The Touch of Twilight

8

Xavier Archer was on his knees, chanting, which was probably why he didn’t hear our approach. He was holding something that reminded me of a child’s rattle, but when I inched closer I recognized it as a handheld version of the prayer wheels in the stupa outside. Its handle was wooden, but there was an ornate metal cylinder at its apex, with a ballasted chain helping the cylinder whirl around with a deft flick of the wrist. His mouth moved as he repeated his mantra over and over, but it didn’t sound like Xavier’s voice. It was too low and respectfully resolute.

“Praying?” Chandra asked, so lightly only I could hear.

I shook my head. Xavier didn’t pray. “No. It’s more like…”

“Worshipping.”

Centered on a colorful rug, he leaned over in a practiced move to pick up a mallet, striking the side of a bronze bowl without losing beat with his prayer wheel. A warm bell tone overtook the tinny chiming in the room and resonated through my body, making the spot on my chest where the doppelgänger had nearly rent me open pulse lightly. I lifted my hand, wanting to rub the feeling away.

I also wanted to back out of the room, ponder what this could mean far from the compelling smell and sound of ritualistic Eastern prayer, but Chandra was inching closer to Xavier. I caught up with her as the even spin of the wheel stopped and the tonal notes died in the air. The room fell to complete silence. We didn’t dare breathe in the unearthly stillness, and even Xavier’s mouth moved soundlessly as he set aside the first singing bowl and mallet, and picked up a second, larger one, placing it directly in front of him on the carpet.

He held the hollowed disk with straight arms, as if proffering it to someone, and I had just enough time to think: No, not a bowl. A mask.

Bending his elbows, he drew the mask toward his face in an exaggerated motion. It was too small for his bullish mien, its bowl delicate and shallow, and obviously a totem meant for ritual ceremonies, clearly not intended to be worn. Yet as Xavier drew the plain wooden artifact parallel to his features, the ancient wood startled and sprang to life. He cupped it to his face as the wood pushed against itself and began to flatten, grain thinning with a high-pitched noise. It attached itself to Xavier’s skin, caressing his cheeks in a jagged slide, seeping like wax beneath his hairline to add Xavier’s coiffure-down to his cowlick-to its inanimate features.

It went fast after that, like the wood was once again living and vital, anchored in the earth, and not merely a hollowed out husk. Xavier was already statue-still, but once the mask encompassed the whole of his face, I heard a sharp click-the animate wood meeting and fastening at the nape of his neck-and he went absolutely rigid.

Ash flew from his mouth to thicken the air in a blackening haze. I leaned forward, waving a hand before me, but the effect was temporary; the air was too heavy, molecules pressed so tightly together they were almost sticky. The whole scene took on a dreamlike aspect, as if what I was seeing was taking place inside of my lids. I took another step forward, and with a second I spotted the candle burning like a focal point in haze. A third step and Xavier became visible again.

Smoke billowed from the mask now, soot coating and darkening the walls of the room. If the smoky mixture had been cloying before, it was oppressive now, and it coated my mouth in wafer-thin layers with every inhalation.

“Only one thing tastes like toasted anise,” Chandra murmured, her face scrunched in disgust.

“What?”

“Parfum de personne.” She waved her hand in the air to look me in the eye. “It’s his soul essence.”

“But what’s he doing with it?”

She squinted, returning her gaze to Xavier. “It looks like he’s giving it away.”

“Well, that was a tad freaky.”

Chandra and I backed from the office, shutting the door silently behind us, and I made a face as I tried to clear the cloying sweetness from the back of my throat. Was I going to have to walk around all day with Xavier’s soul essence clinging to my clothes? “Let’s get back to the drawing room. We’ll wait for Deluca there.”

We started back through the giant stupa, neither of us seeing it this time, still mesmerized by what we’d just witnessed. I was so lost in thought, it wasn’t until Chandra called out to me that I noticed she’d fallen behind.

