“But why?” I thought, so taken with the idea, I let my attention momentarily wander from the Tulpa. “Why now, I mean?”
“Why not?” He shrugged, the movement causing Regan’s shoulder to tear in three separate spots, and I tried to ignore the fresh blood staining Zane’s Persian carpet. Explain that one to the steam cleaners. “You’re the Kairos. You’ve finally come into your supernatural powers, something a double-walker seeking corporeal expression would find irresistible. But I saw your face when she appeared at the top of that scaffolding. You were as surprised as I. And you and your troop have as much to lose.”
So the others were right. He was just as worried about the doppelgänger’s increasingly debilitating explosions as we were. Further proof that she had to be stopped, and soon. “She tried to rip my heart from my chest before escaping,” I admitted, watching for a reaction. It was difficult through the decaying tissue and twitching tendons, but his eyes narrowed and his voice softened.
“Did she?” The hint of protectiveness in his voice might have warmed me if he hadn’t already tried to kill me multiple times as well. “It’s because a double-walker needs a fleshly relic from their chosen prey in order to fully manifest in the physical realm. Organs are best, they contain the most condensed inner energy, and a heart, as the center of your life force, is the most symbolic as well. They’ll do anything to achieve full material form. Of course, there hasn’t been one in this valley for years. I won’t allow it. But this one is strong…and smart. She gains admittance by circumventing the portals, and she’ll soon attempt her vitalistic shift into a natural state.”
“Which means?”
“It means she’s going to kill you, my dear.” He smiled at me like I was a child, before offering his twisted version of a helping hand. “Unless we work together.”
I jerked, like a horse spooked at the reins. Work with the Shadows? Zane’s accusations came flying back at me, and Warren’s unspoken fears that I’d do just that surfaced in my mind. I suddenly felt filthy just for speaking with the walking dead, and pulled myself straight. “I don’t know how many times or different ways there are to tell you. I’m not coming to the Shadow side. Ever.”
“I’m no longer asking you to,” he said, startling me again. He spread his hands in explanation, fingers cracking at the knuckles. “You’re a target for a doppelgänger, Joanna. Your chi is fouled, and the gifts you might potentially bring to the Shadow side are blunted by the risk you pose to those around you…and yourself. Besides, until you get rid of this double-walker, this dualistic version of you, everyone around you is in danger.”
“And you care why?”
“About the agents of Light?” he scoffed, and pulled at a clump of skin hanging from his neck. “Clearly I don’t. But I do care about the possibility of them gaining unfair advantage during one of these chaotic outbursts. We should work together to eliminate this third party so the fate of the valley will be won or lost independent of some ghostly creature’s whim.”
I was silent, weighing his words for deceit, but I couldn’t see any other reason for wanting to work together than the one he’d given. I didn’t say the words, but my prolonged silence was apparently enough to convince him of my agreement.
“Think about it, and if you decide to take me up on my offer, think about me. Envision me coming to you, do it in a ‘safe’ zone if you must”—the mocking in his voice wasn’t lost on me, and it sent my injured cheek to pulsing, but I said nothing—“and I’ll come to you through the nearest agent, like now. Work with me, Joanna. It’s the only way we can banish this chaotic life force.”
And before I could agree, or not, his blackened eyes were snuffed, smoke rising from empty sockets before the whole of him caved back in to Regan’s chest cavity. Douglas’s aura stretched like a sail away from Regan’s body as soon as it flipped inward, as if anxious to be away. Regan straightened, and I saw organs rearranging themselves in her middle, her rent skin stitching itself back together as if being zipped up before she bent to touch her changeling’s shell, a little more roughly than necessary. Douglas gasped as his aura ripped from Regan like tape, adhering back to his shell to prevent any permanent damage. He lifted his head and shook it as if dazed. I couldn’t blame him.
“The Tulpa always has such a compelling argument,” I said to Regan as I stroked Jasmine’s pale face and watched as her aura sloughed from me like soapsuds under water. Her cheeks warmed with my touch. “He’d make a great lawyer.”
