The Touch of Twilight

2

I was surprised, though I suppose I shouldn’t have been, to see the man as soon as I exited the bar. He was leaning against my black Porsche, dark eyes trained on me, and I sighed as I picked my way around the weeds and broken beer bottles scarring the dilapidated parking lot, gravel making little popping noises under my feet. Hunter Lorenzo, weapons master and fellow member of Zodiac troop 175, waited unmoving.

He normally wore tinted glasses when out about town, but had removed them in deference to the night. His hair was growing out-it was about the same length as Ben’s now-but he sported a five o’clock shadow, which meant, though it was Wednesday, it was his weekend free from his cover job in security at the Valhalla Casino. Though not overly groomed, he was impossibly good-looking, and if you didn’t know him, you might think he spent an hour in front of the mirror each morning.

Not that I should talk.

Not the same, I told myself as I flipped a curl over my shoulder. This silicone and self-tan and impossible blondeness hadn’t been my choice of urban camouflage. My sister’s appearance had been forced upon me.

“How long have you been here?” I asked as I came to a stop in front of him.

“Almost as long as you.”

I crossed my arms, looking up at him. “I almost got my ass kicked back there. Why didn’t you come in?”

He quirked one dark brow. “Because I don’t drink watered-down beer or date horses.”

I tilted my head. “You mean you ceased to have my back against one Shadow warrior-”

“And a bar full of twenty-first-century wannabe wranglers.”

“-just because you didn’t think you fit in?”

“I don’t fit in,” he said, wincing now. “Not unless I black out some teeth.”

“Snob.” He was joking, but I knew Hunter well enough to know his tastes ran to classical rather than country. In fact, in some ways I knew this man even better than the one I’d left inside that bar. Ben and I shared history, but Hunter and I had shared magic. We’d never sat down for a so-where-are-you-from? sort of discussion, but by once trading a soft-stream essence of breath tinged with a power known as the aureole, I’d seen into his soul.

We’d agreed to forget about this unearned intimacy, but that hadn’t prevented Hunter from popping up on my mental radar in bright, jarring blips. I knew he felt the same. I could sense when his thoughts snagged on me as well…and it was a knowledge that wanted to burrow through my body, take up warm residence somewhere between my belly and pelvic bone, and part my thighs. It wasn’t helping matters that Hunter seemed to be reconsidering our platonic pact, as evidenced by his appearance now. He’d been watching out for me as plainly as I’d been watching out for Ben.

“How’d you know they were going to be there?” he said, pushing from the car to stroll to the passenger’s side.

How’d you know I was going to be there? I wanted to say as I disengaged the alarm and climbed in. “I put a trace on Ben’s phone, surveillance software on his computer, and satellite on his house 24/7.” Olivia had been a self-taught computer genius, a skill set that’d been lost when I took over her identity. Fortunately, I had the resources of a casino heiress’s fortune at my disposal, and could buy as much information from her illicit contacts as I needed. The word in the underground was the hacker known as the Archer had gotten lazy, but the rumor was somewhat muted by great, flowing-and seemingly endless-stacks of green bills.

Hunter shot me an arched look as he shut the car door.

“What?” I asked defensively in the sudden, vacuumlike silence.

He tilted his head back, ostensibly to study the wide sky outside his window. “Have you ever stopped to think-”

“Not if I can help it,” I interrupted smartly, revving the engine. I already knew I wasn’t going to like the end of this rhetorical question.

“-that the fantasy of something, or someone, is often more vivid than the reality?”

“No,” I replied immediately, shifting into gear as I lifted my brows. “Have you?”

His mouth quirked, but he shrugged one shoulder so his black T-shirt stretched across his torso. “You could just let him go,” he said, his voice unexpectedly soft.

I looked at him like he’d grown a second skull. “Let the man I’ve loved since I was a teen be corrupted and tainted by one of the most evil beings in the Las Vegas valley?”

“Let the man you love,” he said, emphasizing the present tense, “make his own decisions.”

I turned back to face the road. That was the stupidest idea I’d ever heard.

