The Touch Of Twilight (28 page)

I glanced at the bugging device in her hand, less concerned about that than the ice pick poised at my heart while my conduit still lay unguarded outside the kitchen’s back door. “Maybe you missed it before.”

“I did not miss it!” Her hand disappeared into her pocket, and before I could speak again she withdrew it and pegged me with five other devices…all the new ones Gregor had planted. They stung my skin, fell harmlessly to the floor, and I lay extra still, trying not to look like I was planning to attack her.

Trying to figure out a way to kill her where she stood.

“What did I say about backing off?” She placed her hands on her hips, her conduit fisted in her right. Ben should see her now, I thought, eyeing her black on black street wear—perfect for the First Friday crowd—her hair slicked back behind her ears, looming over me with homicide in her eyes.

It’d be unrealistic if I played too nice, so I voiced my first thought. “Gee, Mom, I don’t know. What did you say?”

“I told you I’d kill him. But first I’ll tell him about your ugly secret, the daughter you don’t want him, or anyone, to know about.”

Yet here she was talking about it again. So, even prone on the floor, glyph glowing brightly beneath both boot and conduit, I wasn’t as scared as I probably should have been. I also wasn’t dead like the mortal in the alley, and even though my bones had risen to burn through my fragile skin, Regan read the thought.

“The Tulpa has said you’re not to be touched.” She ground her teeth together, and a smile began to spread over my face. “Not for a while anyway.”

Her left eye twitched, and I whipped my legs up, somersaulting backward to avoid the coming blow. Gotta love knowing someone else’s tell. “This is not touching?” I said, flipping my hair from my eyes as we circled each other again.

“It’s not killing,” she said, tone harder now as she tried to figure out how I’d anticipated the blow. “You can’t prove I touched you. The evidence is fading already.”

“So it seems we’re on equal footing once again.” In more ways than one, I thought, circling.

“You forget I know who you are, where you live, what your daughter’s name is. And I still have the man you love.” She licked her lips when she saw I wasn’t going to argue—all those things were true—and went on. “Have you looked up what I told you about Ben and that street thug yet? Read the account in his journal of how you appeared in a ghetto barricade, disarmed a criminal, then left Ben alone to mete out justice? I guess that makes you an accomplice to that murder as well, huh?”

Magnum hadn’t been an innocent, not like the woman still warm in the alley. He’d probably been born bad, yet he was mortal all the same, so technically under my protection and care. And I
had
left him sprawled on the floor of that barricade. But. “Ben didn’t murder that man.”

“Oh, Joanna,” Regan sighed, flipping her conduit in her hand. “Can’t you see? It’s not hard to push a man to his breaking point. Ben will kill again if I tell him to. In fact, his finger is already on the trigger. All I have to do is tell him where to aim.”

“He’s a good man.” My voice came out in a whisper.

Regan smiled. “A good man with a stain on his psyche. One you put there. And the longer I’m with him, the wider and deeper that stain will spread.

“Yes, I have plans for ol’ Benny-boy,” she went on, smiling. “He’s going to help me accomplish some of my long-term goals. And when I’m done with him he’ll be a cracked shell of the man you once loved.”

The bones beneath my lotion-soft knuckles fisted, the rings on my tensed fingers glinted, and Regan’s eyes widened. I hit her so hard, one of my diamonds was imprinted on her cheek, the memory of something precious carved into her fouled skin. Her ice pick fell as fast as a dart to connect above my knee. I crumpled, and she was spinning in the air, her left foot in my face as she whipped around me on her way out the door. My head knocked back, but I lifted it in time to see her fist lowering again. See it, but not stop it. The scream of panic and rage welling in my throat scuttled off like a roach in the light as my temple took the full force of the blow. There was a slow, almost arduous dropping, then nothing after that.

Light pricked at my vision in shards, and I groaned to send them slicing through my brain. The fluorescent bulbs above me coalesced, and the smell of grease anchored me back in time.
Regan. Damn. Bitch
.

When I could do more than form one-word expletives, I picked my defeated ass off the floor, and found my bag in the alley, though, unsurprisingly, not my conduit. Regan, I knew, would use the crossbow as soon as the Tulpa lifted his protective ban on my life. And then she wouldn’t just kill me, she’d obliterate my memory and legacy from the manuals, our history, and the earth.

