"We kill these people, these Shadows, Joanna. That's what you'd be signing up for."

People like Butch and Ajax. People who sent madmen after little girls in the desert. "I got it, Warren."

"And do you think you could kill your own father if given the chance?" I nodded once. "In cold blood?"

"I've trained my whole life for it," I said, and even though I'd always told myself my training had been for defense, this was the truth.

Finally, after what seemed like forever, Warren nodded. "I can give you that chance."

"And so the hunter becomes the hunted." I smiled wryly as I threw his own words back at him, and held out a hand to shake. "You've got yourself a heroine."

Warren ignored the hand. Instead, with tears suddenly springing into his eyes, he leapt from his chair and plowed full force into my arms. I staggered backward, and the other man, silent all this time, caught my eye over Warren's shoulder and shrugged.

"Okay, okay," I said, pulling away. "Sheesh."

"Did you hear? The first sign has come to pa.s.s," Warren said, turning to the other man. "She'll do it. She'll join us."

The man simply nodded. He was beefy, but not in the hard way that Butch had been. More like Santa Claus, I supposed, if Santa had lived in Vegas.

Warren turned back to face me. "This is our witness from the troop's council. He's just here to make sure you're joining us of your own free will, and haven't been coerced in any way."

I looked at him blankly. "You're joking, right?"

"Under any direct duress from me, I mean." He smiled self-consciously, wringing his hands. "I didn't twist your arm or knock you around or anything, did I?"

"No." I turned to the man. "He didn't."

"Good enough for you?" Warren asked impatiently. The man nodded and rose. Ah, there was the difference between him and Santa. He was nearly seven feet tall. "Oh, but where are my manners? Micah, this is Joanna. Jo, Micah."

How did I know he wouldn't have a nice, normal name like Bob or Joe? "Nice to meet you," I said, holding out a hand.

Micah, the behemoth, finally spoke. "I hope you still feel that way when you wake up."

"Wake up?"

The blow came from the side, and caught me on the back of my neck. My legs folded neatly beneath me, and as my eyes rolled into my head I saw Micah looming above me with a steel baton in his hand. I had only a second to think he was faster than he looked before Warren caught me beneath the arms, his lips close to my ear.

"Remember," I heard him say, "we all become who we need to in order to survive."

Then his voice, his image, and his scent all swam away on a final wave of incoherence and mercifully dulling pain.

10.

The dreams a person has while unconscious are not the same as when they're asleep. They're more like something from a Bradbury novel, a carnival ride with ominous portents and sinister beings waiting to take siege of your soul. My dreams were like that now, shadowy, one slithering into another, carrying s.n.a.t.c.hes of oblique conversations I'd never had and images of faces I'd never seen.

"More to the left," I heard someone say urgently. "That's not how it is in the picture, see? It has to be perfect."

A masked face loomed over me, eyes concerned and considering, before it drew back and fluorescent lights blinded me again. "She will be perfect."

No less unnerving were the tattered flashes of things I had seen, but combined in new scenes and settings, like a horror film saddled with an alternate ending.

There was Olivia, eyes shooting open to pierce me from her deathbed on the ground nine stories below me. Her skin was bleached white, and all of her blood had pooled in a heart-shaped lake around her broken body. Her gaze wide and imploring, she posed the one question I couldn't answer.

"Why am I dead?" I struggled to reach out to her, but was whisked away, her parting words ringing in my ears. "Why me and not you?"

Xavier caught me from above. His grip was steel around my biceps, and as much as I thrashed I couldn't escape him. He dragged me to him, opening his mouth wide to swallow me whole. "Zoe left you too."

Then I was running, fighting for air as I fled through a dark desert night. I felt the sharp sting of tumbleweeds against my shins, my ankles turning over on themselves as I ran blindly into boulders and stones, barely keeping out of reach of an unseen fleet-footed pursuer. He-and it was a he-didn't speak at all. Instead his voice invaded my brain by other means, slithering inside, not so much a snake's hiss as the rattle of its tail. "I should have killed you the first time..."

I woke with a start, breathing hard. The room was dim, though not completely dark, and daylight peered at me through long slats in the window shades. I spied a lumpy outline in the corner of the room, and felt my mouth twitch. Warren, I thought woodenly. I was going to kick his a.s.s.

"You know, you're not funny," I said, causing him to jump. He straightened in his chair, rubbing a long hand over his eyes, and stretched loudly. "You think you're funny, but you're not."

He held up a hand as he rose. "Don't hate."

"Too late." Yawning widely, I lifted a hand to rub over my eyes, but discovered it was too heavy, too far from my face, and too much trouble to complete the movement. Which was odd. Yet having had the distinct displeasure of a lengthy hospital visit once before, I recognized the lethargy as being chemically induced, some sort of painkiller probably. The question was, why had they drugged me? "What am I doing here?"

