The Neon Graveyard (32 page)

“Same thing you’re thinking right now.” I wiggled my brows, and after a moment he sighed, lowering his head so we were eye-level again.

“That I want to spank you?” He shrugged. “Sorta.”

I ran my index finger along his hairline. “Perv.”

“Doesn’t make me a bad person.”

I laughed but kept stroking his forehead, as if my touch could smooth away ache. His eyes were open now, and he watched me steadily, but there was still an issue lying dormant between us, and I wanted it out of the way. “I’m sorry about your child. About what happened to Lola, I mean.”

His gaze sharpened, though he remained immobile beneath my touch. Then he pursed his lips. “That thing wasn’t my child. Besides, what happened to her was done a long time ago, and it was Solange’s doing—not yours or mine. I should thank you for putting that . . . creature out of its misery.”

I nodded then, deciding it wouldn’t hurt to feel him out a bit on the subject of children in general, and cleared my throat. “Well, I’m sorry then that you risked so much to help something beyond saving. It’s noble, though. Risking your life for your child.”

“No. It’s just parenting.”

I understood that well enough. Something fierce and feral had taken over when I’d believed Ashlyn was in danger. I’d given her up for adoption, and knew she was living with a family far better suited to raising her than I’d have been, so that’s why my belated ferocity had surprised me. It also gave me the fleeting thought that I might just make a good mother yet.

“I never knew . . . Lola,” Hunter continued, swallowing hard, having trouble saying the name he’d envisioned giving his child after seeing the mutilated creature she’d really been, “but when I thought she was out there, a daughter who was as much a part of me as my very limbs, I just went crazy.”

I drew back at that, confused. Hunter and I had once traded memories because we’d shared the magic of the aureole. I’d seen him welcoming a girl child into the world. I’d felt love wash through his heart, and seen the tears on his face. What did he mean he’d never known Lola?

But Hunter, oblivious to my thoughts, was still talking, and not wanting to interrupt, I put the question aside for later. “Knowing I had a daughter in the world . . . well, it wasn’t the same as any love I’d ever felt. I mean, lovers, even those who are married, always exist autonomously of one another, no matter how close they are or how long they’ve known each other. That’s why jealousy can flare in even the most intimate relationships.”

“Because you know that at some basic level this person exists separately from you. No matter how close you are, the landscape of their life is always tinted a different hue than your own.”

He nodded.

“And a child isn’t separate?” I asked, hand automatically moving to my belly. I stilled it on my bare side, not wanting to give myself away just yet. I already knew the answer to the question—my answer, anyway—but Hunter, not knowing that—and unable to scent my pregnancy because of Io’s compound—looked over at me anyway.

“Love is a choice. A child? A child is an earthquake,” he said gravely. “The life you knew before they’re born is obliterated by their existence. It’s all new terrain from there on out. That landscape, the hue you view the world through after that is caked in pitfalls and cracks and things that can hurt you. The world becomes a place you’ll never control again.”

I wrinkled my nose, and blinked. I’d never thought of it like that. There’d been no time. “Is that a good thing?”

“It’s devastating.”

And before I could tell him about our unborn earthquake, the bedside phone rang.

The intimacy vanished from Hunter’s gaze, replaced by a warrior’s wariness that—because I was twisted that way—I loved equally well. My own face went blank as he answered the phone, and after listening for a moment, he held out the receiver.

“It’s for you.”

I sat up. I had my cell with me. Who would be calling me on the hotel line?

“Having fun, dear? Is your honeymoon everything you thought it would be?”

I put the phone on speaker so Hunter could hear, then scrambled for my clothes—the jeans I’d worn, Hunter’s undershirt. I didn’t have time to be precious about it. The Tulpa was on the other line.

“Yes, yes,” his voice came in mock soothingness over the line. “I can practically scent your happiness from here. It’s . . . nauseating, really.”

“How did you know I was here?” I said, reaching for my weapons. The bow and arrow went into my waistband first. It felt like an additional limb, so it was the first thing I’d put on and would be the last to leave my body. I wished I still had the soul blade, the only weapon that could truly injure the Tulpa. Hunter would have his whip, but I would have all else. At least I hadn’t been stupid enough to come here unarmed.

