The Touch of Twilight

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 defining 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.

Ben interrupted my thoughts, his sigh suffused with such contentment, a sharp pang squeezed an extra beat from my heart. “I bet she protects the smaller kids on the playground. Just like Jo and I did.”

I’d told him that Jo was away on business, but that she’d wanted me to show him this. She’d wanted him to know.

“You can’t know that,” I said softly, thinking of schoolyard bullies, thinking again of Ben’s way of dealing with them. “You can never really know what’s going on inside a person.”

“‘Who knows most, doubts most,’” he quoted before smiling fondly at me. Of course, he didn’t expect Olivia to know Browning. “But we don’t have to worry about that, do we? Jo and I are going to make a go of this, and somehow, deep down, I always knew it. Because I’ve always known her.”

It was the wrong thing to say.

I shut my eyes at the moment of impact, so that the image that would forever linger was his misplaced serenity. But the sound of my blow connecting with the side of his head still shocked through me. I caught him as he crumpled at my feet.

Gently, I lowered his head to the cool, dusk-damp grass behind the imagined walls still shielding us from sight, and whispered, “I love you, Ben.”

But love came with a price. The cost was knowing one woman’s touch from another’s. It meant searching your heart so an impostor could never insinuate herself into your life, much less your body. Maybe a part of me continued to be piqued that he’d known I was alive, and had still gone out with “Rose” to spite me, the supposed great love of his life. In a way, he’d left me again, as he had the first time, unable or unwilling to trust and understand that I had reasons for my actions. But more than anything, after the years and the emotion and the heartache that had piled up between us, I was tired and burned out. My words, that quote, were the most honest thing I could say to him…but not without adding, “But you should have known…and you didn’t.”

Hunter had been right about that. Right enough that I’d also begun to question the other theory he’d so desperately put forward…that I wouldn’t have ever let Regan near Ben if I’d really loved him.

“I do love you,” I repeated, as if he’d heard the thought and I had to argue against it. “But no matter what’s going on inside of me-this war of Shadow and Light-some things just need to be a little more black and white.”

I packed him up in the Porsche then, and drove to the Bonanza underpass, where I’d asked Warren to meet me. As I pulled to a stop along a clearing next to the Art Deco bridge, I saw Micah and Gregor exchanging looks. They scented the mortal. They said nothing as they lifted Ben from the car and loaded him into the back of Gregor’s cab. It was fast, less than thirty seconds. He was with me, then he was not, and I was left staring blindly in the direction the cab had sped off.

“I didn’t give up on him, you know,” I told Warren, as he came to stand beside me.

He put a hand on my shoulder as cars raced beneath the underpass, engines both hollow and loud, exhaust choking me and making my eyes water. “I know.”

I turned to find him watching me with a kind sadness, like he really did understand the final act in a long goodbye. “He’s a good man. He just needs to remember it.”

Which could only happen if he forgot the rest-a man named Magnum, a woman named Rose. A girlfriend who was also a superhero. I knew now that mortals had no place in our world. One disturbing conversation with Regan’s father had taught me that.

So I wished goodness for Ben, so much so that I was willing to let Micah rewire large chunks of his memory and restructure his neural architecture so that Ben’s original personality could rise to the forefront of his mind. He wouldn’t be the boy I fell in love with, but he’d have a chance at becoming the man he would have been if horror and savagery hadn’t entered his life. And that’s who I wanted him to be. Unscathed. Unharmed.

An innocent.

“You knew it would come to this, didn’t you?” I whispered, swaying slightly in Ben’s wake, his sudden absence devastating, even though he was still alive. At least he had a better chance of staying that way now. “That’s why you didn’t pressure me.”

A half-dozen cars raced by before he answered. “I didn’t want you distracted.”

That made sense, I thought, turning to head back to my car parked on the shoulder, in the shadows. Then I paused, lifted my gaze from the concrete, and felt Warren hesitate behind me.

I whirled suddenly, not caring who saw it or what someone might make of Olivia Archer kicking the shit out of some homeless guy underneath a concrete bridge. But Warren blocked my fist, grinned apologetically, and blocked again.

“Joanna,” he chided, sounding disappointed with my predictability.

“How long have you known?” I said coolly.

“You mean what the doppelgänger was? What she wanted? Who was behind it?” He smiled, and I thought of hitting him again, but knew he’d be expecting it. “Since her appearance in the sanctuary for sure, but I suspected it as far back as our talk in the warehouse.”

Up in the crow’s nest, where he’d already been trying to convince me to release Ben.

“How? What tipped you off?” Why didn’t you tell me?

“For one, you couldn’t describe what she smelled like. Yet when we encountered her I realized she smelled exactly like you.” No agent could smell themselves. The inability was an evolutionary defense, though this time it’d been a liability. Warren went on, obviously relieved now that he could speak of it. “Then, in the sanctuary, she used a nickname on me that only Zoe had known. Once she fled I also realized she’d been less physically stable under the collective stares of the entire troop. She was morphing under our influence, which told me she didn’t leave because she was afraid of us, merely because she couldn’t become you in our presence. The Tulpa too has trouble materializing under the influence of multiple stares and expectations.”

I felt my face crumple with confusion. “And you didn’t help me?”

