But today JJ had to quell the laughter that threatened to bubble out of him when he entered the Lazy Dayz Motel to find a superhero masquerading as a bum getting his palm read by a woman who looked like a cross between a country music star and a stripper.
Tonya Dane stared up at JJ when he entered, blinking a good half-dozen times as she took in his short, blond cut, the skin as naturally dark as her enforced tan, and his overall size. When she finished, her frosted smoker’s mouth pursed. “Obviously another one of y’all.”
JJ glanced at Warren, who sheepishly withdrew his hand. “It’s okay, she knows everything. She’s agreed to a full memory cleanse as soon as we’re finished. We were just passing the time until you arrived.”
Tonya reached over, bright pink nails digging into Warren’s weather-beaten hands. “Remember what I said. She still loves you. She’s showing it in the only way she knows how.”
Warren cleared his throat and rose. “The others should be here shortly.”
That distracted JJ from Tonya’s words. “Others?”
“I decided to bring in the rest of the troop after we talked. Ms. Dane here says that different people bring out nuance in her readings, even if related to the same subject.”
“Time is more fluid than this world believes. Even future relations can be read in the present.”
So she’d be able to read connections between them and the Kairos…if there were to be any.
“I figured there was no harm in introducing her to the others as she’ll give up the memory anyway. It’ll give Tekla a rare opportunity to talk shop with someone who shares her talent, but on the mortal side.” He smiled at Tonya. “She’s our troop’s Seer.”
“I know,” Tonya said, eliciting a truncated snort from JJ. He sobered when her sharp eyes found him again. “We can start with you.”
“Start what with me?”
“The readings.” And she held out her hand for his palm.
“Wait.” JJ turned back to Warren to find humor threading the man’s mouth. “I thought we were questioning her. Not the other way around.”
He didn’t think a mortal Seer could rival their world’s psychic in skill, but with a secret life, and his lover’s touch so recently on his skin, it was best to stay away from Seers altogether…which was why Tekla’s impending appearance was so disturbing. He’d been avoiding her as well.
Warren sobered. “Just give it a try. You may have a residual connection with the Kairos.”
JJ wanted to ask how it could be residual if it hadn’t happened yet, but knew better from his sessions with Tekla. Ask one innocent question and you’d get a weeklong lecture on the intricacies of quantum physics. He had long since learned to keep quiet.
Still, he remained skeptical of Dane.
“I don’t know—” JJ began, but Warren was done.
“Jay, please. I know it’s not much to go on, but we need every available advantage. Okay?”
He clenched his jaw, but nodded. “Sure.”
Tonya reached for his hand as soon as he settled across from her. “It’s better if I touch you.”
It’s better if you don’t. “I don’t like to be touched.”
She reached out anyway, her cool fingers as fragile as a sparrow’s foot in his tensile palm. He couldn’t help but compare her touch to Sola’s. Though undeniably female, his love’s form was merely a streamlined version of his own, as if tendons and veins, bone and muscle, were all concrete-filled. Tonya, in contrast, was air.
Her tone, though, gave her weight. “You’re a singularly driven man, which isn’t rare of your kind, but you’ve a compulsiveness that drives you harder, farther, and deeper. You fight where others will stop.” Which was when she stopped, her body jolting slightly. For a moment he thought she was going to pull away, but then her voice deepened, the cadence altered. “In many ways, and for many years, you will be the perfect superhero.”
So much for her preternatural abilities, he thought, starting to draw away. He’d already screwed that up. “Thank you.”
Her airy fingers constricted, catching his again. “You harbor a strong sense of duty, but entertain a private restlessness. Your gift, a talent with your hands, steadies you and helps you to live more in the moment, but it doesn’t entirely quiet the internal dissension.”
JJ sat straighter, warier now, but intrigued. He was the troop’s weaponeer, had been even prior to metamorphosis into a full agent, and was responsible for making the conduits that could kill agents, something mortal weapons could not do.
