The girl’s words died in her throat when she saw him. Her gaze skittered like beetles to his hands, braced on the broken things he loved. She wasn’t much older than he, maybe eight, but with a darkness about her…one that’d called her back in search of a memento.
She had watched as her troop ambushed and murdered his family, JJ realized with a sniff. Studying for her future position as a Shadow agent.
A tear coursed over his cheek, and she winced as if it repulsed her. She frowned, then opened her mouth to reveal his existence. He held tight to what was left of his parents while another tear fell.
“Solange!” came the voice again, causing the girl to jolt.
Solange licked her lips. Their eyes remained fastened on each other. Finally. “Nothing here, Mama.”
“So allez. Our enemies will soon be here. We don’t wish to be trapped within their radius. Leave the cadeau, and the cleanup, for them.”
Laughter accompanied her retreat, and sapped JJ’s remaining strength. He collapsed between what used to be his family, and stared blindly up at the molten, scarred, celebratory sky.
“Solange. Sola. Ma Sola.”
He mumbled her names over and over. He memorized them. He wondered why she hadn’t killed him. And, sobbing—even once he was lifted into the arms of his troop leader—he wished she had.
1
The bar was a college hangout, hardly more than a steel ceiling and a concrete floor. The so-called band had just finished their final set and was now taking their payment from the tap. JJ let his head hang forward as Warren called for another round, and the bartender, who’d only dubiously allowed the last one, frowned. Options flitted over his face like words on a teleprompter. He could be fined if they left this bar and suffered injury under the influence of the whiskey he’d served, but on the up side, they wouldn’t come back. Even in a run-down, midtown Las Vegas bar, where transience was an accepted part of life, a guy who smelled like a bum and one who looked like a pissed-off linebacker were undesirable. So he hedged his bets, and brought them the bottle. JJ offered up a lopsided smile. It was the Vegas way.
Once served, his troop leader finally came around to the subject he’d spent the last half hour inching up on. “That, my son, was a close one.”
No, JJ thought, tapping the glass and throwing back his head. It had been even closer than that. Trapped in that steel plane, thousands of feet above the ground, JJ had been forced to consider something rare, at least in relation to himself: death. In fact, he’d never been so sure of anything in his life as the commuter flight the Shadows had hijacked flew toward the base, flanked by fighter jets, screams tearing through the air. What most surprised him was the voice, the one he trusted and had named his intuition, had sighed its acceptance. Finally.
JJ knew Warren expected some bland agreement, but his overriding thought was, Just buy me another shot, man.
Then his troop leader surprised him by squaring on him fully. “It’s hard living in the past. Hard to even call it your past if you’ve never put it behind you.”
JJ peered into his shot glass. “This thing still empty?”
Warren motioned, took the bottle from the bartender’s hands, and started pouring it himself. “You’ve broken even so far, but that’s just treading water, and today proved it.”
Because today, for the first time in the three years he’d been a full-fledged agent of Light, JJ had almost lost.
Obviously, he’d experienced death before. One couldn’t live long in an underworld of heroes and demons and not be touched by it, and he told Warren that now without words, using only a shrug and a jerk of his head to throw back another shot. God, but the whiskey was good…sharp and warm, and lingering in his belly as if his glyph glowed there. It made him feel alive.
“Death’s not important,” Warren said in reply.
“I know.” Holding out his glass, JJ accidentally caught his reflection across the bar; eyes spent, face sunken on his wide frame, his normally tan skin sallow, like campfire dust mingling with sand. He was built like his dad, though even wider and taller and stockier. His sheer size had drawn such unwanted attention that the troop’s physician/magician, Micah, had whittled down his frame once already, but the pain of even that minor transformation was like mainlining mercury. In the hours before he healed, it was as if he’d been skinned alive, then stitched back together, tighter. Even now, if he thought about it too much, he could imagine himself bursting at the seams. JJ refused any additional reduction after that, and Warren hadn’t pressed.
Looking at his bleached, military-cut hair through the smoked mirror, he wondered idly if he should shave it to the skull. Would that whittle him down even more? Could walking through the world with less friction smooth out the journey?
“Death also isn’t meaningful, not even a violent one,” Warren continued, impervious to JJ’s thoughts of journeys and friction. “It’s what you tell yourself about death that’s critical. Thoughts shape actions, and actions expose your state of mind.”
“Shit.” JJ jerked the bottle from Warren’s hand, because if he had to listen to a lecture about the past and death and the detonated fate he’d narrowly avoided, he wasn’t going to do it sober. Unfortunately, it took a lot for a superhero to get truly shit-faced, a fact JJ currently lamented. “So is this the speech where you tell me my parents didn’t die because of me, that there was nothing I could do at the time, and that I need to put it behind me? Because I swear I’ve heard that one somewhere before.”