But I had been stupid. That was clear enough.

“You must not have gotten the memo in the last board meeting. See, there’s this man who rules both the mortal and paranormal planes with equanimity as well as a lot of fucking finesse, if I do say so myself. He also owns this hotel you’re currently fornicating in.”

I loaded a green liquid bullet into a supernatural sidearm. He wasn’t the owner of me.

“So the fact that you’re in my hotel, in
my
city, and you don’t think I know everything that happens everywhere . . . well, that’s just downright annoying.”

“Gee, Daddy. Now you’ve hurt my feelings.”

“I’ll do more if you don’t get your ass down to the main casino in about . . . oh, ten minutes ago.”

I stilled at that, and looked at Hunter.

“Mind, I could come and get you myself,” the Tulpa said, his voice falling to a deadly soft whisper. “But I’d have to kill your dear friend Tekla first.”

Falling still, I closed my eyes. He had Tekla.

“Bring that pretty beau of yours, too. There’s plenty of room for everyone. You’re in the Hall of the Slain now.” And the smile in his voice lingered even after he’d hung up.

25

H
ow does one prepare for battle to the death? Not in five minutes, that was for sure. Luckily I’d been preparing for the happy occasion all my adult life. Back when I carried a chip on my shoulder the size of the Tropicana—back when I’d been battling myself, one could even say—I used to project myself into violent situations everywhere I went. The kindly old man at the corner café? A likely Russian spy, with a Makarov pistol tucked into his military overcoat. The Goth girl behind the counter? Strung-out crack whore, willing to separate me from my life if it meant doing the same with my money. Cute boy smiling at me from behind his
Wall Street Journal
? Assassin. Vegas boys don’t read the
Journal
.

But no matter where I went, I anticipated ambush, I pinpointed exits, and I searched for Joaquin, the first Shadow agent—hell, the first person—who’d ever tried to kill me.

So after splashing water on my face in the locked bathroom of Valhalla’s honeymoon suite, I took one extra moment to study myself in the mirror, trying to see what exactly had changed since then.

Experience.

The knowledge that someone wanted me dead no longer fazed me. It just gave me something to put on my calendar. The fact that it was the being that’d originally sent Joaquin after me just made me write it in big, bold red.

No, what was more startling was my physical appearance. I was such a curious amalgamation of my sister and me these days. The surgical enhancements Warren had hoisted on me hadn’t yet been touched, so I still possessed Olivia’s impressive cleavage, her heart-shaped chin and slim nose. I’d removed the colored contacts, though, and my hair was back to its original chestnut brown. “Brown, gray, Shadow, Light . . .”

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

But why choose? All those colors and aspects were just more experiences layered atop each other. It didn’t matter whether I embraced or shed them, they’d left their mark, brought me here, and each remained—in one way or another—a part of me now. And that was okay. I wondered why I hadn’t seen that, and accepted it, before.

So there you are, I thought, realizing it on what might possibly be the last day I needed that calendar. Joanna Archer. Woman. Warrior. Sister.

“Mother,” I whispered, gaze dropping as I placed a hand on my belly. Immediately, like it’d been waiting for a sign, there was a fluttering, an uneven jump. I let out a surprised yelp and exhaled sharply, because I knew it immediately for something that was separate from me. As
someone
. As life.

“I can touch the conduits,” I said softly, as if to reassure my little hitchhiker. “I can touch all of them. Old and new. Shadow and Light.”

True, none of them had proven useful against the Tulpa. He fed on the energy expended in fighting him like it was nutrition. In mommy-speak? It made him grow big and strong. But there was one thing he’d never prevailed against before, and that was me. Because for some reason, buried among the layers of colors and titles and aspects lay a facet that made me tough to destroy. I was also a part of him. Partly imagined.

And wholly pissed-off.

I added one more title to my descriptive repertoire—
Kairos
—before yanking open the bathroom door.

Hunter was waiting.

“We have to find the stupa,” I said, joining him next to the table. Our tender moments were long gone. We were both in full fighter mode. “We have to destroy it now.”

