The Scent of Shadows Free with Bonus Material (8 page)

I nodded like I understood, but was distracted by the tool bar at the bottom of the screen. Another screen was currently in use. “What’s that?”

Her gaze followed my own, and I thought I saw her body jolt. The screen had my name on it. Mine and another.

“Nothing.” A quick dance of fingers and it vanished.

“Olivia,” I said, slowly enunciating each syllable of her name. “What was that? You’re not trying to find that…that child, are you?”

“No!” she said, too fast, and crossed her arms. It was more a protective move than a defiant one. I stared at her, hard. Olivia might be queen of the computer, but I knew body language.

“Don’t play affronted bimbo with me.” I jabbed a finger at the screen. “What’re you up to?”

Her cell phone rang just then, the theme from
Pretty in Pink
saving her from reply. I raised one brow, indicating we’d pick this conversation up later. Some things, and some people, were best kept in the past. She quickly turned her back to me and flipped the phone open. “Hello?”

I turned my attention back to the screen, letting thoughts of unwanted children fade from my mind. Slowly, the computer was working through the records at Sunrise Hospital. I studied it, toying absently with the chain at my neck as I watched the dates and files flash in front of my eyes, and wondered how Zoe had fooled everybody so thoroughly about my parentage for so long? And why?

Had she cheated on Xavier, and didn’t want to risk losing him, or his money? But then, why just up and leave sixteen years later? And why, at least, had she never told me? She knew there was no love lost between he and I.

“But it’s almost midnight,” I heard Olivia say in her best bubblehead voice. This was followed by a sigh that said the person on the phone already knew this and didn’t care. “Look, it’s just not a good time, Butch.”

She rolled her eyes when she saw my expression, and I shook my head. Butch? She was dating someone named Butch? “My sister’s over and we’re just having—”

I heard the timbre of a masculine voice arguing his point, but the boom of thunder drowned out the words. I picked up
Luna, whose tail had gone bottle-brushed at the accompanying flash of light, and tried to stroke her fur back down into something resembling feline. Outside, rain began to pour in sheets over the glass walls.

“Yes, I know it’s raining,” Olivia was saying. “No, you can’t stay until the storm passes. You can pick up your things, but then you have to go. ’Bye.”

She threw the phone across the room and it landed on a pink sea of down comforter and frilly pillows. Then she stalked over to her closet and pulled out handcuffs. And a whip. I stared, openmouthed.

“Don’t ask,” she muttered, adding a studded dildo to the loot. “I thought it would be fun. That was before the condom broke. I panicked at the thought of wading around in his gene pool, you’ll see, and threw him out without giving back his toys. He’s come to collect.”

“Must have found a new playmate.” She gave me a sharp look, and I grinned. “No pun intended.”

“Fine with me. He was too obsessive for my tastes anyway. He wanted to lick me in the weirdest places. And he could spend hours smelling me. Not to mention he had more hair than a woolly mammoth.”

“Aren’t those extinct?”

“So we believed,” she said, and threw some sort of belt—I didn’t want to know what it looped around—into a pile that was growing at an alarming rate.

“Don’t worry,” I said, picking up a tube of lipstick with a penis-shaped wand. “If he gets overly amorous, I’ve got your back.”

“Not necessary,” she said, yanking the tube from my hands. I picked up Luna instead. “He looks like a Hell’s Angel, but he’s relatively harmless.”

I saw what she meant when she opened her door to a six and a half foot ape dressed entirely in leather a minute later. I actually thought he looked rather like a large bulldog, complete with sunken eyes and hanging jowls, and she was right—he was hairy. I could see where Olivia
might balk at banging chromosomes with a physiological mutant.

“Jo, this is Butch.”

“Yes, it is,” I muttered, giving the giant a hesitant nod.

Luna apparently experienced a similar reaction. She took one look at Butch and sprung from my arms like an Olympic platform diver. “Ouch, shit!”

The bundle of fur wheeled across the marble floor, scrambling for purchase with a click-clack of sharpened nails, and disappeared into the bedroom. As I watched, the stinging marks on my arm became angry pink ribbons, then filled with bright red blood, promising scarring.

“Shit,” I said again.

“Are you all right?” Olivia rushed over, leaving Butch in the foyer.

