Cheat the Grave (2 page)

I sighed, fingering my boa. Or I could just put a bull's-eye on my chest.

Suzanne swung a deep olive strand over her shoulders and smiled through the feathers as she led me into the throng, tossing boas left and right, and fighting for balance as the vehicle headed downtown. I watched her for a moment, wishing I could still scent emotion, though even in the dim light she glowed. She really was in love. Catching my look, she continued chatting about the scavenger's hunt. “These will help the guides we planted in the city know who to give the clues out to as well. They're customized for each person…though we're going in teams.”

And just like that my paranormal bull's-eye expanded to include Cher.

“I really need more wine,” I muttered, squinting up at the disco ball.

Magically, it appeared. Hanging out with a future princess had its benefits.

“Look, Livvy.” Cher waved from the front of the bus, where I headed, barely managing not to spill into the same man's lap. His wife glared like I'd gotten up his hopes on purpose. Meanwhile, Cher was holding up a tiny gold ring. “Arun bought body jewelry for the party. It's all from his village in India. These are clip-ons, so you can try them on before committing. But the real deal is in the back with the piercer.”

Which explained the lascivious looks I'd been getting from the guy eyeing my virgin nose. As well as that corner's intermittent screeches. “One badly timed speed bump and things could get very interesting at the back of the bus.”

Nodding absently, Cher said, “Here, this loops around your eyebrow—sexy little center diamond, huh?—and this has a fancy magnet which attaches through your nose.”

Cher kept the nose ring, so I gamely reached for the brow hoop. I squinted at the tiny designs flaring from the diamond like rays from the sun but couldn't make them all
out in the dim, flashing light. I'd been having trouble with my eyesight ever since it'd reverted to 20/20. Meanwhile, Cher lifted my shirt without asking, a faux belly ring dangling from her fingertips, but she drew back in surprise. “Oh, you already have one. That's hot.”

I glanced down ruefully. Maybe, but it hadn't been by choice. I thought about telling Cher where I'd gotten it, the story of a parallel realm called Midheaven, ruled by women who considered themselves goddesses, and fueled by the souls of those who entered there. But I didn't want to give her nightmares…or ideas. That underground world was a pocket of distended reality, like a bubble of poisonous, trapped gas. It offered a place for rogue agents to hide from whatever trouble they'd left behind in this world, but it did so at a price. It was a twisted place that twisted people in return, stripping them down, literally changing them at a cellular level.

Besides, tonight was supposed to be about safe and normal. So I wasn't going to allow in memories of my lost powers, my myriad mistakes, or other dangerous worlds.

Or of the man who'd betrayed me for one of those goddesses.

“Hunter,” I whispered into my wineglass, the name lost in the bowl and the bus's growling technothrob. Then I banished his memory like a ghost and lifted my chin, determined to do the same with my thoughts. And be
normal.

So as the rolling disco/revival got under way, I gave the pole nearest me a considering look. One foot in front of the other. That was how I'd re-embrace my humanity, my sister's life, and the sole responsibility for protecting my own. I'd forget about the Shadow and the Light soon enough…and that I'd once been both. Surely then, even the images dogging my recent dreams—of Hunter suspended amidst a star-studded sky, and wrapped in the slim, soft arms of another woman—would fade away as well.

The bus dropped the lot of us mid-downtown, and while the other partygoers scattered like frilly cockroaches in the bright lights of the Fremont Street Experience, I instinctively hunched in the night. My senses weren't what they used to be—I couldn't smell emotion, taste intent, feel violence approaching from behind—but still knew that feeling like prey meant you probably were. Besides, unlike the other mortals surrounding me, I knew what predators lay in wait in this concrete jungle.

