City Of Souls by Vicki Pettersson Read Free Book Online Page B

status in the troop: the Archer of the Zodiac, the Kairos, and the chosen one of our entire world.
    Right?
    Sighing, I climbed from the fountain and kept walking.
Like I knew
. Spotting a hedge of struggling boxwoods lining the glossy, stamped sidewalk, I trailed my hand idly above them as I passed. A gentle pulse from my mind, then a moment where I could almost feel
green
in my fingertips, which throbbed as I forced energy downward. Bright leaves unfurled beneath my palm and the trunks wobbled then stilled, their roots strengthening. Birthing plant life from nothing—it was a skill, and mark, of Light.
    “See?” I muttered, mollified by the show of power. I wasn’t a hindrance to my troop. I could control my temper. I could thrive as a superhero. I could help…at least when I wasn’t screwing up. I sighed again.
    Besides, others could call me what they wanted—Joanna, Olivia, Kairos, Archer—what really mattered was how I saw myself. “Warrior.”
    That word was the only thing that’d enabled me to keep moving through a world after the attack on my life as a teen, and in a world where much of the population had been larger and stronger and faster than me. It let me maximize the strength I did have, and had me honing abilities other women—and even men—never considered necessary. It’d taken years of intense martial training, but after a time I’d turned my weaknesses into weapons.
    And that was
before
I became a superhero.
    As for the Kairos designation, well that’s where things got a little more complicated. Being the underworld’s “chosen one” sounded wonderfully auspicious…until you realized it was all a big mistake. My mother, an agent of Light, had been sleeping with the Tulpa—getting in close, looking for a way to kill him—when a quick trip to the drugstore confirmed she was the proud new owner of a pregnancy stick sporting two pink lines. She was lucky I hadn’t popped out with fangs and claws.
    For reasons known only to her, she then kept my existence from
both
sides of the Zodiac, so my metamorphosis into an agent a year ago had completely shaken up the landscape of Las Vegas’s paranormal war. Sure, I was reportedly destined to bring ultimate victory to whatever side I fought for, but that was tied to bringing certain signs, or portents, to life. So far I’d managed the first three through trial, and mostly error. The fourth one, though? I’d fumbled that completely.
    As Drake had taunted, I’d inadvertently injured a changeling, Jasmine Chan, who was absolutely essential to our continued existence. Changelings were mortals who lived and died as any other, except for their childhood years, when imagination and belief extended to things unseen. Each side, Shadow and Light, had changelings who kept the secrets of the Zodiac, and passed them on to the next generation, while making sure mortal kids knew and believed in us as well. Those little minds were like fuel cells providing our troops with extra energy to fight the opposing side. Obviously the ability to suspend disbelief—to believe in superheroes—generally passed along with youth, which was why even the changelings eventually had to forget us entirely.
    It was now time for Jasmine to do this; in short, it was time for her to grow up, but she couldn’t—or simply wouldn’t—which had effectively put the brakes on any flexible new minds reading and believing in our stories. The fear was that if I didn’t figure out how to fix Jasmine soon, our troop would gradually weaken. Our alternate realities would fade away, our portals would close, and we would cease to exist altogether.
    But now, finding the elusive Skamar, and getting her to tell me how to “walk the line,” would supposedly help with that. I wondered why Warren wouldn’t instruct her to help me prior to this, or why it took the loss of our safe zones to light some sort of fire under his ass. Meanwhile I waved my hand over a cluster of star jasmine, which bloomed