The Touch of Twilight

by Vicki Pettersson

  Remaining perched on the jib wasn’t an option, and I couldn’t turn around and show my back. Backing up like a tightrope walker would take too long, and while I could feasibly jump to the platform below this one, even a cat needed to spot the ground. I couldn’t see shit, and didn’t see the purpose of breaking a leg just to flee an unseen threat. I might not heal in time to actually run away. So I continued forward, leaping to the steel scaffolding in a noiseless jump.

  I ducked behind a bright red vertical beam, and had just caught my breath when a hoarse, off-key voice sang out over the lifeless air. “‘You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…’”

  Now I wanted to jump.

  “Tulpa,” I whispered, then charged the largest platform, dead center of the unfinished building. Not safe, but safer. I slipped halfway and ended up straddling the beam, my pelvic bone smarting under the weight of my fall. Jostling my conduit, I fumbled it like a second-string quarterback, and ended up lunging to catch it, my thighs clasped tightly around the steel. I ended up upside-down, thankful I wasn’t saddled with a man’s more fragile parts.

  A chuckle joined the name—and me—still hanging in the air. “That’s me.”

  It was him, I thought, righting myself. His description, his title, and his identity all rolled into one distinctly foreign word. A tulpa was an imagined entity, one wrought into being by thought rather than birth. For centuries Tibetan monks had practiced and perfected the skill of creating thought-forms real enough that they could influence the mortal realm, though the man who’d created this tulpa had been a Westerner. An evil one.

  Even when drawn from the most benevolent mind, the creation of a tulpa was considered a dangerous accomplishment. Wyatt Neelson’s original intent was to use the thought-being for personal gain. The Tulpa couldn’t be killed. It could be sent into the most dangerous situations, deal with the most nefarious beings, and come out unscathed. Yet the Tulpa didn’t want to come out, and he quickly grew tired of the evil mind that had created and commanded him. Once he was actualized in the world, he began exercising his own will and judgment, and in the process, became even stronger and more wicked than his creator.

  In short, the dude has some powerful fucking juju.

  “You caused the vibrational chaos.” It wasn’t a question, but the way the air suddenly moved about me, whistling across all the empty floors below, I knew he’d given me an answering nod. It also gave me his approximate location. I angled sideways, putting a second pallet between us. “And there’s no one else here, is there?”

  I didn’t need to feel the air shift to know the girl in the smoke—the one Felix had been so sure was Dawn, the Shadow Gemini—had really been the Tulpa. Able to take the shape and form of anyone he chose, he’d been reacting to Felix’s expectations. Like I said, powerful.

  “Disappointed? I can call in some backup if you’d like.”

  And do it with nothing more than a thought. “No, no,” I said airily, and quickly. “Let’s just keep this between the two of us.”

  It wasn’t necessarily an improvement, but what were my options?

  “Good. Because I think it’s time you and I cleared the air…daughter.”

  I have mentioned this depraved, wrathful thought-form was my birth father, right? And he just loved to rub it in.

  I tensed as the gases cleared around us, and peered from behind the pallet to find his outline materializing across from me, a breeze rushing in to surround his body, slowly expanding to leave a clearing on the unstable platform. From below it must have looked like a light had been turned on across the entire floor, though we were still standing in the pitch of night.

  The first time my father had appeared to me, he’d been in the guise of an old-school casino boss; the Tulpa as Godfather—bada-boom, bada-bing. The last time, however, he’d been featureless as he threatened me in the backseat of his personal stretch limo. Knowing that he took the physical form of a person’s expectations, this unnerved me most. It might mean I hadn’t made up my mind about someone who believed manslaughter was a good tactic in getting your own way. Of course, he could have also been fucking with me. People loved to do that when you were new to the paranormal playing field.

  So it was with relief that I realized he was the one doing all the projecting here. There was no disguise to soften the demonic visage looming across from me, though he stopped short of letting me smell the rot of his soul, and the organs stewing inside. Even the monsters, it seemed, were vain.