Regan spared only a brief glance in my direction but said nothing as she smoothed over her peasant top and patted her hair back in place. I watched her fuss with the bow on her top, and smothered a smile. She’d heard nothing of my conversation with the Tulpa.
“So,” I said slyly, studying her carefully for a reaction. “I understand you live in a townhouse south of the Strip.”
Her head shot up, shock blanketing her face.
“And that you drive a red Audi, two-door, cute, though it’s been in the shop twice this month. You might want to think about replacing that. And how’d your visit to the dentist go last week? Other than the filling in your upper left second molar?”
Obviously I’d gotten Maximus X to dig up the info on “Rose,” but if Regan thought the Tulpa had provided me with the information in exchange for something he wanted, who was I to correct her?
“What does that mean, do you think?” I asked her, tilting my head. “That your leader had so much to say to me in private?”
Regan hesitated, left eye twitching again, and I knew I’d spooked her. I smiled because I’d also just discovered her “tell.” Unable to trade barbs since she suddenly had no idea where she stood, she deftly, and not so subtly, changed the subject. “You know, Ben’s taking me up to Mount Charleston for the weekend. We’re going to rent a cabin, drink spiked cocoa, and cuddle in front of a log fire. I think it’s time to take our relationship to the next level.” She tilted her head wonderingly. “What do you think I should wear? A white baby doll or a red one?”
A tremor, like an animal stirring to life, moved through me. “Ben will never be with your pulpy rotting ass as long as I’m alive, clear?”
That eye twitched again, her mouth thinning. “Well, we can fix that, can’t we?”
My eyes slid to her changeling, who’d picked something slimy from his hair and was studying it closely, trying to figure out what it was. My gaze found hers again, and I thought, Fuck it. The leader of the underworld had made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. A doppelgänger wanted to eat my heart for breakfast. What was one more little war?
I ran at her so fast, my fist was flying toward her face while her hands were still motionless at her side. The crunch of her nose was less satisfying now that I knew how rotted out her insides were…and besides, it wasn’t enough to kill her.
Momentum had me somersaulting over her head, but I anticipated, and was twisting in the air above her, readying a second assault even before I’d touched ground. She turned into me, I blocked with my right, and the sharp tip of my elbow sailed downward to bury into her left eye socket.
Douglas had finally found his feet and had again coagulated into the grotesque, rubberized monster meant to protect the Shadows, but I ignored his snarl, dodged his lunge, and thrust my foot into his solar plexus. It sunk through to the other side, and would’ve pierced his body if not for a membrane wall as clear and thin as a yolk sac. He screamed as I yanked my foot free, but the interruption had given Regan time to retreat. She moved so the blazing fireplace was between us.
“Don’t.” I circled closer as her eyes flicked to the door. “You’ll never make it.”
She shifted too. “What are you doing? You can’t kill me here.”
“This is just practice, Regan,” I said, stalking her. “A taste of things to come.”
She pulled out her conduit, even though it was useless in the safe zone. “Is that what the Tulpa told you when he took a chunk out of your cheek?”
My face still
ached with the residual sting of the Tulpa’s slap, but I shrugged. “That was before we came to an agreement. And I’ll heal.”
“Sure,” she said, feigning unconcern as her gaze darted sideways. “But will your changeling?”
“I’m fine,” Jasmine said, but she was guarded, clearly worried Regan would seek retaliation for my attack on her changeling.
But Regan hadn’t been looking at her. “Jasmine…where’s Li?”
“She was here a minute ago,” Jasmine complained, and she backed away to peer under the freestanding bookcases separating the back of the room into rows. “I swear, if I lose her again my mother is going to…”
“Oh God.” My eyes found Li at the same time Jasmine’s did. I was vaguely aware of Regan’s laughter—laughter and footsteps as she ran from the storeroom—but I bolted in the opposite direction, and dropped to my knees next to Jasmine, who’d been closer and had gotten there first.
“Wait, Jas!”