It’s you she’s after.

I limped over to the body still lying sprawled in the alley, vision wavering as I placed weight on the leg Regan had stabbed. I slid down the grimy wall to drop next to the woman. Of course she was still there. Regan didn’t care about her, the mortal had served her purpose, and it was more tortuous to leave the body for me to deal with.

My nose felt lopsided, and I didn’t bother wiping away the blood yet. My eyes, probably both blackened, watered as I popped my nose back into place, but ten more minutes alone and no one would ever know. At least my extensions had held, I thought, feeling the top of my head. Yay for bonding glue and hairspray.

And then I began to cry.

Shit. Regan was right. I had to start taking responsibility for what I’d done, and now
I’d killed a mortal
. And what about what I was allowing to happen to Ben, and possibly to this entire mortal plane?

What the fuck was I doing?
I thought, gazing through the tears at the woman’s body.

At the involuntary twitch of her thumb. My sniffles died in my throat and I was next to her in a millisecond, belly on the ground, cheek over her mouth, but otherwise entirely still. The softest breath, like a baby bird’s first, warmed my ear.

“Oh my God.” Alive.
Alive.

And to keep her that way I had to get to the hospital quick. Not one of ours; Micah was tucked in the sanctuary until dawn, and she couldn’t wait that long. So one of the mortal hospitals, then, I thought, lifting her. But I’d have to drop her at the emergency entrance, unable to risk the paperwork, the questions about my involvement and appearance, the certain leaks of both of those to the Shadow side…leaks Olivia Archer couldn’t risk.

But this mortal would live. She had to. And after I saw her safe, I would get cleaned up, find a replacement conduit for the one I’d lost, and retire to someplace safe until I could cross to the sanctuary at dawn.

And there was only one place to do all that. Unfortunately it wasn’t until after I’d left my fragile package beneath the spotlight of a streetlamp at the city’s trauma unit, until after I heard cries of surprise and yells for assistance, and until well after I’d entered the shell of the warehouse and its arsenal of silent, hidden alarms that I thought about what exactly it meant to be alone with Hunter Lorenzo. In the depths of night and in a building only he could arm and secure. It really hit me when he swung open the side steel door and I found myself face-to-face with those muscles rounding beneath his white wife-beater, his fresh sweat so heady my nipples contracted. He looked great, yes. But, more, he looked safe.

If Hunter noticed the hitch in my breath he didn’t say. Instead his eyes widened as he took in my face.

“What the hell happened to you?” he asked, yanking me inside.

“Haven’t I healed yet?” I asked, patting at my face.

There was nothing seductive about his touch as he dragged me to the center of the warehouse, positioning me on a high metal stool next to his drawing table to assess the damage. But he wasn’t looking at my face. He’d scented my blood the moment he saw me, and had torn the seam of my slacks aside to reveal the wound above my right knee. It looked like a splash of red paint against a flawless ivory canvas.

“It’s nothing,” I told him, swallowing hard at the sight. One more scar to hide, I thought. Olivia would be appalled at the way I was treating her body. “Just a scratch.”

“From a conduit,” he said, his concern not lessening. “I wouldn’t call that nothing. Whose?”

“Guess,” I said wryly, as he yanked open a drawer on a cabinet-length toolbox to reveal emergency medical supplies. You had to hand it to the guy. He was prepared.

He whipped his gaze up to mine. “Again?”

“Don’t look at me that way!” I bristled, stood, and bristled again when he pushed me back onto the stool. “I’m not seeking her out, I’m not losing control of my emotions, I’m not even going near Ben. She’s like a poisonous mushroom. She keeps popping up whenever the conditions are right.”

“You mean when you’re alone and vulnerable and not suspecting her attack.”

I flipped my hair back and focused on the alone part. “Hey, it’s not like I’m trying to keep Chandra from accompanying me—”

“Anymore,” he added quickly, but I ignored that too, gritting my teeth as he swabbed the cool, stinging alcohol over my knee.

“Besides, it doesn’t seem to matter where I go or who I’m with. She’s locating me almost at will. I can’t figure it out.” I scratched at my chest, and Hunter gently pulled my hand away so he could reach my forearm. I hadn’t even realized it’d been nicked.

“Tell me what you were doing when she found you,” he said, pushing up the long sleeve.