I walked back to her while she continued to stare into a sunken alcove, so taken by what she saw there that she actually touched me when I reached her side. We both jerked away out of habit, but her eyes stayed fixed on the wall across from her. “Do you see what I see?”

I turned my head, and though I’d passed by it hundreds of times before, my gasp was real, and immediately smothered. Of course! I did a mental head slap. “More masks.”

Half a dozen more. And they’d been hanging on these walls so long, they’d only ever registered as creepy, not significant. But they were. Clearly antique, and bearing a freakish resemblance to the one Xavier had donned, the one in front of me looked frighteningly like the mask the Tulpa had been wearing when he’d tried to microwave me only days earlier. I looked around, pointed to another, and we crossed the room in implicit silence, standing before it like it was a caged animal. It was simply, even primitively carved, and painted entirely red, like it’d been shellacked with fresh blood, but for the black line painted down the bridge of the wide nose. I’d just reached out to remove it from its wall peg when a voice behind me went off like a firecracker.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

I whirled, hand falling like it’d been slapped. Recovering quickly, I performed the eye roll I’d perfected in front of the mirror last month, and crossed my arms, tapping my fingers impatiently.

“Buffy,” I said, quickly thinking up the name for Chandra’s socialite alias. It was cute, and it’d piss her off. “This is Helen, our long-time housekeeper.”

And if Xavier had been the devil when I was young, Helen Maguire had been his succubus. Her looks were ordinary enough; she was mousy, in fact, with hair that was neither curly nor straight, and a long, sallow face framing eyes that were slightly hooded. But beneath the lids that made her look like she was dozing on her feet were sparrow-bright eyes. Apropos, as I’d always had the feeling she stored away the dramas of the Archer dynasty like shiny baubles to line her own emotional nest. She gleaned information about other powerful families as well, and after every party Xavier threw she could be found in the camera room, eyes devouring the video as she replayed recorded conversations.

And what did she do with those tiny bits of gossip she scavenged and studied? She marked them as experience, and counted them as her own.

If bothered by the way I’d pointed out her position in the household, Helen didn’t show it. Probably because she considered it a title, like mistress or duchess or queen. After my mother had left, I thought wryly, she’d certainly acted like it.

“I asked what you think you’re doing?” She took a step toward me, a laundry basket with crisply folded sheets resting snugly between an arm and one flaring hip.

“Dusting, Helen,” I retorted before I could stop myself. “Someone has to.”

She reddened under the implied criticism, and for what may have been the first time, really looked at the woman she thought was Olivia. The look softened after a moment; she’d never treated Olivia as anything but a fluffy piece of lint and was obviously still unimpressed.

“Don’t touch the artifacts, Olivia.”

“Don’t tell me what to do in my own home, Helen.” I glared at her. She took a step forward.

“What’s going on here?”

For a moment neither of us acknowledged Xavier’s presence. Then duty overcame Helen and she started babbling. “Sir, Olivia is manhandling the relics. I just want to be sure they don’t come to harm.”

“Daddy!” I said, and raced to throw my arms around him. His clothes reeked of charred spice, and I jolted upon realizing he didn’t fill out the custom-made suit as well as he used to. Pulling away, I saw dark smudges circling his eyes, and though a two-hundred-pound man couldn’t be considered gaunt, his cheeks were sunken and his skin sallow. I pretended not to notice, and shot him a blinding smile. “I was telling Buffy about your world travels, and how there’s a story to the way you acquired each of these masks.” I reached out and stroked the one nearest his office and heard a quickly indrawn breath behind me. Interesting. “But the hired help told me to leave.”

Helen stuttered. “I didn’t-!”

She hadn’t. But maybe it was time the brownnosing sycophant learned Xavier wasn’t the only Archer in this household. Gain for Olivia in death a little of the respect denied to her in life. I shot her a blazing look over my shoulder before turning back to Xavier with a brilliant smile. “Of course, I’ve forgotten most of the stories behind these masks, so I was hoping you had time to tell us one of them.”

