Up into the apex of the world’s largest stupa.
27
I registered only movement. That and pain, though the latter finally overtook all else. I realized with a start that I was looking forward to the salt-and-pepper vision that meant I was blacking out. Here was death, literally staring me in the face, my fate written clearly in the stars, and I was flinching . . . at least until I was thrown to the ground.
My vision quickly cleared, but I moaned as my body burst to life with new aches. I couldn’t construct a shield now if my life depended on it, a thought that made me laugh . . . and spatter blood.
“Jo?”
I stopped laughing.
Squinting, I lifted my head and sucked in enough oxygen for me to again make the mental connection, stupa.
Yet the white marble staircase hadn’t been blackened by an explosion the first time I’d seen it, and the sunken room wasn’t littered with the cracked remnants of faux Roman pillars. I noted a face staring at me in a wide-mouthed scream, and recognized it as an animist mask—also missing from this room upon my first foray. There were a half-dozen others scattered about, some on fire. Screams lingered like specters in the air, both there and not, though that could have just been my mind playing tricks on me. And they could have easily been mine.
Because there was one other thing that hadn’t been here on that first near-death experience, and I squeezed my eyes shut, thinking that I must be hallucinating now. Hunter, after all, was too smart to remain behind after he’d destroyed the Tulpa’s greatest treasure. Too smart to face off against someone with fire dancing in their pupils and smoke pouring from a fang-studded mouth.
So why the hell was he standing across from me, feet planted atop another crumbling staircase, with the wall blown out behind him like a gaping jaw to reveal the bright city below?
“I detonated the first bomb from the camera room,” he explained simply, which meant he’d been watching the showdown in the casino via the security system. That’s why he hadn’t left. He’d seen me losing, about to die. Hunter shrugged a shoulder as I made a strangled sound, dark gaze fixed on the Tulpa. “But I thought I’d wait for you to get here before detonating the second.”
The Tulpa sneered. “By all means . . . fight me.”
Hunter’s whip, held in his right hand, flicked like an irritated tail. I wanted to scream for him to run, to exit the blasted hole behind him, climb from the ledge, and flee into the night. But Hunter wasn’t going anywhere. “No. You only grow stronger when someone acts out of hate or dissension or chaos. You’ll kill us if we try to fight.”
“I’m going to kill you anyway.”
“Your choice. But then you’ll never know where the Serpent Bearer is.”
The Tulpa’s focus homed in on him like a North Korean missile.
“It doesn’t require soul energy for entry into Midheaven either. Perfect for your needs, eh?” Then Hunter tilted his head consideringly. “Mind, if anything were to happen to your daughter, whom I love, I’d just push this button here—”
“Stop!” A sound like grinding rusted gears rose in the air. The Tulpa, growling. But there was a hiccup in the vibration, and after another moment, he took a tentative step my way. He held up a claw—one, I noted, that was missing two digits. “You’re right. I need her.”
Hunter inclined his head. “Yes.”
“But I don’t need you.” The monster moved, blurred, and knocked the detonator from his hand in one swipe. But while I still stared at the spot the Tulpa used to be, Hunter’s whip unfurled with a sharp crack to wrap around the creature’s neck. Barbs sank into flesh, and black blood welled. Hunter gave a tremendous yank.
Pissed, and instantly larger, the Tulpa yanked back.
Hurtling forward as if pulled by a speedboat, Hunter dive-bombed headfirst into the rubble of marble. The Tulpa reached up and gave another jerk on the whip, causing Hunter to bounce like a watercraft over choppy waves. He finally skidded to a halt at the Tulpa’s taloned toes.
This time I could see it coming. I cried out, too late, as the beast thrust those sharp talons into Hunter’s throat, crushing his voice box, cutting his jugular. Blood fountained and I screamed again. And then, before I could take another breath, the Tulpa lifted one of the burning animist masks from the floor and jammed it on Hunter’s face.
