The Scent of Shadows

10

The dreams a person has while unconscious are not the same as when they’re asleep. They’re more like something from a Bradbury novel, a carnival ride with ominous portents and sinister beings waiting to take siege of your soul. My dreams were like that now, shadowy, one slithering into another, carrying snatches of oblique conversations I’d never had and images of faces I’d never seen.

“More to the left,” I heard someone say urgently. “That’s not how it is in the picture, see? It has to be perfect.”

A masked face loomed over me, eyes concerned and considering, before it drew back and fluorescent lights blinded me again. “She will be perfect.”

No less unnerving were the tattered flashes of things I had seen, but combined in new scenes and settings, like a horror film saddled with an alternate ending.

There was Olivia, eyes shooting open to pierce me from her deathbed on the ground nine stories below me. Her skin was bleached white, and all of her blood had pooled in a heart-shaped lake around her broken body. Her gaze wide and imploring, she posed the one question I couldn’t answer.

“Why am I dead?” I struggled to reach out to her, but was whisked away, her parting words ringing in my ears. “Why me and not you?”

Xavier caught me from above. His grip was steel around my biceps, and as much as I thrashed I couldn’t escape him. He dragged me to him, opening his mouth wide to swallow me whole. “Zoe left you too.”

Then I was running, fighting for air as I fled through a dark desert night. I felt the sharp sting of tumbleweeds against my shins, my ankles turning over on themselves as I ran blindly into boulders and stones, barely keeping out of reach of an unseen fleet-footed pursuer. He—and it was a he—didn’t speak at all. Instead his voice invaded my brain by other means, slithering inside, not so much a snake’s hiss as the rattle of its tail. “I should have killed you the first time…”

I woke with a start, breathing hard. The room was dim, though not completely dark, and daylight peered at me through long slats in the window shades. I spied a lumpy outline in the corner of the room, and felt my mouth twitch. Warren, I thought woodenly. I was going to kick his ass.

“You know, you’re not funny,” I said, causing him to jump. He straightened in his chair, rubbing a long hand over his eyes, and stretched loudly. “You think you’re funny, but you’re not.”

He held up a hand as he rose. “Don’t hate.”

“Too late.” Yawning widely, I lifted a hand to rub over my eyes, but discovered it was too heavy, too far from my face, and too much trouble to complete the movement. Which was odd. Yet having had the distinct displeasure of a lengthy hospital visit once before, I recognized the lethargy as being chemically induced, some sort of painkiller probably. The question was, why had they drugged me? “What am I doing here?”

“Recovering,” Warren answered, standing at my side. “And hiding.”

“Are they after me?” My heart fluttered beneath my breastbone. “Can you smell me again?”

“Shh, don’t worry. You’re in isolation. Nobody outside this room can sense your pheromones. It’s like…you don’t even exist.”

I took a tentative whiff. All I smelled was hospital; drugs, antiseptic, and the type of cleanliness that erases not only bad odors, but good alike. It was a clean I’d hoped to never experience again. I looked at Warren. “There’s nothing. I can’t smell me at all.”

“I can.” He smiled, perching himself bedside. He’d taken off the long duster that made him look like some demented cowboy, wore a simple khaki T-shirt and fatigues, and his hair was pulled back, the matting tightly bound to his head. Each time I saw him, he looked a bit more reputable. Scary.

Closing his eyes, he inhaled deeply, like he was bending over a rose instead of a body. “You, but more so. The unscented thread now blends in with the rest of your genetic makeup. It’s beautiful, really. Lit up like some life-saving beacon…if you’ll excuse the visual analogy.”

I closed my eyes and breathed, casting my thoughts downward, inward. Nothing. After several seconds I looked at him again. “So it’s like an identifying trait? Like, I don’t know, permanent perfume?”

“More like the vein that runs through a particularly strong wedge of blue cheese.”

“Thanks a lot.” Just when I started liking the guy. “So, when do I get to go home?”

