Cheat the Grave (4 page)

“You should damned well thank your stars that I did.”

I didn't thank the stars for shit anymore. “Yeah. I'm always thankful when I get knocked out, tied up, and tortured with ring clamps.”

He finally turned. The light even made him look marginally amused. “You could be dead.”

“I'm sure it's on your to-do list.”

He shook his head, features sunken beneath his wide-brimmed hat. “Nope. Mackie's the one lookin' to settle up with you.”

Mackie.
The name alone sent a shiver crisscrossing my spine. Also known as Sleepy Mac for his ability to fall into a comalike state to keep his energy from being drained by the women of Midheaven. A reported member of the Nez Perce tribe, he was the world's oldest living agent. I didn't know how he'd found his way into Nevada, or even if he'd started out as Light or Shadow, but I did know you didn't get to be as old as he was by being merciful. “I thought I'd imagined him busting through the bus's rooftop.”

But I remembered the skeletal face clearly. I'd seen the leathery visage in recurring nightmares, the screaming mouth a sharp whir in my mind, the deadened gaze that could burn holes of decay in my body with a mere glance.

“Carving through,” Tripp corrected, and shifted to reveal what he'd been working on. Himself. He'd been using a hand torch to cauterize a wound already festering with pus. He gestured with it, unnecessarily adding, “With his magic blade.”

And when an agent of the Zodiac said “magic” like it was a special thing, it was worth fearing. Mackie reportedly stored the last bit of his soul—the small part Midheaven hadn't drained away—in his knife's blade. He kept it protected there, always on his person, and it did his will almost independently of him. That was why Tripp wasn't healing.

“What the fuck is Mackie doing outside of Midheaven? Who unlocked the entrance?” Someone who wanted me dead?

And why hadn't
that
list gotten any shorter?

Tripp resettled his hat on his head. “I thought it might have been you.”

I shook my head.

Tripp shrugged. “Well, I didn't waste time askin'. I saw Mackie go through the lantern on that side of the veil and waited till I was sure he was gone 'fore diving out myself.”

The pagoda lanterns were the exit on Midheaven's side, while a pinched taper buried in Vegas's underground sewer system marked this side. When the flame was extinguished, an agent's body was wrapped in a solid wall of smoke, ferrying them to the other world. But even Mackie couldn't have exited without someone removing the lock that secured the entrance on this side. And while entering Midheaven would still cost an agent one-third of their soul—the price of a round-trip ticket to another world, and no wonder there was no great rush—exiting meant freedom.

But who would allow that?

I bit my lip. “No one else got out?”

“You know how it is over there. No one even tried.”

Hunter hadn't tried.

I frowned, but stopped following the thought when I realized Tripp was watching me closely.

“So how'd you find me?” I asked, clearing my throat.

Tripp's shrug allowed it hadn't been easy. Only true identities were revealed in Midheaven. I was Joanna Archer over there, my appearance reflecting the old me—muscular limbs on a slim frame, black bob and dark, un-amused eyes—rather than this bubble gum, Barbie Doll packaging.

“I didn't,” he finally admitted, lighting a strange little cigarette. He blew out the smoke, and though yards away, it choked my pores. I shook against my bindings, which seemed to amuse Tripp. “Mackie tracked you and I tracked him. After eighteen years, I could pinpoint that mean fucker anywhere. His power tastes black.”

I couldn't help it. The opening was too great and inviting, and though I was all trussed up, Tripp had forgotten the gag. “And what did the power you stole from me taste like?”

I was referring to the chips I'd lost to him over a game of soul poker in Midheaven—two odd triangular symbols, their meaning still unknown to me. Not that it mattered much now.

Spitting a stray bit of tar from his tongue, he scoffed. “I won it from you.”

“Then traded it away.” For some alone time with a woman.