So the bums and panhandlers resting in the cold night cavities near the spilling neon didn't bother me. They didn't seem to trouble the socialites and party kids much either. A world cruise was enough motivation to ignore both pedestrian and social ills, and had the participants moving in their Manolos. Watching a woman in a fur push the feet of a sleeping indigent off a park bench near Main Street Station so she could sit and study her map, I shook my head. I loved Suzanne…but sometimes I seriously questioned her judgment.

Meanwhile, Cher was shivering in short silver, her boa offering the only warmth, and her cute faux nose ring
winking in the retro bulbs studding the Golden Nugget. She'd refused to don a coat, saying it would ruin her club kid vibe, though she darted covetous glances at her competitor's fur as she said it. I sighed. When I'd last been part of a team, I was paired with a weapon-wielding, building-jumping superhero who could lift fifty times his body weight. Cher, on the other hand, was a mortal girl who idolized Perez Hilton and thought caustic Twitter updates were the best way to inflict pain. And in this state, she'd be helpless to resist a pashmina, forget a full frontal paranormal assault.

“One of the clues is planted at a bar,” she piped up, gazing at our clue sheet. We'd had a choice of three. Each, Suzanne had instructed, would lead us upon a different path with varying degrees of difficulty. So getting through the clues and back to the bus quickly was as much a product of fate as intelligence.

“Really?” I raised my brow ring. “A bar? In
Vegas
?”

She glanced back at the woman in the fur and bit her lip. “Hopefully their clues are just as challenging.”

Challenging? This was like looking for a specific bulb in a sea of neon. “They're making us use our brains.” I leaned against a billboard on the Nugget's brick face, searching for movement along the rooftops, while thinking it unfair to ask of a bus full of tequila-swilling boa wearers.

Cher blew a stray orange feather from her lip. “Envision the Mediterranean sprawled like a blue carpet before you.”

“I can go any time I want,” I said airily.

She cocked a hand on one slim hip. “Then think positive for my sake.”

“Sure. I'm a glass-half-full kind of girl.” Which is why I was jumping at the slightest sound.

But the Mediterranean comment caught hold. When
was
the last time I'd taken a vacation? Agents couldn't leave the city they were charged to protect, yet even before joining the troop last year, I'd rarely left Vegas. Why should I, I'd reasoned, when the world came to me? Why go—
I'd always thought with admittedly less reason—when the man I'd sought for over a decade was in this city?

But now I was an outcast, and that man was dead.

I was also so wound up the nearest slots were sending my nerves to clanking.

Straightening, I angled the map my way. The Mediterranean suddenly sounded pretty good. “It says here that the sky is our map. We have to correlate the right star systems to those above, which will give us the coordinates to our first destination.”

We craned our necks back, but it was too bright on the ground to see any stars. Good. If I never read the sky's mysteries again, it'd be too soon. Fortunately, a year spent in a troop that practically worshipped the sky meant I'd already memorized the major star patterns.

“Here, give me that,” I told Cher, holding the clue sheet eye level. The faster we did this, the faster we could get off the streets.

Squinting at the numbers again, I dug through the canvas goodie bag given to each team before we'd disembarked from the bus. In it were a flashlight, a detailed map, and the item I held up, a compass. “I'll chart it, you use the key on the map's side.”

We spent five minutes bumping brain cells before coming to an agreement on which direction to head. Man, I missed the days when I could run down the block in zero to sixty. I'd have been back before Cher could vogue.

Cher slipped the canvas bag across her chest. “The corner of Ninth and Sandstone, then.”

“I know a shortcut.” I motioned for her to follow and we headed away from the canopied light show of not-sosubliminal messages and into the weed-choked environs of urban Vegas. Unlike the Zodiac agents who'd grown up hidden from the world's view until they metamorphosed into full-fledged star signs, I wasn't gifted with sanctuary when I was young, and by the time I hit the quarter century mark—the coming-of-age for the initiates—I'd been bat
tling evil on Las Vegas's back streets for a decade. Sure, back then the demons I faced had been my own, but that hadn't made them any less formidable.

