The Neon Graveyard (29 page)

“You would all side with her, then?” he said, looking around without blinking. “After the years we’ve spent together?”

He fought back a wince when no one answered, but disgust twisted his mouth. “You are all gray then. All rogues.”

“No, Warren,” Chandra said, causing him to jerk back and look at her with that new gaze. “You are. Now get your ass on that emblem.”

Warren hid the fear relatively well, except that he was trying too hard to remain still. That’s probably why he ended up shaking.

“There are other exits,” he said, pushing to his feet from the trestle, standing on his own. He did as told, but defiantly, good arm swinging.

“Not our problem,” Tekla said, unaffected. She must have learned it from him.

And, of course, he’d have to find the exits, I thought, looking at Hunter. If there were any left. Solange had torn that world apart at the seams. But neither Hunter nor I said that to Warren. He’d find out soon enough.

“Go on,” Micah said, when Warren stopped short of the Serpent Bearer mark. But when Warren turned, the bigger man refused to meet his gaze. So instead—again—it settled on me.

“You know, I can’t figure it out.” He shook his head.

“What?” Because from my vantage point, he’d had it figured out long ago.

“You.” He said it wonderingly, and I started to think we were about to have our first real conversation since he’d expelled me from the troop. But then his expression fell. “I can’t tell if you’re more like your mother or your father.”

But before I could reply, Gregor and Micah flanked him.

“No,” he growled, struggling. He tried to reverse their grip. He tried to drag them with him.

Micah—taller, stronger,
pissed
—jerked hard, and there was a popping sound, and a cry from Warren. His right arm fell, hanging oddly.

“I’m your leader!” he bellowed, fury ripping the words apart. Micah growled his reply, and whipped him forward. Gregor held him still. And the Serpent Bearer emblem curled around his ankles.

“No!” he bellowed again as he was tipped forward. “No, no!”

But the sky and blasted stars swooped down, ripping away the sound, the man, yanking him into another world. The ragged breathing left in his wake was the loudest thing in the room. But while the others looked at one another, disbelieving, shocked at what they’d done, Warren’s final words haunted me. And I knew they always would.

I can’t tell if you’re more like your mother or your father.

Despite his expulsion from the troop, from this world, it seemed Warren wasn’t weaponless after all.

22

W
e left Midheaven’s thirteenth entrance immediately, and headed back into the real world . . . or at least the crowded antechamber linking the two. More candles and tea lights studded that room, a handful of which the troop had clearly lit on their way into the Serpent Bearer’s chamber. Eight chairs were pulled into a circle in the room’s center, and the heavy tapestry previously covering the bed now lay across the rutted floor beneath them. I wondered who’d put it there. The grays after seeing me off to Midheaven the first time, or the Light, right before my return?

Either way, someone had been having a good, old-fashioned powwow, and I turned to Tekla, thinking it was time we did the same. “Can you please tell me what the hell just happened in there?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Chandra, baton still gripped in her right hand, had her familiar scowl on her face, though after what she’d just done, I wasn’t taking it personally.

“I think we just overthrew a troop,” Hunter replied, arm sliding protectively over my shoulder. Unlike the others, who labored silently before us with Vanessa’s body, he was clearly pleased about it . . . though all of us, down to the last, were awed. Such a thing hadn’t been done in this valley since Warren had accomplished it himself.

“I get why, clearly,” I said, running a hand through my hair. It was gritty with bunker dust and moist with sweat. I could use a shower, a meal, and about a weeklong nap. But first, “How?”

Tekla sighed, not out of impatience but weariness. Wisps of hair were pulled from her normally pin-tight bun and plastered to her gaunt cheeks. She didn’t hesitate in movement or seem to harbor regret, but a glassiness had overtaken her gaze too. Shock, I thought. Even when you were the cause of great change, it still altered the foundation of your world. I knew that well enough.

“Hold on,” she said, motioning to the chairs, before whispering to Gregor and Micah. They both nodded and, along with Jewell and Riddick, carried Vanessa’s body out of the room like pallbearers. Only Micah looked back, giving me a sad nod before he too disappeared. I took a seat across from Tekla and Chandra, and Hunter pulled his chair close to me.

For a moment Tekla only stared at an indeterminate place in front of her, self-contained but not really there at all, and I couldn’t help wonder what she was seeing . . . and if it coincided with the strongest memories I had of her: looking like a vengeful angel when she took down a Shadow agent in an abandoned warehouse, screaming at me in a training dojo over shattered walls she’d constructed out of thought, or just a few moments earlier, expression brittle as she locked her former troop leader in another world.

