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Meanwhile, the police were just as frustrated. Vaughn fumed about lacking funds and manpower, and Skamar listened with her usual detachment, wondering if this was what “life” was all about. What was the point of opening yourself up to people or caring about things if they could eventually be used against you? Why even have a child if her potential absence resulted in a crater being carved in your chest?
She posed a softer version of this question—one that didn’t make her sound as if she didn’t understand the mortal state—to Vaughn when he finally fell silent.
“Because it can be so good, too,” he said, though he looked pained as he said it. “Knowing that the worst might someday happen doesn’t mean you avoid the risk of loving someone. It only means you seize the good when and where you can.”
Was that what she’d felt in that darkened parking lot? While stinking of warden blood and having just taken a life, was that what she’d inadvertently done? Was that why Zoe’s daughter, Joanna, had willingly offered up her life for a mortal child’s? And mostly, Skamar wondered, Was it worth it? She studied Vaughn. He certainly believed so. Funny how when she looked at him now she saw not his physical weakness, that fragile humanity, but his strong spirit, which seemed directly related to that belief. She could suddenly see how in the simplest of things—an invite for a cup of coffee, a small flirtation, a kiss—he seized his life as fervently as she clung to hers. Seizing life . . . and choosing good.
Skamar was still preoccupied by this when she joined his undercover unit the very next night. They were outfitting a female cop so young-looking that only her scent gave her away as a mature woman. Yet mortal girls verging on puberty were olfactory blank spots in the mind, just like the initiates born in underground sanctuaries and raised to fight on either side of the Zodiac. Therefore this plan to plant the officer in the audience during an evening magic show—where a magician would oh-so-conveniently pick her for his disappearing act—was flawed from the beginning. The Shadows would never fall for it.
The one thing it did have going for it was the proximity to another gathering of teens. Yuletide Magic raised money for underprivileged children while easing the social consciences of parents who otherwise seemed hell-bent on spending an insane amount of money on plastic trinkets for their offspring. Yet Skamar remained skeptical.
“This isn’t going to work,” she muttered as Vaughn jerked at the neck of his rented tuxedo.
“Why not?” he asked, frowning at his bow tie. It had been her idea for him to pose as an amateur magician, ostensibly to draw the girls close to him and possibly the kidnappers as well. In reality, she wanted only to keep him out of the way. The run-in at the Festival of Lights two nights earlier had shaken her—even if Vaughn didn’t remember any of it. She wouldn’t want anyone that close to the Tulpa. Never mind a man in possession of a surprisingly kind heart, dry scent, and lips that made hers tingle.
“Too obvious a setting,” she lied, as there was no way to explain about the decoy cop’s scent.
“Ah, sunshine,” he said, grinning as he pulled a springy bunch of colorful flowers from his tuxedo pocket. He offered them to her. “All you have to do is believe in magic.”
Skamar crossed her arms until he tucked the flowers away, though her heart skipped a couple of beats and her mouth quirked at one side when he shot her a roguish wink. Be careful, she found herself thinking.
Frowning, she wondered where that particularly human worry had come from, and turning away, she almost missed the Shadow entirely. As the bait took to the stage and the undercover officers fanned out about her, Skamar saw Dawn, a petite, unremarkable-looking woman . . . except that she was also the Shadow Gemini. She was speaking with a girl perched at the audience’s edge, gesturing animatedly to an exit door. Whatever she said made the girl’s eyes pop with excitement, and though no more than five feet from the nearest undercover cop, their body language indicated they were together. Dawn shepherded the girl toward a door leading backstage, and just as they gained the threshold, she shot Skamar a sweet smile over her shoulder.
Skamar glanced over to see if Vaughn had noticed, but he was now surrounded by half a dozen children who wanted him to hop inside his Plexiglas box, pull the curtains shut, and make himself disappear. It was clear that disguise had backfired.
Meanwhile the plant was onstage, ostensibly being
hypnotized, and all other eyes were fixed firmly on her. It didn’t matter. Skamar was the only one who could keep Dawn from escaping anyway.
She raced through the door and gained the backstage area in time to see the girl yanked behind an arching black scrim. Using the darkness to cover her unnatural speed, Skamar instantly closed the gap between them. Braced for attack—by a warden, by other waiting Shadows, maybe even by the Tulpa—she wasn’t ready for a conversation. But Dawn stood across the vast expanse of the stage, one hand holding a knife to the girl’s throat, the other muffling her sobs.
“My friends and I want to show you a little magic trick,” Dawn called out in a singsong voice.
Skamar laughed harshly. “You mean you and your invisible friends, Dawn?”
“Better than mortal ones,” Dawn said, offering up her own harsh laugh. “Especially at a magic show. I mean, it’s just so easy to make them go poof!”
Then both Dawn and the girl dropped from sight, a trapdoor swinging shut above them. Skamar ran, intending to give the door one hard stomp, but she came up short, Dawn’s final words—and the accompanying grin—finally reaching her mind and stopping her heart.
After bolting back to the theater, she nudged aside surly teens and offended parents to stand in front of the glass magic box. Vaughn was gone, the curtains were pulled shut, and the whole box vibrated with energy. Swallowing hard, Skamar grasped the tassel at the box’s side and pulled open the curtains.
A warden as giant and black as hell’s gaping mouth lunged at her, banging against the Plexiglas front with rabid fury. Screams erupted behind Skamar as the dog rocketed into the glass. Ignoring the chaos behind her, she reached for a note taped to the box’s front. A single word was spelled out in block letters on Valhalla Hotel stationery, one that brought back such an intense memory of pain that she actually sagged.
Valhalla was where. Vaughn was who. Now was when. As for the what? The Shadows weren’t making her guess at that: “CRUCIFIXION.”
Crumpling the note in her hand, Skamar bolted.
Skamar didn’t own any weapons. Shadows were immune to them, so knives and guns were more irritants than deterrents, and the Tulpa was impervious to all weaponry—even the magical ones crafted for Zodiac agents. Skamar couldn’t complain about that too much since she shared the immunity as a tulpa, but it was also why she had to take on the Shadows, and whatever trap they’d set, all alone.
Besides, the thought of something happening to Vaughn because of her was suddenly unacceptable. It set off such a panic in her chest, it was as if her lungs had grown wings. She had to stop it or—yes—die trying.
So Skamar skirted slot machines, floor attendants, and oblivious patrons of the Valhalla Hotel and Casino and followed the meaty, furred scent of Shadow wardens into the heart of the property. When she passed the twenty-four-hour café, the girls’ scent joined the hounds’, causing her heart to skip a beat. She rounded the gift shop, one of four, and felt a mental punch as Vaughn’s scent was added to the mix. The olfactory triptych was impossible to miss—a rabid fury matched only by a throbbing fear.
The scents led into a showroom, the grandest she’d ever seen, and home to one of those freaky acrobat shows Vegas visitors couldn’t get enough of. Multileveled pools and water features pitted the room’s center, and as it was obviously the show’s “dark” night, the Coliseum-like theater was empty.
Yet there was still a show going on.
Deep drums pounded through the cavernous room, while refitted spotlights blazed upon the platforms suspended above two pools of water. One held the four girls—bound and cowering in the rounded middle, facing drowning if any of them even wobbled. Their pool had been blackened into shimmering opaqueness.
