“Trades are always tricky, and fraught with risk. Zell believes himself destined to die at your hands anyway. He almost deserves the fate; a belief that strong can only come to pass. Why would I exchange a perfectly solid star sign for him?”
Exactly the question I wanted him to ask. The mask hid my smile, and I held my breath until I was sure I could neutralize my voice. “Because Regan knows who I am beneath this mask. Beneath all my masks. She’s known my secret identity for months. She just hasn’t shared it with you.”
Truth rode over some people like a stampede. Confusion marred their brows like new thoughts were trying to break out in Braille over their foreheads. Then their expressions, their bodies, would slacken with lost hope. Yet other people, those who held little hope to begin with, didn’t move at all when their ideals were shattered, and not surprisingly, the Tulpa was this latter sort. Minus the “people” part. Because no mortal’s bone would’ve flashed like quicksilver to match his eyes, his hair, the nails that had spontaneously lengthened into honed points beyond the silvered skin.
Black mist, opaque against the stormy desert night, formed in half a dozen tendrils snapping to wrap around Regan’s body. They coiled like sinewy lassoes, jerked her half a foot into the air, and tightened so quickly, the plea forming on her lips was thrust from her body in a terrified gasp.
“Come.” It was said almost sweetly.
Rain began to drench the tiny canyon as Regan floated to him, like rope drawn through a pulley designed of his will.
“You’ve been given an inordinate amount of freedom, Ms. DuPree. From the time you were small it seemed to have been an expectation of yours. I blame your mother for that. How fitting that we should be reminded twice in one night that despite a matriarchal hierarchy, the mother’s lineage isn’t always dominant.”
“Let me explain—”
“It’s a lucky turn of events for the Archer, but…” He raised one pronged hand in the air. “Not so much for you.”
With a mere jerk of his wrist, the coiling mist yanked from Regan’s body, taking her clothes with it. The bonds dissolved immediately, and her clothes fell haphazardly across the dusty ground, like they’d tried to run off on their own. Before shock could set in at her nakedness, before she could even cover herself, the Tulpa also began stripping her of her identity.
Literally.
Raking his fingers through the air, the man who’d been dreamed into being flayed a woman born of this world. Five solid slashes formed down the front of her body like thick paper cuts, from her hairline all the way to the cracks between her toes. She went stock-still, momentarily wide-eyed, until the skin lifted and began to curl back from all edges on her face and body and limbs. Even her screams turned tattered, the cut muscles of her throat causing the sound to overlap in deep and anguished waves, while the Tulpa only watched, his face again lengthening into that unnaturally wide grin. He gave another finger wave, and muscle tore from bone.
“You took a vow—all of you!—to follow me and obey me in exchange for my patronage and power.” Despite the pattering rain and rising wind and twisting bolts firing above our heads, despite Regan’s screams of agony, the Tulpa’s voice remained conversational, slipping around us from every side. The ultimate ventriloquist’s trick. I hated it when he did that. “Have I let you down in some way? Have I not delivered all I promised and more? Have I failed to bring the agents of Light to their knees time and again?”
“No!” The Shadows yelled it as one, living up to their name, nothing more than a series of blurred outlines above us. Their sole distinguishing feature was the smoke billowing from their chests, refusing to be extinguished in the heightening torrent.
“No…” Regan’s pain-filled wail sounded a moment too late, a belated attempt to return to her leader’s good graces despite the flesh hanging from her in ribbons.
“Then please recall that while your service to me is voluntary,” he said to the rest of the troop while he continued gazing at her like she was a beetle under his boot, “once committed, your loyalty is not.”
He beckoned a final time, and Regan screamed until her vocal cords either snapped or split, and even the thunder couldn’t drown out the fracturing of all two hundred and six bones in her body.
I wanted to look away. The mask had merely revealed a truncated version of these events; it hadn’t shown the blood puddling beneath her bare heels or the carved organs peeking through her pink, tattered skin, or the way dust and grime and rain pummeled that brutalized flesh, each drop of rain a world of agony on its own.
