The Taste of Night by Vicki Pettersson

welcoming as a wool blanket falling over my shoulders.
    For a moment I thought I’d entered another portal rather than a storeroom, but that wasn’t possible. Jasmine was with me; and though she was an oddly cute kid with a startling awareness of supernatural phenomena—prepubescent teens had an acceptance of the extraordinary that adults had long lost—she was no agent. Yet here we were, in a room more befitting the manor house of an English lord than the storage room of some caustic counter jockey. Sure, there were comics stored along every inch of the wall, but the shelves were made of thick mahogany planks, and matching crown molding arched toward a cavernous ceiling soaring over a room the size of a small theater.
    While there was space enough for multiple aisle dividers in the center of the room, it was already clustered with leather easy chairs, each with an overstuffed ottoman, and mismatched side tables piled high with comics, texts, and what looked like a teetering cup of forgotten coffee. At the room’s core was a square stone fireplace lit and jumping with orange flames, its flue suspended yards above, but still able to capture the smoke as it rose lazily from the ash. Hence the warmth. I turned a circle around myself, taking it all in.
    Observing my reaction, Jasmine pointed to a tight circular staircase in the back corner of the room, which wound up into a rectangular platform, leading to what I assumed was an attic. “Zane’s living quarters are upstairs, but he spends most of his time writing and researching down here. He says the fire keeps his third eye open, and the dance of the smoke lends inspiration.”
    “Geez,” I said, whistling as I ran my hand over a stack of titles dating back to the eighties. “He must have every comic written for the past fifty years.”
    Jasmine shook her head earnestly. “Oh no, these are all manuals. Zane wouldn’t waste valuable storage space onregular comics.”
    “All manuals?” But there were thousands of them, tens of thousands. “How far back do they go?”
    “All the way to the beginning,” she said, pulling me toward a tottering stack of sleeved comics pushed up against a corner shelf. “Back to when the first troops settled in the valley.”
    “Really?” I’d never thought to ask before. I’d been too concerned with the present to worry or wonder much about the past, but I knew that Las Vegas was only a hundred years old, and the troops wouldn’t have formed here until there was a large enough population to merit notice. That’s when agents moved in, staked out their places on the city’s star charts, and began the whole good-battling-evil-for-the-sake-of-mankind bit. This same scenario had played itself out for centuries in every major metropolis, though the suburbs were the domain of the independents. Too many representatives of the same star sign—even Light—tended to destabilize things, so rogue agents weren’t tolerated within city boundaries. I knew all this, but nothing about where the agents originally came from, or how far back the beginning really was.
    I asked Jasmine just that and she eyed me with a small frown, though more out of concern that I didn’t already know than suspicion as to why I wanted to. “You mean back to the original manual?”
    “Is there such a thing?” I asked, watching as she knelt, hair swinging to obscure her china doll face, and began picking through the stack. I mean, I knew there had to be at one time, but what shape or language or location it was in was anyone’s guess. But the idea was compelling.
    “Well, you know originally legends on both sides of the Zodiac were passed on orally, right?”
    I nodded like I had, and leaned against a bookcase as Jasmine handed me a manual with an agent of Light running through an alley, a shadow looming on the brick behind him. “Well, the first manual was put to paper—or papyrus—as oral storytelling was becoming obsolete. It documented the original