But she was already turning her sister over. “Li, how many times do I have to—”
We both gasped, momentarily stilled by the china doll cheek scored with three deep claw marks. It looked like she’d been attacked by a pit bull. Her beautiful skin hung in tatters, and blood pooled on the floor around her. Even once the bleeding was staunched, even when the furrows were stitched back together under a surgeon’s gentle hand, the child would be scarred for life.
But when she looked up at me, there was none of the loathing I expected in her watery gaze. There was no room for it with pain and fear and hope all jostling for space. “I did good, right? I protected you?”
The lump in my throat turned into a mountain. “Yeah, baby. You did great.”
She smiled with the good side of her face. I turned to Jasmine and found the piercing accusatory glare I deserved.
“Happy?” she asked, voice breaking.
God, no. I certainly wasn’t that. “I-I didn’t know.”
My voice cracked and a tear slid down the cheek that mirrored the injury to Li’s…except mine would heal. Jasmine looked at me in a length of charged silence, and for a moment I saw something akin to pity flickering behind her gaze, but she snuffed it out in the next. “Whatever.”
“I’m going to fix it.” I reached for Li.
“You’d better.” Jasmine said in a voice round with fury and disbelief. “Hero.”
But there was only one heroine present, and I lifted her in my arms and gently carried her from the storeroom.
11
I drove Li and Jasmine to the emergency room, and left only after their mother had arrived, assuring her all medical costs would be covered by the Archer Children’s Foundation. She thanked me repeatedly for “saving” her baby’s life from a vicious dog’s attack, while Jasmine sat in a plastic chair, swinging her feet back and forth as she alternated text messaging on her cell phone and glaring pointedly in my direction.
I wanted to tell her it wasn’t my fault. I hadn’t expected the Tulpa to attack, and I didn’t know how the injury had been transferred to Li instead of me or even her. But intentionally or not, I really had broken something vital to the balance of the supernatural system, and now not only were the manuals not being written, but a seven-year-old’s life had been permanently affected.
It was too late to return to Master Comics. The shop was closed and I’d received instructions to meet the rest of the troop at eight o’clock to examine the mask Chandra had stolen from Xavier’s. It was seven-thirty now and I still had to get across town in the rush of Friday night traffic, but at least it gave me time to think of a way to tell the others about Li, as well as ponder the smorgasbord of trouble now filling my plate. Okay, so it wasn’t all bad news. I’d learned the doppelgänger’s appearance had spooked the Tulpa enough to have him willing to bargain with the Light. I’d also learned Regan’s left eye wigged out when she was nervous, that she was overly sensitive about turning into a walking corpse, and I could best her in hand-to-hand if I played my cards right.
The news about Hunter having a side gig as a sex worker wasn’t what one would call good, but he always had a reason for what he did, and surely he had one for keeping it from the rest of the troop. Since I was exceptionally curious as to what that reason was, it was convenient to find myself swinging in front of the warehouse that served as his workshop with almost a quarter hour to spare. We were meeting here because we weren’t sure what would happen if we tried to take Xavier’s mask back into the sanctuary with us. Anything related to the Shadows was instantaneously incinerated as it slid down the secured chute leading to our hidden underground lair. I shuddered as I recalled the sole time I’d attempted entry without donning my protective mask. In contrast, we didn’t know if this mask was inherently evil—though there was something determinedly not right about a piece of wood that came to life and sucked out a person’s soul essence—but we couldn’t risk it being destroyed before we had a chance to examine it further.
Hunter’s workshop was as safe a place as we could hope for on this side of reality. It wasn’t a designated safe zone like Master Comics or the Downtown Cocktail Lounge, and was technically accessible by mortals and Shadows alike, but Hunter had the place so booby-trapped, the unfortunate Shadow who attempted a break-in here would be skewered, rotisseried, and served up to his or her enemies faster than you could say, Would you like fries with that? I’d seen him construct a weapon out of nothing more than toothpicks and twine, but the devices buried about his workshop were more than that; they were lethal works of art. Hunter did like his toys.
The steel bay door was open on the easterly side, and I assumed all alarms, traps, and missile systems had been turned off, so I pulled my Porsche to a stop next to his Ford Mustang, noting they were the only two cars here as of yet. Also convenient.
