The Touch of Twilight

by Vicki Pettersson

  Regan.

  I glanced back at the Tulpa, whom I could see staring at me, silvered eyes unblinking in the whipping gale, and as yet, unmoving.

  I can have them both, I thought, and the mask stayed still. I can have it all.

  I charged—three running steps—and leaped to the ridge of the battered little canyon, following the trail of blood until the storm wiped it away. Then I used my nose to scent out Regan’s desolate agony, and chased her farther into the darkness. My glyph lit up a mile into the chase, lighting my way only enough to see one foot in front of the other, though if Regan looked back, I knew the wobbling light would alert her to my approach. And I was gaining on her. I could taste the coppery rawness of her blood in my throat. After another half mile, the scent was so strong I knew she was only feet away.

  But in those few feet between us dropped a fully animated, and thoroughly pissed, Tulpa.

  I skidded to a halt, backing up in almost the same motion. “Um. Hi.” I kept backing up, ankle twisting sharply as I tripped over a boulder, though I righted myself in time to see a figure limping away into the inky night. “Can you just give me a minute here?”

  I don’t know what reserve of strength he’d drawn on, but his response was to bellow so loudly he counteracted the gale all around us. My hair blew back from my face, and I tripped backward again. Okay, so he was more than pissed. I’d ruined everything for him, revealed what must have been long-held plans to both the Shadows and the Light, and pulled Zoe from his reach once more. I wondered if there was a chance he’d let me live in spite of it. The way his hands fisted kind of made me doubt it.

  Then a circle of calmness surrounded us, stillness falling like an A-bomb, unnatural after the gale whipping around us. The enclosure—for I had no doubt that’s what it was—was large enough to allow movement, though still not wide enough for my liking. My glyph lit the whole thing like it was a mini-amphitheater.

  “Call the doppelgänger to you.”

  Oh, I thought with some surprise. A reprieve.

  “Why?” I asked, licking my lips, the image of Regan being shredded like paper reliving itself in my mind. “So you can use her to locate Zoe? I don’t think so.”

  Regan had gotten off easy compared to what he had in mind for my mother.

  I swallowed hard and backed up, though I didn’t run into a wall of resistance. The invisible enclosure of calm simply moved with me. Fuck. “Besides, calling her would mean I’m working with you, and I’ve already told you the third sign of the Zodiac is not the rise of my Shadow side. If you haven’t noticed, there was nothing wrong with it to begin with.”

  “Brave words, Joanna. And brave actions too. But I can taste your fear. So let’s skip the formalities and just give you what you expect. A beating…Tulpa style.”

  He raised his claws like he had with Regan, and I winced as I turned away, putting my hands out in front of me even though it wouldn’t help. I thought he was stalling—playing up the anticipation—but when the moment lengthened into seconds, I couldn’t help but crack open an eye. Frustration twisted his face as he gazed down at his upturned palms.

  “She doesn’t belong to you, tulpa,” came a voice from the darkness, and then Chandra sidled up next to me, Zell’s conduit clenched in her fist. She said his title like I’d instructed, as if he was a thing and not a person, and with more than a little disdain. The Tulpa still wasn’t moving well, most of his energy yet bound by the spell he’d given me, and the rest expended on the boundary of stillness around us. The one Chandra had just waltzed through.

  I stared at her in wonder…as did the Tulpa.

  It didn’t take him long to figure out what was happening, and when he drew himself upright, settling in, I realized he was going to try and keep me talking long enough for the rest of the spell to wear off and his full powers to return. It was an obvious ploy, but as Zell slid up beside him to face off against Chandra, I let them both have their way.

  “How long have you known?” The Tulpa asked with forced calm. It fooled nobody. It was the same calmness that encased me against my will.

  “That my mother is the doppelgänger’s creator? Or that a doppelgänger is a precursor to a full-blown tulpa?” My narrowed eyes were sharp as they ran back and forth between him and Zell. “All that matters is I know it now. But you’ve known it all along, haven’t you? You said the double-walker smelled like me, but what you really meant was similar. You also said she was a twin…but I didn’t understand until later that you didn’t mean my twin. You meant yours.”