“She didn’t,” I said, swallowing hard. “I found her.”

I told him about the woman in the alley, what I’d done, where I’d left her, and felt his eyes on me when my voice broke, his work slowing. Without looking at him, I quickly moved on to the Tulpa’s decree that I not be killed, though he stopped bandaging my arm altogether when I said I’d lost my conduit. It was a moment longer before I could look him directly in the eye, but when I finally managed it, I found none of the disgust or anger I expected…or that I felt for myself.

“Oh, Joanna,” he said softly.

“Don’t,” I said, tearing up. “You’ll make me cry. And I can’t cry.” I scratched at my other arm and wished for my room in the barracks.

“Okay,” he said, drawing the word out as he rewrapped a length of gauze. “So you said you think the Shadow changeling told Regan where you were going?”

I nodded. “I know it. Douglas heard my conversation with the other kids. They wanted me to kill Jasmine, if you can believe that. They said it’d been done before by a guy named Jaden Jacks…”

I started to rise to grab the manual the boys at Master Comics had given me, thankful for something to do, but Hunter stilled me with a palm on my thigh. “And did it actually look like Regan in the alley?”

“God, yes! You think I would’ve struck her otherwise? But it was dark and she’d marked the mortal with her own scent, I’d know it anywhere, and I tried to pull back but it was too late and—”

“Shh.” Hunter’s hands stilled my own, which were moving faster and faster in the air with the telling, and I took a deep breath, realizing I was close to hyperventilating. We both waited until I was calm enough, and then my gaze met his. His voice matched it in softness. “So if you know Regan so well, how can you not see she’s been planning this forever? That woman’s injury wasn’t your doing.”

“It was,” I argued. “It’s because I know her so well that I should have seen it coming.”

“So now you’re responsible for all the evil in this world as well?”

Take some fucking responsibility…

I shook my head, loosening Regan’s words, but unable to keep from recalling how soundly my elbow had cracked against that woman’s flesh. I scratched my chest absently, tears threatening again. “All I know is Regan possesses knowledge of my old identity and my new. She has my past, my conduit…my number. And she can find me at will. I just don’t know
why.
”

Hunter straightened, eyeing me narrowly, and I froze in mid-scratch. “What?”

“What are you doing?” His voice was low, modulated, and suspicious.

“Playing patient to your bossy-ass doctor act,” I said, scratching again as I indignantly pushed off the stool. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

He pushed me back down. “Allowing your skin to breathe.”

“What?” My hand stilled on my arm as he reached for my sleeve and ripped it. I was about to yell that cashmere didn’t come cheap when I glanced down at my bare arm. At first it looked like flaking skin to me, but then Hunter was peeling it away in strips, like dead skin lifting from a healing sunburn, but in neat, even rows. “What the—?”

The bronzed slivers lifted, and the scar I’d gotten four months earlier from a Shadow agent named Liam Burke appeared. I realized immediately I hadn’t seen it since applying the makeup Regan had left in the ladies’ room. I’d barely been aware of the itching since then; it’d been as subtle as the bite of a mosquito in summer, something to be slapped at, but not concerned with.

“Shit.” She hadn’t left it by accident. “It’s the makeup.”

“It’s a tracking device,” Hunter clarified, and peeled a thin, flexible strip from my arm.

I was a fucking idiot.

And Regan made a brutal man named Ajax, and a psychotic one named Joaquin, look like kittens at play.
Of course
she wasn’t going to come at me with guns blazing. Women fought differently. I knew that.

Hunter pulled out a knife and a pair of goggles from the stacked tool chest next to us, and I sat stone-still as he cut a giant cross through the center of my turtleneck, then angled the blade toward my chest. The cool tip whispered against my skin until it caught on the edge of the compound. Hunter picked at the edge carefully, close enough I could feel his breath on my earlobe as he worked, the dark hair that was only just growing out again falling across his forehead in front of me. The blade scratched, moving between us, and I kept my hands clasped in my lap. Yet with his head lowered, eyes covered and his hands busy, I could allow my gaze to fall to his lips, slightly parted as he concentrated on my skin.
Damn
.

“There are microscopic wires embedded in the compound. They flattened as you spread the makeup out, and hardened into a flat web of interconnected transmitters.” There was still no censure in his voice, and I was thankful for that.