“Or we could, you know, run for our lives,” Hunter replied wryly, but he was coiling his whip, newly oiled, as he said it.

“He’s been sacrificing people’s souls all these years—”

“Harvesting them,” Hunter corrected, testing the whip’s release, clearly pleased to have his conduit back. I felt the same about my bow and arrow. “Using the animist masks to store them. Hanging them on the walls.”

Hanging Felix upside-down, I remembered. Turning Xavier into a breathing corpse. Who knew how many others there’d been. “It has to stop.”

“Oh, I think he intends it to,” he said, voice clipped. “With you.”

Obviously
, I thought, picking up the charges and handed them to Hunter. “So blow that bitch up before I get there.”

“Leave you?”

I raised my brows. “The eye-in-the-sky. Remember?”

“Of course.” He let out a long sigh and started tucking the explosives in the inner pockets of his leather coat. “They’ll be watching.”

A modern-day casino’s surveillance system made the government models look like baby monitors. They weren’t normally positioned in the hotel’s hallways, but Valhalla was run a bit tighter—for obvious reasons. And the Tulpa did know we were in the honeymoon suite.

“We have to make it
look
like you’re leaving me.”

So we concocted a plan that had him knocking me down and running for his life. Just one more betrayal of me, and totally believable when added to all the others. Besides, who would stick by my side when they knew the Tulpa was about to bring the house down around my shoulders?

But Hunter stood in front of me, unmoving, staring at me. “I don’t want to.”

I didn’t either. I put a hand to his face. “It may be the only way to stay together.”

His answering look was skeptical. It was the slimmest long shot we’d ever faced, though whatever the Tulpa had planned for us down in the casino would undoubtedly be slimmer.

“He knows we’re here. If he has Tekla, then she might have been compelled to tell him why. He’ll probably have the entire twenty-fourth floor on lockdown.”

I jerked my head. “My guess is that he’s going to want to show off a bit for his minions, so those who normally guard the stupa already have their invites for the show.”

“Okay, but his ‘usual’ is pretty strong.”

It was. I’d unwittingly entered the treasured room before, having chased and killed a Shadow agent within it. Accessed by a single elevator bank at the end of a long, empty hallway cheerfully christened the gauntlet, it was near impossible for agents to get to it without detection, and it was a place mortals couldn’t reach at all. You needed a supernatural hall pass to get there, and a lineage that ran all the way back to two women whose lives had been saved by a Greek god and a snake.

Yet, I thought, pursing my lips, once you had it, an alternate reality awaited. Doors, elevators,
portals
would open to you.

They’ll open to me
. The thought thrilled up my spine . . . and gave me an idea. “Did you see a portal on the way in?”

I had stopped looking for the entrances to reality’s flip side because I wasn’t able to see them as a mortal, never mind access them.

Hunter’s eyes narrowed as the plan I’d barely conceived took root in his mind. Another thing I love about this man. He could mentally get from A to Z without a lot of detours. “There was one at the ice machines. Another at the main floor, just next to the buffet.”

I nodded. “That’s your backup, then.”

For a moment Hunter said nothing. Then he crossed to the window and parted the curtains that concealed the view to the world below. “Guess it’s time for me to blow the top off this stupa.”

One side of my mouth lifted in a humorless smile. And time for me to pay a visit to Valhalla’s main casino floor. A warrior’s paradise. The Hall of the Slain.

For once, I thought, following Hunter to the door, it wasn’t a gambling metaphor.

I
am not a great actress. I laugh ahead of time when I’m telling a joke and lower my head sheepishly when telling a lie. But you don’t have to be a particularly brilliant thespian to feign being knocked from your feet by a two-hundred-forty-pound superhero . . . especially when you’ve just been knocked from your feet by a two-hundred-forty-pound superhero.

I also didn’t have to worry about producing crocodile tears or uncontrolled sobbing for the benefit of the surveillance system trained on me as I watched Hunter bolt for the stairwell. It wasn’t my style, and there was no turning back now.

There hadn’t been any turning back since I’d first been made aware of the scent of Shadows.