And it was bullshit. Besides…
“What more do you want from me?” he continued before Warren could answer. “I do the best I can at all times. You can’t tell me I don’t.”
“I wouldn’t. But your level best is different than your potential best.”
“I don’t know what the hell that means.” His voice was too sharp, his body too rigid. Dial it back, JJ told himself, even while downing another glass. Boy, the more you drank, the smoother this shit got.
“It means the heroes of your past should fortify the present. You’re engaged in old battles, son. So, in answer to your question, that’s what I want. For the first time in your life, look forward, not back. What happened tonight should show you what a gift the future really is.”
JJ licked his lips slowly, knowing exactly what sort of gifts his future held. Things like metaphorically throwing himself in front of oncoming trains to save countless others, most of whom had gotten themselves into bad situations through faulty logic, poor planning, or pure stupidity. In fact, the majority of the mortal population was spoiled and ungrateful, and continued to piss away the life he fought for them to have. He also didn’t say he’d give a limb just to be able to work a regular Joe’s nine-to-five, and to come home to nothing more complicated than a pair of squabbling kids and a lukewarm meal. Instead, I have to beware if I go on something as simple as a fucking picnic.
Warren misread his silence. “Don’t you care anymore, Jay? Don’t you still believe you can make a difference, son?”
JJ snorted. Sure he cared. He had no problem helping others—he knew no other life than that—but lately it’d occurred to him that making a difference meant having to always put his own needs and desires second. Or, in a city of two million, was it dead last?
Warren dropped a hand on his shoulder. “I think you’re burned out, son.”
“Maybe,” JJ conceded, rolling his glass between his palms. “Though I’ve never heard of an agent burning out after only three years.” Some superhero.
“It’s been three years since your metamorphosis,” Warren said, referring to that critical moment when a troop member turned from mere initiate into a full-fledged agent of Light. “You’ve been fighting for over twenty.”
Their eyes met, but neither man spoke. His parents’ deaths were long ago, and remembered from different vantage points, but horror and sadness still plagued both of them.
“Look,” Warren said, “I think you should take some time off. Go fishing. Get laid. Fucking shave,
for God’s sake.”
“I’m fine…and stubble looks good on the trading cards.”
Warren didn’t laugh. “You’re cold.”
“I’m calm,” JJ corrected. His voice was low, but his glance was sharp.
Warren wasn’t intimidated. “Well, we need you committed if we’re going to acquire our priceless little package before the Shadows do. Understand?”
JJ wanted to say he understood his own life was passing him by, unlived, while he toiled in service to some pampered elite, but he was already talking too loud, and his eyes were probably pinwheeling from the adrenaline still trailing through his system. He could sit here and argue with Warren, or he could agree with the man and get on with drinking. So he nodded his head, hoped he looked contrite, and waited for his leader to leave.
When Warren did—after an order, disguised as a warning, to go home and sleep it off—JJ glanced up at the television, where a local station was reporting on the latest antics of some vapid society sisters: a blond who’d just shown her physical talents to half the Western world in some men’s magazine he used to read for the articles, and her sister—her dark-eyed, unsmiling opposite—who had no reason that he could see to look so pissed off. He downed the rest of his whiskey and held up a hand for another bottle.
And then, in a roundabout fashion, the “package” Warren had mentioned appeared on the screen. JJ squinted at the image of one Tonya Dane, a psychic who’d appeared on a local morning show the previous week to predict an earthquake on this side of the Sierra Nevadas. That alone wouldn’t have been cause for worry, or even note, not among his kind. But the prediction had come true, which was why the footage continued its loop on the tube.
What they kept cutting was Dane’s lead-in prediction, the appearance of the Kairos, a powerful woman who would tip the metaphysical scales in favor of whatever side—Light or Shadow—she chose to endorse. Mortals, having no idea what that meant, dismissed it as nonsense, but those words had been long coveted in his world. Previously, the Kairos had been buried in mythology, but Dane’s prediction brought that epoch to an end, and now both sides were searching for her in earnest.
Unfortunately, Dane had since disappeared, without even a tarot card to point them her way.
The bartender—mustached, built, and apparently uninterested in parapsychology—flipped the station. He caught JJ’s gaze through the mirror, and quirked a brow. “You watching that?”
“Nah, bro. Flip it.” JJ shakily brought his shot glass to his lips, muttered into it. “Here’s to free will, and all that shit.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
It was a testament to his drunkenness that he didn’t sense the woman’s approach. He turned, and she was just there—slim-limbed, doe-eyed, with a cascade of raven black hair. She quirked a brow at the bottle in his hand, clearly accustomed to getting what she wanted. JJ didn’t mind, though. She smelled good.
