by P. N. Elord
Skamar’s vision swam, her mind clouded, and time leapt forward in the strange stop-motion jerks of battle-born fugue. Using the animal’s magic, she dismembered its energy and form, and when she’d finished, the body lay in pieces around her, the thought that had created his spirit was only memory . . . and the Tulpa and Debi were gone. Cursing, she began to rise before remembering Vaughn.
The cop was no longer standing. Shock had leached the color from his skin, and he was slumped against the last blue portable. Witnessing the object of his lustful fantasies feasting on the blood of a mutant hound was apparently more than he’d expected to see. And, she noted coolly, at some point between firing that bullet and when she’d cracked the last bone in Bandit’s body, Vaughn had repositioned his gun, setting its sights on her.
Their eyes met, and Skamar rocketed forward. After knocking aside the weapon, she lifted Vaughn clean from his feet, to propel him into a pickup at the lot’s edge. She crowbarred his neck until his feet began to kick like an upturned beetle’s—still lots of life in the limbs, though no amount of scrambling would allow escape.
“Get it all out,” Skamar rasped, pushing on his stomach so that the last of his breath wheezed from his lungs. She then wiped Bandit’s blood from her chin, put her mouth to Vaughn’s—beneath eyes widening in horror—and began to suck.
Mortals were so ignorant, thinking the soul lived in the eyes. The soul lived in the breath, threaded to the heart and mind in invisible strings, which pulsed with ethereal life. Skamar tugged on the brightest of these and was surprised at how little time it took to lift the memory of the last few minutes. Vaughn gradually relaxed, and she slowly lessened her hold, finally allowing life-giving inhalations to alternate with the small cocktail straw sips she still used to pull that memory clean.
Vaughn shifted, which she allowed because it was expected. His body and mind would create a new story for how and why they got there. The human mind was so weak that it was easily altered. Or maybe, she thought, frowning as she pulled away, it was that strong. All shifting, adaptable beings had to be, right?
Yet what Skamar didn’t expect, and somehow still allowed, was to be pulled close again. The new story developing in Vaughn’s strong/weak mind was clearly a romance. His mouth fastened on hers this time with a dizzying warmth, an enveloping she’d never before felt yet somehow still welcomed. She returned the kiss, her first, with a shocking urgency. In spite of that, or maybe because of it, she pulled away. Licking now tingling lips, she warily eyed Vaughn . . . who eyed her mouth dreamily.
“How did we—” But he broke off abruptly, putting a hand to his mouth and coming away with blood.
“He punched you,” she lied, flushing. Hey, she wasn’t the one who’d turned the memory cleanse into a kiss!
But it was already forgotten. Vaughn startled again, then fumbled his phone from his pocket. Face already expectantly grim, it fell further as he read the text, and Skamar didn’t have to be told why.
She sighed. “Where?”
“A park in Centennial Hills. The girl’s father tried to intervene this time. It looks like he was attacked by a dog, of all things.” Vaughn squinted into the sky, searching for a memory as he canvassed the stars, before shaking his head. “Isn’t that strange?”
Skamar just nodded, stood, and turned away to hide her bloodied clothing. Touching her hand to still-tingling lips, she thought, Yes. It was all very strange indeed.
The latest victim’s name was Theresa, she’d been born within two months of Ashlyn, and her father was mad with grief. He screamed and ranted about mutant hounds until the nurses held him down and sedated him by force.
Meanwhile, the police were just as frustrated. Vaughn fumed about lacking funds and manpower, and Skamar listened with her usual detachment, wondering if this was what “life” was all about. What was the point of opening yourself up to people or caring about things if they could eventually be used against you? Why even have a child if her potential absence resulted in a crater being carved in your chest?
She posed a softer version of this question—one that didn’t make her sound as if she didn’t understand the mortal state—to Vaughn when he finally fell silent.
“Because it can be so good, too,” he said, though he looked pained as he said it. “Knowing that the worst might someday happen doesn’t mean you avoid the risk of loving someone. It only means you seize the good when and where you can.”