He rose from the bed. I narrowed my eyes. It looked like he was putting distance between himself and me. “There’s no easy way to tell you this, Joanna, so I’m just going to say it.” My heart did that little flutter again as he took a deep breath. “You’re dead. You’ve been dead for just over a week.”

“Dead-dead?” I asked hollowly. “Really dead?”

“Well, obviously you’re here, but as far as the mortal world is concerned, yes,” Warren said. “Your funeral is tomorrow. I’ve saved you the newspaper clippings from the last week.”

He motioned to the papers stacked on the bedside tray, and I glanced over to see my face staring up from the top copy, with the headline heiress joanna archer plummets to death. The byline, dated four days ago, posed the question of whether it’d been foul play or if I’d leapt from the midtown apartment. I dropped my head back, unwilling to read any more.

I was dead, I thought numbly. I no longer existed. And I felt strangely well for the experience.

“If I’m dead,” I finally said, “then who am I?”

I motioned down the length of my body, wincing when my hand brushed against my chest. Gasping with as much surprise as pain, I looked down, gasped again, and clutched both breasts in my hands—what I could fit into them, anyway. They were extraordinarily sore, with a tenderness that had less to do with the natural flux of the moon than a surgeon’s steel and, apparently, some huge creative license. The drugs had kept me from feeling the ache before, but I sure felt it now.

“What have you done?” I cried, holding them tenderly. I don’t think I’d ever heard my own voice so breathy and panicked. Then, brain cells and synapses firing rapidly, another thought occurred. I hadn’t actually ever heard my voice this high-pitched before either. I tried it again. “La, la, la, la…mother fucker!”

Horrified, I glared at Warren. “You’ve changed my voice!”

“And your breasts,” he said, pointing out the obvious with what I considered a great deal of misplaced pride. I glared, and he took another step backward. Just then Micah entered the room, halting inside the doorway. I lowered my chin and narrowed my eyes.

“You knocked me out,” I said accusingly, before turning on Warren again. “And you let him!”

“Well, we couldn’t have a dead woman walking about town, could we?” Warren said, like that was a reasonable argument.

“You told me you would take care of it! You said you’d clean up and make sure I wasn’t in trouble.”

“And we did,” Warren argued, crossing his arms. “You can’t be charged with a crime, because the only one dead is you.”

“But I don’t want to be dead!” I screeched in some other person’s voice. What was I supposed to do now? Only come out at night? Suck blood or haunt the living?

Warren looked insulted. “Sorry, but it was the only thing I could come up with on the spur of the moment. We had to do something to keep you out of jail, not to mention alive, so we brought you here.”

I looked around. Where was here? It looked like a normal hospital room; uncomfortable bed, machines that made beeping noises. Really bad wallpaper.

“You’re in a private facility just outside of town,” Micah said, confirming my thoughts. “I work here.”

“You’re a doctor?” I asked, eyeing his sausage-fingers and substantial girth. He looked more like a pit bull in a lab coat.

“Micah takes all the cases that might send up red flags among the mortal physicians,” Warren said. “He’s an absolute genius with the scalpel.”

Why did I have the feeling the line between genius and mad scientist was frighteningly thin here?

I shut my eyes and dropped my head back onto the pillow. Maybe this was one of those dreams I’d been having. Any moment now I was going to wake up and be myself, and Warren would still be a bum, and Micah some bartender pulling the caps off bottles of Bud. Because I really could use a beer about now.

“That’s right,” Micah said, causing the dream to implode upon itself. I felt him palm my chin, turning it side to side. “I performed all the work on you myself, and did a bang-up job if I do say so myself.”

“Why are you touching my face?” My eyes flew open. “Why is he touching my face?”

Warren looked chagrined. Micah looked surprised. He too glanced at Warren. “You mean you haven’t told her yet?”

“Told me what?”

Warren chuckled lightly, a sound tinged with nerves, and had me jerking my head sharply in his direction. “Actually, I was just getting around to it.”

“Aw, shit,” I said in my foreign voice to no one in particular. “Do I dare look in a mirror?”