“He never did like me,” Butch mumbled, shutting the door behind him.

“She,” Olivia corrected as Butch joined us in the living room. “She never liked you. And maybe she would have if you hadn’t stepped on her tail. Twice.”

Butch just shrugged. Big bad bulldog.

“You two stay here,” she said, catching my eye. That meant she didn’t want him following her into the bedroom. “I’ll just get your things and find Jo something to wash off with.”

She disappeared, leaving me with Leather Man. He was practically wearing the whole cow—when he started moving toward me I almost expected him to moo.

“Want me to take a look?” He held out his hand. I hesitated, without reason, though I generally didn’t need one. I didn’t know Butch, but there was some sort of unease or smothered energy that I didn’t like. The drop-point knife was still sitting on the coffee table, close enough to see, but far enough away to be as useful as a butter knife. Still, I had the folded blade in my boot, and was confident enough to hold out my arm for his inspection, testing us both. If there was something off about
Butch, I didn’t want him around Olivia, and better I find out about it than she.

He took my wrist gently, gazing at the scratch almost clinically, a concerned enough expression on his fleshy face. I relaxed a fraction. Then he raised my arm and inhaled deeply of the wound, nostrils flaring. That’s when I saw.

The pads of his fingertips were curiously smooth, almost shiny with luminescence, and unlined. Without prints. I forced my arm not to tense beneath his touch and quickly returned my eyes to his face.

The lightning flashed outside, firing the room and slashing across his features to illuminate chiseled bone and hollow eyes; a skeleton’s bony sneer with teeth shaped like daggers. His hold tightened a fraction, just the fingertips, those too-smooth pads, but it was enough to make me still and wait for an opening to reclaim my arm.

As thunder rolled across the sky, Butch smiled lopsidedly. “Do you know what time it is?”

I didn’t look at my watch. “Yeah. It’s time for you to let go of my hand.”

His fingers tightened over mine, and given one moment more I’d have broken them, but he dropped my arm suddenly and walked away. Tensed, braced for a fight, this unbalanced me. He just drifted away like he’d never sniffed at my skin in an intimate way or held a look of naked hunger in those hollow eyes. Retrieving my long blade from the coffee table, I tucked it in the waistband of my pants, then grabbed the
kubotan
from my purse, concealing it in my pocket. And I followed him into her bedroom.

“I think that’s everything,” Olivia was saying. Her back to us both, she was bent over a mound of stilettos and boots emptied from her shoe closet. She continued talking, her voice a breathy staccato thrumming in the air, but I don’t think either Butch or I heard a word. There was something else going on, like the dark undercurrent stirring beneath a
placid lake just before the monster struck. I inched toward Olivia, my back to the wall. Butch, strangely enough, kept his gaze on the bedside clock. It was one minute to midnight.

“Olivia,” I said in my quietest, deadliest voice. “Get behind me.”

Two pairs of eyes looked at me, but only one seemed surprised. Butch merely looked amused. I moved to my sister’s side.

“How about that. Ajax was right.” He shook his head wonderingly. “It was you all along. Hidden in plain sight. Xavier’s daughter, no less.”

Whatever the hell that meant. “I’m not Xavier’s daughter.”

He laughed. “Then whoever hid you knew what they were doing.”

“Excuse me? What’s going on here? Am I missing something?”

“I thought it was her,” Butch said, jerking his head at Olivia. “It was the closest I could come to scenting you, but once I was in her…” He shook his head in a sorrowful gesture. “I thought I was going anosmic.”

Then he slid a smoothly curving scimitar from behind the nape of his neck. I had to give it to these guys—whoever they were, they had unique weapons.

“Whoa!” Olivia’s breath escaped her in a whoosh. I don’t think I was breathing at all. “I’ve heard of unsafe sex, but this is ridiculous!”

“It was you we were after,” he said, ignoring her. “You I detected on your sister’s skin, your signature scent all along. But what I can’t understand,” he continued, looking at the bedside clock, tapping the flat edge of the blade against his palm like he was waiting, “is how you recognized me. You don’t fully come into your sixth sense for another…thirty seconds.”

Midnight. Like that homeless freak had said.
Make sure you survive.

“Signature scent?” I mimicked, my eyes also on the clock. “Kinda girly, don’t you think?”