“Slum much?” Cher asked cryptically as I unerringly led her down another narrow alleyway. I turned to reassure her, but caught movement from a boarded-up convenience store behind us. My immediate impulse was to sniff at the air to scent out the cause, but that power had been drained from me along with all others. Besides, it could have been anything from floating debris to a shuffling homeless person, or nothing at all.

Immediate arrival at our destination provided distraction for us both. A neon sign heralded the spot, though parts of its tubing were burnt out and the remaining red glow muted by what looked like centuries of caked dirt. Yet the service it advertised was clear.

“A psychic,” I said, feeling my gut sink. Anything having to do with astrology bumped too closely for my liking against the World that Could Not Be Named.

“Smells like cat pee,” Cher said, bringing me out of my momentary reverie.

“We can hope it's a cat, anyway,” I muttered, taking the lead. I had no weapon beyond my sharp tongue, but it was still natural for me to protect any nearby mortal. Old habits died hard.

Yeah, and sometimes they take you with them.

Climbing a narrow stairwell, we reached what in earlier, cleaner, more hopeful times might have been called a mother-in-law apartment. Right now it struggled to be a garret. I wouldn't have touched the walls even were I still impervious to disease, and Cher stayed to the stairwell's center, like the building was contagious. The thin hallway carpeting was torn and stained, and only one of four bald bulbs worked, but revealed a landing with a peeling green door dumped opposite us like an afterthought. Very bad feng shui. A no-longer-tufted stool slumped haphazardly next to it, bearing some long-dead plant in a shattered pot.
Since Cher had shrunk into the landing's center, boa damn near tucked between her legs, I sighed, folded my knuckles in the hem of my wrap, and knocked on the door.

Nothing.

Shrugging, I turned to find Cher already angling back down the staircase. She cringed sheepishly. “I don't think this is it.”

“I bet they have butler service on that yacht.”

Reluctantly, she rejoined my side.

“Let's look at the map again.” We each took one side so we could cover our noses. The smell of urine was nauseating.

“This has to be it,” she finally agreed, reluctance oozing from behind her palm. “But if this lady were a real psychic, wouldn't she know we were coming?”

Good point. I looked around, gaze catching on a shadowed alcove where too much of nothing lingered. “Hey, Cher. Swing the flashlight over there, will you?”

She did, and a stout, square shape took form. Not a guide, no. But not another dead plant either.

Cher inched closer. “What is it?”

“A wooden chest.” It was obviously aged, but unlike the rest of this place, it wasn't battered. A closer look revealed a black silk lining between glossy if worn slats…something easily ripped, though this was pristine.

“Looks like a pirate's chest,” Cher commented, and I pursed my lips. One with looping whorls and intricate designs that held centuries of meaning.

“Got that disposable camera they gave out on the bus?”

Cher's face turned into a shadowed amalgam of confusion and surprise. It looked distorted on the dim landing. “Why?”

Because the chest was too heavy to pick up and take with us, because doing so would be considered stealing…but also because I recognized some of those dark symbols. “It looks antique. I might want to get one like it.”

“Honey, it looks satanic.” She snapped off a quick shot.
“You might want to get some holy water.”

It
was
foreboding. And if I had to open it, I'd prefer a little distance between me and whatever was beneath that lid. “Maybe we can use that broken broomstick to open it up.” But the stick I'd spotted was as filthy as the rest of this place …

Catching myself mid-thought, I shook my head. I didn't use to be so precious about things.

“Here, give me the map.”

Cher's mouth quirked in distaste as I wrapped it around the broom's splintered handle. “We'll have to sterilize it.”

“Fine. Go boil some water. I'll just work on this latch.”

Cher—savvy to sarcasm—stayed put, but after a few attempts I gave up on poking the thing with a blunt object and resigned myself to putting my opposable thumbs to good use. Fingers sinking into the silky lining, I lifted the lid. The hinges creaked.

Something moved inside.