Was that what she’d felt in that darkened parking lot? While stinking of warden blood and having just taken a life, was that what she’d inadvertently done? Was that why Zoe’s daughter, Joanna, had willingly offered up her life for a mortal child’s? And mostly, Skamar wondered, Was it worth it? She studied Vaughn. He certainly believed so. Funny how when she looked at him now she saw not his physical weakness, that fragile humanity, but his strong spirit, which seemed directly related to that belief. She could suddenly see how in the simplest of things—an invite for a cup of coffee, a small flirtation, a kiss—he seized his life as fervently as she clung to hers. Seizing life . . . and choosing good.
Skamar was still preoccupied by this when she joined his undercover unit the very next night. They were outfitting a female cop so young-looking that only her scent gave her away as a mature woman. Yet mortal girls verging on puberty were olfactory blank spots in the mind, just like the initiates born in underground sanctuaries and raised to fight on either side of the Zodiac. Therefore this plan to plant the officer in the audience during an evening magic show—where a magician would oh-so-conveniently pick her for his disappearing act—was flawed from the beginning. The Shadows would never fall for it.
The one thing it did have going for it was the proximity to another gathering of teens. Yuletide Magic raised money for underprivileged children while easing the social consciences of parents who otherwise seemed hell-bent on spending an insane amount of money on plastic trinkets for their offspring. Yet Skamar remained skeptical.
“This isn’t going to work,” she muttered as Vaughn jerked at the neck of his rented tuxedo.
“Why not?” he asked, frowning at his bow tie. It had been her idea for him to pose as an amateur magician, ostensibly to draw the girls close to him and possibly the kidnappers as well. In reality, she wanted only to keep him out of the way. The run-in at the Festival of Lights two nights earlier had shaken her—even if Vaughn didn’t remember any of it. She wouldn’t want anyone that close to the Tulpa. Never mind a man in possession of a surprisingly kind heart, dry scent, and lips that made hers tingle.
“Too obvious a setting,” she lied, as there was no way to explain about the decoy cop’s scent.
“Ah, sunshine,” he said, grinning as he pulled a springy bunch of colorful flowers from his tuxedo pocket. He offered them to her. “All you have to do is believe in magic.”
Skamar crossed her arms until he tucked the flowers away, though her heart skipped a couple of beats and her mouth quirked at one side when he shot her a roguish wink. Be careful, she found herself thinking.
Frowning, she wondered where that particularly human worry had come from, and turning away, she almost missed the Shadow entirely. As the bait took to the stage and the undercover officers fanned out about her, Skamar saw Dawn, a petite, unremarkable-looking woman . . . except that she was also the Shadow Gemini. She was speaking with a girl perched at the audience’s edge, gesturing animatedly to an exit door. Whatever she said made the girl’s eyes pop with excitement, and though no more than five feet from the nearest undercover cop, their body language indicated they were together. Dawn shepherded the girl toward a door leading backstage, and just as they gained the threshold, she shot Skamar a sweet smile over her shoulder.
Skamar glanced over to see if Vaughn had noticed, but he was now surrounded by half a dozen children who wanted him to hop inside his Plexiglas box, pull the curtains shut, and make himself disappear. It was clear that disguise had backfired.
Meanwhile the plant was onstage, ostensibly being
hypnotized, and all other eyes were fixed firmly on her. It didn’t matter. Skamar was the only one who could keep Dawn from escaping anyway.
She raced through the door and gained the backstage area in time to see the girl yanked behind an arching black scrim. Using the darkness to cover her unnatural speed, Skamar instantly closed the gap between them. Braced for attack—by a warden, by other waiting Shadows, maybe even by the Tulpa—she wasn’t ready for a conversation. But Dawn stood across the vast expanse of the stage, one hand holding a knife to the girl’s throat, the other muffling her sobs.
“My friends and I want to show you a little magic trick,” Dawn called out in a singsong voice.
Skamar laughed harshly. “You mean you and your invisible friends, Dawn?”
“Better than mortal ones,” Dawn said, offering up her own harsh laugh. “Especially at a magic show. I mean, it’s just so easy to make them go poof!”