Hunter was too close, watching me too carefully, and he smelled too damned good to be trapped in a car with a woman who had extrasensory perception. This wouldn’t normally be so unnerving-men looked closely at Olivia Archer all the time-but Hunter knew what tight emotions lived coiled beneath the Botox and boobs. He’d seen and, more importantly, felt the sharp nosedive my nature took whenever I truly lost my temper. Not only did he seem not to care, it appeared to interest him further. Twisted bastard.

“Look, you didn’t know me then,” I said, before he could offer me any more sage testosterone-driven advice. “And despite what you think, you don’t know me now. Ben does.”

And while attraction was one thing, true knowledge of a person was rare enough that it was still celebrated with elaborate ceremonies-a church, a woman in white, a walk down the aisle…and, in those instances, only one man waiting at the other end of it to receive her. One man was all I needed, wanted, or could handle.

Hunter sighed audibly beside me, and the accompanying scent was a lacy pattern of spice and smoke. “You really know nothing of a man’s reaction to spurned love, do you?”

“And you do?” I shot back.

“I’m an expert.”

The quiet rejoinder made me wish I’d said nothing, and I shifted uncomfortably. When your senses were so keen you could sharpen knives on them, when you could feel life pulsing from the plant life around you, and the heat retained in the concrete even after a winter’s day, the desire radiating from a person you were forever yoked to with magical power was like licking sunshine.

I’d be lying if I said a part of me didn’t want to incinerate myself in that fire, to see how far and deep the connection could go, and if a physical joining could compete with, or complete, the breath-stealing intimacy of shared souls. Another, stubborn part of me said that wasn’t fair. If I’d been allowed to share Ben’s thoughts, if pieces of his soul and psyche could’ve been caught and interwoven with mine, I knew I’d feel the same intensity-probably more-for him. Hunter and I had simply crossed a frontier that Ben could never reach.

We remained silent as I gunned it down Boulder Highway, swiveling onto the 95 without slowing to head downtown. The stench of Shadow activity was as easy to follow as if it was transmitted through my GPS, and though it’d been less than a year since my extrasensory abilities had fired to life, using them was as natural to me as moving from sleep into full consciousness.

“It’s not him, you know,” Hunter said, after a bit.

I thought about Ben, probably two-stepping with Regan right now, holding her in a light, practiced hold. I remembered the way his palms had molded to my own back, and could almost feel them there now. Mine first. Mine always. Always mine. “Yes it is,” I said sadly.

“That she wants, I mean,” Hunter said, and I glanced over to find him watching me with stark compassion. “It’s you. She wants to get inside your head and injure your heart, and you’re allowing it. She knows she’s getting to you.”

He was right. My weapon hand twitched even as I nodded. I fought regret for the opportunities I hadn’t taken. I should’ve killed her five months ago when she’d first approached me as a Shadow initiate, and said she wanted to “help” me. I should’ve killed her once I discovered she knew who I was beneath the identity that was my safety and refuge and only remaining link to my dead sister. I should’ve slain her before she targeted my lover, using him to get to me. What I’d done instead was barter her life in exchange for information about the one person who, at the time, I’d have done anything to kill.

But he was dead now, and with nothing left to haggle with, Regan soon would be too. I swore it.

“Something else is causing the vibrational outbursts,” I said, changing the subject as we took the off-ramp down Casino Center Drive.

“Something else?” he asked, and I told him what Regan had said in the bathroom. Yet there wasn’t anything else in the paranormal realm-there were Shadows, there were Light, and that was it-and Hunter said as much as we veered north. I shrugged, unable to answer, knowing only that Regan’s surprise, and ultimate relief, had been real. Maybe Warren would know more when we found him.

I pulled to a stop in front of a street-side meter and switched from my impractical heels into a pair of black canvas boots with silent rubber soles, Velcro securing them tightly about my ankles. I’d have liked to change out of my black skirt and silk top, but there wasn’t time, so I locked everything but my conduit in the car, then took the lead on foot. I’d been a freelance photographer before my metamorphosis into a superhero, and had logged more hours on Vegas’s back streets than any other agent.