  But he didn’t try to hide the arching bones angling his ears into high horns, or the ashen skin stretching from the hooknose and over his hairless skull, all the way to his spear-tipped crown. I’d had a glimpse of the long talons curving his hands into deadly points before, so they weren’t as shocking as they otherwise would’ve been, but the ropy, veined spikes impaling his shoulders and spine made me shudder. I swallowed hard and said the only thing I could think of. “Please tell me I didn’t get your overbite.”

  His twisted lips curved even further. “It’s a mask, daughter. Rather like the one you’re wearing, though with a dual purpose.”

  “You mean you’re actually uglier than that?” Note to self: work harder on controlling Shadow side.

  “This veneer enables me to breathe normally when the cosmic dust from the black hole crowds back in around us.”

  So it was a black hole…of sorts. That explained why the others had been unable to locate even a molecule of oxygen to suck on. However, it didn’t explain why the Tulpa could control it at will. Or how. “What happens if you take your mask off?”

  His responding smile pulled his cheeks into sharp triangles, and my pulse began to hammer as he lifted his hand. But even before he ripped his own face away—the mucus and straining muscles tearing like the innards of a pumpkin—my vision narrowed to a pinprick, tingling darkness closing in fast. The air departed so quickly, blackness rushed in like the first tide of a monsoon, burying me beneath its pressurized weight. It held me upright as it closed in on all sides, and I suddenly realized I was going to die that way. It pissed me off. And I never did get to see his face.

  My only consolation was that he was dying as well. Maybe he’d pushed too hard and the weight of the world was preventing him from returning the mask to his face, but a shudder like a sonic boom ricocheted through the unfinished structure as he fell to his knees. Ah well, I thought sluggishly. Taking out the leader of the Shadow side wasn’t a bad legacy to leave behind. Too bad the breath had been crushed out of me, trapping that taunt in my thoughts.

  That’s what you get, I thought, fading. Show-off.

  Then sound flooded over me like my head had been plunged under water. The weight lifted, I fell to my knees, and the Tulpa’s greedy gasps for breath sounded like the wind over mountain steppes and plateaus, whistling and harsh, and with a whipping force.

  He hadn’t been lying, I thought in wonder, as my vision cleared so I could watch him struggle to his feet. We were somehow connected; I breathed because he breathed. The implication would’ve had me wincing just moments before. Now I found it a relief. He couldn’t kill me without committing suicide…at least not that way. It bolstered my confidence.

  “Is this where you try to convince me to come to the Shadow side or die in an airless, soundless vacuum?” I asked, grasping my conduit between both hands. It still hung limply from my tingling fingertips, not that it mattered. The Tulpa couldn’t be killed even with magical weaponry. No one knew exactly how to kill him yet…which helped make these confrontations all the more disconcerting.

  “No, because then this would also be where you deny me. Again.”

  I stepped out from behind the pallet. It wasn’t helping against the Tulpa anyway. “Wow. Psychic in addition to being evil incarnate.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere.” His eyes narrowed, “Fast.”

  But bravado was the only weapon I had left. Almost every time I’d met this fucker I’d ended up beaten, bloodied, and broken. But he wanted something
this time, and it was clear he wouldn’t kill me until he got it. So could I figure out how to kill him before that?

  Yet I’d have to be careful not to project my intention, or expend any excess energy in doing so. The Tulpa had a way of prevailing over, and gaining power from, the people who tried to kill him. Like Yoda, there was no try. You either succeeded or failed, and so far…well, the Tulpa had just grown more and more powerful. He wasn’t anyone’s imaginary friend anymore…and he had a fuse as short as a third-world dictator.

  “Sit down.” He waited until I found an upended bucket before settling across from me. Even crouching, he was over five and a half feet tall. A fine mist draped his lower stomach, where I assumed he kept his valuables, and I found myself uncommonly grateful for his discretion. I let my gaze fall to his barbed toes and wondered if the name of my pedicurist would be enough to let me live. “We need to have a little talk about vibrational resonance.”

