“I don’t see it.”
“Because for you it’s like the sun. You’re blinded when looking directly at it.”
“But for you?”
Warm breath passed again over my skin, then the cool slide of one fingertip tracing my hips. Bumps shot along my thigh, tightened my nipples, raised hairs on my arms. Hunter’s whisper was steady as always. “It’s like the touch of twilight, a fleeting and beautiful thing. Even now, in the dark, it feels like waves rolling over my ankles. It makes me think a peaceful balance between the two really can exist.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t feel beautiful or rare. But I couldn’t deny the peace slipping over me, coaxing me to release my questions and sorrows for now, and steal this sliver of time while I could. If I let my vision blur, it even felt like I was floating in that wrongly marked sky, weightless and buoyant amid the remains of dead stars. The power I’d felt before, the aureole obliterating the skin that separated us, was fading. And now, I thought dizzily, I was just tired. So I curled up and finally closed my eyes, drifting off at some point before sunrise, still blind to whatever it was Hunter saw as he continued to stare down at me.
Chandra had been the one to tell Hunter where I was. She’d awoken in the cave at Cathedral Canyon, untied herself in short order—as I knew she would—then hiked back to town, which wasn’t as bad as it sounds. She wasn’t a star sign, but she could still move four times as fast as any mortal on foot. Once there she’d contacted the one person she knew could save me from myself. I suppose I should’ve been grateful. If she’d contacted Warren instead of Hunter, I’d be in a secret hospital, unconscious, and wearing someone else’s skin by now.
However, I doubt Chandra had predicted this turn of events, I thought, rising to dress at some point the next afternoon. It was Sunday—the day of Kimber’s metamorphosis and the doppelgänger’s deadline—and I knew I wasn’t the only one in Vegas waking with the distressed realization of what they’d done the night before. Despite the aureole we’d shared, and the solace I’d taken in Hunter’s bed and body, the morning after any ill-considered knee-jerk response was bound to appear sordid in the light of day. It seemed sadly appropriate that Hunter’s makeshift sky had been whitewashed into oblivion in the day’s light.
Hunter wasn’t stupid; he had to suspect I wasn’t making love to him as much as I’d been escaping the haunting image of Ben and Regan together. At least, not at first. Worse, he’d been willing to settle for it, which meant it was less a matter of him taking advantage of me than my exploitation of the perpetual state of hope I knew he lived in. I had exposed that hope. He had let me.
Of course, he also knew the moment I rose from his bed. He didn’t try to stop me, though I felt his gaze on my back and heard the bedcovers rustling as he shifted. I didn’t want to turn around and risk seeing anger—or worse, foolishness—stamped across those stoic features, but I owed him enough to at least look at him. So steeling myself to the expected hostility, I masked my own features and whirled.
He was sitting up, propped where the two walls met, the white sheet draped over him from navel down, though one leg was bent, exposed from thigh to ankle, his foot disappearing again under the covers. He watched me without blinking, everything he’d done and said the night before naked in those dark eyes. He didn’t look ashamed or foolish or apologetic, or anything you’d expect of a man who’d caught a woman sneaking from his bed. And with one short word, he opened to me again.
“Stay.”
My knees almost buckled.
“No,” I said quietly. I laced up the boots to my ridiculous costume, fingers trembling slightly. “I have to make sure he’s okay.”
But we both knew I was lying. If there’d even been a chance of Ben being killed or mortally wounded the night before, we would have both worked to save him then. But Regan hadn’t been killing him. That wasn’t what she’d wanted me to see.
“Why?”
I skipped past the stock replies and straightened to give him the real answer. “He makes me feel soft.”
The dark eyes narrowed. “I thought you didn’t like that.”
But I wanted it all the same, I thought, wincing. How fucked up was that? “There’s a strength in being vulnerable.”
“I know,” he said sharply.