“Well, I’m a right softie at heart.” He flashed those dagger teeth. “Tell me, Joanna, been smelling things lately? Interesting things? Foul things on the wind?”

I swallowed hard. “What, Ajax tell you that too?”

“Common knowledge. You’re turning twenty-five, right? That’s when the metamorphosis begins.”

“Excuse me,” Olivia said, “but do you two know each other?”

Butch smiled and took a step forward. “Not as well as we’re about to.”

“That’s enough, Butch. One more step and this stiletto’s going up your ass.” We all looked down at Olivia’s hand. I frowned, recognizing the ebony pump as one of her favorites. The same thought must have occurred to her. She dropped the shoe and picked up another. “
This
stiletto’s going up your ass.”

I sighed. Bless her for trying.

Butch returned his eyes to me. “Get ready, innocent. Your first real breath will also be your last.”

I only had a vague notion of what he was talking about, based on snippets from a very unreal last twenty-four hours, but I knew a real threat when I heard one.

Ten, nine, eight…the seconds inched by, midnight looming. Outside, thunder cracked like a whip overhead, and the sheet of pattering rain deteriorated into a full-force onslaught of sleet and hail. Wind whistled, rattling at the walls, and the building began to shake in palsied tremors. Some of Olivia’s knickknacks tinkled, others shattered, and then the core of the building began to rock on its braces. An explosion sounded as we crossed into midnight.

“Olivia, get back!” I had to yell as the tempest blew through the bedroom. It was like being at the top of a tornado’s funnel, poised to be sucked inside. Then the glass wall began to splinter, a sound like fingernails raking a chalkboard,
sending spasms up my spine. I resisted the impulse to cover my ears, and went for the blade at my back instead. Butch tensed and raised his scimitar. A bolt of lightning arrowed the sky as Olivia screamed behind me, and there was a flicker of movement from the corner of my eye.

And then I saw nothing.

Molten licorice, smoking iron, and bright flames filled my mouth. I was singed, burning from the inside out, and my teeth felt like they were being collectively yanked from my jaw. I knew somewhere in my mind I’d been hit, and my fallen knife now lay uselessly on the floor, but that knowledge was the only lingering connection between brain and body. The synapses controlling movement had been severed by the bolt, much like how the muscles continue to twitch in a decapitated chicken’s body. I couldn’t tell if I was still standing or had fallen. In the whiplash of that storm, I totally lost myself.

Once, in my early teens, I’d ventured into the high desert during a flash flood, driven by a youthful sense of adventure and an even greater sense of invulnerability. A stray dog had been my unlikely companion that night, and as it galloped unevenly across the rocky terrain, I saw it struck by lightning. Its golden fur disintegrated instantly into ash, and smoke streamed from its body like a signal for help. When I reached the fallen animal’s side, its eyes were wide saucers, unblinking, and the heat emanating from that blistering body warded me off. This was how I felt now; sightless, terrified, and smoldering. And just before all my senses were lost, I felt an acute pain sear through my left shoulder.

Then there was nothing. No pain, no light, not even darkness. I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or closed, and my body felt like I was suspended in water; numb, floating, and impervious from all sides. I knew I was in trouble, if not already dead, but I was unable to react, and had no idea how long I remained in this state.

It felt like forever.

It felt like a nanosecond.

Then the lingering tendrils of Olivia’s scream were back in my head, and a smell so putrid it clogged every cell of my body had me lifting my hand to my mouth to keep from vomiting. Realizing what I was doing, amazed that I
could
move, I lowered my hand again and, still sightless, located the edge of my boot. I flipped open the folded blade and threw it into the heart of that rotting stench.

The air exploded, and crashed over me in waves, like maggot-ridden garbage spilling from a bag, and the scream that accompanied it was inhuman. I fell to my knees, indescribably weak, and allowed my head to fall into my hands.

When I lifted it again, the world had miraculously righted itself and the bedroom was eerily silent. The strange indoor storm had abated. The glass wall was whole and unmarked.

And there was a dead man on the floor in front of me.

“Jo? Are you okay?”

I lifted my head. Olivia was huddled in a corner, cradling Luna, the cat’s head tucked protectively beneath her arm. I nodded, and turned back to where Butch lay sprawled at my feet like a giant toad.