"Recovering," Warren answered, standing at my side. "And hiding."

"Are they after me?" My heart fluttered beneath my breastbone. "Can you smell me again?"

"Shh, don't worry. You're in isolation. n.o.body outside this room can sense your pheromones. It's like...you don't even exist."

I took a tentative whiff. All I smelled was hospital; drugs, antiseptic, and the type of cleanliness that erases not only bad odors, but good alike. It was a clean I'd hoped to never experience again. I looked at Warren. "There's nothing. I can't smell me at all."

"I can." He smiled, perching himself bedside. He'd taken off the long duster that made him look like some demented cowboy, wore a simple khaki T-shirt and fatigues, and his hair was pulled back, the matting tightly bound to his head. Each time I saw him, he looked a bit more reputable. Scary.

Closing his eyes, he inhaled deeply, like he was bending over a rose instead of a body. "You, but more so. The unscented thread now blends in with the rest of your genetic makeup. It's beautiful, really. Lit up like some life-saving beacon...if you'll excuse the visual a.n.a.logy."

I closed my eyes and breathed, casting my thoughts downward, inward. Nothing. After several seconds I looked at him again. "So it's like an identifying trait? Like, I don't know, permanent perfume?"

"More like the vein that runs through a particularly strong wedge of blue cheese."

"Thanks a lot." Just when I started liking the guy. "So, when do I get to go home?"

He rose from the bed. I narrowed my eyes. It looked like he was putting distance between himself and me. "There's no easy way to tell you this, Joanna, so I'm just going to say it." My heart did that little flutter again as he took a deep breath. "You're dead. You've been dead for just over a week."

"Dead-dead?" I asked hollowly. "Really dead?"

"Well, obviously you're here, but as far as the mortal world is concerned, yes," Warren said. "Your funeral is tomorrow. I've saved you the newspaper clippings from the last week."

He motioned to the papers stacked on the bedside tray, and I glanced over to see my face staring up from the top copy, with the headline heiress joanna archer plummets to death. The byline, dated four days ago, posed the question of whether it'd been foul play or if I'd leapt from the midtown apartment. I dropped my head back, unwilling to read any more.

I was dead, I thought numbly. I no longer existed. And I felt strangely well for the experience.

"If I'm dead," I finally said, "then who am I?"

I motioned down the length of my body, wincing when my hand brushed against my chest. Gasping with as much surprise as pain, I looked down, gasped again, and clutched both b.r.e.a.s.t.s in my hands-what I could fit into them, anyway. They were extraordinarily sore, with a tenderness that had less to do with the natural flux of the moon than a surgeon's steel and, apparently, some huge creative license. The drugs had kept me from feeling the ache before, but I sure felt it now.

"What have you done?" I cried, holding them tenderly. I don't think I'd ever heard my own voice so breathy and panicked. Then, brain cells and synapses firing rapidly, another thought occurred. I hadn't actually ever heard my voice this high-pitched before either. I tried it again. "La, la, la, la...mother f.u.c.ker!"

Horrified, I glared at Warren. "You've changed my voice!"

"And your b.r.e.a.s.t.s," he said, pointing out the obvious with what I considered a great deal of misplaced pride. I glared, and he took another step backward. Just then Micah entered the room, halting inside the doorway. I lowered my chin and narrowed my eyes.

"You knocked me out," I said accusingly, before turning on Warren again. "And you let him!"

"Well, we couldn't have a dead woman walking about town, could we?" Warren said, like that was a reasonable argument.

"You told me you would take care of it! You said you'd clean up and make sure I wasn't in trouble."

"And we did," Warren argued, crossing his arms. "You can't be charged with a crime, because the only one dead is you."

"But I don't want to be dead!" I screeched in some other person's voice. What was I supposed to do now? Only come out at night? Suck blood or haunt the living?

Warren looked insulted. "Sorry, but it was the only thing I could come up with on the spur of the moment. We had to do something to keep you out of jail, not to mention alive, so we brought you here."

I looked around. Where was here? It looked like a normal hospital room; uncomfortable bed, machines that made beeping noises. Really bad wallpaper.

"You're in a private facility just outside of town," Micah said, confirming my thoughts. "I work here."

"You're a doctor?" I asked, eyeing his sausage-fingers and substantial girth. He looked more like a pit bull in a lab coat.

"Micah takes all the cases that might send up red flags among the mortal physicians," Warren said. "He's an absolute genius with the scalpel."

Why did I have the feeling the line between genius and mad scientist was frighteningly thin here?

I shut my eyes and dropped my head back onto the pillow. Maybe this was one of those dreams I'd been having. Any moment now I was going to wake up and be myself, and Warren would still be a b.u.m, and Micah some bartender pulling the caps off bottles of Bud. Because I really could use a beer about now.