  “She tried to eat your heart,” he reminded me, like my defensive position was her fault.

  “You tried to microwave me and throw me into a black hole.” My voice deepened at the memory. Zell inched closer to his leader.

  He shrugged one slim, scholarly shoulder. “Think of it as a little belated parental discipline.”

  “Then this would be my adolescent rebellion,” I said bitterly. “Now, Chandra!”

  Chandra whipped back the ax and sent it whistling through the air, head over tail, in a move so quick, you’d have to be superhuman to even spot it. Zell lunged in front of his leader to take the blow beneath his breastbone, and staggered backward, mouth falling open in a cry that was lost in another crack of thunder. I shifted my attention back to the Tulpa, but even though Zell had just surrendered his life for him, even though being impaled with his own conduit would erase his existence from the entire annals of our mythos, the Tulpa ignored the sacrifice.

  Thus he saw Chandra hand signal me, and watched us both lift our arms while imagining the same thing into existence. The lesson she’d given me as we left the city was still fresh, but she was the experienced one and did most of the work. I was just here to reinforce her imagination, to believe in the strength and height and solidity of the giant cacti spearing from the ground like Jack’s beanstalk. Tit for tat, I thought, as the Tulpa and Zell were enclosed in a sharp jutting circle of imagined life. Zell fell behind his leader, still clutching his chest. Meanwhile, the Tulpa’s face finally betrayed alarm, then a confusion that lasted only moments before shifting to amusement.

  “A mind can create life. You know that better than anyone, don’t you?” I said as the sky above paused to take a breath between rounds. The Tulpa looked a little less amused as thistles from the wall of fleshy giants corralled him into the center of the circle, a bleeding Zell edged in tightly behind him. “And, in some cases, two minds are better than one.”

  The only reason he hesitated to blow the thorny barrier apart was because it would deplete the precious energy he’d been rebuilding to turn on me. His pinched expression betrayed his impatience, though, and I knew that when he finally did get free, there’d be no more chatting.

  “Now where were we?” I hurried on, drawing as close as I could to the ring of cacti and still remain in his line of focus. I needn’t have worried; my words were compelling all on their own. “Ah, yes. A name. Proper, informal, common, given; one noun, two aspects, a sense and a referent…a name like…Skamar.”

  Rain gusted around our tight rings, the sky fired above, and smoke ballooned from the Tulpa’s feet like he was a shuttle about to rocket into space. It had been a jolt, probably because it was what he dreaded most, but nothing else happened, and he lifted his chin, straightening again.

  “I looked it up,” I told him, before he could interrupt. “I took it from the Tibetan language. It means Star. You told me when you gave me the mantra that a name wasn’t needed, but you lied. A name is everything, isn’t it? A name is all.”

  In spite of my important and devastating discovery, he actually relaxed. “Fool. She has to be here to receive it.”

  While the sky erupted behind me again, where Kimber was still pinned to the canyon floor, I inched forward until all that separated me from the Tulpa was a single jutting thorn. In the pause between fire and thunderous crack, I tilted my head. “Fool. She’s right behind you.”

  And Zell rose up behind the Tulpa, yanking
his ax downward so that flesh fell open in a perforated line all the way from his pubis to his throat. Fresh blood poured over his chest, and a hand that was only partially materialized—the lower half still shining like the light off an iridescent bubble—reached out to strangle the Tulpa. The doppelgänger—now a tulpa via the power of a given name—shed Zell like a snakeskin…then leaned over the Shadow leader to take a ravenous bite.

  She had the advantage of position, surprise, and the power of a recently consumed organ to give her strength…even if the heart had belonged to a Shadow. Yet experience, a violent will to live, and, yes, finally fear, powered the Tulpa into action. The bubble of stillness around us popped as they fought for the offense, blood flowing from the fleshly bodies they’d been so sure they wanted.

