Free City Of Souls by Vicki Pettersson

even a lateral one, agent for agent. And certainly not for…”
    The Kairos. I cringed. The title didn’t make me feel special…and it certainly didn’t make me feel like the savior of the supernatural underworld. Instead it made me feel like a thing rather than a person. Again, all I could say was “I’m sorry.”
    He looked down, and the warrior-look disappeared in the slump of his shoulders.
    “Warren doesn’t know I’m here,” he said, blurting the confession out like it was burning his tongue. “He told us about Midheaven after you left. That he’d always known it existed, that he’d kept it from us for our own good.”
    I wasn’t surprised. “Did anyone ask about the Shadow side?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean, did they know about Midheaven even while we didn’t?”
    Felix’s brows drew down like he didn’t understand why that was important, so I knew that no one had thought to bring it up. It was significant, though, because if the Shadows knew of it, and Jacks had disappeared with his changelings all those years ago, then he could have found the perfect way around our restriction upon leaving the valley. Jacks, and the kid, could
be
in Midheaven. So I bet that’s what Warren had been referring to when he said the answer to fixing Jas—fixing our world—was in that one.
    I was so taken by the thought that I almost missed Felix’s whisper. “I think I hate him.”
    I looked at him sharply, taken aback. “Who? Warren?”
    Jaw set, he nodded. I swallowed hard, then nodded back in return. I don’t think Felix meant it, but he
thought
he did. I’d known, or at least suspected for a while, that Warren kept secrets from us. He so often wanted things his way, no questions asked, no explanation given. No wonder Felix was pissed. How often had Warren gotten what he wanted by omission? There was an entire world out there, sidled up next to our own, yet it had taken the destruction of our safe zones for him to even mention it.
    Which meant he was probably hiding even more.
    Not wanting to fuel an already volatile anger, I veered course a bit. “He didn’t happen to tell you how to get to Midheaven, did he?”
    Felix cursed under his breath. “You know Warren.”
    Yes. He wouldn’t tell them anything he didn’t think they needed to know. And here was Felix, powerless to do anything to help heal the one person he loved above all others, his impotence palpable. What he needed was an outlet for all that pent-up anger. He needed to feel like he could help her, even if after the fact. I’d seen the same look on my boyfriend’s face years ago, right after I was assaulted, but in a way it was worse for Felix. After all, he was a superhero.
    I bit my lip and considered him. His cover identity as perpetual college student and playboy fit him perfectly. I remembered Vanessa once telling me that Felix had Neptune in his Eleventh House, which supposedly meant he was dreamy and irresponsible, basically the complete opposite of a normal Capricorn. At the time, though, she’d been on a rant about him forcing her to track a possible Shadow alone while he danced the night away at a new technobar. Never mind that he’d found the Shadow at the same club.
    “He’s impulsive, unreliable, and can’t be depended upon to even tie his shoes!” Vanessa had fumed, not entirely wrong. He often left his shoes untied. “He has no work ethic beyond seducing coeds out of their clothing, and you would think that with the goat as his glyph he’d have some sort of ability to see things through, but nooo!”
    While all her accusations were undeniably true, Felix also had a laugh as lithe as his body and mind, and he could sense—and even alter—the mood of a room with his playful energy. I suspected his much maligned mischievous nature, like the frat-boy persona, was exactly what had attracted the serious-minded Vanessa in the first place.
    And it might come in handy at Xavier’s. My view of the place was, after all,