The Touch of Twilight

14

I used my Shadow manuals often. Most had belonged to my first enemy, the man who thought it was fun to attack little girls on steamy desert nights. I now possessed them because our diminutive, assessing, and steady troop Seer, Tekla, had gone apeshit on his putrefied ass, literally shredding him to bits, saving my life…and saving a bit of herself in the process as well. The next week Joaquin’s extensive stash of meticulously organized Shadow manuals had somehow shown up in the sanctuary, though whether he’d bequeathed them to me, knowing I’d continue the work he’d started-finding a way to kill the Tulpa-or whether they’d somehow been appropriated on my behalf, I still couldn’t say.

I also didn’t walk around advertising my possession of them, not with the third sign of the Zodiac looming over our heads like a giant question mark. So I waited until the next day, when most of the others had been called to clean up Shadow activity on the East Side, before pulling an armload of them from my locker, and taking them with me back to the barracks for some late night reading.

It was in one of these that I found an account of the last time the Tulpa had sent his agents out via “message-by-minion.” He hadn’t been kidding about the missive’s hold over his troop. The manual depicted his investigation of one of his own, a Shadow agent named Tripp who’d balked at orders to murder his own family. Instead he’d warned them, and they all rabbited. Their effort to escape the Tulpa, a plan that revolved around some rumored underground for former agents, was foiled by a long-forgotten confidence in the Shadow Gemini, whom he’d told about his safe house in nearby Mount Charleston. Though the Gemini was, in truth, a genuine ally, after a month of no food or sleep or the ability to eliminate bodily functions, his will was thoroughly broken.

The family’s slaughter a week later-three generations of Shadow Aquarians-had shaken the foundations of that side’s Zodiac. It was a brutal act even by the Tulpa’s lofty standards, and the final panels showed a meeting-sans Tulpa-swearing it would never be allowed to happen again.

It must have pissed off Joaquin too, I thought as I left my room, because the manual was dog-eared, and he’d even scrawled in the margins, using that strange hieroglyphic alphabet I’d seen lining the walls of his underground cavern. These, however, were punctuated with giant exclamation points.

So why would the Tulpa impose a message-by-minion again, and once more risk alienating his own agents?

“The doppelgänger,” I murmured, sinking to the floor outside another barracks’ door and rubbing at my chest where the woman had scrabbled for my heart. My wounds had healed, but every so often it was as if dozens of ants marched beneath my skin, tiny legs scrabbling over muscle and tendons, and below it, my beating heart. I pulled my hand away, and attempted to push that image out of my mind.

But what was it about her that spooked him so much? The message-by-minion, the knee-jerk willingness to kill me just because we smelled similar, the offer to work together to eradicate her existence…it all spoke to a fear far greater than his hatred for our troop. Greater, even, than his paranoia at my ascension as the preordained Kairos.

What could he find so threatening about her existence?

“Must be my lucky day.”

I glanced up, already smiling as Gregor approached his room in the barracks, dropping the manual back into my shoulder bag as I stood. It was just after dawn now, and the troop was trickling in. Though he’d be going to bed soon, Gregor held the day’s first cup of coffee in his one arm because he first had to attend a meeting about the night’s mission in the debriefing room. He showed neither surprise nor alarm to find me waiting for him, just motioned me aside with his head so he could reach inside and gather his warden, Sheila. She went everywhere with him on this side of reality, and she bounded from the room to rub up against his legs before flicking her black tail dismissively in my direction. I could have sworn she was also deliberately trying to trip me up as we wound our way through the sanctuary’s concrete halls. Cats.

I’d given Ben’s address to Gregor after my run-in with Regan at the bar, and had asked him to stop by, poke around, and see if she’d planted any more bombs. Gregor was more objective than I was, and could canvass Ben’s home with perspective, a practiced eye, and without leaving behind an olfactory trail. I couldn’t trust myself to do the same.

I’d tried to be patient, but I was obviously anxious to know what he’d found. Fortunately, he didn’t make me wait. “So I did a drive-by on the mortal’s house and saw nothing unusual. I returned later when I was sure it was empty and found this.”

He handed me a slip of paper with Rose’s name and address. I’d been looking hard for a secondary location where Regan stayed outside her troop’s sanctuary, so this would’ve been a Eureka! moment…if I wasn’t so sure it was a setup. She’d given me an address in the past. Going there had nearly killed me. “She must think I’m an ass to fall for the same ruse twice.”

“Doesn’t hurt for her to throw it out there. If you’re looking so desperately for the complex hoax, you might fall for the simple one.” Gregor’s hoop earring glinted as he handed me his coffee cup and bent to lift Sheila. Completely devoted to Gregor, she was purring before he’d even scooped her up. She regarded the competition, me, with cold assessing eyes. “She was probably also feeling reckless. Pissed off to find so many bugs planted around the place.”

I smiled back grimly. Placing the listening devices around Ben’s home had been a cheap and silly mortal’s trick, but they’d seemed to annoy her, so I’d had Gregor do it again. The possibility of falling for something stupid went both ways.

“Thanks, Gregor.”