“Tell me you blame me.” And he said it so defiantly I really wanted to. But I couldn't. Ruthless barter was the way of that world. Come to think of it, it was the way of this one. “That's what I thought. And now that that's settled…you're going to help me.”

“Why, Harlan Tripp,” I said, in my sweetest southern drawl, “why on earth would I deign to assist the likes of you?”

No amusement this time. He leaned forward, still seated, but far closer than I ever wanted him. In a voice rumbling like a far-off streetcar, he whispered, “Because I know who you are. Your father killed my entire family, outlawed me, and sent me on the lam. The only thing that kept me going in that seventh level of hell was the thought of killing him, his sycophants, and everyone else who done me wrong.”

I lay silent for a long moment, trying to scent the heat of his bitter fury, and feeling only the warmth of that strange cigarette's smoke. If I could move I would have waved it away, though I had a feeling it would cling to my hands with its deceptive warmth.

“Tripp,” I finally said, licking dry lips. “You and I are not on the same side, got it? Never have been, never will be.”

I could appreciate the idea of a world unpopulated by the Tulpa and his Shadows—after all, my birth father had tried
repeatedly to kill me, too—but even were I still an agent with powers beyond a mortal's, still in possession of a lineage marking me as special, I would never work alongside a man like Harlan Tripp.

A ghostly smile flashed on his ruddy stubbled face. “I will tear off long, precise strips of your flesh with these pliers,” he whispered in a lover's voice, and holding up the sharp tool, “until you are.”

I swallowed hard, but said nothing. Letting a Shadow know I was mortal was a direct invitation to the grave.

“I'll start with your eyelids.”

I didn't need to smell my fear spiking, I could feel my heartbeat screaming. But Tripp's responding grin was short-lived. Inhaling sharply, head swiveling toward the glass door, he dove for me and began roughly working away my ties. They were belted around the entire case. Apparently he'd been serious about the pliers.

“Done it now, haven't you?” I said, as he cursed, my relief making me punchy…though I wasn't out of this yet. “What are they? Two blocks away? Three?”

I tried to remember how far off I could scent another agent. Three was my best effort. The most senior of agents could double that distance.

“I'm better than that, missy. I haven't smelled pure Light in so long, I could pinpoint them on a map.”

It was a dig, but all I could think was, Pure Light. “They're not Shadows?”

He frowned, like I'd spit in his eye.

Even as my heartbeat bumped faster at the thought of seeing my old troop, the look gave me an idea. “Let me take care of them.”

He was scrabbling at my ties, growing more anxious, and an edgy Shadow was a homicidal one. “Don't fuck with me, Archer.”

“Just hide. I'll distract them. I'll tell them you've already left.”

Tripp stilled, stared, and sucked in one long breath.

I held his gaze. “It'll be the fastest way to get rid of them, and it'll throw them off your trail too.”

He dropped his odd, handrolled smoke on the floor and stomped on it as he angled his gaze toward the door. He either had to leave me there or kill me. Even I could tell there wasn't enough time to untie me. “Why would you?”

“I like my eyelids where they are,” I said wryly. “Besides, they're not coming here for me.”

Either the ticking clock or my genuine bitterness decided it for him, because he soon nodded. “Chisel me, woman, and so help me, I'll find a way to kill you. Even if it's my last act 'fore death.”

“I know.”

He backed away, disappearing into the shadows.

“Take my ID with you!” I hissed after him, because if Warren thought even a rogue Shadow knew my cover identity, he'd alter my memory, my mind, and my life altogether. It wouldn't have anything to do with my general safety either. He'd do it only to protect the troop.

So I took a steadying breath after Tripp and my belongings disappeared and resettled my head on the hard glass top as if napping there. Then I waited in silence, mere moments from facing an entire cadre of superheroes. The agent of Light. The troop that had abandoned me completely.

“What are you doing here?”

Warren's query, flat and suspicious, wasn't at all what I'd practiced responding to in the mirror of my barb-witted dreams. Still, I did my best work on the fly.