“It wasn’t my help that was needed.” The calmness in his voice didn’t transfer to me. Instead it infuriated me, driving home how at odds his personality was with his deceiving appearance. He looked like a have-not in a city built for the haves, and beneath that, a leader bowing to the wishes of his troop. But looking even deeper, I saw the craftiness accompanying his words, his every act. “I needed to stay out of your way. I cleared a path by ordering Chandra to let you go out alone, then I sent you out into the world so Zoe, or her creation, would continue to reach out to you.”

He sounded so fucking proud of it. “You used me as bait.”

“It was necessary to see if she’d contact you.”

Yes, but would you have let her eat my heart if it came down to that?

“It was ruthless.”

“She was getting desperate.”

And it was telling that he didn’t know I was speaking about him.

“What about the mask? Did you know what it could do as well?”

His pride, even his features, sank at that. “Of course not. I really thought we’d stolen that mask out from under his nose. The visions of victory seen by our troop while wearing it made me believe it was the tool allowing the Tulpa to anticipate and counteract so many of our actions.”

Our visions of victory?

What about my visions? Or didn’t I count because I was still part Shadow?

“You fucked up, Warren,” I said, wanting to be hurtful and harsh.

“Big time,” he freely admitted, which pissed me off all the more. I held my breath, bottled my emotion, and looked away.

And after a minute, I softened. I knew as well as anyone that we all acted from the information we had at the time. The thing that made us most like the mortals we sought to protect was that despite our abilities and powers, we could still only choose rightly, work blindly, and hope for the best. My own actions-seizing the kairotic moment-had required not the work of the body I’d honed for years in anticipation of physical battle, but faith, and the work of my soul.

But as for Warren…

“You let me keep Ben,” I said in a whisper, “merely so I wouldn’t be distracted.”

It meant he’d have taken Ben from me earlier if it wouldn’t have interfered with my focus on the doppelgänger.

“I bought Skamar time to form, to contact you, and gave you the opportunity to bring the third sign of the Zodiac to life. Of course that backfired a bit. The Tulpa couldn’t wait for you to act, so he began to draw on his mortal beards for more power in tracking and fighting the doppelgänger.”

“Like Xavier,” I said, remembering the thin frame on the giant man.

“How is Mr. Archer these days, anyway?”

I looked at him sharply. So he knew I’d gone to check. Warren always knew far more than he ever let on. Why hadn’t I kept that in mind?

“Better. Still an ass.” And undergoing his own metamorphosis. Xavier Archer appeared to be giving Howard Hughes a run for his reclusive billions. He wasn’t even leaving his house for meetings anymore. But I pushed that concern out of my mind. “He’s not my responsibility.”

“As much as any other mortal.”

I stared at the man who demanded so much of me, who pulled levers and pushed buttons behind emerald green curtains, and he shrugged. But it was true enough. I thought of Helen, a.k.a. Lindy Maguire, and knew I’d have to take care of Xavier’s pushy, bitchy, stank-ass housekeeper sooner rather than later. But it wouldn’t have anything to do with Xavier Archer’s well-being.

“Yes,” I said, taking my cue from him, deciding to hide a little more of what I was all about. “But no more.”

“No less.”

Despite Warren’s words, the urge to fight drained from me. Did I really have a right to be angry with him? I’d known he always put the good of the troop above that of the individual. I’d been lucky my desires had coincided with that thus far. God help me if they ever did not, I thought, and couldn’t contain my shiver as I watched him recline against the concrete hill, the duster of his coat flapping as cars and an errant gust from a far-off battle sped past. I was glad I hadn’t told him of Ashlyn’s existence.

I’d hate to go to war with you, Warren.

But I’d do it if he took one limping step near her.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I told him, turning again.

“Dawn or dusk?”

“Dusk.” Loneliness suddenly gored me, expelling breath from my gut, and as it passed through my chest, by my heart, I thought I felt a crack. I glanced back, knowing Warren had scented it, but he must have interpreted it, and my expression, as regret over losing Ben. He was beside me before I blinked.

“It’s the right thing,” he said, strong hand on my arm.

I shook off his touch and wrapped my arms around my middle in the encroaching night. I felt the sudden need to go somewhere safe, but we’d already missed the even splitting of this day’s light, so crossing into the sanctuary was out. Cher and her mother had only returned from Fiji the day before, but they weren’t too far from here. It’d be good to forget about supernatural politics for at least a little while. Perhaps it would even distract from the loss of Ben. No matter what, I had to get away from Warren.

“No,” I told him, turning my mind back to the image of Ben lying crumpled at my feet, second-guessing the wisdom in handing him over to Micah. He hadn’t looked like the man I’d wanted him to be, the one I’d been desperate to save and love and live the picket-fence, one-point-two-children, nine-to-five lifestyle with. Instead he’d looked like a cutout of himself, like the paper dolls I’d played with as a child, imposing the clothes and background and life I wanted them to have.

Had I become that already? I wondered, thinking of the last mortal I’d struck on the head. Since I was the primary benefactress of the head trauma unit, the hospital director had kept me apprised of Laura Crucier’s condition. She had emerged from her coma the previous weekend, and with time and patience and care, was expected to make a full recovery. I sighed in relief at that, though it still didn’t answer my question.

Was I really someone who so easily plucked others from their chosen existence because it suited my own needs? Someone who so quickly accepted it as my right just because I was stronger and could do so? Because that would mean I was like Warren, moving people around like pawns, though he did so with superheroes as well as mortal men.

“No.” I sighed again, the question still brightly unanswered in my mind. “But it’s the wrong thing for the right reason.”