Yet I remained kneeling on my hands and knees for a long minute, head low so my hair hid my face. From the ceiling-mounted cameras it would give the impression of abject defeat. Then I picked myself up from the floor slowly, dramatically emphasizing weariness and mortality, and made my way to the elevator banks, where I waited to be ferried to the Tulpa. As he’d commanded.

The mirrored image that greeted me when the doors finally snicked open was probably not one to grace the halls of Valhalla before. Goth Barbie meets G.I. Joe, I thought, stepping in. And was it the low lighting, or did my eyes look significantly darker than they had just minutes before?

Not my fault, I decided, pushing the button leading to the ground floor. Miss Manners had never addressed this exact situation in her handbook of advice for young women. Maybe if she’d been fathered by a thought-form with strong filicidal inclinations, I thought, she’d have been a bit more sympathetic to my plight.

Still, seeing myself dressed like a warrior settled me, even as the elevator doors closed me in. The scene in
Star Wars
where Han Solo and company were nearly crushed by a trash compactor flashed through my mind. Such an act wasn’t out of the realm of possibility for the Tulpa, but I knew he had something greater planned for me on the ground floor.

I also knew I should be more frightened. The apocalypse Daddy Dearest had promised when I refused his initial offer to join the Shadows seemed about to come to pass. Yet fear—which I’d lived with almost constantly for over a year now—was having a hard time squeezing past the other base emotion suddenly ossifying in my chest.

It was not anger making blood rush through my veins to short out my breath and stunt my senses. No, this was harder and colder than that, brighter and starker than any gem in Solange’s doomed night sky. This, I thought, was the last third of my soul taking root in my body, and refusing to move for one more fucking person. I was fed up with others trying to shred it to pieces.

And I’d just gotten a glimpse of happiness, I thought, and watched my reflected eyes darken even further. A little bit of pretty in a life that had been bleak, and yes, a little too gray. For a short while there, I’d had something to look forward to that didn’t include bloodshed and battle or portents and power. And then this monster, unbidden and unwanted, erupted in my life again like a natural disaster . . . sudden and destructive, and altogether indifferent to the carnage he was intent on leaving behind.

Yet I didn’t cry on my descent, or ask,
Why me?
or wring my hands or rail against the gods. Instead I rechecked my weapons, touching each like they were talismans, before crossing my arms. I was more than a little indignant at the normalcy that nobody—Warren, Tekla, the Tulpa—seemed to want me to have. So no wonder my eyes were dark.

No wonder my trigger finger itched.

The bell above me dinged, ticking away floors like the timer on a bomb, and I forced myself to calm again. Concentrating, I mentally reached out to touch my four supernatural powers, the same way a nun would finger her rosary beads. Strength, healing, defensive walls, and my ether, the ability to create something out of nothing.

I closed my eyes and thumbed through these, straightening and shifting my weight as I located each along my spine, near my chest. Becoming reacquainted with extraordinary power felt like a deep stretch after a long period of bed rest. My body was willing and able to make the effort, but it was going to take a while to get back up to super speed.

I had approximately forty seconds.

And then the elevator stopped on the eighteenth floor, sliding open to allow in a couple about twenty years older than I was ever likely to see . . . even if I lived to double my age. I tempered my impatience by closing my eyes and counting to ten as they inched their way into the elevator. When I opened them again, the woman was staring at me from my left. The man from my right. The doors slid shut.

“Is there a convention in town?” the old lady finally asked.

I slid my gaze her way. “I don’t know.”

“No, Mildred. She’s in a show.” The man bent nearer like a gnarled old tree. “What show are you in, honey? One of those preposterous circus things?”

I glanced up, wishing the elevator would go faster. “I’m not in a show.”

The man waited, giving me a slow blink.

I sighed. He was breaking my concentration. I decided to find out if anything in his seventy-plus years had prepared him for the truth. “Actually, I’m with a group who’s trying to free mortals from the persecution of those who’d like to see them forever enslaved.” There. Succinct and true. And it explained the bullet belt at my waist.

They both backed against the wall so quickly you’d have thought I’d pulled out a rattler. “You’re the bastards who picketed Michael Jackson’s funeral, aren’t you?”

“What?”