-necked, tall, though his features were obscured in the swelling haze. I glanced over at the wall of posters to see a delicate image burning through a new page, the angles tapered, and drawn so finely that it almost looked feminine.

Because it’s the first pass, I thought, turning my attention to the most assuredly
not
feminine form solidifying before us. The smoke abated and the man lifted his head. My jaw dropped as he scanned the room. It snapped shut as his gaze stilled on mine. He smiled.

“Oh, my God.”

Here’s an agent, his story epic

Because he’s a ghost, even in plain sight

He’s Machiavellian, his life a grand trick

But he grounds it with his might.

Jaden Jacks, I thought, swallowing hard, was in the Rest House.

I don’t know whether the heat was finally sinking into my pores, or if the shock at seeing the man whom many in my world considered a ghost taking shape in front of me was what kept me immobile, but I didn’t move for what felt like a long time. Yet Jaden Jacks was clearly real, though at first no more than a blurry silhouette backlit by the wall of lanterns. His form solidified as the smoke from the snuffed candle cleared, and I got my first good look at the man I’d previously only known from Tekla’s ripped-up manual.

His skin was dark, the color of brewed tea, though light compared to the black clothes he sported. Battle wear, I saw, similar to mine. His hair was cropped close, so white-blond it was obviously bleached, which would have been funny except that it worked. Everything about him was daring and in-your-face. His musculature was dense beneath his fitted shirt, like tendons and marrow and bone had been baked, brick-hard. He flexed his fingers and the movement shot up the length of his arm in a fast twitch, so that even his shoulder moved. He was a force even at rest, and probably the strongest human being I’d ever seen.

But his eyes, I thought, inhaling sharply. His eyes were pure layers of sunlit amber.

Nostrils flaring, he took in the scent of the room as as-sessingly as his eyes took in the sights, both senses thrown out like weapons. He scanned the division of washed-out men at the poker tables, the women leaning over the banisters like colorful banners, and when he finished—and had determined no one was going to attack—he said one word only. “Solange.”

The deep voice rumbled through the room, through my body, spiking in my nerve endings to shake me from my numbness. I looked to Bill, whom Jacks had intuitively, and rightly, addressed, and saw the bartender’s lips thin to a narrow line, his rag moving in slow circles on the bar. A smile slipped onto my face before I could stop it.

Behold, dear viewers, this world’s male species reacting under threat.

“Miss Solange doesn’t take unsolicited guests,” Bill replied shortly, eyes cutting to Mackie. Jacks caught the look and swiveled his head, but Mackie remained slumped, unresponsive and detached.

“Recognize him?” I whispered to Tripp.

He shook his head, and Jacks caught the movement, setting the full force of his attention on Tripp, who swallowed audibly, as recognition flashed in Jacks’s bright gaze. But shouldn’t Tripp recognize him as well? And how could this be the first pass on his Most Wanted poster? Warren said Jacks was, and had been, over here for some time now.

Except, I suddenly realized, his energy wouldn’t register here if he’d used someone else’s soul for the crossing. I glanced back at the brand new Most Wanted poster, and decided I’d been right the first time. It really was a woman featured there. He was using another innocent to gain entry. Just as he’d used the changeling’s the first time.

So he’d murdered a woman simply for an audience with Solange.

“Tell her Jaden Jacks is here,” he said to Bill, and without waiting for a reply or even glancing at me, he made his way to the staircase. I moved to stop him, but Bill’s eyes flipped in their sockets, and I braced, just in case he was reacting to me. His head did, indeed, turn my way, but then he grimaced, like he’d bit into a lemon, before the expression smoothed out into a smile. He gestured, magnanimously, up the staircase. “She already knows.”

The other men began to grumble. Bill bent his head, muttering as he scrubbed at the bar. Mackie remained immobile. I expected someone to stop Jacks, but nobody even tried, and he took the stairs two at a time, stance wide as he paused at the top, head tilted as he wondered which way to go.

No, not wondered.
Determined.

“Wait!” I yelled, but he only nodded to himself and cut right, utterly ignoring me.

“Shit.” I sighed. The last thing I wanted to do was head up those stairs. The real-time sink was there. I knew it. Everything was slowed on the lower level of the rest house, the life energy of the men conserved by as little movement or thought as possible. But up where the women moved in color, adornment, fluidly, easily…weeks could be lost just exchanging pleasantries. Yet I couldn’t return home without any means of helping Li or Skamar or my troop. Better a quick, or even slow, death here—lost trying—than returning to fight a helpless battle.

The predicament made me hate Jacks all the more. I pushed from the bar without another word and headed up the stairs.

The air was cooler on the landing, and seemingly less dense, as if the molecules were fat and inflated to dizzying effect. I’d been weighed down under the influence of drink upon my last ascension, and I wondered if this was how the women upstairs felt all the time, like they were tropical breezes off an island, the cool of a Caribbean drink in the palm. Breathing up here, I decided on my next woozy breath, was a bit like learning to walk on the moon.

The door leading to Solange’s observatory stood ajar, and its hinges squeaked as I pushed it open, letting Jacks know I was there. He remained as he was, back turned as he gazed out one of the tiny windows, a strong hand pressed to the glass so the sheen of his smooth fingertips was reflected there. Those twelve squares emitted the only light in the room, which was otherwise empty—no mine cart, no Solange.