“Shoot it!” I told Cher, jerking back, and I didn't mean with the camera. Cher just screamed like she was at a Madonna concert. A fat gray rat crawled from the chest and scurried away with the whip of a long tail. Shuddering, I caught my breath and, because we weren't already dead, picked up the flashlight Cher had dropped. Angling the beam back into the chest, I gasped, and tasted sweet victory despite the dank, rotting hallway. Two brightly plumed masks lay wrapped in clear plastic. “Look. Someone has thoughtfully provided waterless hand wash as well.”

“I call dibs on the green one,” Cher said, reaching in, revived by the sight of crystals and plumes. “That's totally my color.”

And pink was Olivia's. I winced as Cher unwrapped it and handed it to me. Not exactly the sort of mask I was accustomed to in my role as a twenty-first century superhero. And just what I needed, I thought wryly. More feathers.

“So where's the guide to give us our next clue?” That was the point of the identifying boas, right? I searched the
chest for an envelope, letting the flashlight beam fall over every corner, but there was nothing else. Yet when it centered on the open lid, I jerked back.

“What?” Cher asked, feeling me startle. She spotted the object strapped to the lid and bent for a closer look.

It didn't stir my blood as it would have a handful of weeks earlier, but I recognized the item instantly. A conduit was a weapon that could not only kill humans, but
super
humans—both Shadow and Light. This one was a silver dagger the length of my forearm, though the sole light caught on a depressed hinge. A trident, then, with two more lethal blades that winged out at a thumb's twitch.

Cher reached for it. There was only one thing to do.

“Cockroach!” I yelled so loudly my voice ping-ponged down the stairwell.

She fled down the stairs so quickly she could have medaled.

I waited until I heard her feet hit the landing, then leaned forward. Someone from my other life had clearly infiltrated Suzanne's scavenger hunt, maybe even the same someone who'd sent the warning not to go out. Seeing that they'd prepared for the possibility anyway, they also obviously knew me well.

Though my palm itched to hold a conduit again, I resisted. Mine had been stripped from me when I was turned out from the troop. This owner's weapon was probably long gone, as the silver was tarnished and clearly ancient, and I wondered briefly if he or she had been Shadow or Light. Then I recalled the sense of being watched outside, slapped my palm against the chest, and slammed the lid shut. “Fuck it.”

I whirled, rapping on the door so hard my knuckles would bruise.

Nothing happened, though Cher did call up the staircase. “Livvy?”

“Open up, you rat-fuck bastard,” I muttered under my breath, and the door ricocheted against the interior wall
like a giant mousetrap. A clump of plaster fell from the ceiling, and I choked in the ensuing dust, covering my face with the mask and ducking at the same time. A figure swayed like a huge, opaque ghost in front of me, and I wished for the dagger behind me. When that figure slipped into the meager light, I wished for two.

It was a man, bald-headed, but with a black wiry beard twisted and forked into two sharp points. He stood barefoot and in tattered jeans, though his chest was bare. I began counting his ribs until I realized that, no, I was seeing his every
bone
—rib cage, chest, clavicles, shoulders and sockets, forearms and fingers. Their outlines sat tattooed atop his skin, fully inked, like his body had reversed its layering.

Yet his fingertips were the eeriest, nails an unnatural extension of all that bone, twining in and out of one another for a good foot each, effectively making his hands useless. Shellacked a shiny black, they matched his beard and, for some reason, reminded me of the dead plant lying next to the door.

“Yes?” he asked, like he expected me to offer him a magazine subscription.

“I want you to leave me alone.”

“You knocked on my door.”

“I mean all of you!” I hissed, and his smile spread like black syrup. “I gave everything I had to the world of Light and Shadow, and I want no part of it anymore. Leave me and my friends alone. Got it?”

“You should at least take the trident.” His voice was a liquid warble, and though his eyes were sunken, his attention was locked on me. Just like the rest of that damned world.