Hunter flailed, grabbing at the mask’s edges. His pained cry was muffled as he fought for breath, but then he abruptly stiffened and fell still. I yelled his name, knowing that as still as he was, his lungs continued to fight for air, and his heart beat in rapid panic. But this was an animist’s mask, greedy for a man’s soul, and it would remain attached to Hunter’s face for as long as the Tulpa wished it.
“You are not going to stop me from ruling as I’m meant to—every plane, every existence, every person,” the Tulpa said, bending to lift the detonator in one giant claw.
All I saw were Hunter’s vocal cords straining in his neck.
Unless I could stop it, I thought, panic snapping me into focus. It coalesced beneath my skin, and my eyes fired red. I thought of another stupa I’d blown up, no detonator needed. I might not know how to create the world as I wanted it, but I could damned well create fire.
Harnessing my anger was easy now that I knew how to do it. The warming light whipped to life via the glyph on my chest, so strongly it burned even me. I released it like a bullet and it caught the Tulpa as he was turning. He staggered, burning, and I gathered more sparks into my core. He dodged the second firebomb, which somersaulted into the jagged concrete behind him. A sound like thunder rolled over the room, and then more of the ceiling fell, revealing the sky.
I stumbled in the wake of the destruction but still managed to yank the mask from Hunter’s face. He took one great breath, but stayed still and unconscious. Yet the time inside the mask had been an unexpected blessing. It’d kept him from bleeding out and had given his body a small amount of time to heal. He wouldn’t die . . . not yet, anyway.
“What was that?” The Tulpa faced me full-on now, spiked shoulders hunched, head lowered like a bull.
Tucking the mask into my shirt at the small of my back so he couldn’t use it against Hunter again, I lifted my head from my crouch. “The power to create,” I said smugly, rising. “The one you’ll never possess.”
Yet, too late, I saw that he was also ringed in red, like a coal not yet banked. My heated power, I realized, was suddenly a part of him. He’d absorbed it, just like he absorbed all the energy that fought to destroy him.
Seeing this realization cross my face, he smiled. “Fire is destruction, dear. It’s chaos and ruin. A fascinating ability, true . . . but where the fuck do you think you get it?”
I sagged where I stood.
The Tulpa grinned. “I’m going to hang your boyfriend on my fucking wall.”
He lunged, but not for Hunter, and that’s what caught me off-balance. I reached for my holstered knife, but he was fast, and the crown of his spear-tipped head raked against the ceiling as he whipped around. I suddenly found myself dangling out above the airy void. The world swirled and dipped in front of me, and I screamed.
“This could have all been yours,” he called, moving his monstrous head from side to side. Wind whipped against me as my feet dangled over the hard, glittering pool of my hometown. “You never needed the power to create the world. I would have given it to you.”
But I shook my head too. Nobody could give you that. He stilled me with a violent jerk. “See, that’s your stubborn streak. You get it from your fucking mother. Ironically, you’re going to end up just like your sister because of it. The same outcome you fought off all those months ago.” Then he laughed. “It was all for nothing, Joanna.”
Cackling, he extended his reach, and I found myself lacking any support but the talons raking the soft flesh of my shoulders. I thought of everything I’d been though, from my mother’s desertion a decade earlier, the first attack by Joaquin just before that . . . and then a series of
shocks: Ajax, Butch—the one who’d killed my sister—then Warren, who turned me into her. My childhood love rediscovered, before I’d been forced to let him go forever. It all played like a film reel in my mind, right up to present where I’d entered Midheaven, desperate to save Hunter, fighting all the way. Fighting so damned much.
A tear slipped from my eye.
The Tulpa laughed harder. Laughed, and moved one talon to my neck and squeezed. The shining whole of the Vegas valley blurred. It felt like my brain was swelling, blood vessels bursting to send geysers of color careening behind my eyelids.
“You know,” he said conversationally. “I don’t think I need that power after all. I mean, sure you can handle any weapon. But look where it’s gotten you.”
And he waved good-bye.
I reacted instinctively, grabbing and clinging to whatever I could . . . which happened to be him. He laughed again, a sound that tore at the sky, and I found myself pleading to the silent heavens. There was no reply.