As I approached the first bright square, Jacks shifted, moving away like he didn’t want me too near, but never fully turning my way. Attention still on him, I glanced out the first small, shining pane to see what he was studying. It was obviously another room, though fogged, with dull shapes weaving in and out of the wispy layers. None drew close enough to identify, and though obviously human, the movement reminded me of fish in an aquarium. Odd, I thought, as the shimmering landscape rippled, gray where it was nearest, melting into opacity farther away.

I moved to the next window, thinking maybe this was why he was here. Maybe there was something else he was searching for…plus, it had the added benefit of bringing me closer to him. But I halted when I discovered this was a different scene entirely. A bustling cityscape I didn’t recognize until I spotted the triangular, Art Deco building looming across from me. There was only one early-century building like that and it was in Manhattan. The stairwell I was peering from was obviously a subway station, and a steady stream of people barreled by in a full-throttle thrust before disappearing underground.

The next window, still closer to Jacks, offered up a half view of an ornate mosque, and in the following one I immediately recognized Buckingham Palace, the guards immobile like human statues. I had no cultural moorings on which to plant myself for the one after that, except to know that the concave tiles and dramatic, sweeping eaves meant it was somewhere in Asia. But if those exotic sights perplexed me, I was absolutely astonished by what I saw next, though not because it was unfamiliar.

This, I thought with a gaping mouth, was a cityscape I recognized all too well. As if through the lens of a periscope, I found myself peering out on the faux settings of New York, Monte Carlo, and a make-believe castle. It was unmistakably Vegas.

“The pipeline,” I whispered, making out the spot where I’d entered minutes before. I leaned heavily against the wall, my thoughts of Jacks momentarily diverted. What were these things? Pipelines from around the world? “Oh my God.”

I’d been right. Midheaven was a way around the restriction about leaving the Las Vegas valley once we were full-fledged troop members. This, I was suddenly certain, was what Warren had been keeping from us. This was what the Shadow agents, and Jacks, had long known. This was why there were so many lanterns spaced along the wall below.

Which explained the varied agents in the Rest House, the full bloom of women behind lacquered doors, their differing races and colors and backgrounds…yet other questions bloomed in their place. What was at the other end of each pipeline? A candle, as it was for me? And while the Old West was appropriate for Vegas, it didn’t hold for Asia or London. So was it hypothetically possible for me to get to London this way? To China?

Jacks had taken the opportunity of my distraction to place himself between the exit and me, and he smiled when I glanced sharply at him. We began to circle one another in that way, each keeping our back to the wall.

“Pretty from a distance, huh?” he said, jerking his head toward the Vegas window.

“Pretty from up close,” I corrected.

“You think?” He pursed his lips in disagreement. “I’ve always thought it looks like an old lady who went to bed without taking off her makeup. A bit sad, and in need of a good scrubbing.”

I tilted my head, continued my careful sidestep. “That why you came here? Take a little vacation from it all, play some poker…strip away part of your soul?”

I was looking for a reaction…but all I got was an admission.

“All but the last part,” he said coldly.

My heart rate snapped to attention as I stared, but I tried to play it cool, though it was taking all of my formidable acting abilities to stand in the same room as him and not swing. “She’s making you wait,” I said, like I wasn’t thinking of planting a boot—or a grenade—in his chest.

“It’s what women do.” The shrug was in his voice. He was looking at me, waiting for her, and standing in a world where he was a second-class citizen, yet he didn’t look a bit concerned. He’d killed at least two mortals so he could bounce between worlds, and it weighed upon him like cigarette ash. I inhaled, expecting to find a deadened rot, similar to a Shadow’s, but the scent emanating from his giant body was green, like money or opportunity, and so round on the air it was almost three-dimensional.

Not like the men downstairs, I thought, breathing in deeply again. Scent appeared to be attached to energy here; maybe the others had bartered away too much of both, and what was left had been watered down into an imitation of its former odor. This man’s blood was rich, like elixir, and it didn’t seem fair. It was also probably vain of me to wonder in that moment what exactly I smelled like, and if it was this heady and dizzying too.

But Jacks was here to see Solange. Beautiful, dangerous Solange, who had knowledge of the stars, who smelled sweet and frosty like ice wine, and who was also of our world.

Which reminded me. “I have a question for you.”

He began to smile, already knowing I was going to ask how to fix the changeling. Everyone in my world knew what was happening there. “And you’ll give what for the answer?”

“Your life,” I answered coolly.

He laughed, but I couldn’t tell if it was because or in spite of the threat. “And if I want yours in exchange?”

I thought of the sky falling over Vegas.

Skamar’s desperate plea for power.

An unstoppable infection festering on Li’s ravaged baby face.

It wasn’t an entirely unreasonable request.

I swallowed hard.

Jacks began circling again, and this time I stood my ground. He folded his arms when he drew to a stop in front of me, so close his body heat lapped at my skin. His rich eyes had darkened in the depths of the dim room and now resembled dry sap, with life still caught within. “Here’s what we’ll do,” he said, voice so low only the rumble escaped his throat. “We’ll trade answers for answers. But I get to ask as many questions as I want. You only get the one.”