“Shopping,” I said, turning my head to the wide-open door where eight agents of Light fanned out like a palm frond. Warren was centered like the sun, and the others were planets revolving around him. I gave them all a sweet smile from beneath my unyielding ties, then focused on my former leader. “What do you think, the pearl necklace or the choker?”

“Joanna.” His impatience, immediate and unearned, had my hands clenching at my sides. I studied the craggy, sun-scorched skin I knew so well, and the hardness in his eyes I was beginning to know better. He was dressed in his favorite cover guise, a vagrant in a trench so tattered only his demeanor was more frayed. The last time I'd seen him was at the entrance of a swiftly flooding tunnel. He'd just locked a fellow troop member in another world with a calm ruthlessness, and had been thinking of abandoning me to the Tulpa to save his own skin.

“I'm thinking pearls,” I continued, fighting the memory in order to keep my voice light. “Every high-powered female executive should own a set.”

I glared at each agent in turn, the men and women who had once feared me for my dual-sided nature, who'd overcome it to accept me as one of their own, and who now regarded me as distantly as if we'd never met. Studying each carefully blank gaze, I tried to figure out who had left me the warning not to go out tonight.

Perhaps Vanessa, I thought, staring at the subtly exotic woman. We'd been the closest. She looked both beautiful and strong in her long black silken scarf, worn since her hair had been shorn weeks earlier. She'd secured this one with an antique silver brooch, an iron bolt pinning the black silk to the side. Other than the hair, which was still growing out, she'd otherwise recovered fully from the attack that claimed digits and limbs from her flesh. A sharp corner of the glass cabinet dug into one of my calves, and my sarcasm reared.
Good for her
.

Maybe it'd been Micah. Healer wasn't only his position in the troop, it was his calling. He might have an interest in preventing my injury…if he still cared. I found the seven-foot man standing to the left of Warren in shadows that so obscured his features I couldn't read whether any concern for me lie on them. But Riddick was next to him, and with a jolt I realized Micah wasn't in the shadows. They were in him. This time it was the physician who sported some kind of injury, a realization doubly shocking since agents always healed from attack unless struck by a conduit.

But how did a man as fair as Micah turn dark? Not black, no, because that was natural, and this was anything but. It was as if grit and soot strained at his pores, his skin acting as barrier, like a cement truck that had to keep moving so the ash or brick or burnt lime—whatever was inside of him—didn't still and set.

My gaze lingered too long, and he inched back. I jerked my gaze away, automatically wanting to give him privacy
and to cover for us both, and studied the others instead. Riddick was ginger-haired, tight-muscled, and driven, but had yet to gain the experience that would make him into a dangerously seasoned agent. Jewell, next to him, was the same age, and they'd grown up in the sanctuary together. While she was a second daughter and had never expected to inherit her star sign, she almost wore the responsibility better. Having it unexpectedly thrust upon a person often made them more vigilant and serious, as I well knew.

I couldn't figure any of them keeping Warren out of the loop, though. If any knew about Mackie and his quest to kill me, if any
cared—
and I thought it likely there was at least that between us—they'd have told him. Unless one of
them
had opened the gateway to Midheaven, accidentally let the demon spawn out, and was too afraid of Warren to fess up. Though agents' actions were regularly recorded in comic book form, thus a matter of public record, this wouldn't be if it could upset the balance between Shadow and Light.

So had one of them planted the old conduits for me? Maybe…though wouldn't it have been easier to show up on my doorstep, hand me my crossbow, and bid me good day? I thought again of the fury I'd once seen blanketing Warren's face.
Maybe not
.

“Joanna.” Tekla now, their Seer. Though the smallest, staturewise, she was arguably the strongest of them all. She watched me as carefully as I'd studied the others, her odd, birdlike stillness making me nervous, as always. She read the stars and skies, and carried the Scorpion sign fiercely in memory of her son. A mother wasn't supposed to outlive a child in any world, and since reclaiming the star sign, Tekla had been more daring and vigilant and aggressive than the others. Warren loved it, but I could have told him there was a fine line between nervy and nutty.