We slipped past the four-block stretch still remembered by locals as Glitter Gulch. Though having undergone an extensive facelift-including a canopy of light, a name change, and an exodus of most elements of urban decay-the Gulch would always be grittier and more infamous than its temptress sister, the Strip, and for that I was pleased. Long live the ninety-nine-cent shrimp cocktail.

For now, we strained to see beyond the canopy of neon and into the scarred landscape of an in-fill site, the still developing Union Park. The city had bought the railroad land that’d been Las Vegas’s original link to the rest of the world, and while the ambitious multi-use development promised to revitalize this historic urban center, right now it was a sixty-one-acre cross-hatching of cranes and gigantic mounds of earth. And a stark black void had opened up directly above the skeleton of one promising high-rise hotel and casino. I didn’t say anything about our new beard being located at what seemed to be the center of all that opaque darkness because Hunter’s stiffening posture told me he was thinking the same.

A beard was a mortal who acted as a front for troop activities. Beards-or goats, as the Shadows referred to them-were given gifts, usually monetary, in exchange for allowing us to own their lives. Most thought we were a new crime organization, while others were sure we were government special ops. Interesting that there didn’t seem to be any perceptible difference. Naturally, some beards figured out the truth and ran to the press with fantastic stories about superheroes and monsters battling for the soul of the city, but the stories never ran. When you had your thumb on the pulse of the entire valley, it was easy to intercept one frantic, babbling mortal.

The Shadows, of course, had no qualms about torturing and killing our human allies in an effort to ferret out our secrets, and seeing this unidentifiable black cloud so close to one of our beards’ outposts worried me. Meanwhile, they flaunted their allies, knowing we wouldn’t harm them. The most notorious of them? The man I’d once believed was my father, the seemingly untouchable casino magnate, Xavier Archer. I had to admit, the first time I’d heard the term goat, I’d laughed. The thought of a heavyset, thick-jowled billy goat wearing Armani cracked me up.

But I wasn’t laughing as we slipped past the construction fence into the old rail yard. The black cavity above the steel scaffolding appeared even denser as we advanced into the construction zone. Even the sky looked dry-erased around and above its field. Yet the structure below appeared sound, and more, the explosive particles that tasted like microscopic tin arrows on my tongue seemed to be drawing closer, pinging off one another with each breath, as if desperate to re-form whatever object had been obliterated. I doubted anyone inside that bubble of darkness could see a foot in either direction, but I covered my face with my mask anyway. I wanted my Olivia identity protected in the event that the particle-charged sac burst.

“You sure this is it?” I asked Hunter when he halted in front of one of a dozen construction trailers circling the shell of the high-rise. It was hard to tell one nondescript building from another in the haze.

“I’m the one who set it up,” Hunter replied coolly, angling his head back at the giant structure. “I did the research, scouted the location, picked our man, set him up as foreman. He’s in charge of this project in the day, and at night maintains visual surveillance of the entire downtown area from the top floor of that structure. His name’s Vincent Moore.”

Gone was the man whose deep gaze and subtle flirtation had made me squirm. Equally absent was the one who’d taken cheap shots at the urban cowboys. In front of me stood our troop’s weapons master, the man who lived and breathed hand combat, weaponeering, and all the arts of martial command that so perfectly aligned with an Aries’ natural physicality.

Physical talents aside, however, Hunter’s greatest weapon was his mind. Ever the tactician, he was constantly assessing and planning, and was more at home in a combat situation than in a La-Z-Boy. Like a general marshaling his forces, he called on everyone to be their best, and if you fell short-and I had on occasion-the silent rebuke was deafening. In short, Hunter was the hero we all wanted to be.

“So then where’s the top floor?” I said, straining to see any sign of life in the pitch-topped tower. Now that we were closer, I could make out filmy veils of ionized air draping to the ground from the thick nucleus in the blackened sky. They were like black flags hung up to dry in uneven layers from the top of the two-hundred-foot scaffolding.

“It was blown to smithereens about ten minutes ago.”

We turned to find a filthy, greasy, soured, and tattered man approaching. His hair was matted with dreadlocks, and an authentic limp had him swishing and swaying in horror movie mode. “I can’t see him,” I told Hunter, “but boy can I smell him.”