I swallowed hard. He did. He was doing just that by showing me into his workshop via his secret passageway. By lying naked—literally and figuratively—in a bed he’d allowed me to share. By opening his body and mind to me so completely I’d momentarily forgotten myself. But…I sighed.
But Ben.
“I know what you’re thinking, Jo,” Hunter said, his voice so reasonable I was sure he’d rehearsed this during the night. “Peace and quiet sounds good. Some harmless little mortal sounds safe. But it won’t satisfy you for long.”
I wanted to tell him he didn’t know what would satisfy me, but after last night I couldn’t even think it. “Don’t push me, Hunter. I’m being pushed from too many sides right now, and I don’t need it from you.”
“No,” he said evenly. “It’s exactly what you need.”
I covered my face with my hands, slumping slightly, just for a moment. “Please. Just stop.”
He paused…but he didn’t stop. “So what do I make you feel, then? Because it’s something.”
Guilt. Chaos. Divided.
I looked him in the eye, needing to prove I too could be strong and vulnerable at the same time, and thinking the truth would settle things between us once and for all. “Whenever I look at you I feel at war with myself. You make me think of need, like there’s something lacking in myself. That, and violence.”
He winced before he could help himself, looking sad, like he’d trusted me with something fragile and I’d responded by smashing it at his feet.
“Look, Hunter—” I was reaching toward him, but he squeezed his eyes shut and jerked his head.
“You’ll make it worse.”
My frozen silence was making it worse anyway. I glanced down at the workshop floor, the organized clutter of tools and chests and tablets and books. Foam templates spilled from his waste bin, crumpled papers drooping over the drawing table and onto the floor. Chandra’s arrival had obviously interrupted his work. And he’d dropped everything to come to me.
“You know it’s not out there, right?” He huffed humorlessly at my returned look of incomprehension. “The lack you’re talking about. It just goes on and on. And one day you’ll be cruising along, doing the work you’ve championed for years, and suddenly it’ll rear its head, and your conviction fails. All this time, you’ll find yourself thinking, I’ve been a fool.” I swallowed hard as his gaze skittered past me, unseeing before he blinked. “But when it happens? It’s actually a relief. You’ll recognize yourself in the mirror again. It’s the epiphany you’ve been seeking laid out right under your nose.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I murmured.
“I’m saying you don’t have to do what you’ve always done,” he said, voice snapping sharp. I swallowed hard, and stepped back. “You can just forget, drop off all the memories that make you you, and give yourself leave to feel more.”
“I don’t want to forget him.”
“You don’t want him to forget you.” He shook his head in disagreement. “You’re holding on to a Ben that doesn’t exist because you’re holding on to a Joanna that no longer exists. You don’t exist.”
I straightened on the spot. “I’m right here!”
“But you’re not present! If you were, you’d stay with me!” And he pounded his bare chest so hard the echo thudded through me. He ran a hand over his hair, pulling at it in frustration. “You want everything to be like it used to, but it’s okay to change, Jo. Growth doesn’t have to be painful. It’s natural for a person to change their mind. Even to admit they were wrong.” A humorless snort escaped him, but I only stared, and he fell back against the wall again, deflated. When he next spoke, his voice was again
soft. “You can even change your heart. You can do it in an instant.”
I didn’t believe him. Certainly not in this instant. Because You don’t exist still hung on the air. “Maybe you can. I can’t.”
“Won’t.”
“Semantics.”
“Truth.”
“Hurts!” I countered, yelling suddenly. He should stop. Now.
“Maybe,” I said, after a hard swallow, “I just prefer him.”
He scoffed, expression shuttering again. “You prefer the idea of him…but the white-picket fantasy will never be yours, Archer. Your fence will always be coated in blood. Don’t drag him into it.”
I smirked. “Your concern for him is touching.”
“I’m concerned for you.”
No. Like everyone else, he was concerned for himself. “I love him.”
The words didn’t even faze him. “If you did you’d never have let her near him.”