“What happened?” My voice rasped like it’d been cut to ribbons by a tiny razor.

“Y-You did what you had to do, Jo,” Olivia said, misinterpreting my question. “He came at you with that big knife and I thought for sure he’d kill you. But you didn’t back up. You didn’t run. You didn’t even waver. I couldn’t believe it.”

I glanced at the clock next to her and did a double take. It was 12:01. I couldn’t believe it either. Only a minute had passed since the onset of that tempest? “What about the storm?”

Olivia looked momentarily confused, and glanced uncertainly from me to the window, where a patter of raindrops stroked the glass. “It stopped, I guess. I hadn’t noticed.”

Hadn’t noticed? Hadn’t noticed an electrical bolt had damn near sliced her sister in two? Hadn’t smelled my flesh burning?

“Help me up.” I held up my hand and she reached for it, but Luna whirled in her arms, hissed, and swiped at me.

“Fuck you,” I said to the feline, and pushed myself to my feet. I was a bit wobbly, but alive.

“That’s no way to talk to someone who just helped save your life!” Olivia scolded before burying her face in Luna’s furry nape. “Is it, my precious pookie?” Her voice came out muffled. “My pookster? You love Auntie Jo so much you risked one of your nine lives to save her.”

“What do you mean?”

Olivia didn’t answer at first. Then she turned her face toward mine, cradling the cat to her cheek. “Look at his eyes.”

My legs were shaky, but they held as I crossed to Butch’s body. I nudged him with the toe of my boot, and he rolled like a sausage to his back. He would have been staring sightlessly at the ceiling…if there hadn’t been four long scores across each eye. The lids had been shredded with scalpel-like accuracy, slim incisions but deep, lacerating each eyeball.

“I think I’m going to be sick.”

Olivia joined me next to the body. “You’d be dead if Luna hadn’t leapt when she did.”

But why would a cat attack a human? A man, no less, whom it was obviously afraid of? I turned to ask Olivia this just in time to see her eyes go wide with shock. The heroic feline was unceremoniously dumped on the bed. “Jo! You’re injured!”

I looked down and saw the blood seeping through the left shoulder of my blouse. Part of me was surprised I hadn’t felt the injury before. Another part knew it was a bad sign I hadn’t. “It’s okay,” I told her, knowing it wasn’t. “It doesn’t hurt.”

“Lie down. Let me get something to staunch the wound, and we’ll call an ambulance.”

I was in no shape to argue. Perhaps it was only psychosomatic, but I
was
feeling a bit dizzy all of a sudden. Luna
hissed as I plopped down among the pillows, then leapt from the bed, over the corpse, and streaked away. I closed my eyes.

I must have drifted off because when I came to again Olivia was seated next to me, pressing a clean towel to my wound. I winced as fresh pain coursed through me, and was about to tell her she shouldn’t have used the good towels when the first tear fell.

“Hey,” I said, reaching up to wipe it away. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m going to be fine.”

“I know,” she said. Her face crumpled anyway. “I just keep seeing that monster—he really looked like a monster!—and he wouldn’t stop staring at you.” She shook her head side to side, as if to dislodge the memory. “I thought for sure I was going to lose you. Again.”

I tried to make my smile reassuring. “Well, you didn’t lose me, and you won’t ever lose me. It’s just a little scratch. See? The bleeding has already stopped.”

She sniffled. “I guess.”

We sat in silence, Olivia’s cell phone clasped on her lap, though she made no move to open it. Chaos would resume as soon as that call was made, and even though it was a false sense of normalcy surrounding us now—there
was
a dead man on the bedroom floor—I think we both felt once we made that call, our lives would never be the same.

“Gawd,” Olivia sniffled, and lifted the edge of the towel to see if the bleeding had stopped. “I just have the worst luck with guys.”

We looked at each other and for a moment neither of us spoke. Then we began to laugh, that crazed, hysterical laughter you see in people who’ve drank too much, or who’ve forgotten their lines on their wedding day. The laughter tore at my shoulder, probably starting the bleeding again, but it felt so good, much more acute than the pain, and I didn’t want to stop. Our bodies shook with it and tears rolled unheeded down our faces.