“Vanity is something I normally endorse. But yours, Ms. DuPree, has been your downfall.”
Her downfall, but not her death. She wouldn’t expire from these injuries…but she wouldn’t recover from them either.
“Lindy. Dawn. Escort Regan to the other side of the ravine.”
“Halfway is fine,” I said, unable to hide my revulsion. He smiled.
Despite the carnage done to her body, of the humiliation of being reduced to nothing more than a lesson in subservience, and of the downright cruelty of his actions, Regan began to shake as she found herself suddenly flanked. “Sir, if you’ll just let me—”
“One more word and I’ll rip that lying tongue from your mouth with my teeth.”
The only sound she made after that was a soft squeal as her two guards grasped her tattered wrists. Chandra leaped from the canyon’s edge to drop with Zell behind me, and I almost began to breathe normally beneath my wooden guise. It was going to work.
Yet as Regan neared, the mask surprised me by flaring to life. Something was fluid in this situation again. Some decision had been made that could put my plans in jeopardy.
Wishing for my conduit despite its absence in the mask’s vision, I glanced sharply at Regan, but she was beyond any ability to form expression or thought, her glassy eyes fixed on Dawn. The Shadow Gemini had paused, searching the discarded clothing long enough to locate Regan’s conduit. She laughed as she threw the ice pick at the Tulpa’s feet, and Regan jolted, though her gasp was lost in a clap of thunder. I couldn’t help but empathize. I knew how it felt to have your conduit taken from you. It was like losing a limb.
I was watching Regan so closely, I almost missed the stare of the other Shadow, Lindy, as she and Dawn dragged the former Cancer closer. The mask suddenly sang to me in colors, obscuring my peripheral vision and admitting a sound as shrill as a home alarm. This wasn’t good.
I widened my stance, readied for a physical attack, but gasped when Lindy’s hooded eyes met mine. Thank God the mask concealed emotion as well as thought, because Lindy was none other than my longtime malevolent housekeeper, Helen Maguire. I hadn’t recognized her because I’d never seen her dressed in anything but frumpery, and was surprised to find she actually had a figure hiding beneath those loose black dresses. Blood pumping hard in my chest, I wondered how greatly it would screw things up if I reached out and snapped her neck.
My vision clouded again, but this time with a smoky heat that hardened my gaze. I glared at her with my father’s eyes, and suddenly the color in the mask died. Whatever thoughts she’d been having, any recognition or speculation she’d been entertaining, had suddenly been redirected. I still had an edge.
Time to hone it to a point, I thought, the exchange made, Zell safely behind the Tulpa, Regan held at arm’s length by Chandra behind me. “One final thing,” I told the Tulpa.
“Of course,” he said wryly. He was losing patience.
“I want your pledge that none of your agents will touch Kimber for as long as she’s immobilized by the impact of metamorphosis. The rest are fair game”—I shrugged—“as is she the moment the paralysis leaves her, but I’m Light enough to still want an even playing ground.”
“Joanna!” Warren’s voice was curdled with disbelief. His fear stank. “Think about what you’re doing!”
But the Tulpa already had. “I swear it.”
The remaining Shadow agents dropped to the ground, fan
ning around the Tulpa in a half moon but for Zell, who fell back as if afraid his leader might turn around and punish him for his capture. But the Tulpa’s eyes were shining, brightly fixed on the agents of Light, who continued to hold their circle around Kimber. Stubborn. Loyal. Practically helpless.
Just as I’d seen in my vision.
29
I centered myself with a breath so deep I felt like an athlete preparing for an impossible physical feat. Then I squared on the Tulpa, strode two feet forward, and looked directly into those swirling silver eyes. “And I, Joanna Archer, pledge to use the primordial force of universal life to bind together the roots of your origin, faster than light, the whole to the half, reclaiming the essence of your original mind and subjecting it to my own.”
It was the spell he’d given me, twisted back upon himself, and I recited it precisely three times, just as he’d ordered, right down to the inflection he’d used in relaying it to me. He was a tulpa, not a doppelgänger, and therefore too strong for the spell to hold for long, but it would secure him long enough for the troop to realize their advantage, at least if the glowering Shadow agents didn’t catch on first. Their leader had fallen unnaturally still.