"That's right," Micah said, causing the dream to implode upon itself. I felt him palm my chin, turning it side to side. "I performed all the work on you myself, and did a bang-up job if I do say so myself."

"Why are you touching my face?" My eyes flew open. "Why is he touching my face?"

Warren looked chagrined. Micah looked surprised. He too glanced at Warren. "You mean you haven't told her yet?"

"Told me what?"

Warren chuckled lightly, a sound tinged with nerves, and had me jerking my head sharply in his direction. "Actually, I was just getting around to it."

"Aw, s.h.i.t," I said in my foreign voice to no one in particular. "Do I dare look in a mirror?"

"It's really not that bad," Warren said, then backpedaled as Micah shot him a piercing stare. "I mean, you're gorgeous. n.o.body would ever think it was you."

"Thanks a lot," I said dryly. Then, tentatively, I lifted a hand to my face to feel for myself. Everything seemed normal until I got to my nose, or whoever's nose this was. Mine had been broken in a sparring cla.s.s, and the slight off-centeredness lent a sort of aquiline quality to my features, or so I chose to believe. In truth, I was deathly afraid of even the thought of surgery...a slight irony given the circ.u.mstances.

I let my hands trace downward. My lips were full, but still my own; my chin, however, dipped to a more heart-shaped point than I remembered. I felt for a strand of hair and lifted it, peering sideways. "I'm blond."

"The package said 'Platinum Perfection.'"

I let my head fall back again. The b.o.o.bs, the voice, the face, the hair...I didn't need a mirror to put it all together. Unbidden tears suddenly filled my eyes. I never cried, so my guess was that it too was part of this grand prize package. G.o.d, they'd f.u.c.ked with my body and my hormones. "You've turned me into a...a...a bimbo!"

"Shh," Micah said, patting my shoulder, trying to comfort me. "It's the perfect cover."

The perfect cover for a woman who wants her b.r.e.a.s.t.s to enter a room before the rest of her, I thought hysterically. One who relies on her looks to do the talking. One who doesn't even take herself seriously!

"We all have our disguises," Warren added helpfully.

"What?" I snapped angrily. "And 'Yoda on crack' was the best you could come up with?"

"I see you did nothing about her temperament," Warren muttered.

"Some things even I can't fix."

I glared at them both, then s.p.a.ced my words so that even with the come-hither soft-p.o.r.n voice they'd know I meant business. "Get. Me. A Mirror."

"Okay, but I'm warning you, it might be something of a shock."

"More shocking than being whacked on the head with a steel baton?" I said sharply. "Or more shocking than waking up officially dead?"

More shocking than watching your own sister die? I didn't say that. Instead, as Warren adjusted the slant of my bed, I held out a hand for the mirror. He gave it to me once I was propped up, and a fresh spasm of alarm sprung up in my chest as I felt their gazes, almost hungry, on my face. Taking a deep breath, I lifted the mirror and looked.

I felt my jaw moving, saw the reflected jaw working in the mirror, but no sound came out. I turned the mirror over, checked for a false back, pounded it against the bed twice, and peered into the gla.s.s again. Then I lifted my gaze to Micah's anxious one. "It-It's...Olivia."

His face relaxed into a relieved smile.

"You're Olivia," Warren corrected, his own smile broad and hopeful.

I returned my gaze to the mirror. I certainly was.

And this time I pa.s.sed out all on my own.

When I next woke, I was alone. The room was dark, and I thought briefly about calling for a nurse before deciding against it. Instead I reached for the stack of newspapers, but yelped when I lifted the first one. My fingertips were both sensitive and numb at the same time. I felt the structure and weight of the paper, even the fibers that comprised the page, but that was a deep knowledge, one born of previous experience. On the surface it felt like I was holding it between crystal gloves. I overturned my palm and stared.

My fingerprints were gone.

I tapped the pad of my thumb against my forefinger, expecting to hear a clicking like fingernails against gla.s.s, but there was only silence. The clink was felt, not heard, as if my bones were banging brittle and cold against one another. It was an odd feeling, slightly nauseating, though perhaps that would lessen with time. For now, I resolutely reached for the newspapers, prepared to feel trees screaming beneath my touch, and began to read.

The articles were stacked by date, most recent on the bottom, and the contents of each became increasingly surreal. They went into excruciating detail, not always flattering or correct, about me, my life, and my tragic demise.

The gist of the story was this: Joanna Archer had died after a botched break-in at her sister's ninth-story apartment. I'd fought and struggled valiantly, but ultimately fell to my death along with my a.s.sailant, one Butch Lewis of Houston, Texas. However, I'd saved my sister's life in the process.

How ironic was that? Hailed a hero in death when the reality was I'd been able to save no one. Including, it now seemed, myself. I sighed and read on.