  The succulent wall didn’t hold for long; the cacti ripped away in fleshy chunks, barbed darts impaling themselves on wheeling limbs and soft cores. Chandra and I backed up as the two tulpas whipped past us and back toward the canyon now flooded with water and blood…and unfortunately, Kimber.

  We glanced at each other, then bolted after them.

  The Tulpas fought like snarling dogs, whipping over their own malleable bodies to re-form in superior position. Evenly matched, they fell into the gorge and churned across the canyon floor like a snarling dust devil, so out of control that our fear was realized just as we skidded to a stop at the canyon’s lip. They careened into Kimber so hard she was knocked from place, and the bolts of lightning were riveted to them instead. Screaming in liquid voices of agony, they loosed themselves, then continued their homicidal tumble through the arroyo, around stained glass bends, leaving only shards in their wake. The lightning found Kimber again, and Chandra and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  The Shadow and Light had scattered, no one left in the crevasse of earth where the fight had originated. I pulled off the now-useless animist’s mask, gasping as cold stormy air whipped over my sweaty face. Chandra licked her lips, her own face pearly with rain, hair plastered to the sides of her head as she squinted against the whistling wind. I realized, too late, she was watching the metamorphosis she so longed for, and she turned in response to my stare.

  “You should go.” She had to yell it, and I nodded to let her know I’d heard.

  I should. Skamar would take care of the Tulpa. The other agents were battling elsewhere, but if any Shadows returned I’d have no way of defending myself. Yet…

  “Kimber—”

  “I’ve got her.”

  And I knew she did. With nothing but a stolen conduit, dreams of a future in this troop, and a whole heap of imagination, Chandra had helped to save us all. So I nodded, then ran, leaving her as the protector of the canyon, and letting her go down in her rightful place in the manuals. The last woman standing.

  30

  One would think with the birth of the new tulpa, and the rebirth of my mother’s influence in the paranormal plane, that everything would have changed. Yet in the days after Skamar’s nascence, life remained remarkably normal. It was a relative term, to be sure, but my daily routine, my duty to society, and the way I interacted with the world remained exactly as before.

  With one giant exception.

  The Las Vegas valley was going through something of a crisis weather-wise. The Tulpa and Skamar continued to battle, one or the other disengaging only long enough to catch their breath, before launching themselves at each other anew. Their progress through the valley was marked by distant roars, whipping dust, and a city-wide blackout when they careened into the power grid. The meteorologists were agape—and even more mistaken than usual—and over the next few months scientists would travel from all over the globe to study a weather situation sporting elemental chaos more commonly associated with tropical depressions.

  And still they fought.

  It occurred to me even as I fled on that stormy desert night, that if the Tulpa had been pissed at me before, there’d be no mercy now. He’d never really wanted to join forces with me, anyway. All he’d yearned for was a way to annihilate the agents of Light…and find Zoe Archer. Daughter or not, I’d shown three times now exactly whose lineage I intended to follow. It was also painfully clear that I could have given the doppelgänger a name immediately upon figuring out who and what she was behind that souvenir shop off the Strip, but I’d waited until she was in a position to engage and kill him, and by introducing a third party into our troops’ sick little dance, I’d also caused the destruction of the Tulpa’s long-held dreams of retribution and revenge.

  A little “parental discipline” couldn’t be far off.

  For now, though, a reprieve. His hands were full with Skamar…another living tulpa. And while he possessed experience and a reserve of power, she was hungry…and she was named. And really, I reasoned, it was his own fault. He’d taken the wrong approach when trying to make nice with me. I was always suspicious of overtly friendly gestures, the fallout of a life lived looking over my shoulder, so after he so blithely handed me a spell he claimed would kill the doppelgänger, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why? And how had he even come to know about it?

  The answer was obvious now. He knew what she was because he was the only being in our city to have ever walked the same path into existence. Blowing holes in our reality was the only way she could escape him, though now that she was fully realized, that was no longer an option. Giving her a name had elevated her on a vibrational level that was incompatible with other realities. Besides, one needed a soul to access the regular portals, and neither of them had that.