I darted a glance down at the Strip’s cascading light, pouring over the valley like a river, and gripped him tighter. Even now my will to live—or my mother’s famed stubbornness—was so great I would cling to my greatest enemy. The irony wasn’t lost on the Tulpa. He raised his arms, muscles bulging like sandbags, and pulled me so close my nose touched his.
“Let go, dear,” he said softly, like he was giving me good, fatherly advice. “It’ll be over quickly that way. And just think what a relief it’ll be to finally stop fighting.”
I winced because he’d come so close to my own thoughts. But when I didn’t move, he reached over with his free hand and began prying my fingers, one by one, from his own. Whimpering, I looked straight up into the sky.
Maybe it was the new knowledge that thirteen constellations stared back at me. Maybe that I was composed of the same worldstuff as they, or maybe something up there had heard my prayers. Because I understood then, without even having to think. It was as clear as the dark matter that lay sprawled between the stars. All that blank space. All that nothing, I thought, returning my gaze to the Tulpa’s soulless eyes. Just waiting to be filled by someone with the power to create.
“Supernova . . .” I choked, and his brows pulled down like darts. What was it Tekla had said? When a star goes supernova, it becomes the thing it was meant to be all along.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He’d know if he had spent a little more time wishing upon stars. Like Tekla, who loved the Universe’s mysteries. Like Vanessa, who’d admired the hard science behind it. Like the rest of us, who had atoms winging through our bodies—oxygen moving through lungs, calcium in bones, iron in hemoglobin—all of it birthed by supernovae . . . stars that’d burned out long ago.
“Just that we are all children of the stars.”
All of us, that was, except the Tulpa.
My gaze met his, and I had the satisfaction of seeing his eyes widen just before I pulled the mask from behind me. I slapped it on his face, bracing it at the edges, careful to hold it, and not him. Then I began moving things with my mind.
Rearranging the world as I knew it.
Creating the world as I wanted it to be.
There was no anger or heat to fuel the effort. No Gotcha now! or Die, motherfucker! to emphasize my victory. I didn’t beat against his will because there was, very simply, nothing there to beat against. He was right. I had to give up. Why spend energy on something that wasn’t there? This imagined entity had only grown into a monster because he’d been given so much care and thought in this world. His power had been cultivated by his followers, lionized in the manuals, and feared by his enemies. That’s what had allowed him to take on a life of his own. Or its own.
But people could change their minds in an instant.
I could change mine.
There was a rattle, like teeth chattering, and the Tulpa’s body began to shake. The sound reminded me of Solange’s chimera, but I just tightened my grip.
A gust of wind swiped at me, testing, while another licked at me from behind. Both were ripe with the rot of the Tulpa’s stewed breath, but I grounded myself in my mind, and thought of the Pythagoreans, and the way they’d first named the elements: air, fire, earth, water . . . and the fifth essence: quintessence. Ether.
For a moment, there was nothing. Even the wind fell still and silent, no more breeze carrying rot and decay, fouling up the balmy spring night. I stared into the mask, wondering if it could be that easy, if he could be gone—not without a fight, but after so much of it—leaving nothing but silence in his wake.
Then the most famous boulevard in the world—carved into the desert with brazenness and neon—shifted. The soldier-straight row of streetlamps marking its presence on the valley floor disappeared first, as completely as a seamstress’s cut cloth falling away. Darkness billowed in its wake.
The shredding continued with the largest and most famous hotels winking out one by one, stripping away all the chutzpah and glamour and neon from the city, before attacking the smaller business and clear-glowing streetlights crisscrossing them. My mouth fell open as the valley’s entire middle was swept into darkness.
It looked like a giant sinkhole had sprouted up in the Mojave. I could practically hear the televangelists now, squalling and judging, manufacturing emotion from the pulpit; pointing fingers and railing about retribution for our city’s wicked ways. Then the electricity began failing in the residential areas, the darkness taking large bites out of the grid, and I remembered that the Tulpa’s wicked ways included hiding under the veil of total darkness.
