The Taste of Night (33 page)

“What about the rest of them?” I asked, glancing toward the twins, who regarded me warily from behind cupped hands, and Sebastian—the little bastard—who’d smirked in my direction, making a point to display his copy of the latest Shadow manual. Only Jasmine looked happy to see me.

“Oh, them?” Carl said, gesturing back into the store. “Yeah. They totally blame you.”

I sighed, thanked him, and left.

There was no next step, no place to go that was forward, and so I took a step back, and returned to canvassing Vegas’s empty streets as I always did when I needed to think. And somehow I found myself in that same filthy alley I’d chased a human predator into the night I killed Liam. It seemed like years ago, not weeks, that Regan had set me up, but nothing had changed here. I headed past broken-down boxes and splintered crates, neither sensing nor smelling anything out of the ordinary…until I did.

He was slumped beneath a pile of broken crates, the clothes on his chest and the wood above him charred black with what appeared to be someone’s failed attempt to burn the entire mess. Not that the man would have minded. Even with bloat and rot distending his face, and the maggots wriggling in his eye sockets to make the corpse look possessed, I could see the burn marks around his mouth. If I were inclined to investigate further—which I wasn’t—I was sure I’d find his private parts equally seared by disease. He’d been dead before someone left him to this alley grave, tossed here like the rest of the refuse, the halfhearted attempt to burn his remains only dehumanizing him further.

I looked at the shredded skin and diseased flesh and moldering bloat that used to be a human, and my head swam with the same unhinged fury that’d had me driving a stiletto up between Joaquin’s thighs. Those fucking Shadows had decided to play God, and someone who’d once cradled dreams was now splayed on the ground like he’d never mattered.

And someone else, who’d tried to protect me in what was
probably the first bold and chivalrous act in his life, was now captive to Joaquin; a fate, I could attest, that was even more terrifying than this.

And a third someone—young, hopeful, and vibrant—had died while tasting what had probably been her first kiss, the one that should have been the sweetest. Instead it had taken her life before it’d truly begun.

All this destruction, and here I was, skulking in the alleys of
my
ravaged city, feeling ashamed of what
I
had done? While I was caught in limbo, neither belonging in the world I’d grown up in, nor yet the heroine the manuals prophesied I was to be, Joaquin and Regan and the Tulpa were stamping out lives for no other reason than to make a point.
You can’t protect them all. You can’t even protect yourself
.

My head was suddenly buzzing as I tasted decay, the
darkness
on the stifled alley air, playing the part
they’d
chosen for me. I punched the wall beside me, sending shards of plaster and brick crumbling to the ground.
Pull this string, and the Archer acts this way.
It was stupid, fruitless, but I punched again.
Pull this one, and she’ll jump as you please
. They were able to do this—not just with me, but with all the agents of Light—because we held fast to a moral code that said killing was wrong, protecting human life was our highest duty, and we did it on a level playing field. But we weren’t even playing the same game. And that’s all it was to the Shadows.

I closed my eyes, let the rot of another human I’d failed to protect seep into my pores, and extinguished the Light inside me like a snuffed-out taper. I let all the anger and pain and helplessness I’d been feeling since Marlo’s death pour out of me in a piercing shriek, a cry so raw the rats went scurrying back into hiding. The wind ceased to breathe. Shadows arched over me.

Strings snapped inside me.

How dare they make me feel like I had to hide—any of them! How dare they treat me like a rogue agent! And how dare I think the only solace I could find would be in these
shadowy alleys, like I should be ashamed…or at least more ashamed than all those who chose not to act. Who knowingly put themselves before the innocents. All this time Warren had insinuated—and I’d believed—that I’d have to choose one side over the other, I thought, breathing hard. When really, all I needed to do was
be.

I thought about the Tulpa, how only after he’d cut the ties between himself and his creator had he truly come into his own power. I had that ability inside me. I had self-will. And now that my ties had been cut with the troop, I had a place to start.

And so, as I slipped from the alley, I walked off the map I was supposed to follow, and strode into a void as vast and unknowable as the midnight desert. A cursed battlefield it might be, but I was done warring with myself.

And, I thought, striding down the center of the abandoned street, I was no longer anyone’s puppet.

It was the last place I should have gone, a move so bold I was stupid to even consider it. And the first thing I noticed once inside the cool, dark enclave of Olivia’s apartment was Luna’s absence. She wasn’t in any of her usual spots; beneath the couch, behind the fake ficus I’d bought to replace the real one I’d killed, or curled up on a dining room chair waiting to pounce on my feet as I walked by. I stuck my head in the laundry room on the way to my bedroom, knowing her penchant for lounging on clean clothes—and mine for leaving them there—but there was nothing.

“Come on, Luna,” I said, peering in the closet before dropping to my knees to peer beneath the bed skirt. There was no sign of struggle, no foreign scent marring the space, and I knew a Shadow couldn’t have entered without Luna ripping them to shreds, so I decided she was probably just making me pay for leaving her under the neighbor’s care for so long. That’s why it took a moment before I realized the shoes I saw pointing my way from the other side of the footboard belonged to a man…and they were on someone’s feet.

