Free The Neon Graveyard by Vicki Pettersson Page A

was dividing their bodies into zones, calculating where to strike first. I did the same with her, noting slight differences from the last time I’d seen her . . . mostly in the dark shadows smeared beneath her eyes.
    The rest of her was close to the same. Same strong, stocky legs arrowing into a surprisingly slim waist, wide swimmer’s shoulders, and thick chestnut hair, now half a foot longer than when we’d first met. Hard to believe I’d once mistaken her for a man. The softening of her features felt like a visual sigh, as if she’d long been holding her breath and had finally let it go. It wasn’t even that her physical appearance had changed, I realized, but that her very essence, her chi , had clearly softened.
    She still looked like she’d whack the first rogue to cross that line.
    “So is the new weapons master from Arizona?” I asked, trying to distract and smooth out the tension. We didn’t need to risk injury at Chandra’s hands—or, more to the point, her weapon—or vice versa, giving Warren yet another reason to hunt us. Besides, while Chandra clearly wasn’t here to join the rogues—she’d never turn against her beloved troop—she wanted something badly enough to be talking to me. I couldn’t imagine what was so important that she’d come all the way out here for that.
    She lifted her chin. “They’ve been a good sister troop to us.”
    “You mean they harbor the same concern over the grays spilling into their territory that you do.” It was a statement, not a question, so before she could bother with an unsatisfying answer, I asked, “Is he as good as Hunter?”
    “She,” Chandra corrected, glancing down at her baton. After a moment she added, “And no, she’s not.”
    Her answer both pleased me and pissed me off. This woman had known Hunter all her life. She’d once looked up to him with admiration and awe, yet she’d turned her back on him because that’s what Warren decreed, and I just couldn’t let it slide.
    “So I take it my crossbow didn’t work for you?”
    The conduits could be passed down from mother to daughter, and from the moment I’d touched the crossbow there was never any question it was anything other than mine. But an agent with an entirely new bloodline generally had to have their own made, and while Chandra had long coveted my palm-sized bow and arrow, the magical weapons chose the bearer as much as the opposite. There was no forcing the issue if the weapon simply decided it wasn’t yours.
    “It doesn’t matter,” she said, though her shrug was stiff. “Warren’s keeping it locked up tight.”
    I snorted at that. Obviously Warren couldn’t just leave a magical weapon lying around, and as a mortal I was supposed to be unable to utilize it anyway, but my anger at his pinching my conduit was more than that. I wanted and needed it to help me live. He thought I should be grateful to be alive at all.
    Yet why was he so intent on guarding the weapon now? Turning it against me at this point was overkill. Dead was dead, and in my case, the average kitchen knife could achieve the same results. Then again, Warren knew I wasn’t his greatest fan either. He’d want my former conduit in his hands in case he found himself, however improbably, on the pointy end of my soul blade.
    “So he still worries about me, huh?” I asked, shoving my hands into my pockets.
    Chandra leveled me with a dark stare. “A former ally is more deadly than a constant enemy.”
    “Don’t have to tell me,” I muttered, though I wasn’t sure I’d consider Chandra a former ally. She’d long lobbied for the troop’s Archer sign, and had been helpless to do anything but watch as the coveted star sign was unceremoniously dropped into my lap. That, along with my initial lack of knowledge and interest, had infuriated her. Yet my lineage trumped her experience. Considering everything that’d happened to me in my short time as the Archer of Light, I thought wryly, Chandra was probably