We were both gasping, dizzy, and breathless, when I felt
Olivia jerk and inhale sharply. Opening my teary eyes, I too froze. There was a beefy arm across her throat, and her fingers clawed at it, her eyes wide and instantly somber. Butch wasn’t exactly choking her, but he wasn’t being gentle either. Hauling her to her feet, he squared himself behind her body in a position that made it impossible for Olivia to defend or escape the hold, even if she knew how.

“You’re dead,” I said dumbly, though all evidence pointed to the contrary. I’d killed him. Yet there he stood, blood staining his clothing out of a wound that no longer existed. How could that be? In fact, the only ill effect he still showed was the scoring about his eyes and a blind and total reliance on his other senses. Especially, I noted, his sense of smell.

“Not quite,” he said. “Not yet.”

The words
fast healer
burst through my brain, images of a wrist popping back into place on a dusty desert road, a crumpled body coming back to life. I knew then it
was
possible. Blindly, Butch backed away from me, dragging Olivia with him, his nostrils flaring widely with every breath. He was moving closer and closer to the blade I’d dropped. I had to do something quickly before it was too late to do anything at all.

“Let her go,” I said, pitching my voice to the right of the bed before easing myself up and to the left. “Y-You want me, fine. But leave her out of this.” My arm throbbed and the bedroom wavered as I stood, but I forced myself steady. I didn’t know how long I could stand, but passing out wasn’t an option. I’d save Olivia or I’d die trying.

“How’d you do that?” Butch asked, head tilted into the middle of the room.

“Do what?”

“Kill me. You’re supposed to be immobile during metamorphosis. How’d you move?”

Like I knew? Instead of answering, I advanced.

“One more step and you’ll watch your sister die.” He’d stilled and was focused on me despite his blindness. For
emphasis, he tightened his grip. Olivia’s eyes bulged. “Now step back.”

Death rode his brow. I stepped back.
Think, Joanna. Think!

Okay, so Butch’s sight was gone, but his other senses were flawlessly acute. It made me wonder at this transformation he’d talked about. It obviously meant something to him. He’d waited until then to try and kill me, and in that time all my senses had been shut down. But now that they were back, what about that “sixth sense” he’d spoken of? Was that what he was using to track me now?

As much as I hated to take my eyes from Butch and Olivia, I had to close them in order to transfer focus to my other senses. I did, and the difference was immediately discernable. Colors flashed behind my eyelids, accompanying scent and sound. By simply casting my mind in the direction of the objects I last remembered seeing, I could smell them.

On myself I smelled blood, Ben, and the faint scent of the soap I showered with. I turned to the dresser beside me where a bevy of beauty products rested—mint, eucalyptus, wax, powder, and a perfume that reminded me unerringly of Olivia. Turning my attention to her, I inhaled deeply, and caught lingering tendrils of that scent, as well as something sharp, which I instinctively identified as fear.

As for Butch, I didn’t dare cast my mind in his direction. His scent was already overwhelming me, like being locked in a room with a pustulant corpse. I was already more sensitized to him than anything else in the room.

Except the blade on the floor between us.

My eyes flew open in time to see Butch’s head jerk, then jerk again when I inhaled sharply. We scented it at the same time, or scented each other scenting it. He was closer than I. I lunged, he snarled, and we reached it at the same time.

I came up with the tip burrowed beneath my chin, Butch’s laughter hot in my face. Olivia’s squeal was choked off in a warning tug. “Don’t fucking move. You don’t think
I
know
what you’re doing? What you’re thinking?” He flicked the blade, a swift motion that made me wince in anticipation, but no pain came. Yet. My necklace, however, dropped soundlessly to the carpet. My jaw clenched reflexively, but otherwise I didn’t move. Butch laughed humorlessly. “I can detect your thoughts before you even form them. Remember, I’ve been at it longer, Archer, and I’ve never been an innocent.”

That I could believe.

“Just tell me what you want,” I said, fighting to keep my voice even. “Anything you want. Me for her? Give the word and I’ll do it.”

“Oh, now you’re making deals, are you? Isn’t that noble, sacrificing everything for your sister. But you’ve done that before, haven’t you, Jo?” He grinned that corrosive smile. “Time to do it again.”