“Have a name?”
“JJ, or just Jay.” He didn’t bother lying. Unlike his glass fingertips, hers appeared printed, like any mortal’s, and again, she smelled like a dream. “You?”
“Yes.” She licked cherry lips, coming on strong out of the gate. One way or another, JJ seemed destined for a head-on collision tonight. Besides, he thought, letting his eyes travel the length of her body, Warren had said to take some time off. “That your convertible outside?” she asked.
His focus sharpened marginally. “How’d you know?”
“Anyone else in here look like they can manage that ride? Besides, Mustangs are my favorite. Though I usually prefer a dark-haired man driving it.”
“Really? So…” He leaned forward, into her space, testing, angling in further. She met him halfway. “You willing to overlook that glaring fault and go for a little ride?”
“If I wanted a little ride,” she said, pointedly, “I’d be talking to the guy over there.”
He laughed, throaty and loud, surprising himself, then threw down some bills. Draping his arm over her slim shoulders, he turned her toward the door. “Come,” he said, already sure she would.
2
She did love the car. She purred when he revved the engine, laughed when the tires bit into the curb, and stood in her bucket seat, hands gripping the windshield as speed and desert air—pregnant with a summer storm—played havoc with her hair. Bolting up Charleston, he left the false cheer of Las Vegas behind, driving so fast it was like he was burying them in the night.
He jerked the wheel right before Spring Mountain Ranch, the turnoff coming more quickly than he remembered, though the view from the asphalt top was as spectacular as always…and theirs alone. Wild burros and rattlers regularly canvassed the dusty range, but as the first bolts of lightning pinged off the desert floor, all that flashed back at them were Joshua trees, sagebrush, and the red sandstone range framing the basin. JJ killed the engine, and for a moment they were both silent, enjoying the beginnings of a storm that would turn the dry washes into rivers sure to flood the valley.
Then the woman rose, straddling the windshield in one liquid motion, skirt rising to her hips. She challenged him with a downward glance as her bare foot carelessly crushed a wiper. “I love a good desert monsoon,” she said, and licked her lips as the sky cracked open.
JJ moved so fast she was pinned to the glass before the first raindrop fell. His hands were in her wind-whipped hair, his mouth eating her laughter. He had to remind himself to be careful with her—she was mortal and more fragile than his kind—but her hunger was spiced, and it fueled him. It was probably just the drink, but with his eyes closed, his mouth open, and his body spread atop hers, he felt pieces of him shifting inside, as if loosening from tethered moorings, suddenly unbound.
When JJ finally opened his eyes, he was surprised to find their positions reversed. He was pinned to the hood, her clothing pushed aside, his jeans half down his thighs. She lowered herself over him, a private smile revealed in a sharp crack of splintered light, but when her hips began pistoning above him, he forgot even to be surprised.
He decided later that despite her aggressiveness, she was a closet romantic. Why else wait until the storm had heightened, and they were both about to climax, to pull out the weapon? The need for symbolism, coupled with raw power, obviously motivated her…him, too, which was why he happened to open his eyes in that moment, wanting to watch her rain-streaked face as she cried out into the wild night. Instead he saw her wide, dark eyes hard with intent, and the honed edge of a tomahawk barreling toward his chest.
JJ barely pulled his palms from her waist in time to counteract the lethal blow, but once it’d been deflected, adrenaline lent the sobriety needed to disarm her. He flipped, crushing her against the car she so loved, her slim frame denting the pristine hood. The glyph on her chest began to smoke. “Guess I don’t have to be so gentle after all,” he said, and made a second, deeper dent.
The impact didn’t stop her throaty laughter. “Satisfy a girl’s curiosity before she dies?”
“Is this a final request?” he growled, forearm across her neck.
“At least you’ll finish off something tonight.”
“Besides your life, you mean.” He dug a nail into the flesh of her fingertip, and felt a false print pop off. He sucked in a deep breath but still couldn’t scent anything of her Shadowy nature. She’d covered it with a synthetic, then. It was easy enough to do.
She smiled weakly. “When did you get the tattoo on your right shoulder?”
She’d seen the yin/yang symbol. The word desire was etched out in the shaded side. The other held fear. “I was nineteen.” He saw no harm in answering now.
“And now you’re twenty-eight.”
She relaxed beneath him as his brow furrowed, all her strength sinking inward. He remained on guard.
“JJ,” she teased in a threadbare croak. “I’ve known you since you were five.”
He froze above her, all the shifting inside of him ceasing, reversing. “And you are?” he asked, voice as hard.
“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.”