That mobilized me. I clamored down the rickety staircase in haste lest I really think about what he was saying. “I just hope you find someone who feels this strongly about you someday. Then you’ll understand.”
Let him sulk and scheme alone, I thought, kicking a foam template out of my path as I headed across the vast open space of the warehouse. Because that person couldn’t be me. My mind had been made up long ago. It wasn’t a matter of just doing something new or dropping treasured memories like they were refuse. It was a matter of following through and sticking it out and making the life you wanted—and needed—for yourself. My life. With Ben. Period.
Hunter was at the railing now. I could tell because his voice shot over the empty warehouse like it was fired from his body. “I doubt it. Your violent need,” he said, throwing my words back at me, “has completely fucked me.”
I stopped in my tracks, the warehouse too silent after the sure-footedness of my heeled boots. I wanted to keep walking but I couldn’t leave him like that, not after what we’d done and shared and knew.
“Don’t,” he called from over the balcony, a warning and a command. “Don’t you look back now.”
“But—” I was already half turned and could see his strong naked silhouette from the corner of my eye.
“You’ve made a commitment with your head and your heart. A backward glance is an apology. And an insult. Better to stick with your bad decisions.”
And I had made my decision, long before he’d ever come into the picture. So despite the waves of pungent bitterness assailing me from behind, I began walking again. I needed to compartmentalize if I was going to effectively go after Regan…and Ben. I’d bottle this night up and let time wash it away, because there was only one way to fill the lack creating that hole inside me, and it couldn’t be accomplished with another man’s body.
So I strode out into the crisp autumn day, turning into the chaotic center of my hometown, the sharp scent of Hunter’s hostility lessening the farther I walked.
I didn’t look back.
27
Regan didn’t bother taking Ben hostage. She didn’t need to. He’d probably risen like the dead from that coffin-shaped bed and followed the crook of her little finger as she led him away from the chapel and sheets the color of blood. I followed their olfactory trail—rot and smug satisfaction mingling with the scent of their lovemaking, a figurative and conspicuous middle finger in my direction—until his vanished through the threshold of his modest home, and hers disappeared altogether.
She’d gotten what she wanted from him, and injuring him was unnecessary. Not to mention too easy. She’d rather do as her mother had before her, and let the man corrode from the inside out, a slow corruption of his mind that would torture him and me both. And watching him deteriorate, growing shifty-eyed as he began smelling like something rotted and rancid, was much more fun than a swift death. So she’d simply left him at home to sleep off their lovemaking, disease incubating inside him.
I left him there too and headed to the Strip to begin my search for Regan. It was the most populous, transient area of town, and if I were she, this is where I’d hide from me. I started at the north end, closest to the chapel where I’d last seen her, and started walking south. Tourists streamed around me like bright, chattering banners, but I never veered from the stiff, almost militarily precise stride that took me down the center of the walkways, my senses thrown outward, searching, but my gaze straight ahead.
Usually the dusky autumn afternoons distracted me. I always felt on the precipice of something profound in October, like I was walking a tightrope in the thin light between the past and the future, suspended over the unknown. This had never been truer than it was today, but unlike Octobers past, my upended hourglass into the future was now a ticking bomb. And when a breeze swept across the sidewalk in front of Planet Hollywood, skittering leaves and dust from City Center, it was accompanied by a rush of static bristling across the power line overhead. The sharp crackle followed me across Harmon, growing louder until the line sparked and sizzled overhead. When the mortals started noticing it, heads and hands pointed upward, I altered course to end up behind a strip mall composed entirely of souvenir shops. The last grain of sand had fallen in my hourglass. I’d cleared the tightrope safely, and now my unsafe future was here.
A click, more solid than static, sounded behind me.
“You’re early,” I said, without turning around.
“I’m hungry.”
I opened my mouth, the Tulpa’s mantra ready to trip from my tongue, but a sliver of sound shot past me and the air between me and the back of the pink stuccoed strip mall splintered like a web. I held my breath lest reality fracture on my exhale.
