The Touch of Twilight

by Vicki Pettersson

  I picked up my now-cooling coffee, and thought again of my unyielding hands around my mother’s neck. Maybe the Tulpa was right. If that’s what the future held for me, maybe I was a danger to everyone around me.

  Warren had straightened during my telling and was absently running a hand over the scruff at his neck. “And he claimed to scent your pheromones every time the doppelgänger ripped a hole into this world? Did he say exactly what that smelled like?”

  Of all the bits of information to latch on to. I rolled my eyes. “Are you listening to me? The Tulpa asked me to work with him.”

  Warren’s eyes found me again, and he shrugged. “Then you have a decision to make.”

  “What?” I drew back so suddenly, my coffee sloshed in my cup. I was making a mess of the crow’s nest, I thought, rubbing at the wet floor with my shoe. Warren offered a handkerchief, but I took one look and knew if I touched it I’d add vomit to the mix. Did he have to take his vagrant persona so seriously? “Okay, Warren? Not to shoot myself in the foot here, but aren’t you at all worried the third sign of the Zodiac is the imminent rise of my Shadow side? Isn’t that your greatest fear right now, what with my biology permanently on the fence and all?”

  “Why? Because the Tulpa wants you to work with him?” He leaned against the railing again, rubbing at his bad leg. “I’m not concerned with what the Tulpa wants. It’s you I’m concerned with. And, Jo?” He leaned forward to loom over me. “You’ve proven yourself, okay? Sure, you fuck up regularly, and you’re stubborn, and your quest to keep Ben in your life is one of the stupidest—”

  “Thank you,” I said loudly before he could screw up the rest of his compliment.

  Warren smiled. “Besides, the Tulpa is obviously more worried about this doppelgänger than he is about you.”

  “He said she could be some long-lost twin of mine. He told me one of his agents would have to meet with me if I decided to work with him to get rid of her.”

  That unseeing look came over Warren’s face again. Suddenly he was backing down the wooden staircase. “I have to go.”

  I threw my hands up into the air, palms up. “Oh, sure. Don’t mind me. I’ll hang out here. A sitting target for heart eaters and other things I never knew went bump in the night.” My voice had escalated with true panic, so I wasn’t surprised when his head popped back up.

  He tilted it, sighing. “Jo. I am worried about you. I don’t like that Regan was the one to find you in Master Comics. I don’t like that she knows your true identity, and could spill the Olivia/Joanna connection at any time. I’m scared to death of the way the Tulpa managed to touch you in a designated safe zone.”

  “Don’t forget the way an animist’s mask had to be ripped from my face,” I said, rubbing my jaw. It was sensitive—aching as if there was a scar there, though the damage couldn’t be seen or felt beneath my fingertips. Micah was right. I’d already healed.

  “That too,” he said, not unkindly…but not overly solicitous either. “But unless you’re willing to be locked up in the sanctuary for the foreseeable future—”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Or give us leave to reconstruct Ben’s memories?”

  “No.”

  “Then I need to get on with the running of this troop.”

  “But…” But Zane’s words had gotten to me. I could admit it here, alone with a man who’d overcome his suspicion of me before. “You know I didn’t break the changeling on purpose, right?”

  His irritation instantly disappeared. “Of course not. The others don’t think so either,” he added, because it was clear that’s what was really bothering me. I’d been outside the troop’s good graces before, more than once. I didn’t want to go there again. “The new manuals are being written, even if they aren’t being read. We’ll find out how to fix Jasmine—which is what I’m going to go research now—and then all those written words and images will bloom to life, bringing a fresh wave of energy and force to our cause. Supply and demand at its best.

  “Until then, the children who follow the Light side of the Zodiac can feed their insatiable imaginations with the older manuals. Those can sustain them, and us, for a long time.” He pushed back his trench coat so it billowed out behind him, and began descending, mindful of the leg that gave him so much trouble.

  “Warren?” I said suddenly, and the top of his head appeared again, eyes mildly irritated. I rushed through my question, but mostly because I needed to. “Why don’t you erase Ben’s memory without asking me? I mean, you could, and there’d be nothing I could do about it.”

