The Taste of Night (25 page)

“That’s not true,” I said, but my voice was barely a whisper, like I had no conviction left inside me. Like I didn’t even know who I was anymore. Or had never known myself at all. Oh, God…

“It is.” He smiled serenely and rocked into me again. “That’s why you’re here now. You
need
to feel the pain because beneath all this peroxide and silicone and shit,” he said, flipping a blond curl from my shoulder with disgust, “pain forces you to remember who you really are. It lets you know why you exist, why you wake every dawn and retire each dusk. I anchor you to this existence, Joanna. I give your days meaning and purpose.”

I tried to shake my head, but the bindings held me fast, and the invisible ones—the ones he was talking about—held my tongue. Don’t let him be right, I pleaded silently. I
don’t
see myself as a victim. I never have.

Had I?

“When I hurt you, Joanna,” he said, his soft whisper at odds with the hand that had lifted to twist my nipple between ironclad fingers, “when you think of me hurting you, it puts you in your place beneath me…and that, my dear, is where you feel most safe.”

I cried out, unable to stop myself, eyes tearing with the pain of both his actions and his words, and cried out again when I realized I was pissed at myself for doing so. Like it was my fault, and the blame for his actions lay solely with me. And anything was better than that. So I wished for unconsciousness, I wished for death…I wished, as he wanted, that I’d never survived this the first time.

Those wishes rose like noxious fumes escaping the earth…only they’d been stewing deep inside my core all these years, rich, like emotional deposits lain down one atop the other, waiting for the right person to come along and mine the vein.

This, I suddenly knew, was the real me. Me, giving Joaquin exactly what he wanted.

As he scented it all, his throaty laugh rose in tandem with my voice, and he twisted harder, his amusement reverberating through his body, joy in every noxious breath.

I shut my eyes, the only movement I had left to me, and there was a gusting boom, like a cannon going off. I looked up to find spiders and worms and vermin and rats and reptiles all slamming to the floor in a explosion of dust, followed by five bodies dropping to the ground like precision-guided bombs, chests glowing like beacons.

Goddamn, I thought, choking on a cry of relief as Joaquin’s weight disappeared. I loved having superhero friends.

Joaquin made the only offensive move he could, lunging
for my conduit still lying on the pine table. Hunter’s whip flicked out, the tail knocking the conduit from reach, sending a stinging barb into the soft tissue of Joaquin’s palm. He yelled in rage and pain, and I was gratified to see his glyph now puffing away like a teepee’s smoke hole. Hunter yanked back on his whip, but the barb had only caught the fleshy part of Joaquin’s hand, no bone, and it ripped away, freeing Joaquin again.

Vanessa rolled beneath the table, flicking her steel fan open as she came to her knees, the barbed claws on the end swiping through the air at Joaquin’s ankles. He jumped, avoiding the strike, but she caught him on his way down, as she lifted to a crouch, while he simultaneously darted from the path of Felix’s double-edged boomerang. Joaquin yelped as one of his Achilles tendons was torn, and I did too, as Felix’s boomerang came precariously close to shearing my skull on its return flight.

“Watch it!” I yelled, struggling against my ropes. Felix scowled, leaped on an ornate credenza, and came up behind me.

“Hold still,” he said, and with a flick of his wrist cut through the ropes at my neck with the boomerang, before working his way down. I wriggled free, bindings falling from me to mingle with the reptiles now slithering across the floor, and Warren handed me my conduit as I stood. I cocked it, looking for Joaquin.

“Where’d he go?”

“That way,” Vanessa said, pointing in the direction of the reference room. I bolted forward, though the others had already beaten me there, skidding to a halt before a thick steel door. The black curtain had been rent aside.

“No!” I pushed past them all, pounding on the door, then pushing against it with my good shoulder. I wasn’t going to lose him now.
I wasn’t going to let him get away with saying, or making me feel, all those things
. “No!”

“Shit!” I heard Vanessa say.

“We gotta go!”

“Olivia!” Warren yanked at me, as I continued to pound at the door. “The ceiling’s caving in!”

I looked up to see sun streaking in through the crumbling hillside, then back at the door, where I knew Joaquin was breathing and alive and safe on the other side.