Xavier closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Olivia, I’m awfully busy today.”

My bottom lip shot out. “You’re always busy.”

He looked from me to Chandra, assessing her so quickly, I could practically see the ticker tape rolling across the screen of his gaze. I was glad I’d insisted on her makeover. Finally he sighed. “Five minutes. That’s all I have.”

“Thank you, Daddy!” I squealed, and clapped my hands wildly as I grinned at Chandra, who gave a good shot at giggling back as Xavier turned away. My apparent giddiness drained when my eyes stalled on the housekeeper, who was still staring at the hand I’d returned to the wall next to the mask. “Oh, you’re excused now, Helen.”

The impulse to stay where she was flashed like lightning in her eyes, but died just as quickly. Her lips thinned to a single line. “If you need anything,” she said stiffly, and left it at that.

Xavier had already disappeared back into his office, and Chandra whispered as we followed. “Does it seem like a little more than coincidence that she arrived just then?”

“Cameras,” I muttered, gesturing to the one above the study door with my head. “Helen seems to have a knack for popping up at the most inconvenient times.”

“Curiouser and curiouser.”

Maybe, I thought, and maybe not. When you grew up in a house of secrets and unspoken resentments, even oddities seemed normal. I suppose that’s what had kept me from seeing the masks before, and at the moment I had to admit Warren had been right. Partnering up had been a good idea. As annoying and spiteful and untrustworthy as I found Chandra, she was no idiot.

“You know,” she said, in a voice so low it couldn’t be picked up by a mic, “Hunter has mentioned before that Valhalla has a room full of Asian artifacts, tribal pieces reportedly collected while searching out Viking artifacts to accessorize Valhalla. I bet these are more of the same, but even more valuable.”

“Viking artifacts in Asia?”

I looked at Chandra-saw the same dark knowledge tingeing her gaze-then around at the room I’d both seen, and somehow hadn’t, my whole life. Thus a plan was born. Warren might kill me for not running it by him first, but he was the one who’d told us to go on the offensive. I had to start seeing the physical spaces that had occupied my old life in a new way-even when Chandra wasn’t with me-including my childhood home. Including Valhalla.

“Stay here,” I told Chandra, and headed back to Xavier’s office.

She caught up to me. “But-”

“I have an idea,” I told her, and shut the door in her face before she could say any more. Xavier would be too aware of her presence, his pride and self-consciousness acting as barriers to seriously considering my words, and I had to get what I needed from him in the same way Olivia always had. By appealing to the soft side of her beloved, doting father.

In retrospect I could appreciate that the years I’d considered myself trapped, confined, and caged under Xavier Archer’s roof hadn’t been heartbreakingly traumatic. He could be accused of neglect, but not abuse. He had never injured me physically, though his words, and even his silence, had possessed a whiplike feel to them. Compared to the way some people terrorized their children, Xavier could even be called benign. But back when I was sixteen-traumatized, alone, abandoned, frightened, pregnant-I didn’t have such a wide frame of reference. I only knew that he flinched when I walked into a room, he refused to let me speak of my mother, and he ignored both the physical and mental scars of my attack, so that I felt shamed in my own young body.

So fuck him if he was having trouble sleeping lately.

The office was normal once again, oversized furniture returned to the room’s center, desk spotless, wood gleaming like it’d just been polished. Even I wouldn’t have been able to scent out the lingering incense if I hadn’t known it was there only minutes before. The Tulpa had set Xavier up with some seriously powerful hoodoo. Which begged the question. Why?

“Where’s your new partner in crime?” Xavier said, jerking his chin at the door as it swung closed behind me. His word choice threw me for a moment, but I relaxed when I saw he meant it figuratively.

“Outside. We’re just hanging out until Cher gets back from Fiji. But I wanted to talk to you alone.”

He motioned to a high-backed chair across from him, before settling in his own.