I continued on like I hadn't heard her. “Of course, there's high-powered like me, and then there's
high-powered
like you. There's a difference between mortal power and those
who allow it, isn't there?” I struggled with the restraints any one of them could have broken through, and had the satisfaction of hearing someone moan. It sparked something dormant and dark inside of me.

“Riddick, untie her. Joanna, this isn't about you.”

“Of course not.” Gritting my teeth, I wondered what my anger smelled like. “If it was, you wouldn't be here.”

Riddick, coming close, looked like he was holding his breath. It pissed me off even more. “Hello, ‘friend.' How's life treating
you
?”

He didn't respond or look me in the eye, but his strong fingers fumbled at my ties. I snorted.

Warren cleared his throat. “Gregor, Jewell. Check the rest of the building.”

“Harlan's not here, asshole.” I added the insult because it would get his attention. “Don't you think I'd have said so first thing?”

“But he was,” he said so accusingly it was as if I'd invited the attack on my life. “We can smell him.”

That's the part I focused on. “Can you?” I replied sweetly. “How interesting. I can't.”

And I didn't realize how furious I still was about that loss—about all of them—until the sharp words were out of my mouth. I'd been finely ground under Warren's ambitious heel, and I was as bitter as a glass of Campari.

“And you don't know where he went?”

I stared, buying time by taking in his scruffy hair—longer than when I'd last seen him—and the trench he'd abandoned a few months earlier, but had apparently reclaimed. Security blanket, I thought snidely. But I also tempered my emotions, knowing he'd scent out a lie as fast as I could tell it. So I scrounged up my annoyance as a cover. “I know where he
was
. On a party bus filled with mortals, including my best friends.”

Warren's opportunity to turn a barbed phrase. “
Your
best friends?”

“Oh, that's right,” I said, pretending to muse over Cher's
relationship to Olivia, not me. Never mind that I'd been forced to care for them and see to their safety over the past year. Someone here should have since taken up that slack, but in their efforts to avoid me, no one had. The memory of Cher's soft arm falling to the ground was what finally put me over the edge.

“What I meant to say was”—and here I yelled, muscles straining as I rose against my bindings—“he attacked the only friends who stuck by me after I lost everything!”

My voice was scratchy from the strangling, but louder than I'd raised it in weeks. And it felt good, using the only power left to me. It also surprised the so-called superheroes surrounding me. Even I had no idea this much raw anger simmered so close to the surface. Sure, I was resentful that every fresh morning brought with it a wave of renewed rejection, but this was the kind of fury that had once had my eyes burning black in my skull, my breath coming from me in waves of noxious hate.

It was my father's anger, and that, at least, I harbored still.

Felix's face was taut and drawn into the middle, as were Micah's mottled, sooty features. Tekla's remained unreadable, though she too had fallen superstill. Riddick's powerful hands briefly fell to his sides, and Jewell had begun crying, though she wiped away the tears before Warren whirled to see. Vanessa didn't bother. Though Warren gave her a warning under his breath, she defiantly continued to stare at me. I stared back as relentlessly, but didn't soften anything.
Sense my pain and your betrayal as I did. Scent it like a chalk outline stamping the air. Feel its abrasion erupting behind your eyelids at night.

“Enough!”

I sucked in a deep breath, the air cool against my heated anger, and turned that hard stare back on Warren. “I don't take orders from you, old man.”

He damned near hissed. “All mortals are subject to my whim.”

I raised my brows so high they probably disappeared into my hairline. “So we owe you fealty, is that it? For your protection?”

He sniffed, regaining his composure. “Something like that.”

“Then where the fuck were you tonight?”

His lips pinched reflexively and I knew he wanted to punch something.