Then both Dawn and the girl dropped from sight, a trapdoor swinging shut above them. Skamar ran, intending to give the door one hard stomp, but she came up short, Dawn’s final words—and the accompanying grin—finally reaching her mind and stopping her heart.
After bolting back to the theater, she nudged aside surly teens and offended parents to stand in front of the glass magic box. Vaughn was gone, the curtains were pulled shut, and the whole box vibrated with energy. Swallowing hard, Skamar grasped the tassel at the box’s side and pulled open the curtains.
A warden as giant and black as hell’s gaping mouth lunged at her, banging against the Plexiglas front with rabid fury. Screams erupted behind Skamar as the dog rocketed into the glass. Ignoring the chaos behind her, she reached for a note taped to the box’s front. A single word was spelled out in block letters on Valhalla Hotel stationery, one that brought back such an intense memory of pain that she actually sagged.
Valhalla was where. Vaughn was who. Now was when. As for the what? The Shadows weren’t making her guess at that: “CRUCIFIXION.”
Crumpling the note in her hand, Skamar bolted.
Skamar didn’t own any weapons. Shadows were immune to them, so knives and guns were more irritants than deterrents, and the Tulpa was impervious to all weaponry—even the magical ones crafted for Zodiac agents. Skamar couldn’t complain about that too much since she shared the immunity as a tulpa, but it was also why she had to take on the Shadows, and whatever trap they’d set, all alone.
Besides, the thought of something happening to Vaughn because of her was suddenly unacceptable. It set off such a panic in her chest, it was as if her lungs had grown wings. She had to stop it or—yes—die trying.
So Skamar skirted slot machines, floor attendants, and oblivious patrons of the Valhalla Hotel and Casino and followed the meaty, furred scent of Shadow wardens into the heart of the property. When she passed the twenty-four-hour café, the girls’ scent joined the hounds’, causing her heart to skip a beat. She rounded the gift shop, one of four, and felt a mental punch as Vaughn’s scent was added to the mix. The olfactory triptych was impossible to miss—a rabid fury matched only by a throbbing fear.
The scents led into a showroom, the grandest she’d ever seen, and home to one of those freaky acrobat shows Vegas visitors couldn’t get enough of. Multileveled pools and water features pitted the room’s center, and as it was obviously the show’s “dark” night, the Coliseum-like theater was empty.
Yet there was still a show going on.
Deep drums pounded through the cavernous room, while refitted spotlights blazed upon the platforms suspended above two pools of water. One held the four girls—bound and cowering in the rounded middle, facing drowning if any of them even wobbled. Their pool had been blackened into shimmering opaqueness.
The other platform held Vaughn Rhett. He was suspended over a sparkling blue pool, though he faced exactly the opposite problem in his potential death. Lifted to his toes by a makeshift series of pulleys and levers, he would suffer crucifixion if his platform suddenly gave way. And though Skamar didn’t move, didn’t even blink, something inside of her screamed. Her palms also began to sweat as she recalled the acute ache ratcheting up her arms from the giant nails the Tulpa had driven into her wrists. Her calves cramped up reflexively, and she closed her eyes, swaying as she remembered her ribs pressing against her lungs in a slow suffocation. Her normally sharp mental admonition to pull it together might as well have been a kitten’s plea.
“Decisions, decisions.”
Her eyelids flipped open, and her gaze landed on the ringmaster to this wet, twisted circus. The Tulpa stepped onto the walkway separating the two pools, surrounded by three doppelgänger hounds, their bodies shimmering and frothing, refractive and nauseating. When Skamar said nothing, the Tulpa grinned and took a bow.
“Choose platform A and you’ll save four innocent, albeit relatively useless, lives. My pets, then, will have to feast on something else.” He placed a hand on the flat head of the nearest warden. It growled liquid menace. “Choose the second, and you’ll save only one life—though one that’s been trained to save many.”
Skamar said nothing. She was trying to still her shaking hands, hidden behind her back.
“No choice!” Vaughn’s voice was strained as the rope around his neck drew tighter. “Save the girls!”
He didn’t realize his words made her decision more difficult, not less.
