“Leave her be.” Tripp emerged then, an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips, hat drawn low.
I resisted the urge to smell myself, and angled toward him. “Well, it’s been a long day and I had to wait for your call under a loading dock.”
“It took time to secure this place first,” Tripp explained, but the second cypress was still inching my way.
“Not that,” he said, his voice deep, but oddly warbling. “The Light.”
He said it like I had leprosy.
“Fletcher is right. You still smell like one of them.”
I looked at Tripp meaningfully. “You’re all Shadows?”
“Former,” he said, knowing exactly how I felt about that. “This is Fletcher. That’s Milo.”
Milo raised his chin. “Like you’re a former agent of Light.”
“Discards, then.” I glanced at the two men, not a bit like each other…but not like me either. And not like Caine, born independent. These men had been raised in a Shadow troop, and if Las Vegas’s, then they were old enough to have once worked for the Tulpa.
Shaking my head, I turned back to the gate.
Tripp caught up, closing the expanse between us in one step. “Where ya think you’re going?”
“I don’t know.” But I wasn’t bedding down with Shadows. I kept walking.
“Ain’t nowhere Mackie can’t find you.”
I said nothing.
“And Warren won’t help.” He pulled the strange cigarette from his lips, licked them, replaced it. I shuddered, remembering how the smoke felt pressed against my pores. “If he even knew you were talking with us, he’d kill you himself. That’s truth.”
Hastening my pace, I reached into my pocket for the phone Warren had given me. I had a brief, insane urge to dial his number to ask him. Hey, Warren. If I took up with a splinter group of rogue agents, would you slay me on sight? Oh, they’re all Shadows too, but they told me that no longer counts. I laughed, humorlessly, imagining his response.
“So would the Tulpa,” Tripp continued, easily keeping pace.
“And Mackie and Helen-and still every Shadow agent in this city.” I halted and pointed back at the ones watching me. They’d held back, but I knew they could hear my every word. “So many ways and people to kill me. Why should I give them the pleasure?”
“They’re not the ones swingin’ at you.”
I angled a hard glare at Fletcher and Milo, then glanced at the mesh roof obscuring the winter sky. I felt like one of the plants trapped beneath that net, caught someplace unnatural, and likely to wind up in the hands of someone who would treat me carelessly.
“Skamar said she’d help,” I said, but the promise sounded hollow even to me. At some point Mackie would be too close to me, she’d be too far, and by the time she finished her death-dealings with the Tulpa, it would be too late.
And the other agents of Light? The ones I once counted as friends? Tekla had some sort of dealings with Caine, the Seer who’d just sacrificed himself for me, for relevance. She’d appeared in my dream, saying not everyone had abandoned me. But that was just a dream. It remained to be seen if she’d lift a finger for me in real life.
And what would Vanessa and Felix do, the couple that’d gradually become my closest new friends? Or Micah, who’d healed me more times than I could count? How about Gregor, who had a warden like Luna that was as protective of him as he was of her? Would their indifference to my mortality turn into aggression, just on Warren’s say-so?
Feeling unsteady, I leaned against a giant green machine called the Mulch Master. “You said before I could leave the city.” Maybe it was still an option.
Tripp said, “And go where? You got paranormal contacts elsewhere? Someone who knows how to deal with ol’
Sleepy Mac?”
“Do you?” I snapped back.
“Yup.” He spat something black and nasty into the green bin. I imagined it working like cement, binding the mulch together. “Why do you think we’re here?”
“You lie, Shadow.”
“I’m rogue,” Tripp corrected. “A free agent, though I still know a brethren Shadow when I see one.”
“I’m Light.”
“Goodness and Light,” Tripp taunted, scattering ash.
I ignored his sarcasm. So he was here on someone else’s orders. Not to save the petite mortal girl from a magical blade. Fucking Shadows.
“Did you tell this someone about Mackie?” I asked. “His quest?” His blade.
Tripp nodded.
“And he’s still willing to side with me?”
“He’s been waiting to do so for years.”
Options bounced around my skull like superballs. Slowly, dreamlike, I pulled Warren’s phone from my pocket and stared at it, trying to anticipate a conversation that had me explaining about Sleepy Mac and asking for sanctuary. That was the one place, I knew, the man from Midheaven couldn’t go. Hidden underground, protected by a security system even the strongest of Shadows couldn’t breach, and located on the other side of reality, it was home to the agents of Light.
And inaccessible to mortals, I thought, sighing. I couldn’t enter even if he did relent.
Which was what Warren would argue without even trying to find another way. I sighed. He’d then probe me for everything I knew about Mackie and Tripp, but what then? Would he have a sudden change of heart? Offer the troop’s protection if I agreed to work as a mortal beard or spy for the troop? Or would he kill me, as Tripp suggested?
“Sleepy Mac killed my warden,” I told Tripp, tilting my head, watching carefully for his response. “He killed a Seer too, a man as powerful as any I’d ever seen.”
Tripp only removed that strange cigarette again and slowly licked his lips. “Do you want to live?”
Was it wrong that I had to think about that for so long? Fletcher grumbled as he plucked leaves from a topiary, but Tripp shot him a silencing look over his shoulder.
If I wanted to live.
I glanced again at the phone Warren had given me, remembering how afraid I’d been before of losing it. Of losing, I now knew, anything else.
Losses aren’t bad things in themselves. Not as long as you remain open to new sensation.
Irritated, I huffed. Like working with Shadows?
Then again, Caine had been of the Shadows. Maybe he’d been born “free,” as he put it, but his lineage was stamped on his disposition as clearly as postage. And yet he’d sacrificed himself to Sleepy Mac’s blade for my sake.
Maybe, while I wasn’t looking-while I was getting reaccustomed to my mortal skin-my old defenses had become my prison. With the agents of Light turning their backs, and the sanctuary closed to me, the city I’d always found refuge in did suddenly resemble more of a tomb. But what had me pushing upright and turning to the mulch machine was that unanswered question, and the full comprehension of a niggling I’d already sensed. My T-Rex brain, I thought with a small laugh. Sparking to life.
Because though I didn’t know what Warren would do to me, I knew I didn’t trust him to protect me, not as I once had. Mortal or not, I no longer counted in his world-view, and he’d like nothing more than for me to disappear, become part of the woodwork…at most a bit of scaffolding on which to build his own idea of the way the world should be. To him, I was just someone to run down with his ambition.
Once you decide a person has no control over you…they no longer do.
And Warren’s mind didn’t create my reality. I would not be overrun because, all-powerful leader of Light or not, I mattered. I counted. And would as long as I lived.
“Your days are numbered, old man.” It was my T-Rex brain talking, pitching my voice low, my lips barely moving. No matter that he wasn’t there to hear it. Tripp heard, and one corner of his mouth lifted as I tossed the phone over the side of the mulcher, waited to hear it clank on the steel bottom, then laid my palm against the red button on the panel to my right. “You’ll go down so hard the earth will quake.”