“It’s really not that bad,” Warren said, then backpedaled as Micah shot him a piercing stare. “I mean, you’re gorgeous. Nobody would ever think it was you.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said dryly. Then, tentatively, I lifted a hand to my face to feel for myself. Everything seemed normal until I got to my nose, or whoever’s nose this was. Mine had been broken in a sparring class, and the slight off-centeredness lent a sort of aquiline quality to my features, or so I chose to believe. In truth, I was deathly afraid of even the thought of surgery…a slight irony given the circumstances.

I let my hands trace downward. My lips were full, but still my own; my chin, however, dipped to a more heart-shaped point than I remembered. I felt for a strand of hair and lifted it, peering sideways. “I’m blond.”

“The package said ‘Platinum Perfection.’”

I let my head fall back again. The boobs, the voice, the face, the hair…I didn’t need a mirror to put it all together. Unbidden tears suddenly filled my eyes. I never cried, so my guess was that it too was part of this grand prize package. God, they’d fucked with my body and my hormones. “You’ve turned me into a…a…a bimbo!”

“Shh,” Micah said, patting my shoulder, trying to comfort me. “It’s the perfect cover.”

The perfect cover for a woman who wants her breasts to enter a room before the rest of her, I thought hysterically. One who relies on her looks to do the talking. One who doesn’t even take herself seriously!

“We all have our disguises,” Warren added helpfully.

“What?” I snapped angrily. “And ‘Yoda on crack’ was the best you could come up with?”

“I see you did nothing about her temperament,” Warren muttered.

“Some things even I can’t fix.”

I glared at them both, then spaced my words so that even with the come-hither soft-porn voice they’d know I meant business. “Get. Me. A Mirror.”

“Okay, but I’m warning you, it might be something of a shock.”

“More shocking than being whacked on the head with a steel baton?” I said sharply. “Or more shocking than waking up officially dead?”

More shocking than watching your own sister die? I didn’t say that. Instead, as Warren adjusted the slant of my bed, I held out a hand for the mirror. He gave it to me once I was propped up, and a fresh spasm of alarm sprung up in my chest as I felt their gazes, almost hungry, on my face. Taking a deep breath, I lifted the mirror and looked.

I felt my jaw moving, saw the reflected jaw working in the mirror, but no sound came out. I turned the mirror over, checked for a false back, pounded it against the bed twice, and peered into the glass again. Then I lifted my gaze to Micah’s anxious one. “It—It’s…Olivia.”

His face relaxed into a relieved smile.

“You’re Olivia,” Warren corrected, his own smile broad and hopeful.

I returned my gaze to the mirror. I certainly was.

And this time I passed out all on my own.

When I next woke, I was alone. The room was dark, and I thought briefly about calling for a nurse before deciding against it. Instead I reached for the stack of newspapers, but yelped when I lifted the first one. My fingertips were both sensitive and numb at the same time. I felt the structure and weight of the paper, even the fibers that comprised the page, but that was a deep knowledge, one born of previous experience. On the surface it felt like I was holding it between crystal gloves. I overturned my palm and stared.

My fingerprints were gone.

I tapped the pad of my thumb against my forefinger, expecting to hear a clicking like fingernails against glass, but there was only silence. The clink was felt, not heard, as if my bones were banging brittle and cold against one another. It was an odd feeling, slightly nauseating, though perhaps that would lessen with time. For now, I resolutely reached for the newspapers, prepared to feel trees screaming beneath my touch, and began to read.

The articles were stacked by date, most recent on the bottom, and the contents of each became increasingly surreal. They went into excruciating detail, not always flattering or correct, about me, my life, and my tragic demise.

The gist of the story was this: Joanna Archer had died after a botched break-in at her sister’s ninth-story apartment. I’d fought and struggled valiantly, but ultimately fell to my death along with my assailant, one Butch Lewis of Houston, Texas. However, I’d saved my sister’s life in the process.

How ironic was that? Hailed a hero in death when the reality was I’d been able to save no one. Including, it now seemed, myself. I sighed and read on.

Olivia Archer, reportedly in critical condition, had been relocated to a private facility where even her closest friends and family members, including the megawealthy Xavier Archer, were denied access to see or visit her. An anonymous source—and I had a pretty good idea who that might be—disclosed only that Olivia was stable but presently lying in a life-threatening coma.