The Tulpa smiled. He knew it. “Well, it’s a conundrum either way. I’ll leave you to it.”
He began to turn, and Skamar acted out of instinct. Letting out a battle cry, she dove not for Vaughn or the girls, but for the Tulpa. Yet even as she flew forward, he rocketed straight into the air, yanking at ropes he’d had concealed behind his back. The platforms, one attached to each of his wrists, twisted from the pools. The girls fell. Vaughn screamed.
Unable to cease her forward motion, Skamar could only drop to the walkway where the doppelgänger hounds lunged, all three striking at once. Skamar’s screams spiraled throughout the theater as the drumbeats increased, syncopated with the girls’ terrified cries and, just as they hit the water, the Tulpa’s booming laugh. “Permanence must be a bitch.”
Skamar was too busy working a jaw full of luminous razors from her left calf while shielding her throat with her other hand. Yet the wardens were almost impossible to see in the reflected light of the tanks, eerie undulations appearing through their not-flesh. A strange sensation began to overtake her, one she’d only smelled on others before but recognized immediately—pure, sharp panic.
When the third hound took a chunk from her back, she arched forward and knew the next would claim her heart. Ironically, it was that sharp pain of teeth piercing skin that brought Skamar back to her senses. She hammered one snarling beast on its head, less to fend it off than to anoint it, naming it even as it regained its balance. “Dasher!”
He shuddered, the forced moniker giving him form as Skamar whipped around, kicking the second. “Dancer!”
The third animal again found her back. “Prancer!”
The power of permanence rippled through them, just as it had done when she’d turned from doppelgänger into a full-blown tulpa. It gave them the same momentary pause she’d had, too, and in that moment she launched herself backward. When they continued their midair attack, the wild snaps of the first two dogs found each other instead. Too far gone with battle lust, and too newly born in their permanent state, they writhed madly, tearing at each other’s bodies.
Meanwhile, Skamar propelled the third dog, so recently existing in a liquid form, into the giant tank of water where the girls had already sunk. Release and relief came immediately, and as the third hound lost its breath and life to the black liquid, she dove past the pooling of her own blood to search out the drowning girls.
Blindly, she flailed around until grabbing rope, or hair, or something that wound easily about her hands, then used her legs to thrust herself and the girls straight out of the tank. She dropped the gasping girls on the center platform and braced for the
Tulpa’s counterattack, only to find the cooling bodies of the hounds destroyed by their own magic.
And then she looked up.
The sensation of flying was an afterthought. She was back on the ground so fast, a tortured man cradled in her arms, that the girls were still sputtering on hands and knees. But Skamar forgot them for now. How odd, she thought, removing the rope from Vaughn’s neck, that the Tulpa hadn’t missed a trick. After all, she wouldn’t have expected a patently unreligious being to remember the spear in the side.
Though Vaughn’s larynx was crushed, his neck hadn’t snapped, leaving him to bleed out slowly, as the Tulpa had no doubt intended. Holding the man, Skamar thought of the boy who’d once borne kissable freckles. Tearing up, she could almost smell blueberries. “You did it, Vaughn. You saved those girls. Just like one of those medieval knights.”
She didn’t know if it was the small white lie or her tears dropping to his face that did the trick, but his eyes fluttered open long enough to reveal recognition touching his gaze. “Your . . . name . . .”
It wasn’t even a whisper, only his lips moving, but she read them and whispered back, “Skamar. It means star.”
And he somehow managed to reward her with a full smile, though the shockingly brave look twisted quickly into an anguished wince. Then as she held him, as she cried for the first time ever, her fragile knight died.
Skamar hadn’t opened the door to the apartment in days, never mind left it, so when she allowed Zoe in—and even that had taken a few moments of dull, uninterested consideration—her creator winced at the smell, and then in sympathy. It was the latter emotion that made Skamar want to slam the door shut.
Zoe, in yet another pretty if nondescript disguise, perched on the rented sofa’s side. “So, the Tulpa thinks he’s won. That you’ve gone into hiding . . . injured, licking wounds, beaten.”
