Holidays are Hell

For a moment she thought he'd hit her again. She didn't have to scent his emotions to know how angry he was. "Fine," he finally said, voice frighteningly low. "But let's get one thing straight. You're just baggage, Zoe. You're no good to us—" She flinched; to me, he was saying, " — to anyone. We'll get back this precious mortal for you, but after that you disappear for good. And you formally relinquish your star sign."

Zoe sucked in a breath. Formally renouncing her star sign meant another agent born under the Sagittarius moon would fill her place on the Zodiac, in the troop. It would void her lineage forever, and nullify everything she'd sacrificed.

And that just wouldn't do.

But Warren didn't need to know that. So she held her indrawn breath, and inclined her head. And Warren was just arrogant enough—and angry and righteous, too—not to insist she do it right then and there. He shot the three of them a grim, closed-mouth smile, then threw down his napkin and rose. "Fine. Let's work it out."

Gregor shot Zoe a relieved smile before following, and Phaedre took her hand, helping her up. Zoe wanted to thank her but didn't know if her voice would hold. Besides, just because they said they were going to help didn't mean they could do it.

The Shadow and the Light had been battling in the valley ever since Vegas was just an X on some prospector's map. Each side was comprised of twelve agents—one for each sign on the western zodiac, and when both sides were full there was balance in the mortal realm. People were then free to make personal and societal decisions uninfluenced by paranormal nudges meant to bring out the shadow or light lurking in their own souls.

As tempting as it sometimes was to interfere in the world's human dramas, agents of Light worldwide had fought to preserve the gift of choice for too many centuries to blithely disregard it. The Shadows, conversely, specialized in that, which gave them a distinct advantage over the mortal realm; it was far easier to cause heartache and mayhem than clean up the resulting mess.

Zoe's life work, before she threw it away, had been to neutralize this advantage. She'd grown up idolizing the elder agents, devouring the manuals that depicted the fight between good and evil. From the moment she'd undergone metamorphosis at the age of twenty-five, coming into her full powers, she'd dedicated her life to infiltrating the Shadow organization. She was patient, wickedly sharp, and determined to use whatever resources she had to fell her enemies: her strength, her craftiness, and eventually her body. She'd spent more years than she cared to remember using that last tool… but an effective weapon it'd turned out to be.

So Warren had no right to complain about the means by which she garnered her information or stalked her prey. Hadn't she always reminded him that no matter whose bed she woke in, her heart remained solely with him? "It's what I was born to do," she told him, years ago when they were both still young and arrogant enough to think philosophically about the whole thing. "It's what I'm good at."

And Warren knew it. Maybe, Zoe thought now, that was the problem.

"The child is how premature?" asked the troop's physician, Micah, over the car phone's speakers. They'd called him on the way to the real McCormicks' residence, hoping he'd be able to better deduce where the Shadows would have taken the child. "Well, the nurse—though an imposter—was right. Children can be saved at twenty-four weeks, though it'd help if she were an initiate. One born to the Zodiac is naturally more resilient than a mortal infant."

Zoe knew that, which was why she wasn't as concerned about the child's health as much as her continued health.

"So they're hiding her, incubating her, keeping her safe from discovery—"

"Not exactly news to us," Warren snapped, hands tight on the steering wheel. The dueling sides of the Zodiac were constantly shifting their appearances, their occupations, and haunts. Settle in one place too long and you were just begging for a paranormal ambush. As Zoe had discovered.

"Geez," came Micah's voice from over the speakers. "Someone woke up on the wrong side of reality today."

Gregor and Phaedre snickered in the back seat, but Zoe kept staring out the window, careful to keep her expression neutral.

Micah continued before Warren could reply. "We have a couple of locations scouted out. Nothing confirmed yet," he added quickly, and there was a shuffling of paperwork as he searched for the addresses, then read them aloud. Two were located on Charleston, a street where the single-family homes of the seventies had given way to medical and legal offices along both sides of the streets. The third was downtown.