“No!” Olivia struggled against his iron grip. He just held on until she’d worn herself out. If it had been me, I could have bent forward until his weight was on my back, flipping him, or swept a leg, or scraped his shin on the way to breaking bones in his foot. But it wasn’t me. It was my sweet, harmless, innocent sister, and she could only stand there and weep. And choke.

“Take out the weapon in your left pocket, and throw it out the door.”

I didn’t wonder how he knew about the hidden
kubotan
. Even I could smell the cold, pressed aluminum. I did, tossing it through the doorway leading to the living room.

“Now step back…Step back,” he repeated, when I didn’t move. “I can smell the defiance on you, Joanna, don’t you know that? Do you really think you can do something to change what’s happening here? You think you can save Olivia now like you saved her before?”

I stepped back, but instead of relaxing Butch, this seemed to provoke him. Olivia struggled, her face going red, but his grip was a crowbar wrapped around a feather. If he’d shoved that knife through my jaw, I’d have felt less horror.

“No!” My fists balled impotently at my side and fear slicked my insides and rose like a tide of tar, oiling the air around me. I knew he could smell it on me. Desperation made my words earnest. “You said you’d trade me for her! Me for her!”

“Now why would I want to trade you for her?” he asked, loosening his grip. Olivia stilled. Butch raised the blade. “When I can have you both?”

With that he began to cut.

“Joanna?” Olivia’s voice was childlike, small. She looked at me as if seeing me for the first time, wide eyes filled with childlike confusion. I knew, though, that she was really viewing me through a veil of white-hot pain. I remembered how the world looked when buried beneath your own blood. Tears burned in my eyes for Olivia’s sake and a strangled cry escaped my throat.

Butch began to laugh. Laughing and cutting, precise despite his blindness. Beyond the brutality, there was just something horrifying about seeing that pure beauty marked. I’d never seen Olivia injured before and it was like seeing wings torn from a butterfly, like watching a temple being defiled. It broke something reverent in my heart, and her anguished cries filled my own mouth.

“Stop! Stop!”

Butch held out the dripping blade. “Stop? Yes, well…why not? She’s nothing to me, after all. Just a pawn, really. Just a way to get to you. Thank you, Olivia. For a job well done.”

The tips of his filed teeth sparked in a telling grin. I saw it, and still there was nothing I could do. Butch opened his stance, turned his shoulders, and propelled Olivia into the arching wall of glass. I heard the sick thud of her body hitting, the hollow crack of the pane, and in what seemed like slow motion, the glass splintered, then shattered. It collapsed, and Olivia fell with it.

Her scream razored through the night, lingering after her body had fallen. An answering cry burst from my throat as I rushed the window, clambering gracelessly over
the wide bed and bounding across the other side. I clawed at the jagged glass, bloodying my hands and forearms, feeling nothing.

I couldn’t see her. She was already lost in the void of night; dropping like the rain, falling like a star, setting like a crimson sun.

Staring out into that cold black void, I had a momentary urge to follow. One step, a mere five inches, and it would all be over. I’d never have to move or fight or weep again. I wouldn’t have the unending chore of breathing anymore, and the screams pinballing in my skull would be silenced once and for all.

I heard my name; a taunting, singsong repetition, languorously drawing out the syllables. All I could think, all I could feel, was that I’d been wrong. Wrong to believe I’d taken every precaution to protect myself. Wrong in believing nothing else could be taken from me, that I had nothing to lose. There was one last thing that I had cared about in this world. My sister.

And now she too was gone.

“Jo-ahn-naa…”

Sucking in a deep, steadying breath, I lowered my head like a bull readying for the charge, and I did take that first, that final, step forward.

But not before I had turned around.

I sprang forward, body low, and used my weight to take his legs from under him. There were no thoughts of weapons as I wrapped my arms around his knees. No care of injury as his bulk collapsed and toppled forward. I swiveled, fighting for his back, but he was quicker than he looked, even blind. Before he could use his fists or weight against me, I was out of reach, regrouping, and readying for a second assault.

“What are you doing?” He sounded genuinely surprised. “You don’t have a weapon.”

“Yeah. I do.”

“No. I’d be able to smell it.”

Both of our nostrils flared, and we located the weapons; his scimitar that had skittered beneath the bed when I killed him the first time, my folding knife knocked from his grasp when I’d lunged, and that now lay outside the door.