  He leaned forward, feet on the staircase, elbows on the floor, to stare up at me. “Because I know what’s involved in a slow good-bye. The release of long-held dreams is a kind of death, with all the emotional stages that go with it, including anger, though you’re not quite there yet. It’ll be hard enough once you are, and I’d rather it not be directed at me.”

  “I see. A selfish ploy to avoid the brunt of my wrath.”

  His smile was tight-lipped. “You’ll release him when you’re ready.”

  I wouldn’t. Not ever. But I sat prim and proper as he finished his spiel.

  “Just try to prepare yourself to do it sooner rather than later. For his sake. For yours. And for ours.”

  Not even for all the inhabitants of this city.

  A wry smile flickered at one corner of Warren’s mouth, and he shrugged, still thinking I was in denial. The belief bought me time, so I said nothing. Without another word, Warren did disappear beneath the sightline then, reappearing seconds later on the ground floor below me. I followed him with my eyes, relieved I’d come clean about the Tulpa and what he’d asked of me…but curious about Warren’s reaction.

  This was the guy who freaked out at the slightest perceived imbalance in the Zodiac. So why wasn’t he freaking out now? The changeling of Light was broken, the manuals couldn’t be read, my chi had apparently become the supernatural equivalent of foot funk, and the Tulpa suddenly wanted to be friends. And what the hell had he been thinking when I told him how the Tulpa planned to rid this world of the doppelgänger? Because the expression that’d slipped over his face had looked like excitement, not concern.

  Below, Vanessa glanced impatiently at her watch. Kimber still fondled her unfinished conduit, looking younger and friendlier and dreamier than any future Shadow killer should. I couldn’t blame her. Her metamorphosis was scheduled two weeks from now, and it was the event an initiate looked forward to from the time they first learn of their preternatural destiny. I glanced at Hunter, thinking I should’ve told Warren about his call boy identity. If he was telling the truth, and Warren wouldn’t care, there was no reason not to mention it. Except I owed him. He’d kept my Joanna identity from those who didn’t already know it, as well as the bigger secret Warren knew nothing about—my daughter.

  So I sat back in the crow’s nest and watched Vanessa finally yell at Kimber, who reluctantly handed the weapon back to Hunter before disappearing through the bay doors. Then I sucked in a deep breath filled with the warmth of toasted fruit, so heavy and round I wanted to take a bite. The scent of Hunter.

  He glanced up at me sharply before he relaxed, and a languid smile visited his face. I’ll be your secret keeper, he’d once said to me. But he’d said it with heat, looking at me the way he was now, meaning that and so much more.

  “I’ll be your secret keeper too, Hunter,” I murmured, pushing away the memory even as it rippled through me. “But that’s all.”

  14

  I used my Shadow manuals often. Most had belonged to my first enemy, the man who thought it was fun to attack little girls on steamy desert nights. I now possessed them because our diminutive, assessing, and steady troop Seer, Tekla, had gone apeshit on his putrefied ass, literally shredding him to bits, saving my life…and saving a bit of herself in the process as well. The next week Joaquin’s extensive stash of meticulously organized Shadow manuals had somehow shown up in the sanctuary, though whether he’d bequeathed the
m to me, knowing I’d continue the work he’d started—finding a way to kill the Tulpa—or whether they’d somehow been appropriated on my behalf, I still couldn’t say.

  I also didn’t walk around advertising my possession of them, not with the third sign of the Zodiac looming over our heads like a giant question mark. So I waited until the next day, when most of the others had been called to clean up Shadow activity on the East Side, before pulling an armload of them from my locker, and taking them with me back to the barracks for some late night reading.

