“Return balance to the Zodiac.”

“Return it? Or…” She left the question open.

“Not return it. Unbalance it. Hunt them down. Obliterate the enemy, destroy them all. Use my gifts to do it, but I don’t know how.”

She ignored the rising question in my last remark. “And who is the enemy?”

“Ajax. A man named Joaquin. The Tulpa. There are others. I’ve smelled them, but I don’t know them. And…”

“And?”

“The enemy is inside of me also.”

“No, Olivia, it doesn’t—”

“Yes, Greta. It does.” My voice deepened, like an instrument someone else was strumming. I stirred, jerking my head side to side. “I must destroy the Shadow within and without.”

“Shh. Let’s take a step back now. Listen to my voice, and follow the words. Are you with me?” She paused for my sleepy nod. “Good. Now, think. What experience will most help you in unbalancing the Shadow? What will allow you the vengeance you spoke to me about? What will help you restore the agents of Light to the Zodiac?”

“Krav Maga,” I answered without hesitation. “The skills I learned after Joaquin destroyed me the first time.”

Again, that press of questioning silence, before she went on. “And what was that like?”

I shivered, the memory sweeping through me. “Cold. So cold after, when the scorpions crawled over me, but didn’t sting. They knew I was dead. They scuttled away, legs mired in my blood.” I shivered again, then stilled. “But she found me and warmed me. She gave her own power and gifts over to me. So I would survive it. And avenge it.”

“Who, Olivia?”

“My mother.” I smiled. And I remembered. One day, when the time comes, you’ll understand I didn’t leave. I fled. “Ah, I see now. I understand.”

“Focus, Olivia. Listen to my voice,” Greta commanded. “What gifts did she give you? What will allow you to battle the Shadow side?”

I didn’t answer. Instead, I saw my mother’s face floating directly above me, her hair falling like golden-red curtains over her cheeks, eyes burning with hot, furious tears.

“Olivia?” Greta questioned.

My mother’s mouth moved, three words fired like shots over the bow. I love you.

“Olivia!” Greta again, panicked now.

“Love,” I answered simply, realizing I’d carried it with me all this time. “She gave me complete and unconditional love.”

And the dam gave way. The memories I’d blocked so successfully for so long flooded my brain, the rush of them deafening in my ears, and I was borne on their tide back in time. Back to the hospital again; to the machines, tubes, painkillers, and stitches. Back with the bruises and the swelling, the torn fingernails and the rope burns still buried in my neck. Back to birth of my second life cycle. Back, I thought, when I was sixteen years old.

I turned my head and she was there, next to me. Not just hair and haunted eyes, but the whole of my mother; body and essence, skin and aura. I stared, drinking in her features; the freckles standing out defiantly on a button nose, the pressing of delicate bones beneath too-pale skin, a scar I’d always meant to ask her about. She swept shiny fingertips across my face and gently smoothed back my hair.

“Sleep,” she said, and somewhere in the back of my mind I knew my mouth had moved, the command and voice issuing from my throat, my memory. I settled deeper into myself, obeying her.

“Olivia?” Greta’s voice was far off and wary, no longer authoritative or sure. She was right to be alarmed. My mother’s voice had taken over.

“I’m going to show you who I am, who you are,” I said in my mother’s voice, as she had once said to me, “who you will be someday.”

She leaned over me, hair swinging delicately over my bloodless cheeks, blue eyes boring into mine. “Because you will survive this. It has been foretold. You will fulfill the first sign of the Zodiac. You will rise again as our Kairos.”

Then she put her soft lips to my chapped ones, and resuscitated my soul. Desert sage—blooms sagging, but stalks strong, as though wet with a summer monsoon—infiltrated my senses. The juice from a fig cacti, which kept knowledgeable predators alive in the desert, trickled down my throat, coating my belly. I breathed in a homey spice, like cinnamon but stronger, and it numbed my skin from the inside out so that every muscle in my body simultaneously relaxed.

Then there was the exotic and redolent scent of the womb where I’d once lived. It smelled like night-blooming flowers, and the wind across the bright side of the moon. I recognized it immediately, and inhaled deeply. She gave me more. As all great mothers do, she gave me all. “See? You can taste the Light in another person. Now store this power deep inside of you. Because he’ll come for you again.”

“Olivia!”

Greta’s voice had my mother looking up. She frowned, annoyed at the invisible interruption, before rising and heading toward the door. She looked back at me only once, one hand braced on the door frame, a petite and powerful figure eyeing me with fierce love and resigned determination. “Watch Olivia. She’ll show you how to survive.”

And she was gone. Again.

“Tell me your true identity,” Greta demanded, entering the hospital room through the portal she’d opened in my mind. Her outline snapped with power, like sparklers bursting to life along her skin, but I merely looked at her, words tumbling like dice through my mind. Goddess, bitch, whore, mother, daughter, sister, friend…

I could be any and all of those things, but I picked out my titles like selecting fruit from a vendor’s stall. Enemy, I thought, picking it up, taking a bite, finding it sweet. Huntress, I thought, adding it to the other. Once the prey, now the predator. I pocketed that one, saving it for later.

“Tell me who you are!”

“Can’t you see?” I turned my head to face Greta, still lingering uncertainly by the doorway to my hospital room, and I smiled. I knew from her gasp that I wasn’t supposed to be asking the questions, but I suddenly had all the answers. Hearing footsteps in the hall, I leaned to peer around Greta. “Look, see how my aura precedes me? See the barbed texture of my soul? The vessel is fierce, is it not? My mind is bathed in crimson.”

In a full panic now, the mind-Greta whirled, shifting so her back was to the wall. Her whisper wobbled. Her hands fumbled, doing something behind her back. “Tell me your name.”

The answer was heavy in my mouth, numbing the tip of my tongue. I gasped with its weight, and my eyes burst open with my mouth. “I am the Archer!”

And like an arrow loosed from a bow that’d been held too taut, too long, the woman I should have been winged past the last ten years like a fiery comet, plowing into me with all the knowledge I’d been born—and buried—with. The knowledge of the Archer, the Zodiac…and my place in it.

A second pair of eyes opened up behind my own, blinked wonderingly, then crinkled as a smile lifted one side of my mouth. Alternate ears, with drums tunneling down into my soul, popped as if the pressure on them had finally been released. New taste buds exploded on my tongue, and every pore in my skin hummed to life, making me more attuned to the particles weighing down the air than I’d even been before. My sixth sense had returned. It had taken a decade, but I was finally healed.

I rose.

A crash, the sound of glass shattering on the floor, and Greta was backed up against the far wall of her room, a vial shattered at her feet. The transition from the hospital room I’d been imagining and Greta’s chamber was abrupt, but I was still my dream self, my real self, a predator haloed in red. I smiled as I turned my head to meet her eyes. She looked afraid, and I was sorry for that, but I wanted a mirror. I wanted to see for myself.

“How did you do that?” Greta asked as I swiped a damp tendril of hair from my cheek. She nearly had her face under control again, a mild sort of worry pressing in on her delicate brow, but her voice was searching, and just sharp enough to cut through the thin webbing of resistance left by the hypnosis. “I put you under. You’re not supposed to be able to come out of it without my assistance.”