“I also found this.” He balanced Sheila on his shoulder and rustled in his jacket pocket, coming out with a photo of Regan in a crystal-studded, heart-shaped frame. She was in Rose mode, so there were enough visual cues to suggest a likeness to me without fully reviving me in Ben’s mind. It was one of the Shadows’ more subtle ways of luring in their mortal prey.

One of the less subtle ways was attached on the back, via the crystals.

I took it, studying the plastic backing Gregor had obviously pried away. “Another bomb,” I said, as my stomach dropped to my toes.

“More like a hand grenade, and one activated by a sound signal.”

“So she can hit a button in one location…”

“Or blow a dog whistle, whatever she has the receiver set for, and it’ll blow wherever she’s planted it.”

I licked my lips slowly, and gently held the grenade back out to Gregor. He laughed, and waved it away before tucking Sheila back under his arm. “I called Hunter immediately and he told me how to disengage it. See the wire next to the photo hinge? Plug it in and you’re live again. Thought you might want it.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “I don’t get it. She’s had plenty of opportunity to come after me herself. She could plant bombs around my condo, in my car, on my cat-”

Gregor winced, nuzzling Sheila. “Don’t say that.”

As if she’d ever be able to touch Luna, I thought, but gave Sheila an apologetic rub under the chin anyway. Our feline wardens could slice Shadows to bits. Of course, their canine counterparts could do the same to us. “All I’m saying is if the goal is to get to me, why is she going after an innocent? A guy who clearly has no knowledge of me or my world?”

“Because that apple didn’t fall far from the tree,” he said wryly, and Gregor would know. He’d been the one to drive a mace into Brynn DuPree’s chest. Yet before that, Brynn too had targeted an innocent man. She’d seduced a priest, conceived his child, and used that to blackmail him until he was as corrupt as she was. Though it wouldn’t surprise me to find Father Michael had been depraved long before Brynn DuPree had come along. The Shadows were experts in telling which humans had nefarious potential living beneath their skin. But Ben was different, targeted solely because I loved him, and I said as much to Gregor.

“And I don’t understand why she’s so fixated on me, anyway,” I added as we passed walls studded with mythological symbols and astrological shapes. “Why doesn’t Regan go after you?”

“That’s my girl,” Gregor replied jauntily. “Sugar and spice.”

I tilted my head. “You know what I mean.”

Killing Brynn had made him infamous on both sides of the Zodiac. The infamous man shrugged lightly. “She can’t come after me because I believe in luck, not love, and that’s something she doesn’t know how to twist.”

I frowned, halting in my tracks. “What do you mean?”

He turned to face me, and the stripe zinging through the hallways to light our way stopped with him. “I mean the one great lesson imparted to Regan before I could relieve her mother of her worthless life was to use a person’s love against them. She believed there was no room for love in a heroic life, so she broke her daughter of the habit immediately.”

“How?” I asked, jogging to catch back up as Gregor started off again. By my calculation Regan had only been ten when Brynn died. Most moms hadn’t even initiated the birds-and-the-bees talk by then.

“She made an example of Regan’s first love, of course. And by then he was already serving life in prison.”

“Oh,” I said slowly, realization dawning. Her father. That made sense. “What did she do?”

“Once Brynn realized Regan had feelings for her father, that she wanted to get to know him and have some sort of sustained relationship, she sent pictures of a young Regan to the man who’d been convicted of stalking children, replacing Regan’s introductory letter with a love note she’d penned herself.” Gregor’s mouth twisted in distaste, and he must have tensed because Sheila squirmed in his grip. “When he responded with a letter more suitable for a lover than a daughter, Brynn simply told Regan there was no such thing as pure love. It was a weakness, one that always came with strings attached.”

“Why would you do that to your own daughter?” I mean, Shadow agent aside, wouldn’t any mother want to protect her daughter from that sort of flattening disappointment?

“I asked her, you know.” He nodded vigorously at my surprised expression. “I did. Right before I killed her. She said, ‘You agents of Light worship the idea of love, but we Shadows kill anything we feel the slightest affection for.’”

“She loved him?”

He nodded. “She said she did. And he loved the church…could’ve loved Regan. One thing Brynn couldn’t ever abide was competition.”

I remembered that; Regan taunting me over defending my lover, saying bad habits were hard to break. Brynn had certainly succeeded in her quest to twist her lover, and her daughter. And now Regan was using my first love against me. “Effective,” I murmured darkly, but strangely not feeling a bit sorry for Regan. Go figure.

Gregor looked at me sharply.

“I didn’t say it was right,” I said, fingering the palm-sized frame I’d dropped in my pocket, “just effective.”

And it confirmed something I’d already suspected. If there was something Regan couldn’t have-a place in her birth father’s life, a love to share that life with-then she wasn’t going to let anyone else have it either.

“Do you have a rash?”

“Oh, yeah.” I glanced down. The skin above my V-neck T-shirt was red to the point of being raw. I must have been scratching it for a while now. “I might.”