“Not too long ago you spoke to me about a legend,” I said loudly, stalling for time, and motioning meaningfully in Chandra’s direction. Regan stilled beside her, the only one to note it, but Chandra felt her stiffen, and responded swiftly by whirling and burying Zell’s ax in her tattered thigh. That took care of that. Regan crumpled to the ground, sobbing again, but nobody on either side of the Zodiac protested. The rain drew down more relentlessly now and I had to yell to be heard. “A person born equally of the sun and moon who could freely choose her fate, her allies. The first sign that this person and her allies would come to power was her discovery—the Kairos actually exists. The second was a plague in her city of birth, which she would overcome with the help of her troop.” I inclined my head. “Anyone care to tell me about the third sign?”
Chandra, steadier and with Regan at her feet, spoke up. “The third was the reawakening of her dormant side. For the bearer of the Archer sign there would be a death, a rebirth, and a transformation into that which she once would have killed.”
“Her Light eclipsed, her solitary descent into darkness, an ability to see the unseen.” Dawn’s words were loud as the rain suddenly shuttered off. She looked at the sky as she untied Zell’s hands. He continued staring at me, unblinking, as if in a trance. “Tell us something we don’t know, please.”
“All right,” I said slowly, watching her bend to unbind Zell’s feet. Lindy was snapping her fingers in front of his face, frowning as he stared through her. I smiled, not because of his lethargic response, but because they were both so preoccupied with him that they’d taken their eyes, their energy, off their leader. The Tulpa, however, was watching me closely. He was furious, eyes charred marble, hatred rolling from him in bilious waves to join the low ceiling of clouds, but otherwise totally incapacitated under his own spell. “That sign has nothing to do with me.”
Dawn’s head shot up as Zell flexed his fingers and shook away the numbness that had them tingling back to life.
“Dormant doesn’t merely mean lying at rest. It can also mean lying in wait.” A small shiver rolled up my spine as elemental madness funneled into a fat, swirling vortex above us. The crackle of lightning and growl of thunder streamed into it, and I had to yell again. “The third sign of the Zodiac heralds the return of my mother to the paranormal battlefield. The death you speak of is the decade-old loss of her otherworldly powers. Her rebirth came when she fully embraced her mortality and all its gifts. But time is fickle and fluid, and her full transformation has taken until now to complete.”
“She’s a mortal. She no longer has any influence in our world.” Lindy turned to the Tulpa for confirmation, but he could only glower in return. She took it as chastisement, swallowed hard, and turned away.
I smiled.
“It’s true that at their worst mortals are simply pawns, fuel to be thrown away when their useful resources are depleted. But at their best?” Pride and anger powered my words, and I paced like a caged lion between the two opposing factions. “They’re agents of free will, and the mortals who know what that really means are also purveyors of energy through the power of thought.”
Spoken words, written language, action—and my mother, Zoe Archer, was most certainly a woman of action—could all be channeled into visualizing matter into life. She would be conscious, as most mortals were not, of moving through this mortal plane both physically and mentally, constantly creating and recreating her world, building on what was already constructed or tearing it down. Either way, the constant flux of reality was an opportunity, and like my mother, I saw it all as I never had before. We could all mentally manipulate different aspects of vibrational acuity. Because wasn’t vibration nothing more than matter?
And wasn’t matter all that mattered?
“A tulpa is made from thought,” Chandra provided, and I could hear the smile in her voice.
I smiled too, and this time the animist’s mask responded to my will by tilting evilly, cheekbones flaring with the grin. “And so is a doppelgänger.”
Lindy’s expression blanked. The others shifted on their feet, still waiting for the Tulpa’s orders. My troop had gone still as well, sensing a shift as imminent as the sky’s eruption. I looked up to see a visible mass of power swirling in the funnel, looking as if it was ready to fall in around our ears. The animist’s mask didn’t contradict the thought.