Clicking the alarm on my car, I glanced at the red Mustang and wondered if he used it for his security cover or if it was the ride for his side gig. What did a call boy drive on a date, anyway? And why, I asked myself as I shook my head, should I even care?
The workshop was housed in an isolated commercial district where the Strip’s biggest names in magic stored their props. Burton, Copperfield, Penn and Teller; they all had storage buildings the size of airplane hangars, so if our place ever was broken into, the templates and drawings and odd contraptions could be explained away as yet another magician’s illusionary trove of tricks.
What it was, however, was a place to plan, design, and test the weapons we used against the Shadows as we vied for control over the valley. The conduits designed to complement a specific agent’s talents, temperament, and training were conceived and honed to lethal perfection here. However, that was a relatively rare task—agents, with any luck, tended to live a long time—so the rest of the time it was a place to run sims and defensive programs meant to counteract our enemies’ machinations. Even the tools used to clean up a location affected by a paranormal battle were contained in raw form and made here. And Hunter’s hands crafted them all.
I’d once heard the Eskimo languages had dozens of different words for the concept of snow. Agents, I decided, should have the same extensive linguistic flexibility for the qualities of smoke, because the scent I inhaled upon entering the warehouse wasn’t the Shadow stench of incinerating flesh and hot ashes, and it wasn’t the suffocating fallout that had squeezed all the air from the molecules in the pseudo black hole the Tulpa had created downtown last weekend. No, Hunter’s scent was more natural, like the wisps rising from an isolated forest campfire, when the breeze was up and there was no other person for miles around. I located him by inhaling the heady mixture of clean sweat and a spice as identifiable as a sliver of ginger on the tongue, and my belly flip-flopped inside me. It’s true what they say, I thought, rounding the corner to find him shirtless, bent over a sliding table. Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire.
And this man was scorching.
He wasn’t overbuilt like a gym rat; his physicality was more raw and far less se
lf-conscious than that. He was sleek in the fashion of panthers and fast cars, built for performance, with latent power almost quivering beneath that compact frame. Still, the first word that would spring to mind if you ever saw him backlit, in silhouette, would be man. I especially liked the way his shoulders rounded, how they rolled high and smooth, like statues on display, clearly the force behind his fist. I’d seen him pummel through a concrete barrier with a careless backslap, and couldn’t help but compare that to the way I fought. I had never solely used the torque of my shoulder. I used my wide hips, my long thighs, my agile mind. As a woman, my whole being had to be the force behind my fist.
And back when I was a mortal woman, Hunter was exactly the type of man I’d study from behind the lens of my camera. I’d see them moving across a room with unconscious, predatory grace, and wonder what it would be like to be that powerful. What did it feel like to be able to run faster, jump higher, hit harder? To feel synapses firing in split-second bursts beneath the skin, testosterone making me jumpy?
Those were, of course, the covetous thoughts of a girl who’d been victimized in a way most men could never imagine. Back then, before I was a hundred times stronger than all those men I so jealously and suspiciously studied, I equated physicality with power. I thought the stronger you were, the more you controlled your own body and destiny. I even remember swearing in the abyss of night that if I’d been born with a male body I would never let it get out of shape or allow it to be less than what it could be. I’d have sculpted it until David wilted beneath his fig leaf in comparison. I’d have taken up as much space as possible. I’d have run just to feel power pumping in my thighs.
I hadn’t felt that envious twinge since my metamorphosis, but it struck me now, and surprise had me holding back as I studied Hunter from my location beside the wall cabinets. I’d never seen him without his shirt before, and the ambient light from the low-hanging bulbs captured the cuts and grooves of his muscles as he worked. His skin was burnished like faded copper…the result of sporting beneath the desert sun, not worshipping. More, there was a tattoo high on his back, above his right shoulder blade, and when he shifted again I crept closer to inspect it. It was a perfect circle of ink so black, his tanned skin looked pale in comparison. One side of the circle was shaded, the other left naked in the classic design of yin and yang. But the artist had left enough skin bare on the shaded portion to spell one potent word: Desire.
The Touch of Twilight Page 14