My arms were still bound, but by now my legs were finally freed, so I decided to take my one-woman guilt trip on the road, slipping off the countertop, but staggering as pins and needles crawled up my limbs. I leaned against the glass case, refusing to fall in front of them as I hissed, “Where the fuck have any of you been?”

“We're not going to risk—”

“Shut up!” I fired back, because I'd heard the official statement, and wasn't buying it. “It was rhetorical. Riddick, are you fucking done yet?”

He mumbled what could have been an apology as the last of my bindings fell loose. I pushed from the counter to stand, and realized that my dizziness wasn't due to the change in positions. I was flush with the power of someone in full control of another's guilt. In this case, many others. And not just people. Superheroes.

Clinging to the power like a barnacle on a hull, I limped forward. “If you're done here, I'm going to find a clinic and get cleaned up.”

Micah, ever the physician, stepped forward, sad eyes tucked into the smoky skin, voice strained with pain. “I can—”

“No!” Warren and I yelled in unison.

To ward him off, to keep anyone else from touching me, I swallowed back the lump in my throat and tried on a sneer I only partly felt. “It looks like you can't even help yourself.”

Jewell gasped, as did Felix, but Micah just stepped back—which I took as a symbolic return to his betrayal of
me—and Warren and I again locked gazes. I knew I'd hurt the big softhearted man, but I worked better with anger than pity, which was what I needed to get through this.

Warren made a growling noise in his throat. “Tripp did that to him, and if you know where he is, you need to tell us.”

“I don't expect to meet up with Harlan Tripp again.” A white almost-lie.

“But you might. And just in case…” He fished in his pocket, then held a cell phone out to me. “Use this if you see him, or hear of any other rogues hiding in my city. It's an untraceable number, you won't talk to a person, but you can leave a brief message. We'll only contact you if we must.”

I fondled the phone, a one-way channel into my past.
Why was everything with Warren always so one-way?

“Believe me,” he said, mistaking my silence for acquiescence as I placed the phone on the counter beside me. “You don't want rogues leaking from Midheaven. They'll all be worse for their time there, even the Light.”

Yes, he'd already told me.
A twisted place that twists people in return.

“Even Hunter?” I asked coldly.

If I was a sore spot with the troop, Hunter was an open wound. Pain bloomed on every face, and Riddick even staggered. No one in the troop had experienced Midheaven the way Tripp and I had, but no doubt they'd each done their research into the world since discovering it really existed, a fact Warren had only recently and reluctantly clued them in on. I didn't know if they'd researched it with his now-blessing or furtively, on their own and behind his back—probably both—but from the collective look on the faces around me, they were actively imagining the horror their former troop mate and ally was enduring in a world meant to separate a man from his soul.
Good
.

Not that their imaginations could ever do the place justice.

An unreasonable pang struck me at their reaction—they
should
feel more for their lifelong troop mate than a woman they'd only known a year—but it was blunted by how clear it was that no one had forgotten. Not my sacrifice, not Hunter's banishment, not the way Warren had locked his Aries of Light in a world where men were used as batteries. They remembered all, no matter how much Warren willed it otherwise.

Meanwhile, Warren had closed his eyes, falling immobile. I fought not to step back, but after another moment he only strode to the room's center, gait powerful despite a pronounced limp. “The point is, it would unbalance everything. It wouldn't be good for you or us.”

He just couldn't resist differentiating me, disparaging me, in front of them.

“I'm curious, Warren,” I said, mimicking his indifference, right down to the placement of my hands on my hips. “Did you feel this sort of disdain for my mother too? After all, she was an agent who also became mortal by giving up her powers.”

In a way, I'd simply expanded on the premise. She'd only done it for one person—me. Warren's gaze darkened, a look that said my mother's sacrifice hadn't been worth it. “Your mother never attempted to re-engage in our world after leaving it.”

“I didn't re-engage! I was kidnapped!”