Free City Of Souls by Vicki Pettersson Page A

colored by familiarity and loathing. My energy would also be divided by having to hide that, so I could probably use an extra pair of eyes. Perhaps Felix would see something I could not.
    Plus he was cute, a necessity for any of Olivia’s romantic interests…or conquests. Riddick would’ve been a better match—his cover as a successful dentist satisfied Xavier’s standards of suitability as a match for his beloved daughter—but Felix was the one standing in front of me. Xavier would probably just think Olivia was slumming again, the boy nothing more than another trivial pursuit.
    Besides, it would be a good way for Felix to expel some of that pent-up fury.
    “You’ll do,” I finally said, motioning him to the passenger side.
    “Thanks,” he said flatly as he angled around the nose of the car. “I’ll do what?”
    “I have to pay a visit to my other daddy. Or Olivia’s, that is. You’re going to come along as my plaything.”
    He said nothing, but his sigh was long and drawn, his mutterings incoherent. Clearly it wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind. I shot him a sweet smile as I settled in next to him. “Oh, and we’ll go ahead and kill one of the Tulpa’s most loyal Shadow agents while we’re there.”
    Felix’s head shot up then, and for the first time he looked like his old self.

    I filled Felix in on the Archer household as we drove to the compound—the personnel, the layout…the strange little room shaped like a Tibetan burial mound.
    He nodded impatiently before asking, “And Lindy Maguire? How do we get to her?”
    Ah, Lindy. The woman who once massacred an ally’s entire family just because her leader said to. The Shadow so in love with the Tulpa that any woman seen as a threat met an inexplicable, early demise. If she’d known who I really was, she’d have killed me in my sleep years ago, and not just because I was one of the Light. Lindy Maguire and my mother had a well-documented, decades-old feud due to Lindy’s infatuation with the Tulpa. I’d long wanted Lindy taken out because of this, among other things, but Warren’s cooler head had prevailed.
    “If we kill Lindy,” he’d said, “the Tulpa might send someone more attentive to watch over Xavier and his assets. And ‘Helen,’” he said, referencing her alter ego in the Archer household, “has never looked at Olivia as anything more than a dizzy airhead.”
    No, like Xavier, she’d always saved her pointed criticism for me, Joanna. If Xavier had made my young life a living hell, Lindy/Helen had aided and abetted. I obviously hadn’t known then that she was an agent monitoring Xavier for the Tulpa, but I did now. And I was going to use that information to help bring down her beloved Tulpa.
    But I’d go ahead and give the pleasure of killing her over to Felix.
    “Age hasn’t made her any less dangerous,” I told Felix now. Shadows were scary enough when acting out of duty, or because they simply liked wreaking havoc, but Lindy was even more brutal because of her obsession. “But we have the advantage here, so just keep your eye out, your emotions dampened, and your hands hidden.”
    Felix glanced down at the shiny, smooth surface of his fingertips, where his prints were missing. “The biggest ‘tell’ in our paranormal identities, huh?”
    “Yeah,” I said with a wry smile. “And Lindy, ‘Helen,’ will be looking.”

    Once admitted through the guard gate, I cruised up the serpentine drive, kicking gravel as I skidded to a stop between the mansion and an eternally running fountain. Excess, I thought, staring up at a matching marble staircase, was a word Xavier Archer defined. And why not? He’d literally sold his soul to attain all this. He should make the most of it.
    It was surprisingly windy as we climbed from the car, reminding me of the powerful gusts that held the valley captive every spring. They bit into the flesh now that it was winter, and we rushed up the white marble steps, ducking beneath a