I skimmed through the papers again, and thought, there it is. An entire life reduced to black and white. Summed up in a week, old news by the week’s end.

I picked up the mirror next to me and gazed again at a face I knew intimately well, and didn’t know at all.

“How?” I said aloud. Olivia’s singsong voice came out, but it was tinged with a weariness she’d never possessed. How was I supposed to look at her every day? It would be like facing a beautiful, accusing ghost, along with my own still-raw guilt over failing to keep her safe. But that wasn’t all I dreaded, and I knew it. Others looked at Olivia and saw softness and beauty and a feminine wealth of power. But I only saw weakness and vulnerability. A potential victim.

In turning me into my sister, Micah and Warren had unwittingly turned me into what I feared most.

“I saw you moving on the monitors.” I jumped, dropping the mirror guiltily, and looked up to find Micah peering through the doorway. He was waiting for an invitation. I nodded, and he came in, watching me like a keeper watches a caged lion. “Water?”

He poured from a plastic pitcher and handed me a paper cup. Then he folded his hands in front of his massive body and waited. The water was as crisp and fresh as any I’d tasted, and I finished it off at once. “Thank you.”

He smiled, reassured as he returned the empty cup to the table, then perched lightly on the side of the bed. He possessed amazing grace for such a large man. “How do you feel?”

I thought about it. None of the postsurgery blahs. In fact, I felt incredibly well for someone who was dead. Or in a coma. Much less who had marbles for fingertips. “Great, considering.”

“You should. You heal cleanly as well as quickly,” he said. “And I was very gentle.”

I knew it was his way of apologizing. “Thank you.”

His fleeting smile was swept away by furrowed brows and worry-filled eyes. “I thought you’d be pleased with the changes. I never stopped to consider how it might affect you to live in your sister’s body.”

“No offense, Micah, but all of this is new to me. Metamorphosis, people trying to kill me, never mind this acute—and cute, by the way—new sniffer.” My sigh reverberated dully throughout the room. “I had twenty-five years to grow used to my face, and now…I don’t recognize one thing about myself.”

I didn’t know who I was anymore. Joanna Archer? Olivia Archer? A twenty-first-century superhero, for God’s sake?

“Changing a Zodiac member’s identity after a supernatural incident is part of the clean-up process. This was a bit extreme, even for us. Usually we can prepare the subject better for change, but with you there simply wasn’t time. We don’t want to lose you, Joanna. You’re very special.”

I smiled humorlessly. Not special was sounding very good right now.

Micah sighed. “Look, I don’t know what Warren’s told you, but we’re on the verge of collapse. Three star signs have been killed in the past two months, and they weren’t novices either. They were full-fledged professionals, the elite—this generation’s Zodiac. That’s why we had to act quickly to secure you and alter your identity. Nobody can know who you really are, do you understand?”

I didn’t, but nodded anyway.

“And nobody knew Olivia better than you, right? You can act and walk and respond the way she did. It’s a bonus really that you don’t have to remember countless mannerisms and develop a whole new personality. It simplifies things for you.” He paused. “It also has the added benefit of keeping you close to Xavier Archer.”

“I don’t want to be close to him,” I said. Micah said nothing, which I was beginning to recognize as a bad sign. “What?”

“He’s in the waiting room. He hasn’t left in three days.”

“No.” I turned away, folding my arms across my stomach. He was waiting for Olivia, I thought bitterly. Not me.

Micah nodded, agreeing readily, too readily, with my wishes. When he held out a hand, I regarded it warily. “You feel up to moving around a bit?”

I didn’t, but my body ached so much from the lengthy immobilization that I took his hand and stood for the first time in days. Dizziness rolled into my head, but eventually I nodded to Micah that I was okay. He led me across the room to a chair situated next to a full-length mirror. “Sit here. Just get used to being upright for a while.”