“No,” I whispered, choking on dust-filled air, as I raised my conduit and fired into the steel door. I’d rather die than let him live. An arm curled around mine and yanked me back, causing a misfire, but my indignation was cut short by a solid crack against my skull. My vision fled immediately, and I felt myself falling as if in slow motion. A set of arms curled about me, softening my landing, then everything drowned in black.

I wasn’t awake. I was floating in memory, drifting along echoes of forgotten sound. Like the emotions Joaquin had laid bare, I was buried deep in my past, and even though I recognized it as a dream, I felt and saw and smelled all the things that’d assailed me after that first attack. And like the first time, I couldn’t escape any of it.

Beeps and readings from complicated machinery surrounded me, and voices intermittently spewed from an intercom in the hall with words I’d long stopped hearing. I was lying on a bed, body aching because I’d been there for weeks. I looked down, past crisp white sheets, and tried to count on my fingers just how long I’d been in the hospital. But I couldn’t concentrate. I was distracted by the brace on my right hand, holding my fingers straight and aligned, like the Boy Scouts’ three-fingered salute. My eyes wandered, drawn to the blackened nail beds poking from beneath the dingy gauze, where the jagged fingernails had only now begun to lengthen, finally long enough to cover the tender flesh beneath. Proof that I was healing. That my body was fighting even as I remained not moving, not speaking, trying not even to think.

I wriggled my fingers, then tentatively twisted my wrist when that provoked no real pang or ache. I lifted my entire arm shoulder height, and frowned when there was no smarting response. I repeated the action with my other arm, the one sealed tightly in a cast. There. A sliver of white-hot pain shot through me, and I dropped it again, letting the ache wash over me, ringing through my core before it ebbed and faded away. I closed my eyes, and rested.

When I opened them again, it was dark. The streetlights outside my window had come on, and I could see the headlights of passing cars as they sped down Flamingo Road, each in a hurry to reach a separate destination, all unknown to me. All unimportant.

What time was it? I wondered, my mouth dry as sandpaper. For that matter, what day was it? I glanced at the wall across from me with a giant number twenty-five emblazoned, black on white. That couldn’t be right. That meant it’d been only one day. Twenty-four hours since the doctor had sat next to my bedside, face solemn and concerned, voice soothing and low, tanned hands patting my own as he told me I wasn’t merely healing. I was growing life.

But he was wrong. They were all wrong. Because I was broken. You couldn’t go five inches up or down my body without running into something that was fractured, shattered, or bruised. Me and Humpty Dumpty, I thought, biting my lip till it bled. Never to be put back together again.

I licked the blood away, surprised at the metallic taste, then frowned as I thought,
That’s not right
. Bleeding means the vessels were working, and the heart was pumping, doing its job like nothing ever happened, like it hadn’t been stomped on and bruised and stopped. So why did the fucker keep on ticking? I felt my betraying heart skip a beat, before it started slamming against my chest, faster and harder with each progressive beat, and my head grew dizzy and light. I opened my mouth to suck in a lungful of air—because that’s all I had left, one lung—and still the panic attack snuck up
on me, an A-bomb detonating right in the middle of my chest.

I wish.

I swallowed hard and tried to slow my breathing, ignoring the button beside me that would call the nurse who would provide the drugs that would numb me to the world. I fumbled for the remote, pushing it behind me, deep beneath the extra pillows I’d been given, before fishing out another hidden treasure. My own call button. My own form of medicinal relief. I was my own nurse.

The razor had come from the guy in the bed next to me. They’d let him shave before he left the hospital, and he’d tossed it in the bin between our beds, and left without saying good-bye. The adventure from my bed to the trash can three feet away had been my first since fleeing across the desert night, and I’d almost ruined it by sitting up too fast. I passed out and flipped the wrong way on my bed, but luckily the nurses had been in the middle of a shift change, and never noticed a thing.

Now I curled my fingers around the razor I’d nicknamed Tonto after the Lone Ranger’s loyal sidekick, and lifted the bedsheets to reveal the pale, freckled length of my good thigh. The marks from the day before were already scabbed, healing. And that just wouldn’t do.