“You have a tragic past, not unusual for one dealing in evil matters, but yours has shaped you in a strange way. You are attracted to things you fear, and desire to understand them. You have friends, you’re well liked, but the one who will know you best is drawn in by your fallibility.”
Warren stiffened at that, though he remained turned away, pushing aside the curtain to look out the window. Tonya spoke faster, as if rushing through the words could lessen their impact. “Saving ‘all of mankind’ isn’t enough to motivate you. It needs to be personal. You strip away a person’s labels and see the individual. It’s very admirable.”
“It’s very dangerous,” said Warren, who always saw things in terms of black and white.
“Yes,” JJ agreed immediately, knowing too well how his leader felt. Cohesiveness was desired, the good of the whole came first, the troop was more important than the individual.
“Can be,” Tonya said, knowing none of this. “But you desire a deeper involvement. You want to feel more. People, their ability to choose—”
“That’s enough,” JJ jerked away, her pseudo-strength giving way to his will. “None of this is useful in finding the Kairos.”
But her voice continued to rasp from between those frosted lips. “This will allow you to see her. She is a mystery to you. A dark—”
Matter.
The greatest mysteries are destined to remain a dark matter.
Dane wasn’t talking about the Kairos, he suddenly realized. She was speaking of Solange.
“You will know she is meant for you before she does.”
“No more.” JJ shot from his chair, heading straight to the door. He needed air.
“You will recognize her immediately—”
“Later,” he said, thinking, Shut up, shut up, shut up.
“There is no later. Not for you. Not even for me,” she said, tone darkening as JJ threw open the door. “There is only now.”
JJ froze. Because now half a dozen Shadow agents fanned across the parking lot in a reverse chevron, Solange at the tip. She had her tomahawk in one hand, his cell phone in the other. Her chest was smoking. She looked through him as if she’d never seen him before, as if he’d never lived inside her.
He probably shouldn’t have been surprised, but the betrayal cracked his heart. She’d used their private time, their time of truce—and, he’d stupidly begun to believe, their love—to gain data for the Shadow side.
“Hope you’re living ‘in the moment’ right now,” Warren commented, suddenly beside him. “Because these next few are going to be doozies.”
When JJ saw Sola standing there, his first impulse was to smile.
You see the individual.
Luckily his instinct was stronger, because he dove sideways just as the tomahawk appeared in front of his face, death inscribed on the blade. Whirring head over handle, it sliced air, then there was a sick, wet thud as it found another bodily home. JJ shifted to find Tonya Dane reclined in her chair, frosted lips rounded in surprise, the tomahawk buried in her skull. The crevasse between skin and gray matter literally split her in two.
The glyph on JJ’s chest kicked to life, matching Warren’s, who’d dived to the other side of the doorway as the phalanx of Shadows moved closer. JJ reached into his pocket and withdrew his whip, unfurling it as he pivoted. Its length licked out and wrapped around Tonya’s chair leg, trapping her body to it as he yanked, whipping both to Warren’s side. His leader withdrew the toma
hawk quickly, with a murmured apology, and JJ jerked his weapon again, this time spinning the chair like a top, the barbed tips in the strip of leather releasing, ready now for a Shadow.
Obligingly, they continued their advance. JJ didn’t aim for Solange. Warren, possessing her conduit, would do that. Turning a person’s own weapon against him was like turning his body inside out. It was personal, destructive, and gave the bearer of the death an additional measure of power. Instead, JJ centered his weight, flicked his wrist, and sent the barbed whip on a snapping journey around the doorframe. He felt the tug of flesh as it connected, and jerked back like he was fly-fishing, instead pulling a man ashore. Once the Shadow was blocking the doorway, JJ pulled his whip free, ripping the man’s life with it. Warren and JJ then used the dead bulk to push their way into freedom.