I knew what he was doing. He wanted me to get used to my face, and to seeing myself the way the world now saw me. He swiveled the chair on its casters so I was in front of the mirror, and pulled a nearby table forward. Then he did something completely unexpected. Lifting a brush from the drawer inside the table, he began to comb through my hair.

How could a large man have such a gentle touch?

“I knew your mother, you know,” he remarked, ignoring the way I stiffened. He just continued to brush gently from the ends of my hair to the roots, curling each section softly around his fingers before laying them aside. My eyes drifted away from my face and I began to see the dance of his fingers, that inborn surgeon’s skill. “You’re a lot like her, actually. You have the same cheekbones…well, had. Anyway,” he hurried on when I frowned, “your mother was gorgeous. And deadly. She could do things with a combat cane that I never saw before, or since. To tell the truth, I had a bit of a crush on her. We all did, I think.”

I still said nothing.

“She gave up everything to infiltrate the Shadow Zodiac through Xavier. It’d be a shame to have all that work go to waste now.”

I shook my head, causing the waves he’d just set about my face to tumble this way and that. You don’t understand what you’re asking, I wanted to say. I couldn’t face the world like this. Olivia was born feminine and soft. I was about as pliable as new leather. Instead, I muttered, “I don’t know how to be a superhero.”

Micah smiled gently at that. “Nobody’s born knowing how. We’re just born with specific gifts. Think of the things you’re naturally good at, those that you loved to do as a child. When a new recruit begins his or her training, we build on those gifts. Eventually they develop into weapons, and those can be used against the enemy.”

“Are there that many ways to kill a Shadow agent?”

Piling my hair upon my head, pinning strands here and there in a close imitation of Brigitte Bardot, he hummed, a melancholy sound that resonated throughout his entire wide body. “About as many ways as there are to die.”

But death was easy, I thought, watching him. No more than a mere breath away. As close yet as distant as a stranger in your bed. Like my real parents. “Is my birth father really trying to kill my mother?” I asked Micah.

“I’m not sure I’m the one who should be telling you this,” he murmured, eyes on his fingers. “What exactly has Warren told you about your birth father?”

“Only that I was born on both his and my mother’s birthday, which makes me unique somehow. And that he’s the leader of the Shadow side of the Zodiac. Our enemies.”

Micah nodded. “And he’s a powerful leader too. Before him we had no problem balancing the Zodiac. We were practically invincible.”

“What makes him so different?”

“He’s a Tulpa.” At my blank look, he shook his head. “Cripes, you really don’t know anything, do you? A Tulpa. A person who’s been created rather than birthed.”

Images of the Tin Man and the Scarecrow flashed through my head. Then a rib being pulled from a man’s side, the man himself formed with clay. “Created how?”

“Someone imagined him into being.”

I stared at him wordlessly.

“I know,” Micah said, holding up a hand, “it’s not something our western culture can easily understand but the eastern philosophers accept it readily as fact. Think about it. Take someone with the concentration of a Tibetan monk. Now have that person apply all his thought and energy into visualizing a being. The power of a disciplined mind is so profound, so mighty, that it can actually imagine that being into existence. That entity becomes their Tulpa.”

“But…you can’t imagine a person into existence. It’s not possible.”

“Sure it is. That’s the power of the mind, isn’t it? What you tell yourself is true becomes true for you. We all have the power to create in one form or another.”

I thought of painters, writers, mothers. “Yeah, but not everybody uses it.”

“Ah, but this person did use it, and he used it for evil. He imagined a being both strong and wicked. One strong enough to rule a group of nefarious beings as instructed, with no question or conscience. But the creator didn’t count on one thing.”

“What?”

Micah smiled wryly. “Once the Tulpa gained enough clarity and substance in the originator’s mind, it became independent. It took on a form and personality of its choosing, then began acting out of its own consciousness. Began ruling and doing as he liked.”

“But who would imagine such a thing in the first place? And why?” I asked, earning myself a look of ironic amusement.

“Why is simple. Power. Immortality. If you can create a living being out of nothing more than the gray matter in your mind, knowing that if you just give it enough substance it’ll live forever, then a part of you will live forever as well.