I stood and swung at the same time. There was a blur as
the man dodged my blow and my follow-up roundhouse kick, and I whirled, ready, to find two pairs of sharp eyes trained on me. Only one pair was filled with amusement, and it wasn’t Luna’s.

“I take it this is Luna,” Hunter said, stroking the spiky fur to calm the cat until she leaned against him. Her eyes closed, and a deep purr resonated like distant thunder in the dim room.

“You’re an asshole,” I told him, relaxing.

He kissed Luna on her little egg head. “You shouldn’t let her talk to you that way.” The cat purred louder.

I narrowed my eyes. “What are you doing here?”

“Waiting,” he said, leaning against the dresser. He looked odd propped up against the frilly knickknacks and toiletries littering the vanity—a dark smudge against a sea of white and pink. “By the way, you’re out of milk.”

“Waiting for me?” I asked, mimicking the pose, minus the cat, on the four-poster bed.

He shrugged. “For you, for a Shadow to stop by and try to kill you. For anyone. Anything.” He bent and gently dropped Luna on the bed, where she immediately began grooming herself. When he lifted his gaze back to mine, the answer was plain on his face.

I put a hand to my mouth to withhold the gasp. “They kicked you out, too.”

“No,” he answered, with a quick jerk of his head. “I left voluntarily.”

“But why?”
Please don’t say it was for me
, I thought silently. Not when it was the only home he’d ever known. The place he loved above all others. “They’re the ones infected.”

“But I’m the one who got Marlo killed.”

“Unknowingly.”

“Well, you know Warren. Even if he didn’t say it…”

He blamed Hunter. Anger rose in me at that. Mr. Black and White. Mr. Right or Wrong. Mr. Light or Shadow, and nothing in between. “Yeah,” I finally said on a sigh. “I know Warren.”

Hunter began brushing Luna’s hair from his clothing, careful not to look at me as he spoke. “Have I ever told you why I don’t drink?” he said abruptly.

I quirked a brow. I’d seen him intoxicated twice in the past week. He looked up as my silence lengthened, read the thoughts on my face, and chuckled darkly. “Before all this, I mean. Why I haven’t allowed myself a drink in almost ten years?”

I shook my head. Nobody’d told me, and I couldn’t imagine what his not drinking had to do with anything now.

“You should know,” he mumbled, then swallowed hard as he ate up the distance between us. His hands were shoved in his pockets, like he didn’t know what to do with them, and he shifted from one foot to the other, a nervous gesture for Hunter Lorenzo. “It would all make a lot more sense if you knew.”

Something making sense. That would be new. I gestured to the bed, and when he sat—sinking a good few inches into the downy comforter—I took a seat on the white bench at the bed’s footboard. It was both firmer and closer to the door. Hunter, of course, knew what I was doing, and he let me, which went a long way to helping me relax further.

“Okay,” I said, wrapping my arms around one up-drawn knee. “So why don’t you drink?”

“Because whiskey nearly killed me a decade ago.”

I drew back, startled, and Hunter let out a humorless laugh, pulling his ankle up to cross his knee, looking large and dangerous and tough, even surrounded by eyelet and lace. “Well, it wasn’t just the whiskey,” he said, and told me the story.

He’d just come off a mission, rescuing a commuter airliner from the Shadows, who’d hijacked it and were flying it right over Nellis air base. It was going to be shot down in seconds, as close as he’d ever come to being killed, and he said he’d never felt the passing of time so acutely. I could imagine. Agents couldn’t be killed by mortal weapons, but if you happened to be blown to smithereens? I shuddered at
the thought. Even if he’d lived, it’d take some doing to put those pieces back together again.

“Anyway,” he said, shaking his head, “chalk another one up for the agents of Light. But I was ready for a little vacation after that, which I took as soon as I got back.”

In the form of a shot glass and a bottle.

He sighed at the memory, and when he spoke, it almost sounded apologetic. “See, I’m not like Warren. I don’t believe in a greater cause, or in the troop as an institution. I believe in people. Individuals.” He looked at me, and I knew that’s why he had tested me so greatly in the beginning, why he’d remained on my side since I’d proven myself to him, and why he kissed me even after I revealed the darkness living in my core. He knew my Shadow side and he still believed in
me.
“There has to be a deeper involvement for me. I…feel more if it’s personal. I feel alive.” He snorted. “And if there was anything I needed to feel that night, it was alive.”

So when the raven-haired siren with the lush lips and the body that wouldn’t quit asked if she could join him, he welcomed the company, ordered another shot glass, and drove away the Reaper with some hard-core XXX flirting.

“In retrospect, I knew something was wrong,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck, wincing. “I scented deceit on her, but didn’t want to admit it. I tasted guile in her kiss, a smoky heaviness that found harbor inside me. You possess the same flavor, though not as strong. I recognized it when we shared the aureole.”

I licked my lips self-consciously, and he hesitated, but I motioned for him to go on. If he really believed in individuals—in me—then I didn’t have to apologize for who and what I was. So, he continued, even though his instincts told him something was off, he’d ignored them and took the woman home. He shook his head thoughtfully. “I don’t know how I woke up when I did, but she was straddling me, naked but for a tomahawk bowing toward my heart. I killed her in the bed that still smelled like our lovemaking.”

