“Solange,” she said simply.
Lightning cracked over his shoulder as memories moved through his skull. Solange. Sola. Ma Sola.
“You’ve lost your accent.”
“Second generation French.” She shrugged easily, like they didn’t have a past, and she still had a future. “Easy when you’re raised here.”
“Have you waited twenty-three years to kill me?”
Her tongue darted out, wetting her bottom lip. “I’ve waited to see why I didn’t.”
They looked at each other, and JJ inexplicably lessened the pressure. Then he caught himself, and picked up her conduit, the tomahawk. The heft was eerily unfamiliar. He lifted it above his head.
She gave him a slight smile for being able to do what she hadn’t. “I’m sorry.”
Again, it threw him.
“About…my parents?”
She nodded again.
He raised a brow. “So sorry you were going to kill me?”
He felt her forearm flex before her fingertips trailed up his arm, playing just below his tattoo. “I was going to put you out of your misery.”
“Don’t do me any more favors, Solange.”
But as her fingertips continued to play on his skin, he lowered her weapon. Warren’s words revisited him as he stared into the cocoa depths of the woman’s eyes. Death’s not important…not even a violent one. Thoughts were crucial, he’d said. Actions exposed one’s state of mind.
After a few more moments of staring and still living, Solange lifted slightly and ground her pelvis into his. Still half clothed and, surprisingly, half hard, he swallowed, met her gaze…and slid easily back into her warmth.
“Ah. So even superheroes,” she whispered in rhythm, “crave the illicit.”
Her hot breath sent chills down his arm.
“And you crave…?” he asked, somehow knowing he was giving it to her. He pushed deeper.
“Not much.” She waited until she was coming again, breathing the answer into his mouth. “Mere relevance.”
Why don’t I kill her? Why, despite being natural enemies, did JJ instead lie with Solange on the dented hood of his car, until the full of the high desert storm had passed?
Maybe it was because she, too, had been born into this life of battling sides—good versus evil, Light and Shadow—and she recognized, or was at least willing to admit, that perfection and compulsiveness and vigilance would get them only so far. They could both act like model agents, but if either so much as breathed in the wrong direction, the same gruesome death they’d watched his parents endure would readily be theirs.
Normally his mind shied from that memory, but with his enemy’s head on his shoulder, he admitted that that’s what happened when a person gave himself over entirely to the lifestyle. It was why he was burned out, and why he resented the mortals he’d sworn to protect. He found the thought of continuing to exist for the mere good of someone else unbearable. But…
If I had something for myself, something that was mine alone.
“What do you recall?” Solange asked him, the heat in her voice threaded soft.
JJ gazed up at the black metal sky. Not the battle, that was sure. That was muddied with the confusion of a five-year-old’s mind, a swirl of color and sound melding into a singular cry of pain. When he thought back to the night his parents died, he didn’t even remember the red carnage, or not much anyway. Yet he could clearly envision his parents touching hands, holding to each other until the very last. They’d died because of him…but they’d lived because of each other.
“It was my fault,” he finally said, in lieu of his truest thought, which was: I’ll never have that. “I wanted to see the fireworks. They were permitted to take me from the sanctuary because no one could stand to listen to me whine any longer. So we were on the golf course, out in the open, because of me…and I think we were tracked because of me, too.”
He knew now, eyes following the tail of the receding storm, that his emotions had been high, a young boy’s excitement even stronger than the fireworks staining the sky.
“Your joy was like tingling, warm taffy,” Solange confirmed, turning her head so she was staring directly into his eyes. “It was the sweetest thing I’d ever sensed.”
JJ swallowed hard. She broke eye contact first, nestled closer, and looked back to the now-clear sky, stars so bright they looked scoured. He could snap her neck in one swift jerk.
“I follow the constellations,” she said suddenly, as if the words and her voice were at odds. “Never someone else’s orders. Not even my own whim. So, in a way, the sky is a map of my mind. Nobody else knows that.” She tilted her head up to his, exposing her neck like a dare. He bent, kissed its hollow, and found it salty and slightly sharp. When she spoke again, her voice thrummed against his lips. “So if you know what constellation I’m tracing, you can connect the dots and predict my next move.”
“What constellation are you on now?”
She gave him a look like he was crazy.
JJ laughed, liking the way she could surprise him. “Fine, then tell me this. Are you on an upswing or down?”
She shook her head, lifting to lean on an elbow. “You’re missing the point. The stars aren’t what’s important. They’re just pivot points to send you off in a new direction. It’s the space between them that’s relevant. Everything that can actually be seen—the stars, you, me—is less than four percent of what’s out there. The rest is…dark.”
“Because it’s invisible?”
She shook her head. “Because it’s unknown.”
She sat up, turning suddenly so both elbows were propped on his chest, her weight entirely atop his, though he felt little of it. “You know, most people think everything they do is so important. They sweat the small stuff—traffic jams and spilled milk—and get pissed off if things don’t come off exactly as planned. Most go their entire lives without realizing plans don’t matter one bit.”
JJ knew. They were at the mercy of something much bigger and, he often thought, more uncaring than that.
“The greatest mysteries—life, love, loss—are destined to remain a dark matter.” She jerked her chin at the crystalline sky. “We don’t even know what we’re looking at right now.”
He dropped a kiss atop her damp, perversely refreshing, cynical head. “It’s the Universe.”
“No.” She nestled closer, and pointed at the sky. “That’s a violent, evolving panorama of births and deaths. Just like us. The Universe,” she said, pointing to the spot he’d just kissed, “is in here.”
Which was the same shit Warren had been telling him earlier. Which was the same shit, he thought, sighing, that he already knew. Except for one thing. He tapped his head. “Which means you think that ninety-six percent of what is up here is dark matter.”
“Exactly.” Linking her slim arms behind her head, Solange smiled. “And chaos reigns.”
3
It was hard to argue against people being predisposed to chaos, JJ thought as he hauled a skinny mortal from a seedy downtown strip club. The idiot had been about to challenge a Shadow over a woman who called herself Destiny. Yeah, JJ thought, posing as a bouncer, Destiny was really worth getting your head ripped, literally, from your shoulders.
“Maybe it’s why you guys need protection in the first place,” he mumbled.
“What?” the man asked, his tone matching his terrified face.
“I said you should take a serious look at the way you spend your free time.”
“Look at you, man!” The scrawny redhead jerked down his shirt after JJ threw him against the wall. “Like you have any right to judge!”
Score one point for the village idiot, JJ thought, because as much as the comparison rubbed, for the first time he was indulging his darker side, too. And enjoying it. Still, he had a job to do, and was finding a perverse joy in that again as well. He reentered the club and headed back to the VIP room to give the lone Shadow a real taste of destiny.