“As for who?” Micah chuckled humorlessly. “Well, that was the million-dollar question. The great mystery of our world. The axis upon which all our fates hinged. It was the mystery your mother was intent upon figuring out.”

And she had. It took her years to do it, but eventually she came upon a mortal named Wyatt Neelson, a westerner who was a fervent student of Tibetan lore. However, he hadn’t limited himself to Tibetan studies, or Buddhism, but was a self-taught student of all world religions. His original goal was to create his own religion, an amalgamation of those things he most fervently believed in.

Very Jim Jones of him, I thought wryly as Micah went on.

“But then he got distracted by the idea of a Tulpa. I mean, why coerce, convince, and hope that people will follow you when you can create a being who will compel, even force, them to do so?”

Why, indeed. So Mr. Neelson set about creating an entity that wouldn’t age, and couldn’t be killed—a god among mortals. He figured it’d be much easier to convince people to give in to their weaker natures—hate, lust, greed…all of the seven deadlies—than to convince them to do good. He quit studying the religious doctrines and focused solely on meditation, harnessing the power of his mind, dedicating fifteen years of his life to creating the Tulpa.

“See, we don’t know if the Tulpa can be killed—we haven’t found a way yet, at least—but Zoe thought if we could somehow kill its creator, maybe it would sever any lingering power between the two of them. Create a gap. We could then act upon any resulting weakness, infiltrate the Shadow organization or kill the Tulpa outright.”

“So my mother got close to this Tulpa in order to find out who his creator was?”

“She spent years gaining his trust, concealing her identity, masking her scent. It wasn’t easy, but she was dogged.” Micah shook his head in admiration. “So convincing that sometimes even we wondered whose side she was on. Yet, she always came through with some small bit of information that would give us an edge, or stop an attack, or save a Zodiac member’s life along the way.”

“She was gaining his trust.”

“Getting in tight.” Micah nodded behind me. “And she used whatever means she had to in order to get there.”

Including her body. “He never thought his greatest enemy would be in bed with him.”

“Most men wouldn’t.” Micah placed his hands on my shoulders, causing me to look up and meet his eye. “Don’t think she didn’t love you, Jo. You wanted to know who your father is, and I’m telling you. He’s pure, unfiltered evil.” I flinched. “But he bedded down with pure goodness and didn’t even know it. She had the option to rid herself of the pregnancy, but even knowing that keeping you would risk everything she’d worked for, she didn’t. She wanted you. More, even, than she wanted him.”

She had wanted me. But she had left me too. “So what happened?”

He smiled, but it was reserved. “She succeeded.”

“She did?”

He nodded. “Just in time too. It wouldn’t be much longer before the Tulpa could see she was pregnant, to smell she was pregnant. But she found Wyatt Neelson, and immediately killed him herself. Got away clean, and disappeared like smoke.

“Problem is, every time you kill someone, not only do you destroy their signature scent, you leave your own in its place, like a calling card. Great when you want the recognition, but hell on subterfuge. When the Tulpa found out it was your mother who betrayed him, he became crazed.”

“But did he become weaker?”

Micah shook his head. “Stronger. It was like cutting the strings from a puppet only to discover you’d freed it from shackles. The belief of the other Shadows was already strong enough to keep him going, so he was free to destroy and rage and run the Shadow organization the way he wanted. And what he wanted, more than anything, was to find Zoe and crush her.

“Here’s the genius of it, though. While he was looking far and wide, she masked her scent, created another new identity for herself, and took up with Xavier. Snuck back in and hid right under the Tulpa’s nose. You were born shortly after—Xavier’s child, for all the world knew.”

And then she’d had Xavier’s real child too. It made me wonder if she’d ever been with a man solely for love.

“She just wouldn’t give up,” Micah continued, shaking his head. “A more single-minded and brave woman I’ve never met. She spent years with the Tulpa, then years with Xavier, and in the process forfeited any personal joy she might have had, any chance at a normal life.”

“She still failed,” I pointed out.

“Yes, but she was so close,” he said, tucking a curl behind my ear. “A few more weeks and she would’ve had him.”