Our troop leader stepped closer and his features sharpened, as if drawn by a coal pencil. His sun-slammed skin was muted in the dark, but brown eyes pinpointed us in beady assessment. He was dressed in secondhand fatigues and a tattered trench coat, his standard vagrant guise, and one that’d served him well. Mortals found him too frightening to approach, and the Shadows found him too repulsive to scrutinize. “Better?”

“Not particularly,” I said, eyes watering. Olfactory acuteness was both a blessing and a curse.

“It’s about to get worse,” he said, motioning us away from the base of the building. Sharing a confused glance, Hunter and I followed.

“I’m assuming you mean the haze,” Hunter said, as we sped up. Warren’s leg injury had done nothing to slow him down. If so, he’d never have ascended to troop leader, much less remained there.

“And the situation. Our contact was up there just before the corporeal explosion. Top three stories fell like hotcakes. Indication is they have him imprisoned on the same level used to gain access.”

We all glanced up, then diagonally to the crane that any enterprising Shadow could traverse. And they were all that. Shit.

“How many?” Hunter asked, meaning Shadows.

“At least four from the way they’ve managed to secure all lower-level passages. But my guess is more than half a dozen.” Warren smiled then, and I had to shiver a little. The look was off-center, brittle, slightly whacked, and thin. Don’t get me wrong, Warren was one of the good guys, but he was the leader of a troop of paranormal beings who got off on this sort of situation.

“An ambush then.”

“Their largest yet.”

The troop charged with the paranormal security and safety of the Las Vegas valley was huddled beneath an isolated hydraulic crane. The sheets of destroyed wave matter, presumably fallout from the explosion, hung around them in tatters on every side. In the right-hand corner we had a doctor, a reporter, an oversexed college student, and a reclusive psychic. In the left-hand corner there were a dental student, a taxi driver, and a high school teacher. They all turned as one to watch as a bum, a security guard, and a socialite joined to create the whole of Zodiac troop 175.

Or what remained of it, I thought wryly. The Zodiac chart had twelve signs, but our Pisces star sign had been murdered last year after our troop had been infiltrated by a mole working for the Shadows. Our Libra, I thought, with guilt, had died only last month. Their star signs had yet to be filled.

“Movement, Felix?” Warren asked, falling in beside him.

Felix jerked his head in the opposite direction of our approach. “I saw the Shadows’ Gemini. She was headed to the top of the crane.”

“Sure it was her?”

“Only Dawn can wear a leather corset and still manage to look that sweet.”

“Yes, she’s so sweet,” Vanessa said acerbically. Her hair was pulled back in a haphazard knot, soft curls escaping to frame her honeyed face, and she’d thrown on a mask similar to mine in style, because her reporter’s profile might be high enough to get her noticed by the Shadows. “I almost never want to put a foot through her chest cavity.”

“Violent,” commented Felix, brow quirked.

“Only when I see her.”

“You mean smell her,” said Riddick, wrinkling his nose as he sorted through his set of oversized carvers and picks, deciding at last on a palm-length bar with double-sided hooks. Hunter had designed the set especially for him, as he did all our weapons. Fitting for a dentist, I thought. His was the only weaponry that gave me the heebie-jeebies.

“Did she see you, Felix?” asked Warren, steering us back on track.

Felix shook his head, and his hair fell over his forehead. He was older than me by a few years, but had the look of a college freshman, and his smile attracted coeds like bees to honey. He enjoyed his cover more than any of us. “Don’t think so. But they’ve gotta know we’re coming.”

We always came when mortal lives were threatened.

“All right, here’s the plan.”

As Warren outlined our attack formation, I glanced at Hunter and waited. Feeling my gaze on him, he shook his head imperceptibly, so I returned my attention to the grouping of our combat positions. I’d asked if we should tell Warren about Regan’s reaction to the initial blast, and that the Shadows hadn’t been responsible for the plague of explosions upsetting the vibrational matter of this reality prior to now. He was telling me to wait; this particular event was the work of the Shadows, and it was all we needed to occupy our minds now.

I agreed. Though new to the troop, I was no longer the least experienced star sign. Jewell and Riddick had joined the ranks after me, and though they’d been raised in the troop’s sanctuary, trial by fire inspired martial proficiency in a way a textbook couldn’t.