  “I forgot to bring my notebook.”

  “I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version.”

  “Okay, but my tutor won’t approve.”

  A growl rumbled through his body, and the platform shook beneath me. “It’s time for the third sign of the Zodiac to come to pass. The first sign was the revelation of the Kairos—the chosen one—my daughter.” There was a note of pride in his voice, but the multiple attempts on my life rather blunted the charm. “The second was a cursed battlefield, which you not only managed to survive, but brought most of your current troop through in fighting form.”

  His emphasis of the word most wasn’t lost on me. I gave him a look he probably recognized from his own mirror, because he chuckled again.

  “Which brings us to the third sign. The reawakening of the Kairos’s Shadow side.”

  I held up a hand to stop him cold. “I don’t believe that’s what it means.”

  See, these signs of the Zodiac had nothing to do with the astrological wheel, as one might initially believe. No, the signs were portents instead, indications that one side in the fight between good and evil was finally gaining dominance over the other, and doing it with my help. So while my willingness to switch to the Shadow side was theoretically feasible—with the gift of free will and a serious breakdown in my personal mores—what the latest portent actually said was that the Kairos’s dormant side would soon reawaken. I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I was pretty certain I wasn’t going to start acting against humanity any time soon.

  Obviously the Tulpa disagreed. “Our mythology tells us that under Pluto’s influence the woman born of the Archer sign will have a death, a rebirth, and a transformation into that which she once would have killed. Even though she begins her journey with the spirit of a dilettante, her light is soon eclipsed and given weight. There is a descent into the underworld, and she will soon see the unseen.”

  “Day-um.”

  His face froze, registering nothing. I swallowed hard. “I’m ready to forgive your adolescent dalliance with the agents of Light and extend to you, once again,” he said tightly, “the offer to reign at my right-hand side.”

  The side, in history and mythology, reserved for the second-in-command. He was speaking literally too. I’d seen it in the Shadow manuals. A solid gold throne elevated on a red-carpeted dais. But still an underling. Still under his thumb. I nodded thoughtfully, before stilling. “Screw your mythology.”

  He surprised me by looking amused. It stretched that graying skin in all the wrong directions, and I found I preferred his scowl. “This is your final chance to reconsider. Normally you’d get only one warning, but paternal duty obliges me to extend one last olive branch before wiping you from the face of the earth.”

  “My lineage is matriarchal, same as anyone else’s…no matter who my father is.”

  I was prepared for him to lose it, readied for a battle cry to sound across the sky, and tensed for his attack. But he merely studied me with sunken eyes before abruptly steering from the topic. “I understand my new Cancer is targeting your old boyfriend. She was dogged even as an initiate, raised by the ward mothers to be as cold and scheming as her mother. Yet I could stop her with a word. I can save your mortal love. I can give you Regan…like I gave you Joaquin.”

  My heart was pounding, and it took all the control I had to keep my face impassive beneath my mask. I held my breath until I was sure my desperation wouldn’t be sensed on the next exhale. “You didn’t give Joaquin to me,” I said, bitterness bright on the air as I led him away from the subject of Ben. If the Tulpa found out I still cared for him, he’d be dead within the hour. “I took him for myself.”

  “So take Regan as well. She can be yours…for a small price.”

  “You mean my soul?” I scoffed like I didn’t care about Regan or what she was doing. Besides, one didn’t need superhero senses to scent bullshit. “Regan DuPree can’t take out a want ad without tripping over her own nonexistent dick. I can kill her at will…and do it without reverting to my Shadow side.”

  One brow quirked like a dart. “Not yet a full year as an agent, and already so sure of your skills?”

  “Trial by fire speeds along the learning curve.”

  “Call me a skeptic, but I’d like a little demonstration.”

  And he finally moved, not to attack, but like a stage magician conjuring his latest, greatest illusion. A flip of his wrist, those talons whipping upward, and an inky ball bloomed over our heads. The nucleus was controlled, but it grew steadily, eating up the air again with as much efficiency as a vacuum cleaner.