  It was in one of these that I found an account of the last time the Tulpa had sent his agents out via “message-by-minion.” He hadn’t been kidding about the missive’s hold over his troop. The manual depicted his investigation of one of his own, a Shadow agent named Tripp who’d balked at orders to murder his own family. Instead he’d warned them, and they all rabbited. Their effort to escape the Tulpa, a plan that revolved around some rumored underground for former agents, was foiled by a long-forgotten confidence in the Shadow Gemini, whom he’d told about his safe house in nearby Mount Charleston. Though the Gemini was, in truth, a genuine ally, after a month of no food or sleep or the ability to eliminate bodily functions, his will was thoroughly broken.

  The family’s slaughter a week later—three generations of Shadow Aquarians—had shaken the foundations of that side’s Zodiac. It was a brutal act even by the Tulpa’s lofty standards, and the final panels showed a meeting—sans Tulpa—swearing it would never be allowed to happen again.

  It must have pissed off Joaquin too, I thought as I left my room, because the manual was dog-eared, and he’d even scrawled in the margins, using that strange hieroglyphic alphabet I’d seen lining the walls of his underground cavern. These, however, were punctuated with giant exclamation points.

  So why would the Tulpa impose a message-by-minion again, and once more risk alienating his own agents?

  “The doppelgänger,” I murmured, sinking to the floor outside another barracks’ door and rubbing at my chest where the woman had scrabbled for my heart. My wounds had healed, but every so often it was as if dozens of ants marched beneath my skin, tiny legs scrabbling over muscle and tendons, and below it, my beating heart. I pulled my hand away, and attempted to push that image out of my mind.

  But what was it about her that spooked him so much? The message-by-minion, the knee-jerk willingness to kill me just because we smelled similar, the offer to work together to eradicate her existence…it all spoke to a fear far greater than his hatred for our troop. Greater, even, than his paranoia at my ascension as the preordained Kairos.

  What could he find so threatening about her existence?

  “Must be my lucky day.”

  I glanced up, already smiling as Gregor approached his room in the barracks, dropping the manual back into my shoulder bag as I stood. It was just after dawn now, and the troop was trickling in. Though he’d be going to bed soon, Gregor held the day’s first cup of coffee in his one arm because he first had to attend a meeting about the night’s mission in the debriefing room. He showed neither surprise nor alarm to find me waiting for him, just motioned me aside with his head so he could reach inside and gather his warden, Sheila. She went everywhere with him on this side of reality, and she bounded from the room to rub up against his legs before flicking her black tail dismissively in my direction. I could have sworn she was also deliberately trying to trip me up as we wound our way through the sanctuary’s concrete halls. Cats.

  I’d given Ben’s address to Gregor after my run-in with Regan at the bar, and had asked him to stop by, poke around, and see if she’d planted any more bombs. Gregor was more objective than I was, and could canvass Ben’s home with perspective, a practiced eye, and without leaving behind an olfactory trail. I couldn’t trust myself to do the same.

  I’d tried to be patient, but I was obviously anxious to know what he’d found. Fortunately, he didn’t make me wait. “So I did a drive-by on the mortal’s house and saw nothing unusual. I returned later when I was sure it was empty and found this.”

  He handed me a slip of paper with Rose’s name and address. I’d been looking hard for a secondary location where Regan stayed outside her troop’s sanctuary, so this would’ve been a Eureka! moment…if I wasn’t so sure it was a setup. She’d given me an address in the past. Going there had nearly killed me. “She must think I’m an ass to fall for the same ruse twice.”

  “Doesn’t hurt for her to throw it out there. If you’re looking so desperately for the complex hoax, you might fall for the simple one.” Gregor’s hoop earring glinted as he handed me his coffee cup and bent to lift Sheila. Completely devoted to Gregor, she was purring before he’d even scooped her up. She regarded the competition, me, with cold assessing eyes. “She was probably also feeling reckless. Pissed off to find so many bugs planted around the place.”

  I smiled back grimly. Placing the listening devices around Ben’s home had been a cheap and silly mortal’s trick, but they’d seemed to annoy her, so I’d had Gregor do it again. The possibility of falling for something stupid went both ways.

  “Thanks, Gregor.”