Plus Jewell hadn’t initially been tagged for the Gemini sign. Her sister too had died last year, and she’d unexpectedly inherited the post, like Riddick. A teacher by day, she turned into the quintessential Vegas party girl at night. The Shadows, we thought, wouldn’t look too closely at the girl walking around with stamps marring the back of her hand. As for Riddick…he was exceedingly fond of those dental tools. I shuddered again.

Warren finished explaining our groupings: three tight triangular formations staggered and designed to interlock if we had to fall back to defend. Warren would go first, leading point, and his voice was clipped and strong as he told us to “fucking focus,” before disappearing.

We palmed, primed, and honed our weapons in silence until Felix said, “I can fuck and focus at the same time.”

Jewell laughed as she disappeared to back Hunter and Riddick, but Vanessa and I traded eye rolls. From somewhere in the haze to our right came Tekla’s caustic reply.

“We’re all well aware of your sexual prowess, Felix. And that you wake every dawn in a different bed.”

“Hey, I’m like a good breakfast cereal,” he called back to our Seer, causing Micah and Gregor to shush him. He whispered, “I help the ladies get going in the morning.”

“Snap, crackle, flop.”

I snorted as we headed out. “Speaking from personal experience, Vanessa?”

“Not in this reality,” she scoffed, and when she saw me glance her way, quickly added, “Or any other.”

Hunter’s voice bloomed to the left of me. “Hey noob, keep that tooth hook away from me.”

“Sorry,” came Riddick’s reply. “The gas in the air is disorienting.”

“Just another day at the office,” said Felix, but even he sounded muted. I suddenly noticed they’d all fallen back. Realizing I was leading a flanged assault with no backup, I immediately backpedaled.

“That’s not cool, you guys. You didn’t-”

I was going to say they hadn’t given me a warning to pull back, but that’s when I realized they were all moving in slow motion, their limbs wheeling forward as if swimming in Jell-O, straining with the effort. Hunter was trying to motion them back, but it was taking too long. I did it for him, then dragged Vanessa backward until I felt a second gravity field release around her body. A coincidence that the gaseous sheets lessened upon retreat? I think not.

I’d managed to pull Riddick from the smoky quagmire before the other teams reached our rendezvous point.

“The air’s too heavy. It’s like breathing in foam,” Micah said, gasping. At nearly seven feet tall, he was by far the largest member of our troop, and seemed to be having the most difficult time breathing, though everyone was panting hard. Everyone, that was, but me.

“I can see well enough,” Tekla said, bending over so her thin frame was almost hidden in her soft gray salwar-kamiz. “But I can only go so far before it feels like I’m being smothered.”

I looked at the others, and they each nodded. So we huddled in silence until Warren popped up next to Tekla, his footsteps muffled in the heavy air.

“The air repel you too?” Gregor asked him, as Hunter and Micah swiveled to guard our perimeter, close enough to hear our words. Warren nodded, rubbing at red-rimmed eyes, and I realized that was exactly the smoke’s purpose. We weren’t meant to reach the center, our beard, or the detonation’s origin.

Back against mine, Micah broke into a hacking cough. Alarmed, I put my hand on his great shoulder, and he spat on the ground at our feet. It was black. “Shit. This stuff is toxic.”

Warren straightened. “Let’s try it again together. I think it’s just a wall, and not one thick enough to be sustained for any depth.”

I glanced back up at the tight black nucleus sitting atop the fractured building and bit my lip.

“One large phalanx might breach it, especially if we focus our energies on a sole entry point. So on my count. Go.”

We marched like Spartans…for a few feet. Then the others slowed, molasses-limbed, eyes bulging along with their lungs. Despite the foreign environment, I was breathing easily. So while the smothered coughs and gasps continued to vibrate feebly at my back, I faced the heart of the smothering sheets and drew in a deep breath. Blackness sank past the porous barrier of my skin, filling my muscles, replacing the water hydrating them with a density that made me feel like an outcropping from the earth itself. I was granite, with petrified veins and a solid heart that didn’t need oxygen because it didn’t need to beat. The air coated my tongue like wet ash, lining my throat until my not-breathing allowed it to harden and bake in my marrow. The others-still filmy, floating, fleshy beings-fell behind.