But Tekla went back to a memory earlier than all of those, back to the most painful moment of her life. “I have been a changed woman ever since I held my dying son in my arms. It’s a strange magic, the power gained in outliving your own child. When you get past the initial grief,
if
you do, you walk the earth knowing that nothing will ever pain you so acutely again.”

Hunter shifted uncomfortably, and Chandra raised her hand to place it atop Tekla’s, which lay motionless on her lap. I said nothing. The grief Tekla was talking about? None of us could share.

“It took me a long time to accept what happened. The world seemed muddied, confused. My thoughts were always clouded and heavy. I couldn’t find my way in or out of my own mind. Everyone thought I was crazy, and eventually I thought so too.

“And then I found the written account of another Seer, long ago, who’d endured a similar tragedy. Her daughter had died in her first battle. What she described next was exactly what happened to me.”

Dreams she couldn’t wake from, she explained. Her child speaking insistently in her mind, not letting go until she acted on what felt like commands.

“But they were really prophecies.” Tekla looked up, blinking like she was surprised to see us there. “That’s how I figured it out. When Stryker died, the Scorpion sign reverted back to me, and my talents instantly doubled. You see, I’m more powerful than the troop’s last three Seers put together.”

From the moment of Stryker’s death, Tekla had begun holding dual perspectives in her own mind. It was, she explained, like playing chess against yourself. “It’s the same game, but you’re looking at it from opposite sides of the board. Then I figured out that I wasn’t battling myself, but moving and calculating both sides to bring the match to its natural conclusion.”

And turning on Warren had been a crucial move. Like sacrificing your queen to end a stalemate.

“We thought you were going crazy,” Hunter said apologetically.

She inclined her head, a wordless acceptance. “Because Warren told you I was going crazy.”

“No offense, Tekla. But you looked crazy.” The first time I’d seen her she’d been wild-eyed and ranting. She’d also attacked me.

“I was banned from the astrolab,” she said, the memory making her defensive. “I was deprived of my charts and books, the tools I use to make sense of the world, and all while grieving, a time when nothing in the world makes sense. I was sedated, and held in solitary confinement. Then I was left there.”

“We were told she would harm us,” Chandra said quickly, speaking to me but looking at Tekla. This time it was the older woman who reached out to give comfort.

“I know,” she said quickly. It was obvious Warren had fooled them all.

“Meanwhile these perspectives, these
voices
—mine and Stryker’s, in tandem—they told me that something big was coming. They said we needed to be ready. And I would have to act subversively to bring about the change that would make all our sacrifices worth it.”

“And let me guess,” I said dryly. “You told Warren.”

She gave her head one shake, folded her arms in the wide sleeves of her robe, and took a deep breath. “He overheard me talking—to myself, my other voice, in my sleep.”

“He bugged her room. A wiretap in the sick ward,” Chandra’s nostrils flared. “How sick is that?”

“And when he didn’t like my predictions of the changes to come, he tried to force me to give up my star sign and my place in the troop.”

I believed it. How many times had he told me that nothing was changing? He’d set Hunter up to prevent it, casting him from the troop. He’d done the same with me. All to ensure . . . what? That the troop would go on under his leadership as it always had? That there’d be balance in the valley—an equal number of Light and Shadow to play out some twisted, eternal game of homicidal one-upmanship? It didn’t make sense.

“But you didn’t give up your star sign,” I said to Tekla, realizing he’d tried to do the same thing to her that he’d managed with Hunter and me. Somehow, though, she’d dodged it.

“I wouldn’t. Even through the fugue of drugs and Warren’s pressured coercing, both my voices were adamant about that.”

“And,” Hunter said slowly, golden eyes narrowed as he reasoned out his memories according to this new information, “the rest of us were preoccupied at the time with finding out why our agents, including Stryker, had been killed.”

There’d been a mole in the troop. A spy for the Tulpa who’d almost taken the agents of Light down from the inside. Which, coincidentally, was when I arrived.

Tekla nodded. “Of course it didn’t take any real power or clarity of mind to know that Warren was also a mole of sorts. I knew he was lost when he started ignoring my prophecies. Never before had he neglected to look to the stars. But suddenly his own will became more important than the sky’s patterns.”

And the stars had taken on a new order in the skies. That’s what Vanessa had told me. That Tekla claimed we had to be open to new ways of viewing both the heavens and the earthly events they influence . . . and that Warren wouldn’t listen.

“So anarchy?” Had that been the stars talking, or Tekla finally getting fed up with being ignored.