  A speck appeared in the center of the hole, growing larger within the limitless void.

  “What is that?” I whispered, my mouth dry, as the object took shape, first as a luminous five-tipped star…then as a splayed-limbed human being. I gasped, and found myself with a mouthful of rancid vanilla, a flavor that always accompanied the compounded scent of torment and fear.

  “You mean who,” the Tulpa corrected conversationally. “That’s the man who agreed to be used as a tool against me.”

  “Where—?” I couldn’t finish. Where had he come from? The man was full-sized now, suspended above us and rotating slowly, still centered in the ever-expanding void. His face was fixed in a pained expression, and though he was spinning, the shirttails of his plaid flannel shirt didn’t sway. It was as if he’d been frozen in a block of black ice.

  “He’s been here the whole time, dear. That’s part of the mystery, the magic, of black holes. He’s been watching you from beyond the event horizon, even as he inches toward its center.”

  “Let him go.”

  “I can’t. What you’re seeing now is only a product of the curvature of space-time. This was him an hour ago.”

  “You can, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” I began shaking my head slowly, then faster, unable to tear my eyes away from the petrified, lost mortal. “He’s an innocent. He only knew how to work surveillance equipment.”

  “Ah, but you knew. And you enlisted him. Engaged him. Endangered him.”

  And the mortal was paying for our—my—hubris. “Don’t hurt him,” I whispered, not knowing if I was telling him or asking.

  The Tulpa’s face cracked in a grin, and he waved his hand in my direction, causing molding vanilla to wash over me again, but this time it was charged, zinging in the air, stabbing at my skin like rusty darts. He’d already hurt Vincent; I just wasn’t seeing it yet.

  But then something went wrong. Perhaps the surrounding steel acted as a magnet for the Tulpa’s force, like a lightning rod beneath a blistered sky, but somehow the wires got crossed, and instead of merely sensing the residue of Vincent’s pain, I found myself on my knees, writhing with it.

  Electricity spindled inside me, driven on a spiked axis through the top of my skull, splitting in my center, and arrowing out of the soles of my feet. Bolts of pain fired from my spine to cauterize my nerve endings, and the scent of something flash-cooking reached my nose before the membrane was seared and all scent blunted. But
none of that was as painful as when the invisible axis was suddenly removed, like a flanged drill bit ripping through my center and out my skull. Minutes passed in long, blissful silence. When I could finally open my eyes again, the black hole blocked the entire night sky.

  “That…that…” That was all I could manage. My tongue was singed. If I lived through this I’d bear the scars inside.

  “Hurt?”

  I gained my feet and shook off the brindled energy unsteadily, like a dog flinging water from its coat. “Felt familiar.”

  “It should. It’s your power, inverted.”

  My stomach dropped, and my knees actually buckled. Not more than a month ago a good deal of my power had been depleted in an electromagnetic maze. I’d survived it, barely, but there were abilities that’d been stripped from me and transferred to the maze’s creator, the Tulpa. It was why he’d sent me in there to begin with, and now the power he’d gained was being used against me…and an innocent.

  I looked back up at Vincent, a man who’d lived a blissfully normal life until approached to be our cover, and the only thing I could think as I watched his slow rotation was, I’m sorry.

  “You can’t save him, Joanna,” the Tulpa said, misreading my look. “Your power is what put him there, and nothing can escape the gravitational pull of a black hole. Besides, energy cannot be divided against itself. An agent,” he clarified, his words damning me, “cannot be divided against herself. You are Shadow, and the sooner you accept it, the sooner your weaknesses will become your strengths.”

  I shook my head, refusing to be damned. “That is not my power holding him there. I would never do that.”

  “You already have,” he said airily. “The reason this man is pinned up here like a science experiment is because of your hatred for another named Joaquin. A man, too, named Liam. Ajax and Butch before them. So the facts would seem to contradict you, Joanna. You have no qualms in dealing out death when it serves your purposes…you also seem to have a particular fondness for edged weapons.”