I caught Warren’s gaze, his eyes large and white above the coat sleeve covering his mouth. He motioned me back with his head, an achingly slow movement, and one I could see pained him. We fell back, and I waited until they all recovered. This time it took minutes.

“We have to pull out,” Warren said, sucking in great mouthfuls of breath. “Get masks and breathing apparatuses of some sort.”

Masks would crumble like wadded paper under the weight of this concrete matter, I thought, rubbing an arm that felt like marble beneath my touch. I told Warren this, and what the air felt like inside me as best I could, adding, “The Shadows will make it impossible to clean up if we wait much longer.”

There was a grace period before the mortal world recognized paranormal influence, almost like the interference had time sliding off its tracks so that it needed to stop, back up, and redirect. This period was less than twelve hours, and we could usually clear up whatever mess the Shadows had made before then. After that, time stitched the veil between our two worlds into a new tapestry, and the best we could do was cover it up with excuses and reasonable explanations, and make sure as few humans were affected as possible.

“I’ll go,” I said quickly. “If you guys cover the perimeter I can make it to the center.”

I took a testing step backward into the curtained mire, and Warren’s eyes widened. I dodged even before he reached for me, because if I waited until I saw him move, it’d be too late.

“Dammit, Olivia! There’s too many of them.”

“Warren, listen to me.” I was only a few feet away, but utterly alone in the heavy air. My voice sounded leaden, and I knew the rest of the troop was hearing it seconds after I actually spoke. “Micah’s right. It is toxic, but not for me. I promise I won’t take any unnecessary risks, and if there’s even a chance of being ganged up on, I’ll turn tail immediately.”

There was silence in the lag time, and then I could hear Micah reasoning it out. “It’s a power that shouldn’t be denied.”

What he meant was that it was all right for me to use the power of the Shadow side as long as it benefited us. Tricky argument…and one that’d been a sticking point within the troop ever since my emergence.

“Listen to my voice,” I added, knowing a part of what was motivating me was a need to prove myself. Still. “I can be up and back with our guy before they even know I’m there.”

Because if we hadn’t known I could do this, they wouldn’t either. I was that unpredictable, that new. More silence, this time a full minute passing before I heard a resigned sigh. I’d begun feeling cut off in a rich web of oil, and was surprised to find the weight heavy and comfortable, almost peaceful.

“You retreat if even one of them spots you,” came Warren’s reluctant orders. “Use your intuition-don’t wait for your glyph to begin glowing before heading back.”

“I swear it,” I said, not reminding him that my glyph-drawn in comic books as a large letter or symbol on a character’s chest-might start smoking instead. Yes, I was both Shadow and Light. My troop, even my leader, could often ignore the implications of that. I was finding more and more that I could not.

“And if I pick up a manual next week to find you’ve done any different, I’ll save the Tulpa the trouble and kill you myself.”

Surely that was hyperbole, so I nodded as I silently headed back into the swirling fog. Besides, manuals-and the activity they reported in such bright and meticulous detail-were the least of my worries.

I lowered into a crouch, preparing to charge the base of the tower crane. The lack of air was blunting my senses. I could see as I vaulted off the concrete pad and onto the crane’s mast, but it was with a mortal’s gaze, and tasting the air was impossible with a leaden tongue. Sound was stamped out under the heavy black boot of this particular mushroom cloud, but so was scent. My pace on the crane’s mast faltered when I realized how vulnerable all this made me.

But the Shadows were laboring under the same circumstances, right? I hit the top of the mast and began to make my way across the crane’s long arm. I couldn’t help but wonder if my Light side would make me slower or less able than them. Yet it hadn’t so far. Indeed, my dual sides seemed to fuel each other, and why not? I was the Kairos, the only one who’d ever been both, and could draw on powers no one else could. So then why were nerves winging themselves around in my gut like butterflies trapped in netting?

I patted the extra crossbow bolts I’d clipped to my waist, pulled my conduit so I was holding it upright, and continued to climb.