I was about to say,
So?
when he cut me off with a shake of his head.

“I’d…been with her only minutes earlier. I know the alcohol was clouding my senses, but it also slowed every moment so that her death seemed to take years, not minutes. So even as her last breath rattled in her chest I was still seeing her in a lover’s light. If I let myself, I can see her even now.”

And he looked at me like he hoped I might understand that.

What I understood was that in telling me this he wasn’t only explaining why he didn’t drink, but that he knew how I could allow a Shadow to live. That even those of us who should know better sometimes mistook them for human.

“What was her name?” I asked softly.

“The Shadow woman who so ruthlessly seduced me?” he said, but the teasing note couldn’t mask his shame. I nodded. He shrugged self-consciously. “It doesn’t matter. She’s gone.” And he stood, turned his back on me, and headed out the room. Topic closed.

I was about to pursue it anyway when I noticed something else not quite right. “Oh, my God.”

“What?” Hunter was back in the room in a shot. I’d probably injected more alarm in my words than necessary, but as I crossed to Olivia’s desk, I said it again. Louder.

“The computer’s missing.”

“What computer?” Hunter turned, eyes falling on the empty desk.

“Exactly,” I said, whirling on him. “You haven’t left the apartment in three days?”

“I’ve been here the whole time.”

So before that…not that it narrowed things down much. I’d been gone from the apartment for almost three weeks. Yet Luna wouldn’t have let a Shadow just waltz in here and walk out with Olivia’s computer. Not without putting up a fight, and there was no sign of struggle, nor—I confirmed—had there been when Hunter arrived to make himself at home. Still, this didn’t sit right. A random break-in at a
guarded, high-rise condo…and nobody noticed someone leaving with a desktop computer they hadn’t walked in with?

“I’ll have to report it,” I said, mostly talking to myself. “Maybe they’ll let me see the building’s security tapes.”

“You think it’s a lead.” He stated it as a fact, and I turned back to face him.

“It’s something.” I didn’t add it was all I had to go on. He could probably see that for himself.

“Let me help,” he said, lifting his chin.

I didn’t have to say anything. He knew my thoughts. What about the second sign of the Zodiac? What about Marlo’s death, still lying between us like an unbreachable river? Even the most understanding guy in the world, and Hunter certainly wasn’t that, couldn’t erase all that.

“It wasn’t fair to let you take the blame for everything that happened.” His voice, steady now, had lost the thickness it’d possessed while relaying the past. “I kissed you too, but I was in shock back at the sanctuary, and before that I was just acting like a hormone-crazed teen. Chasing you into that maze. Pouting when you said no that night in my room. Kissing another girl just to make you jealous.” He shook his head, sighing with the movement. It was a look he usually reserved for Felix, and I would have smiled but for his next words. “Marlo died for no good reason, and I want to right that. I want to make it right.”

“So…coworkers?” Skepticism coated each syllable, as much for myself as for him. Was that possible? “Nothing else?”

“Scout’s honor.”

“You were never a scout,” I muttered.

“Okay, but I swear it. You don’t want me, and that’s okay—”

“It’s not that, it’s just—” He silenced me with a finger to my lips, looking down at me from his great height, and my voice died away with the touch. It was gentle, the scent of him warm and spicy on my lips, but it was firm too.

“It’s okay,” he said, lifting his finger away. “Besides, I was getting tired of being cooped up in that oversized shoe anyway.”

Now he was talking. “All right,” I said, like I had any other option. But my relief was evident in my smile.

He smiled back, cracked his knuckles, one fist, then the other. “So where do we start?”

“Well, I thought someone might show up here, but if you’ve already been here…” I trailed off, looking around.

“Three days, yeah,” he said, sighing. “Besides, if we were just going to sit around and wait we might as well be back at the boneyard. I called work, said I’d reconsidered quitting my job. They told me to come in tonight for the swing shift. Apparently they’re short-staffed at the moment.”

“I can imagine,” I said, nodding. “So you go back to investigating things from inside Valhalla. We need to track down that lab again, see if the antibody to this thing is still on property.”

“That’s easy enough. I’ll make an excuse to patrol the building. If that doesn’t work I’ll find a portal somewhere—they’re constantly moving, though. It might take a couple of days.”

“Well, everything in its time,” I said, half to myself. “Meanwhile I need to figure out who broke in here and why.”

“My guess is they wanted the computer,” Hunter said, earning a steely look from over my shoulder. He grinned in reply. It looked wolfish—and I fucking loved wolves—but if he could make an honest effort at sexual restraint, so could I. “What was on it, anyway?”

Every secret Olivia ever had, I wanted to say. The passwords and logs detailing her cyber life, the information she’d collected in folders, journals, notes…everything about her that wasn’t girly and pink and expected.
Something worth knowing
, I thought, looking around at the rest of the room, as pristine and untouched as the day I left it.

“I don’t know,” I told him, before bending down and scooping up the handbag I’d let fall beside the bed when he’d appeared. I took out the disks Cher had given me weeks ago, and tapped them against my other palm. “But I’m going to find out.”