“A newly born tulpa gains power in one of two ways. The first is by consuming the heart of someone with a concentrated amount of will and mental strength.”
A gasp from someone in my troop’s circle. The Shadows shifted, almost as one, again, but the Tulpa still didn’t move. I hurried on before he did. Not long now. “Eat enough hearts and their strength becomes boundless. The only upkeep required? A regular diet of soul sacrifice.
“Yet there’s a second, less bloody, but more powerful way to do this. A means by which you can instantaneously create a strong, fast, smart, and fully realized tulpa. And that is done simply by bestowing a name.”
Not a formal name, but a proper one. Informal. Common. Given.
The Tulpa’s fetters began to loosen. Color flashed across the pane of the animist’s mask, and a rumble escaped the funnel, a fractured warning from the sky. I paused, the mask fell blank, and I remembered to pace myself. The exact moment of Kimber’s metamorphosis. Not a moment sooner or later. Not yet.
“My mother has spent the past decade channeling the fuel of her mortality into the creation of a doppelgänger, the evolutionary predecessor of a tulpa. She could have been the one to provide it with a name, but she’s patient and she’s good. Well…good-ish.”
Tekla was up to speed now, and she joined me to face the Shadow warriors. “And a name would be so much more powerful if provided—”
“By a living Zodiac member,” Warren finished, and he too stepped forward, next to me. The agents of Light flanked me, save Kimber, who was oath-sworn as off limits. “One with the same blood of its creator, no less.”
“One little noun,” I said to the Tulpa, watching as the body he’d donned began to shake. Silver zigzagged so furiously beneath his eyes that it leaked from his tear ducts and into the watery-thin layer between muscle and flesh, causing him to shine, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if his physical mold exploded into a million splintering pieces. “Two aspects, a sense and a referent. Something you were never given.”
The Tulpa’s face twisted as a lightning bolt escaped the sky’s low funnel, and a howl tore from his throat, probably ripping it from the inside. The Shadow agents jumped as if waking from a trance, and fire erupted in the sky, lightning searching out Kimber like she was a living rod. Agents, both Shadow and Light, shifted on their feet—my allies automatically pulling in tight as the Shadows bent their knees, weight shifting to the balls of their feet—but
still waiting for their leader’s command. And when my pulse was so strong I tasted the bloody beat in my throat, I opened my mouth.
The first arrow of heat lightning struck Kimber, searing her image on the canyon floor—back bowed, limbs twisted awkwardly, mouth open and splayed to the sky. I screamed, but my voice was lost in the hail of lightning ripping at Kimber’s prone form.
Nobody heard.
My mask burst into a kaleidoscope of color. I felt, rather than saw, the Tulpa draw on the reserves of power he’d stored to chase the doppelgänger—power afforded him by the loyalty of his agents, the soul energy of his mortal worshippers, and the lives he’d stolen to fortify his own—and suddenly, on the back of the mask’s face, screaming into my own, was an image of him finally, painfully, willfully opening his mouth. “Kill them!”
Lindy was the first to move, barking out a command as she unsheathed an edged weapon and lunged at Vanessa. Our Leo’s bladed fan whipped open and they were off in a shower of sparks and smoke, cold darkness gobbling them whole. Felix and Riddick and Gregor all lunged, clashing with the other Shadows in the center of the canyon. Warren, more circumspect due to the lack of a conduit, took a more circuitous route, weaving between bodies before pouncing from overhead. Chandra ferried blows from behind with Zell’s ax, while he continued to cower behind the Tulpa.
I too hung back until my allies could clear the path to the Tulpa, and they did gradually break up and scatter—sparks flying every time one conduit met another, glyphs fired, battling mano a mano, like we were in the Dark Ages all over again. The charged sky continue to pummel at Kimber, but no one took note, limbs and cries and weapons whipping in martial fray.
“Joanna!”
I’d been so focused on securing a defensive position that I didn’t hear Chandra until she used my real name. “Jo!”
I whirled to find her alone in a rain-drenched crevasse. “She’s gone!”
The Touch of Twilight Page 36