“You’ll get better, Joanna,” my mother had said, smoothing her hand over my face, drying my tears after the doctor had gone away. “You’ll see. You’re going to heal, the pain will stop, and you’ll go on to live a happy, full life. I promise you. You will survive this.”

I sliced, once, twice, and her voice receded. She finally shut up. I shut her up. I shut the doctor up. And the screams and cries in my head, the ones that woke me up in a cold sweat each night, the ones that caused these sudden attacks of panic, finally shut up, too.

I sliced again, watching the blood well, a thin black line in the dim light. Cars continued to race by outside, but it didn’t matter where they were headed. My thighs burned.
The pain anchored me. It gave my life in this bed meaning and purpose.

When I was in pain, I felt safe.

I came to in a place very similar to the one I’d left in my dreams. Curled on my side, I first saw the machines, all turned off and silent in the corner as there was no real emergency here. Not on the surface anyway.

“He got away, didn’t he?”

I didn’t turn or look around, but I knew someone was there. I could smell them in the corner. I inhaled deeply and caught something close to brewer’s yeast and Axe after-shave. Felix.

“He did. Who’s Tonto?”

I did turn my head at that. “What?”

“You were talking in your sleep. Who’s Tonto?”

I dropped my head back on my hands, facing the wall again. “An old friend,” I whispered, and touched the bandage on my left arm, wondering, as a reassuring flash of pain shot through me, what else I’d said. “How’d you find me?”

“Your glyph,” he said, coming around the side of the bed so I could see him. He looked odd without a smile touching his face or eyes. I looked away, touching my chest. The ache was gone now, the fire doused, but the tenderness was still there. “Light finds Light.”

“A tracking device?” I asked, lifting my head.

Felix mistook my awe for annoyance, and crossed his arms over his chest. “You’re lucky Joaquin likes to keep his victims conscious while he toys with them. If you’d been unconscious, or dead, it would’ve been impossible to locate you down there.”

Because the glyph would have gone dead as well.

I turned away from his accusing eyes and sat up, realizing I was in the same room I’d recovered in after Micah had turned me into Olivia. It was a hospital just outside Vegas that served as the troop’s cover for medical emergencies and recovery. Since it was after dawn—both too
late and too early to return to the sanctuary—I gathered we were biding our time until the next crossing.

I knew why Felix was here, of course, just as I knew someone else was stationed outside the door. The rest had probably gathered in one of the conference rooms to discuss me, and while it rubbed to be the topic of conversation again, they had just collectively saved my life. Besides, the thought that I’d failed them all once again shamed me, adding to the misery brought on by my capture. And my dream.

So instead I turned my thoughts to Felix’s words, how he thought me lucky to have been conscious while under Joaquin’s thumb.
Toyed
was such a benign word for what he’d done. He’d revived shattered memories knowing that’s what had driven me all these years, through my young adulthood, into superherodom, and ultimately into that dank and infested hillside. Just the way he’d wanted, I thought, sighing. Just as he’d intended.

“Why do you have to make it so hard on yourself?” Felix asked, and I drew my gaze up to his in surprise, then found I couldn’t hold it, the sympathy in his eyes too much to bear. I turned away, but knew as soon as he moved to my side, his breath stirring my rumpled hair, his body warming my bare shoulder as if his hand were hovering just there. I curled back up on the bed and closed my eyes, a sigh lifting from behind me as I did it. “Every time you act alone you make it harder to trust you. It’s like you go out of your way to remind us that you’re not really Olivia Archer…”

That I was someone they really didn’t know.

“And still we help you. It’d be nice, for a change, if you’d do the same.”

But I couldn’t even help myself.

Felix sighed, as if I’d spoken aloud. “You can start by working with us, as a team. That’s what a troop is, you know.” He hesitated—I heard the catch in his voice—but plunged ahead when I remained unmoving. “You want so badly to exact your revenge that you’re going to get us all killed.”

I half whirled at that. “You didn’t have to come after me!”

Felix’s eyes narrowed as he began shaking his head. “Haven’t you heard a word I said? Yes, we did.”

Because we were a troop. I swallowed hard, but couldn’t form a reply, and when he realized there’d be no tantrum or argument, he huffed and turned his back on me, probably thinking me a lost cause.