  “I also found this.” He balanced Sheila on his shoulder and rustled in his jacket pocket, coming out with a photo of Regan in a crystal-studded, heart-shaped frame. She was in Rose mode, so there were enough visual cues to suggest a likeness to me without fully reviving me in Ben’s mind. It was one of the Shadows’ more subtle ways of luring in their mortal prey.

  One of the less subtle ways was attached on the back, via the crystals.

  I took it, studying the plastic backing Gregor had obviously pried away. “Another bomb,” I said, as my stomach dropped to my toes.

  “More like a hand grenade, and one activated by a sound signal.”

  “So she can hit a button in one location…”

  “Or blow a dog whistle, whatever she has the receiver set for, and it’ll blow wherever she’s planted it.”

  I licked my lips slowly, and gently held the grenade back out to Gregor. He laughed, and waved it away before tucking Sheila back under his arm. “I called Hunter immediately and he told me how to disengage it. See the wire next to the photo hinge? Plug it in and you’re live again. Thought you might want it.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “I don’t get it. She’s had plenty of opportunity to come after me herself. She could plant bombs around my condo, in my car, on my cat—”

  Gregor winced, nuzzling Sheila. “Don’t say that.”

  As if she’d ever be able to touch Luna, I thought, but gave Sheila an apologetic rub under the chin anyway. Our feline wardens could slice Shadows to bits. Of course, their canine counterparts could do the same to us. “All I’m saying is if the goal is to get to me, why is she going after an innocent? A guy who clearly has no knowledge of me or my world?”

  “Because that apple didn’t fall far from the tree,” he said wryly, and Gregor would know. He’d been the one to drive a mace into Brynn DuPree’s chest. Yet before that, Brynn too had targeted an innocent man. She’d seduced a priest, conceived his child, and used that to blackmail him until he was as corrupt as she was. Though it wouldn’t surprise me to find Father Michael had been depraved long before Brynn DuPree had come along. The Shadows were experts in telling which humans had nefarious potential living beneath their skin. But Ben was different, targeted solely because I loved him, and I said as much to Gregor.

  “And I don’t understand why she’s so fixated on me, anyway,” I added as we passed walls studded with mythological symbols and astrological shapes. “Why doesn’t Regan go after you?”

  “That’s my girl,” Gregor replied jauntily. “Sugar and spice.”

  I tilted my head. “You know what I mean.”

  Killing Brynn had made him infamous on both sides of the Zodiac. The infamous man shrugged lightly. “She can’t come after me because I believe in luck, not love, and that’s something she doesn’t know how to twist.”

  I frowned, halting in
my tracks. “What do you mean?”

  He turned to face me, and the stripe zinging through the hallways to light our way stopped with him. “I mean the one great lesson imparted to Regan before I could relieve her mother of her worthless life was to use a person’s love against them. She believed there was no room for love in a heroic life, so she broke her daughter of the habit immediately.”

  “How?” I asked, jogging to catch back up as Gregor started off again. By my calculation Regan had only been ten when Brynn died. Most moms hadn’t even initiated the birds-and-the-bees talk by then.

  “She made an example of Regan’s first love, of course. And by then he was already serving life in prison.”

  “Oh,” I said slowly, realization dawning. Her father. That made sense. “What did she do?”

  “Once Brynn realized Regan had feelings for her father, that she wanted to get to know him and have some sort of sustained relationship, she sent pictures of a young Regan to the man who’d been convicted of stalking children, replacing Regan’s introductory letter with a love note she’d penned herself.” Gregor’s mouth twisted in distaste, and he must have tensed because Sheila squirmed in his grip. “When he responded with a letter more suitable for a lover than a daughter, Brynn simply told Regan there was no such thing as pure love. It was a weakness, one that always came with strings attached.”

  “Why would you do that to your own daughter?” I mean, Shadow agent aside, wouldn’t any mother want to protect her daughter from that sort of flattening disappointment?

  “I asked her, you know.” He nodded vigorously at my surprised expression. “I did. Right before I killed her. She said, ‘You agents of Light worship the idea of love, but we Shadows kill anything we feel the slightest affection for.’”