“Do you think Warren would ever change his mind? Start listening to reason?”

No. You didn’t need to be a Seer to know that would never happen. But I held up my hands. “I’m not sticking up for the guy, believe me. But I’m curious as to what it all means. What are you doing, Tekla? Taking leadership? Installing a democracy? Dismantling the troop?”

“Nothing that extreme, dear,” she said with a wry smile. “I merely mean to wipe out the entire Shadow troop. I thought you might want to help.”

Hunter and I stared at her, openmouthed.

“It’s the only way to bring peace to the people of this valley, Joanna. Surely you see that. And destroying them entirely will ensure another Shadow troop never assembles here again.”

“Will it?” Because there was always some rancid motherfucker more than willing to step into the Tulpa’s shoes. There was no shortage of power-hungry people . . . in any world.

Chandra stood, stretched. “Once an urban troop is destroyed the other side has a sizable advantage. It’s almost impossible to catch up again. Ask your friend Carlos.”

I already knew what Chandra meant. The Light had been driven out of Carlos’s hometown, Mexico City. The mortal population had faced an increase in drugs, crimes, and killings because of it.

And if Tekla could “see it all,” did that mean she was setting herself up to rule this city in the same way? “So then what?” I asked her outright. “The Light rules all?”

She shrugged.

Shaking my head, I stood as well. “I hate to say it, Tekla. But if you saw it all and didn’t help me? Didn’t even try to save me from a flood, from the Tulpa, from a woman who wanted to strip my soul into little pieces? Then I’m alive in spite of you, not because of you.”

“I follow the skies,” she said unapologetically. “The stars told me you would prevail—we all
will
—if we act not at the earlier moment, but in the most opportune one.”

She meant the kairotic moment, the supreme moment. In other words, as long as I continued to be the Kairos of my own life.

But Hunter shared my ire. “And that’s
now
?” he said, anger and disbelief crackling through each word, making his voice tight. “Now that Vanessa and Felix are dead? Now that the troop is weaker than ever? Now that the Shadows are more powerful than ever?”

We all looked at Tekla with raised brows. It was a good point.

Tekla sighed again, closing her eyes, momentarily slumped, before she straightened and rose as well. She crossed to us—nonthreatening, diminutive,
powerful—
and in the most motherly action I could ever recall, took each of my hands in her own and held them to her chest.

“There’s only been one other time in my life that I was so perplexed about the Universe’s intentions, and that was when fate decreed my beautiful, strong, and brave son should die, even before his first battle. Even before he’d truly begun to live.

“This was as great a loss.
You
were.” She shook her head at me, seemingly still confused. “Why would we find you, a woman so clearly gifted and unique, only to have you sacrificed and then go on as before? Like nothing had happened?”

So that was her perspective, I thought, trying to see it all from her side of the “board.” And she was right. Put that way, it made no sense.

Tekla went on. “So even knowing Warren was still suspicious of me, still watching, I disappeared into my labs, into the world of my books and charts and stars. I had to trust that the Universe would lay the answer bare for me, if only I knew how to look. And that, my friends, is the real problem with most people. They can’t see how their lives are to unfold because they don’t know how to look.”

“And you do?” I said, trying and failing the keep the skepticism from my voice.

Chandra made a sound across from me, like she wanted to defend her Seer, but Tekla only inclined her head, looking regal in her certainty. “For me it’s like reading Braille. For those like Warren, they are only interested in the message on the page of the sky if it says what he wants to hear.”

And she raised her brows, silently asking which sort of person I wanted to be.

“You told Warren that I should sacrifice my soul to Midheaven,” I said, reminding her of our conversation in the car.

She didn’t even blink. “I told
you
what you needed to hear.”

I clenched my jaw. “And how did it help me to think you wanted me dead?”

“You were made to act independently and with force. To drive yourself into the future. We all have to actively choose our own lives, Joanna. If you don’t claim your life for yourself, you won’t ever be of any use to others.”

“And you still think me . . . useful?”

“I still think you’re the Kairos, yes.”

I pulled away at that, not meeting her eyes, or Hunter’s. When I finally looked up, though, I was decided. “Vanessa said you believed I am forever lost to the Light, and that I’ll never be super again.”

Tekla must have seen my resolve, because she didn’t bother to soften her words, and ticked my points off on two slim fingers. “You are. And the full of your powers can’t ever be recovered.” And then she spread her arms. “Yet here you are. Still alive. Still influencing the stars.”

I tilted my head. “Bringing to pass an apocalypse?”