Using his tattered trench as a defensive shield—JJ had made the armored coat himself—Warren covered the rear, deflecting projectiles, Solange’s tomahawk still fisted tight. JJ’s whip danced. Warren planted his boots into solar plexuses and stomachs, both screamed their battle cries…and a part of JJ continued to search for Sola.
“Look out!”
The Shadow dropped from above. Warren drew the trench over them, and JJ swept the ground with his whip, one hand braced on asphalt. Even so, he felt death smiling at him—there were too many enemies from too many directions…and all because he had trusted Solange.
The full weight of the descending Shadow crushed his shoulders. He braced, but it didn’t move, even while other Shadows yelled warnings into the night. Warren whipped the shielding trench from their heads, and JJ circled his whip, readying for the next attack. But the voices raining around them were familiar, and he recognized the mace lodged in the chest of the Shadow at his feet as Gregor’s, an ally.
Arriving in response to Warren’s call, the troop had surprised the attacking Shadows, and managed to inflict casualties of their own.
Because Solange hadn’t known about them, JJ thought, once the remaining Shadow agents had fled. He stood, breathing hard, whip hanging at his side, and surveyed the lot. Warren’s phone call, which Solange had somehow taped or bugged or replayed, had mentioned only the two of them locked in a room with the woman who could deliver them the Kairos. But now that woman, and link, was dead, and they were left to clean up the mess.
And Solange had disappeared. Again.
5
The perfect superhero…attracted to things you fear…it needs to be personal…
Tonya Dane’s final prediction, always his first waking thought, jolted JJ awake again.
He cursed as he rubbed a hand over his moist face, down his neck, and over his bare chest. That prediction, along with his mind’s betraying dreams—the touch of Sola’s flesh on his, the taste of her tongue in his mouth, the scent of her lingering on his skin, the sound of her soft moans in his ears—was why he’d become an insomniac in the past three months. And he supposed that was why he’d accidentally dozed off here, in the lush comfort of the Valhalla Hotel’s Turkish-style hammam. It was a warm and misty wet sauna with walls and floors of swirling mosaic tiles in relaxing blues, and the perfect place for JJ to study the city’s partiers…though that was hard to do, he thought wryly, if his eyes were shut.
Pushing himself to an upright position, he took a long drag from the ice water at his side, and looked around. The hammam boasted a heated gold slab in the great room’s center, occupied on this day by three blonds in minute bikinis—including one woman who looked marginally familiar. From his corner, which was both bench and booth, JJ watched as a cluster of suitors, eager to impress, flexed and bulged around them. Determining that none of the mortals were either risky or at risk, he breathed in the scents of eucalyptus and soft mint, and squinted up at the recessed lighting. It was so obscured in the wet haze that it almost resembled the night sky.
The blonds soon left, resulting in the exodus of most of the room’s occupants, but not before the middle girl, the one who looked familiar, shot him a smile sweeter than he’d expect attached to that body. He realized belatedly that it was the socialite he’d seen burning up the airwaves months ago. He recalled hearing she’d been keeping a low profile since, but imagined that could be true only if she refrained from stepping outside altogether. When the hammam doors swung shut behind her, the swirling wet haze closed ranks.
JJ shut his eyes.
“If you think this is relaxing, you should try the thermal detox.”
He’d imagined her voice so many times—screaming, begging, pleading for mercy—that for a moment it felt like a daydream sparked by the misty environs. But when he opened his eyes she was there, reclined sideways on the smooth, thick center slab, steam-slick from head to thigh, white bikini glaring against her tanned, smooth curves. Her dark hair swung down to reveal her slim shoulders. Only her eyes were indistinguishable, dark in their sockets, like they were missing altogether.
“It would be so much easier on me,” he said, before he knew it, “if you’d give me something to beat against.” He was a warrior and needed a fight. All this passive aggression was somehow exhausting.
“I know,” she whispered, letting her hand trail down her thigh.
“Are you going to ambush me again?”