  As for Skamar and her cold-blooded attempt on my life, she’d been truthful in claiming impulse had caused the behavior. A new, undisciplined tulpa was like a toddler exercising her free will. Zoe had given her everything a mortal mind could manage, but Skamar wasn’t just hungry for life, she was ravenous. And trapped in a no-man’s-land between her creator’s control and own free will, with the world cracking and the Tulpa getting closer, time was also short. Becoming me, taking over my life, eating my heart, would’ve solved all that, despite my mother’s attempts to restrain her.

  In a way, I didn’t blame Skamar. Zoe had initially sent her after me so that someone in the Zodiac, and of the same blood, could provide her with a name. A name giving that would be as powerful as if the creator was still a troop member. But the naming had to be given, not coerced or forced. And while she couldn’t come right out and say what she needed from me—not without negating the energy in the spoken word, and diminishing the power Zoe had spent a decade amassing for her creation—she could provide hints, like offering the parts of a noun that make up a name…like saying we were cut from the same cloth.

  Birthed from the same woman, one physically, the other solely from thought.

  It was how she’d known things about me, including my real name and that Ben and I used to talk in traded quotes. She’d also kept referring to a cryptic “she” who was feeding her info. That “she” told her I was smart, good. Well, good-ish. I’d thought for a brief while, especially after my conversation with Zane, that she was referring to the First Mother. The one who existed in a place of exile and myth. Yet perhaps the others were right, and Midheaven really didn’t exist but in the minds of a few who needed it to, like a very desperate record keeper.

  Well, I knew about desperation, didn’t I?

  Because it was desperation that had me driving to a nondescript home in a guard-gated community on an iron-leafed autumn afternoon, a day after retrieving an address I’d secreted away in the sanctuary. There I put up a wall to shield us from mortal eyes…and introduced Ben to the daughter he never knew he had.

  We watched her play in her front yard, an ungainly colt of a child with shining curls that caught light like her father’s, with a ferocious knack for concentration, and a grudge she was taking out on a battered soccer ball. She wasn’t one of those children whom eyes followed, already marked with beauty or physical attributes that would lead her into adulthood. She was one of the plain ones whose definin
g features would mushroom at puberty, surprising everyone, particularly themselves.

  But we were watching her, each trying to locate the best, possibly lost, bits of ourselves in her, and we were silent for so long, the sun finally dipped behind the rose-tiled rooftops, and the girl fled the accompanying chill by escaping indoors to a warm cup of cocoa, and a mother who slung an easy arm over her shoulder. Ben and I were left staring at the ball as if it was a magical relic just for belonging to her. I’d had more time to grow used to the idea of a daughter, so I was the one who found my voice first.

  “She has your hair.” It was the same exact color, with the same gorgeous unruly waves, but given leave to grow, those curls softened with length and snapped when they bounced. I had seen them so clearly, even through unexpected tears, that I could bring the exact way they fell over her shoulders back to me now.

  “And Joanna’s eyes,” he said, taking my hand in a brotherly touch, gazing down at “Olivia” with a fierce and blindingly pure happiness. I held tight to his hand, my chilled palm warming beneath his grip, but I didn’t return his smile. She did have my eyes. They’d blackened to obsidian depths when her goal attempts flew wide.

  Yet even seeing that, I still had a hard time thinking of her as mine. There was a disconnect there, probably because of years of refusal to acknowledge her existence. Yet I didn’t allow myself to feel guilt over that. I’d believed she was the offspring of a killer, and the only true memory of her I could dredge up was a nurse’s half-horrified whisper at her grossly premature birth. A survivor, like her mother.

  I hoped so. Because even with the time-induced disconnect, it was clear I could no longer pretend this child didn’t exist. She’d been born on my birthday in late November, an Archer, like me. She was as much a child of the Zodiac as I had been, and I couldn’t let her remain ignorant of that fact for much longer. Another year, maybe two, and her pheromones—and lineage—would begin asserting themselves. Puberty would mark the onset of her second life cycle, and then everyone would know of her existence.