“But?” I prompted, needing to know why she’d disappeared so abruptly, both when I’d needed her most and these people had needed her also.

“But you.”

Micah looked at me with utter stillness, a bittersweet smile on his face. “You inherited more than your mother’s cheekbones, Joanna. You possess her genetic makeup, and while she had the ability to hide her own scent, you weren’t protected. You hit puberty, entered what we call the second life cycle, and your hormones went rampant. Shadow agents were scouring the city looking for her, and one of them—”

“Found me.” I closed my eyes as the final pieces of the puzzle clicked together. No wonder her grief had been so palpably guilt-ridden.

“He tried to kill you, to kill everything that was good and pure and…Zoe in you. Just so you know, any one of us would have died that night.”

But I hadn’t. Why? I glanced at myself in the mirror. The eyes were still mine, I noticed. They’d deepened like the night at the mention of my attack. “His genes,” I said. “They protected me.”

Micah inclined his head. “I guess you could say the Tulpa, the creation, was now your creator. You’re something new, Joanna. Something never seen before, though your existence has been foretold. See, you’re the only one who’s ever been both…certainly the only one who’s ever survived such an attack. The only one.”

Then he explained about someone called the Kairos, the fulcrum, upon whom all their fates hinge. It was part of their mythology, both Shadow and Light, and Warren apparently thought I was it. I was silent for a while, trying to let that soak in with all the rest, but everything just seemed to pile up on the surface of my consciousness. “Does he know about me?” I finally asked.

Micah shook his head. “Not that you’re his daughter, thus not that we suspect you’re the Kairos either. He only knows that you’re Zoe’s. We can all smell it on you now that you’ve reached your third life cycle. And now that he’s aware of your existence, he’ll be gunning to take out his revenge on you.”

So the leader of the paranormal underworld—or at least that of the greater Las Vegas valley—had a hard-on for my blood. Fabulous. I bit my lip and looked up at Micah through the mirror. “So did he do it?”

“What? Who?”

“The man. That night. Did he kill…” I searched for the right words, but there weren’t any. There was only the truth. “Did he kill all that was good in me?”

“Yes,” Micah said softly, but smiled. “But that you’re even asking that question should reassure you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Simple, Joanna. He broke the potential hero in you. Then your mother put you back together.”

The machines were silent, no dripping or beeping to mark the passage of time, and the room was painfully quiet as I pondered this. An answer to one of my life’s most enduring questions was taking shape in my mind, but before I could form it aloud, Micah did it for me.

“She gave you everything she could, every olfactory blend we’d created to protect her, every personal power that kept her whole. She used chemistry to mask your pheromones and then she hid you, even from us. But that left her open to discovery and vulnerable to attack. She knew it was only a matter of time before the Tulpa found her, and if he got hold of her…” Micah shuddered.

“But how could she just leave? Abandon everything she’d worked for?” Abandon us, I wanted to say. I wondered if I hadn’t said it aloud because Micah gave me such a look of disdain and annoyance that I immediately felt ashamed.

“She gave it all up for you.”

I didn’t move, not even to swipe at the curl that lay tickling my left cheek. I heard myself breathing, heard Micah behind me, and cast my thoughts in his direction, just to see what I would discover. He smelled like silver powder, rain clouds, and Old Spice. The blend fit him perfectly.

“So what am I supposed to do now?”

Find the Tulpa? Find my mother? Find out how the Shadow agents were killing off the star signs?

“Just learn to stay alive,” Micah said gently, and put the brush down. “We’ll never know what you’re capable of if you don’t at least do that.”

“And you’re going to teach me?”

“Me,” he nodded, “and others. We’ll teach you to be the person you were born to be. We’ll teach you the ways of the Zodiac, of the Archer in particular, and your mother’s legacy.”

A legacy of star signs and superheroes. I glanced in the mirror at the finished product, an image that had emerged at some point during the past ten minutes. Blue eyes widened back at me, the rims of contacts barely discernable along the edges of my irises. “Wow.”