He could only manifest in a complete void. That was how he overrode a viewer’s expectation, and that’s what he was creating. A vacuum so great he could create himself anew. Bigger and better too, I thought, suddenly alarmed. Because he was using the energy of the most electrically charged city in the world to do it.
Shit.
A serrated chuckle sawed at the air.
The headlights on the cars disappeared next, and the sound of tires screeching and metal twisting popped throughout the shadow-pocked valley. Confusion rang in the distance, alarmed shouts of chaos feeding the energy the Tulpa was already stealing away.
The muscles in his arms went rigid, cramping, knotting into such an elongated moment of paralysis that I grew hopeful. Then they bulged, ropy veins popping on his thick gray neck, rising so that I only had a moment before the mask on his face splintered, and exploded.
I scrambled for purchase, slipping from his arms, falling to his waist, nails raking flesh that felt like a sheet fitted over concrete. Breathing hard, once again dangling, I jolted when the Tulpa spoke again.
“It takes tremendous energy to create light, Joanna,” he said, his voice razored and shredded. “But absolutely zero energy to create darkness.”
And darkness suddenly loomed everywhere. The whole of the Universe bore down on my hometown, so dense with cosmic gravity I felt I could take a bite out of it. It was a gorgeous collision of dark matter and burning light, alien galaxies pressing in on every side. The air was frothy with particles, the stars bright as candles, and everything was expanding, streaking, burning up, and being reborn at the same time.
The sky was the most alive thing I’d ever seen in my life.
Of course I’d never seen the constellations from the center of my bright hometown before—there’d always been too much neon to contend for people’s attention—so the soaring heavens also felt misplaced and strange, like I’d just woken to find a foreign language tumbling from my tongue.
A soft chuckle began to shake the Tulpa’s body, and I lowered my gaze from the stars. He laughed, shaking harder, and as I gazed up, a bright tear fell from the corner of one black eye, rolling down his face like candlelight. Suddenly he couldn’t hold it in any longer and he snorted, and let out a throaty roar. Neon and gas, electricity and fire—everything stolen from the city was in that laugh.
I cringed, turning my face down, feeling my hair singe
, as his face turned into a white ball of light. There was no way to get my bearings, no chance of catching sight of my companions in the sky. Not the constellations, the dark matter in between. Not the stars threatening at any instant to go supernova.
I froze.
Good things, Vanessa had told me, can come from something that looks like total destruction.
I let the Tulpa laugh, keeping my eyes shut.
Fire, I thought, and envisioned a gorgeous, glowing natural disaster in front of me—an explosion of light, splintering and breaking up just as the mask had.
The laughter cut off in a jagged tear. Then came the first crack of heat lightning. The hair on my head and arms stood on end, but I kept my eyes shut, and when the next crash sounded, I envisioned bone crushing like nuts in a cracker.
Strong arms grabbed at me, then faltered. I fell, my chin catching on the jagged floor of the stupa, before I slid over the edge. Grabbing blindly, I almost jerked away when I caught hold of a giant talon. Instead I reached up with both hands and held tight. I didn’t dare risk opening my eyes. Seeing the Tulpa, even fallen, even with cracked bones, would ruin my vision of total destruction, so I imagined the rubble of the stupa piled on that body, pulverizing those broken bones down into dust.
No. Earth, I thought, and a grinding sound caused the building to shudder.
Suddenly the wind started up again, attacking from the void at my back, coming from nowhere, growling in my ear. It whipped my body side to side, circling for attack. Fine, I thought, and located the place inside me where all my lost powers had once been. Then I took that emptiness and imagined that same vast emptiness in the world. Air.
I couldn’t help but think that this was the world Olivia should have been born into, one empty of the evil that’d stalked me from birth. It should have been my birthright as well, but more than that, I wanted that empty space for my unborn daughter. So when rain blasted me next, moving in like a tsunami, I didn’t hesitate. I envisioned it pummeling that bone dust, breaking it down even further into molecules and atoms that disappeared, reclaimed by the night. Water . . . whisking it away.
The Neon Graveyard Page 33