“I’m going to get a job,” I announced brightly, crossing my legs, and sitting up straight so I looked innocent and eager. Maybe my bright smile kept Xavier from recognizing Olivia Archer’s first ever act of defiance. When, after an awkward moment, he realized I was serious, he laughed anyway.

“We’ve discussed this before, Olivia,” he began, his tone patently patronizing, one most people used with domesticated animals and toddlers. He picked up a thick fountain pen and began twirling it in his fingers.

“No, you dictated before. I don’t remember ever discussing it.”

“Well, the answer is still the same.”

“Except this time I’m not asking,” I said, my voice both high and sweet. His fingers stilled. The incongruity between my words and tone seemed to baffle him, and I widened my smile, probably confusing him further. “I’ve been doing a lot of reevaluating the last few months and have decided I need to change some things in my life. I need a purpose. A rhythm to my days. A reason to get up in the morning.”

Xavier didn’t move. I realized I was going to have to sugar him up, so made sure my gaze wasn’t challenging when I met his eyes. “Like you, Daddy. You get up in the morning and you know exactly what you want from your day. I want to be like you.”

A number of emotions passed over his face in quick succession, fatigue overlaying them all. That might have softened me toward him if the very first emotion hadn’t been derision. If it had been Olivia sitting here, she would have seen it too. I consciously unclenched my jaw.

“Honey, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Why?” I asked, imbuing hurt I didn’t feel into my voice. “You don’t think I can do it? That I don’t have the ability to learn?”

“Why would you want to?” he asked, skirting the questions. “I give you everything you want. If there’s something more, tell me. I’ll get that for you too.”

I leaned back in my chair. “Okay. How about self-respect?”

When he only sat there, those fingers still and brow drawn, I thought, You bastard. He’d always done this, regarding Olivia from a distance that reduced her to a single dimension. A pretty picture he could hang on his wall, imagine as he wished, control and attend to at his whim. “Nobody who’s given everything they desire without having to work for it,” I inserted into the silence, “can truly possess that.”

I was talking about him, about the way the Tulpa dangled carrots to control him, but naturally he didn’t realize that. “Self-respect doesn’t come from what we do, Olivia. It comes from who we are.”

“Who we are?” I repeated slowly. “You mean an Archer?”

“Yes. Exactly that.”

I nodded my head slowly, like him, then stopped. “I don’t know, Daddy. Sometimes the title feels like something I’m wearing. A brand upon my skin. Like I belong to someone, rather than am someone. Like I’m a puppet in the…Archer’s organization.”

And there it was. Humiliation had him wincing. Anger thinning his lips. Hopelessness lowering his eyes. The blended emotions smelled like used fuel and the soul he was so cheaply giving away. “That’s ridiculous. Now, you’re not getting a job and that’s final.”

I stood. “It’s not final.”

“You’re not getting a job.”

“Fine.” I angled my body around the chair. “Then I guess I’ll have to-”

“What?” he finally snapped, rising to his feet and turning away at the same time, only to whirl on me again two feet later. “What will you do, Olivia? Go on a spa strike until I give you your way?”

I let that hang between us to see if he could hear how ugly it sounded. He did, and shame dueled with stubbornness to have him turning away. He paced over to the window to regain his composure, but I wasn’t going to give him time for that.

“I was going to say,” I said softly, “that I guess I’ll have to leave.”

He stiffened, and half turned. “What?”

His face was sallow in the harsh daylight, and he suddenly looked fragile despite his bulk, or what was left of it. I didn’t care.

“Leave,” I repeated, clasping my hands in front of me. “Leave the city, leave the West Coast if that’s what it takes. Leave the Archer dynasty.”

“I’ll cut you off like I did Joanna. Is that what you want?”

It was an automatic response; the ruthlessness and nerve that’d propelled him to the top of the competitive gaming world had him calling my bluff while countering with one of his own. Usually it served him well. But not now.

I shrugged. “I’ll survive.”