He glanced at my chest where the doppelgänger had swiped at me, moving his eyes along the rest of my torso, pausing at my left arm where even I hadn’t noticed red bumps popping up over a new, and still sensitive, scar. “It’s spreading. You should have Rena make a salve for it,” he said, then grinned and imbued his tone with motherly censure. “‘I swear, sometimes you full-fledged star signs are worse than my initiates.’”

I grinned back. It sounded just like her.

But our levity dropped away when we reached the briefing room, where it was immediately clear there’d be no meeting today.

Tekla was there, but she didn’t note my arrival, nor did the others surrounding her. She was prone on the floor, and at first I thought she was crying, but then I saw she was only there for support. A keening rose from the circle, the bubble of people shifted as one, and I caught sight of Kimber, sobbing and splayed on the floor like a broken doll. The animist’s mask was lying on the ground beside her.

“I wanted to see my fate again…” Kimber was saying as Micah held her. Vanessa stroked her hair. “I didn’t think it would attack me. I didn’t know her ill chi lives in the mask…”

The her in question backed out of the room unseen and unsensed, ears roaring with blood while everyone else’s horrified attention remained fixed on Kimber. Even Gregor seemed to have forgotten me, and I placed his coffee on the ground outside the door before I ran.

My mind ticked with possible routes of escape: boneyard, cantina, locker room, other reality…no, no, no, no! Thankfully my movements were as rote as my thoughts, and I turned automatically to my sanctuary within the sanctuary.

Throwing open the door to the sparse, utilitarian room, I tossed my messenger bag on the large platform bed, but remained standing, palms to eyes, emptiness pressing in around me. I’d added little of myself to the room, choosing instead to leave it as it was when my mother lived here. The walls were white, relieved only by chunky end tables and floating mahogany wall shelves. Granted, there wasn’t enough room to do much more, but I could have added color in the form of a painting or photos or a rug overlaying the concrete floor. I could have added life in the form of a plant or a vase of flowers or mementos that would’ve truly made it mine, and I didn’t need a psychologist to tell me why I didn’t. The clothes I left hanging perfectly spaced in the closet-clothes not mine-told me I was in a holding pattern, a moratorium, waiting, still hoping she would come back.

“She’s not going to rescue you, Joanna,” I muttered darkly to myself as I rubbed a hand over my face, then jerked it away as I thought of the mask in the dojo. Rescuing wasn’t what I needed anyway. Tough love, the kind my Krav Maga instructor, Asaf, had used to bring me back from the walking dead, was more effective. Yet all I had was self-love, and a tenuous thread too. But I could fake tough. I could be my own trainer and mentor, wear yet a different hat for the time it took to see a way out of this trouble. Again.

Rescue yourself.

Okay, I thought, opening my eyes. I would do that. I strode into the bathroom and leaned into the mirror, trying to see any difference than there’d been a month ago, before the third sign had been revealed. I didn’t feel like I had bad chi. No stiffness or soreness, no loss of equilibrium or sudden bouts of vertigo. And wouldn’t there at least be something to indicate some sort of imbalance? Maybe not physically, but if I was destined to, oh, say, kill my own mother, there’d be something to indicate the predisposition, right?

Then again, did the Shadow agents wake up with heartburn every morning just because they had the desire to exterminate the soul of humanity? Did humans who killed other human beings spend their days feeling like a walking meat suit, unable to process emotion unrelated to their violence? I had to at least concede the possibility that just because I didn’t feel it didn’t mean it wasn’t there. If anything, I’d learned how to strip past the layers of my multiple identities and get comfortable analyzing my own interpersonal neuroses.

So what about Kimber’s accusation, her injury? She said it was bad chi; the Tulpa had rescinded his offer to allow me to join his troop for the same reason. Even the doppelgänger, with her deadly focus on me, “the golden ring,” had said the spirit of the Kairos shouldn’t be shackled to a body with damaged chi.

I didn’t know. The only clear thing was that of all the problems plaguing me, the doppelgänger was public enemy number one. Get rid of her and I’d nullify the danger posed to everyone by the chaos brought on by her violent ruptures of the fabric of our world. But would that entail having to work with dear ol’ dad?

I had to admit, if anyone knew how to move seamlessly along different realities, it was the Tulpa. I’d seen him call someone to his side with nothing more than a thought; disembodied, he’d once assaulted me using nothing more than the windy torrent of his breath. He clearly knew how to access alternate planes, what was possible as well as what was limited. And even given all that, he thought he needed my help. But at what cost to myself?

Meanwhile, I still had to figure out what to do about dear, sweet, smells-like-a-carcass-marinating-in-a-putrid-swamp Rose. In the past few months Regan had manipulated my relationship with Ben, made me infect my allies with a deadly virus, had me chasing my enemies-and my own tail-and nearly cost me my place in the troop. I could be philosophical about all this if she’d done those things just because I was Light. If she’d just killed me…or tried to. But she hadn’t, which made this personal. She wanted more than my death, but what? And why?

Learn that, and I could anticipate her next move. For now I prioritized: doppelgänger, Regan, and then Tulpa. Eliminate these one by one, I thought, tapping the side of the sink, and surely my ill chi would take care of itself.