Micah beamed behind me. “We found some great photos of Olivia in your house. You have a real talent. I was able to capture her down to the most minute detail.” He reached into the pocket of his lab coat and pulled out the photo I’d brought with me to the motel the night we’d met. “See?”

I held the photo in front of me, studying it carefully, before lifting my eyes to the mirror. There was no discernable difference between the two images. I frowned. Shouldn’t I, at least, be able to tell us apart?

“See how happy she is,” Micah said, pointing out one difference.

“That’s because someone’s taking her picture,” I muttered. But it wasn’t. It was just Olivia. Happy, yes. And open, trusting. Innocent. “I look more like Olivia than Olivia,” I said.

“I would bet,” he said, nodding cautiously, “if you were willing, you could even fool Xavier.”

I glanced at him sharply, then sighed. What were my options? I mean, I wanted my old body back, my own face if only so I could scowl and not have it look like a sultry pout, but I couldn’t exactly ask him to change me back, not after I’d already been dead almost a week. An altogether different identity would be just that, different, but hardly an improvement.

Stay alive, I thought doubtfully. Survive. To do that I would have to convince the world I was Olivia Archer. One part of me thought, How hard could it be? Olivia shopped and brunched and chaired a bevy of balls and charities, and—at night, when no one was looking—ran an illegal website. I could probably just skip that part.

But what about the harder part of being Olivia? Could I really allow myself to be that soft without seeing myself as weak? That vulnerable without thinking like a victim? That agreeable without believing I was a pushover? It wasn’t the things Olivia did that gave me pause. It was her utter defenselessness.

I pursed my lips and watched Olivia pout across from me. So that’s how she does it, I thought, and smiled. Her mouth—my mouth, actually, since it’d been the same—curved upward, looking devastatingly seductive in that heart-shaped face. I lifted my eyes to Micah, who was watching, waiting as I decided.

“You did a very good job, Micah.”

He took the compliment for what it was, a concession, and an acceptance of my situation. A grin bloomed in reply. “Thank you, Olivia,” he said.

Olivia.

Me. Olivia. I took a deep breath, then released it slowly, until my body felt emptied of air. Perhaps this way, through me, Olivia could still live. I rather liked that idea. It was the least I could do for her…and the only thing now. At least it made me feel less helpless, and that was something. As for the rest, I’d just have to figure it out as I went along. “You may send my father in.”

Micah held out a hand and gently helped me to my feet so that we stood eye-to-eye for a moment. “Yes,” he finally said, “I think you’re quite up for a visit now. A miraculous recovery, really. Your father will be so pleased.”

Then it’d be the first time I’d ever pleased him, I thought sourly, but that wasn’t what I said to Micah. It wasn’t what he was waiting to hear. It wasn’t, I thought, what Olivia would say.

“I’m so glad,” I said, trying for sincerity.

Micah helped me back into bed, then turned immediately to the door. I think he was afraid I would change my mind. “I’ll be right back.”

So I leaned back and waited. I tried to tell myself every superhero led a dual existence. Look at Superman and Clark Kent. And Wonder Woman was a kindly secretary when she wasn’t lassoing bad guys with a truth-inducing rope. There were others, I was sure, and it made me wonder how many of these stories, these fictions, were pure figments of some comic book writer’s imagination…and how many had leaked through this thin webbing of reality that separated the Tulpa’s world from our own. My own dual existence, this channeling of my dead sister as a cover in the real world, certainly had a fabled air.

I was Joanna, who was dead.

I was Olivia, who was also dead.

And I was also my mother, who had risked her life in ways I had yet to put together so that I might be safe. But if that were true, then I was also him. The man, the Tulpa; an entity so evil he had once both destroyed me and simultaneously kept me alive.

“I will kill you.” The words hollowed out the hospital room. And that’s how I recognized the Tulpa in me. But I liked the sound of that oath, and I swore it again. “I will kill you for what you did to my sister. And for my mother.” And for what was left of myself.

And with that pledge still lingering in the air, I leaned back and waited for the man who both was and wasn’t my father to enter the room. When he finally did, I looked up and smiled sweetly.