“How?” His voice was a tad hoarse, and he cleared his throat, adding a sneer to his words. “How will someone like you survive? You have no skills, no real education, you’ve never even won a talent contest.”

I pressed my hands against his shiny desk, leaning forward to keep the bitch-slap with his name on it from knocking him off his feet. “And why is that, Daddy? Why have you always been hell-bent on keeping me in my place, a box marked, ‘Look, but don’t touch.’ A pretty one, but a box no less?” I straightened as his eyes widened. He was finally facing me fully. He was finally listening. “You never hear or see me. You refused to even consider I might have an opinion, and now look at me. I’m like a property you acquire, wealth you hoard, a company you collect because you can.”

“You’re becoming hysterical.”

I was acting like Olivia, but speaking for myself…and he’d never seen my kind of hysterical. I lifted my chin and returned his earlier sneer. “Mother would have never allowed you to do that to me.”

And that was said for both of us. Xavier was breathing hollowly now, much like when he’d been chanting, his movements measured as he returned to his desk and deliberately lowered himself into the soft leather chair.

“But she did allow it, Olivia,” he said, leaning back, eyeing me from the relaxed pose of an attentive tiger. “She allowed it by her absence. By abandoning her family. She left and never looked back. I wanted to make you into a better woman than she was, that’s all.”

So that’s the lie he told himself so he could sleep at night, I thought. One of them, anyway.

“You made me,” I said evenly, as Joanna, as myself, “into a shadow of what I could have been.”

Xavier didn’t even blink. “I’ve given you a place in this world. Is that really so bad? If your mother had been more like you-”

“-she wouldn’t have left you,” I finished for him, amazed it had taken me this long to see it. That was it. He’d smothered Olivia with money and baubles and coddling because he didn’t want to lose her. In some corner of that useless heart, he might even love her. It was nice to know…but for the fact that his involvement with the Tulpa made him indirectly responsible for her death. “She couldn’t have left you.”

He didn’t deny it. “I just want to keep you close.”

Inhaling deeply, I pretended to consider that. Though anger had me shaking inside, I was used to holding my tongue around Xavier, and as I angled around the desk to take his hands in mine-careful not to let him feel the unnatural smoothness of my printless fingertips, or the tensile strength in my palm-I smiled.

“And I want to be close to you as well.” Because you’re going to lead me to the Tulpa. And someday I’m going to see you pay for all your countless sins. “So where better to begin my career than at Valhalla? Surely your premier property isn’t below me? Plus you can keep an eye on me while I learn a skill. Surely there’s a way, Daddy, for us to both get what we want?”

He was silent for so long, even the house seemed to hold its breath around us. There was almost an audible exhalation when he finally said, “Tell me again why you want this?”

“Because I want to be like the parent who raised me. The one who stayed and stuck. I want to be like you.”

He rubbed a hand as large as a ball mitt over his face, and I knew I’d won. “I’ll think about it.”

“Thank you, Daddy,” I said, and exited his office before my eyelids caught in a permanent flutter. I had finally gotten him thinking, and that was the best I could hope for right now.

Or so I thought.

Chandra was back in the drawing room, seated awkwardly on the window seat, but she stood to fall wordlessly into stride with me as we exited. We skipped down the palatial white steps, hopped into my car, and I rolled the engine over, still silent. I glanced up to find Helen’s pinched face peering at us from the living room windows, though she drew back when I waved, retreating into the house that so completely defined her existence. The gates were already opening as I gunned down the drive, though I waited until we’d left the compound and had reached the first stoplight before turning to Chandra. “You look smug.”

“It’s all that goop you made me put on my face.”

“And?” Because there was more.

And she lifted the handbag I’d made her carry, opening it wide enough to reveal a blackened face stretched in a long, silent scream. The light changed. A car honked behind me. I looked from the mask in her purse back up into her face. And for the first time since we’d known each other, Chandra and I exchanged real smiles.