“Don’t even think about it.”
I did turn now, and found the doppelgänger dressed like me in dark jeans, a long-sleeved black tee, with a messenger bag slung across her body from her right shoulder. Of course, her dark clothing was relative. Layers and layers of the same mutable substance composed her body and clear face, and her outline now darkened into near-opaqueness, though anyone could still see she wasn’t human. Yet her hair no longer bubbled from shaft to end. She’d found my old style and copied it precisely. I was getting so tired of people doing that.
“You’re depressed.” Her voice no longer rippled in long echoes from that see-through throat, and I wondered how she’d managed to copy my tone, my cadence. Of all things to imitate, voice had to be the hardest.
“I’m tired.” And maybe a little depressed. The desire to curl into a fetal position was almost palpable.
“No, it’s more than that.” She tilted her head, eyes catching in the thin light. Those hadn’t changed at least. They still swirled like clouds caught beneath glass. “Could it be because the Shadow Cancer has your mortal lover?”
“Why bother asking the question if you already know the answer?”
She shrugged a slim, muscled shoulder and casually perched a hand on the bag at her side. Like we were just chatting, I thought wryly. As if she wasn’t here to kill me. “I wasn’t sure you knew about their carnal escapades…the way he took her on the park bench. How she opened to him on that rooftop.”
I closed my eyes. Regan was “marking” the city so no matter where I went, seeking her, I’d smell them, and I’d know.
“You two collected famous quotes as children, didn’t you?”
My eyes flipped open like shades. “How’d you know that?”
She ignored the question, continuing her dramatic monologue. “You swapped them back and forth in a secret language all your own, an ode to the love blossoming between you like a rose. And as we know, ‘A Rose by any other name…’”
Smartass. I waited for her to finish the quote, but she suddenly looked distracted, head twisting slowly from side to side like she was trying to work out a kink, or dislodge a thought. The drawn-out silence continued until I finally realized that no, it hadn’t. Buzzing, so faint at first it was like a swarming hive approaching from a distance, grew louder, but then the doppelgänger shook her head
violently, her neck stretching so thin it was no wider than a candy cane. I thought, and was hoping, it’d snap, but then the buzzing dropped off like a switch had been flipped. The doppelgänger’s skull righted itself, a bit bobblehead-esque at first, but normal enough once she’d stilled.
“If she hasn’t gotten it by now, she won’t,” she muttered, like someone was standing beside her. She caught my raised brows, and almost looked embarrassed. “Give me your heart.”
Surely I’d known it was going to come to this? Otherwise why leave Ben with Regan last night? Why leave Hunter, who could have helped, today? Wandering the world in search of Shadows was only possible if there was still a world to wander, and sacrificing myself was the only way to ensure that. So I’d go down in the manuals as a hero, my death would return Jasmine’s chi to her in full, and it would certainly put a definitive ending to the question of the suspected “rise of my Shadow side.”
Still, fighting to the death was one thing, but simply lying down and submitting? I’d sworn that off a decade ago. “I don’t know why you can’t just tell me the answer to your riddle. A sense and a referent. One noun, two aspects. Especially now, when you’re going to kill me anyway.”
It’d be nice to know what—other than the city’s survival—I was dying for.
“That’s right. You don’t know. That’s exactly the problem.” As she took a step closer, the planes of her cheeks rippled, then settled into an unsettlingly familiar upward curve. One last viewing, and she’ll have you. “Look, if I could have told you before now, don’t you think I would have? You’d have figured it out long ago, we’d both have what we need. But like anyone, my actions must speak for themselves.”
“Your actions?” I scoffed, unable to help myself. “Well, let’s see. You’re unforgivably careless with the vibration of matter, and you want to kill me just so you can gain more power. So, all in all, your actions tell me you’re no different than the Tulpa.”
The Touch of Twilight Page 33