“Rather hard when I don’t know where you’ll be,” she said, voice wry. “You’ve done a good job of covering your tracks, Jay. I’ve been waiting at this spa for weeks.”
Because he’d changed up every habit he had. He’d stopped drinking, moved house, and even sold his Mustang. Took a fiscal beating on it because of the dents in the hood, too. “You must be getting wrinkly.”
One corner of her mouth twitched. “It’s the hot new place in Vegas. I knew you’d have to come here eventually.”
So as to protect mortals from each other, and themselves. Keep the balance so all had a fair choice between virtue and vice.
Scent out the Shadow to exact his revenge.
But he hadn’t done such a good job of that, had he? He must have some sort of sensory blind spot where she was concerned, just like the emotional one that had allowed her to aim a tomahawk at his skull, while he never saw it coming. And now that she was in front of him, all he was doing was staring.
“You tried to kill me. After we made love, too. After we said whatever we learned while together was off-limits.”
“I was merely following the constellations.” She shrugged. “Orion.”
“And, let me guess, you hit the dark matter?”
She shook her head. “The apex. I was on a downswing.”
This time he didn’t think her explanation cute. He stood, crossing the room in full strides to loom over her. “So your decision to take my life was random?”
“Life is random, JJ!” Solange was suddenly on her feet, too, standing in the middle of the slab like a pissed-off sacrifice. “The stars and skies are the only things that make sense, don’t you see? They’re impermeable. They’re forever. The light gets all the attention, but the dark matter is the glue of our Universe.”
“Would you quit with all the ‘dark matter’ shit? They’re just words someone used to describe something unknown. That’s all. Fuck.”
Her eyes followed the way he rubbed his hands over his head, and he stopped. She huffed. “People like to label things they don’t understand.”
“Like Light and Shadow?”
“Like love.”
His turn to huff. “You’re going to talk to me of love?”
She lifted her chin. “Don’t look so outraged. You enjoyed our time together. Remember, I’ve seen the way you look at me when you’re buried deep. You like it.”
“I don’t like you.”
“But you love me.”
He didn’t say anything.
“And there’s your ‘tell.’ You’re actually quite incapable of a lie, JJ.”
“Moral pinnings aren’t weaknesses.”
“Sure they are. They make you predictable.”
He thought about th
at, took a step forward. “You love me, too.”
Her turn to fall silent now, but she didn’t move back.
“It means you can change…if you choose to.” And the thought fueled the first flush of excitement he’d felt in months. How sick was that?
“No,” she ultimately whispered. Her dark eyes were buried into his as she looked up. “I no more want to be you than you want to be me. You forgot that, even though I warned you.”
“So what now? You’re warning me again?”
Solange wrapped her arms around his neck. JJ let her.
Why the hell did he let her?
“What do you want?” he finally said, voice muffled against her neck.
“I already told you that.”
He thought back, brows furrowing, then shook his head. There was too much emotion marring his thoughts when it came to her. Like static over a phone line, it kept the real message from getting through.
“The first night,” she prompted. “In the desert storm. On the hood of your car.”
He’d asked her what she wanted then. Relevance. “I can’t give that to you.”
Her fingers trailed along his back, blindly found his tattoo. “Do you know the meaning of the word quintessence?”
“It means typical.”
She pulled back, offended. He pulled her tight again, and held her there. For a moment it felt like she’d struggle, but then she relaxed, her hipbones playing just beneath his. And then she pulled him down so they were seated across from each other, legs intertwined on the warmed marble. “It means pure. A highly concentrated and most perfect embodiment of a substance. You know what the basic elements are, right?”
He rolled his eyes. “Air, fire, earth, and water.” As an Aries, JJ was a fire sign. Solange was Pisces, a water sign. Maybe that was their problem.
And she’s a Shadow agent.
“So think about it. Quint-essence. The fifth essence, or element. The Pythagoreans called it ether. They claimed it flew upward at creation to comprise the stars.”