The Touch Of Twilight

To my grandmother, Eva Mattingly.

Thank you for unconditional support,

ceaseless prayers…and for saying

I remind you of you.

In the time elapsed since the release of my first book, the audience that once existed solely in my mind has solidified into an enthusiastic core of readers, utterly surpassing my ideal.

Specific thanks go to Joy Maiorana and Shada Adrianna for reaching out to me on message boards and allowing me to steal character names, and to Kim Castillo, who single-handedly kept this from being poorly titled
Book Three
. Of course, the series wouldn’t exist at all if not for my exceptional agent, Miriam Kriss, and the enthusiasm, hard work, and dedication of my outstanding editor, Diana Gill. Emily Krump and Jack Womack have been on my side from day one, and Tom Egner’s vision continues to astound me. Thank you all.

There are others in the Harper family who’ve made me feel right at home, but names must naturally be omitted to protect the guilty (Rhonda Rose, Mark Landau, Donna Waitkus). Thanks always to Suzanne Frank—my partner-in-crime and literary BFF—the
KWC
girls, and continued gratitude to my husband, Roger, who remains my reason in All Things Good.

The country-western bar rocked on its pilings with music and conversation, laughter and line dances—and an obscene number of ten-gallon hats—all competing with the glint of the club’s lights to obscure my sightline. It didn’t matter. The scent of the Shadow alone was enough to alert me to her presence. Even the sweaty masses, with their perfumes and deodorants and soaps, could do nothing to mask the pungent rot of a demon masquerading as a human being.

A cigarette flared on the lips of a man to my left as I slipped smoothly across the straw-strewn dance floor, squeezing the grip on my crossbow through the open zipper of my designer clutch. Raucous laughter erupted ahead and to my right as bellies filled with the Jell-O shots that would eventually be blamed for this night’s folly. The band rocked hard in front of a plate-glass window suspended beneath a slanted rooftop, and the lights of the Las Vegas Strip sparkled enticingly in the distance.

My awareness of all this was cursory. Acridness was building in the back of my throat, and the tang of soured skin made me wince as I neared the bathroom door, but I held my breath once there, stilled my movements, and steeled myself for battle. Regan—Shadow agent, astrological Cancer of our enemy Zodiac troop, and would-be rival for my true love’s affections—possessed hearing so sharp she could make out wings beating in the air. She could taste unbridled emotion as if sipping from a cup, and given the chance, she could scent me too.

My nostrils flared as I breathed in deeply, and it was there…the petal-soft top note of singed roses powdering the air, just shy of cloying. The heart note like milk so recently gone sour a dulled palate wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

The base note of slick, hot vomit.

With aching slowness, I gripped my conduit in front of me, slipped off my kitten heels, then lowered my chin and widened my stance.

You are the Kairos, the fulcrum upon which hinges the paranormal battle between good and evil. Your every action is loaded with meaning, charged with energy, and linked to your legacy.

My troop leader’s reminder fired like a rocket through my mind, and I shot back a mental rejoinder as I kicked open the door with a splintering crack.

How’s this for action?

But the sitting area was empty, and I immediately sidestepped my way to the cluster of stalls, stopping short when something sharp and unnaturally shiny caught my attention. An ice pick lay angled across the vanity, projecting homicidal intent as clearly as a chalk outline. I recognized it as Regan’s conduit, her paranormal weapon, the only thing that could truly destroy one of
us
. A blow from an enemy’s conduit would slay you, and a conduit turned against its own controller would erase their existence so completely, they were scrubbed from supernatural history. Not even a footnote left to speak to their existence. And Regan’s was lying right there in the open.

Stupid bitch.
I took a step toward it.

“I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

I whirled toward the stalls in time to watch a slim, delicate, and deadly hand appear. It held one of the tiny, teasing devices I’d found littering my ex’s modest tract home. It was the reason I’d come here to kill.

Lowering my own conduit, I stepped down. One mean twitch of her thumb, and a man would be blown to bits just outside these doors.
My
man.

“Come on,
superhero
,” Regan taunted, coming into full view. “Show me your scariest super face.”

Though expected, Regan’s appearance always startled me. Her dark bob was exactly chin length, as if she’d measured it with a ruler while cutting it, and hadn’t let it grow a centimeter since. Her build was more compact than when we’d first met, but then mine used to be as well, and that’s what jolted me. That’s who she’d been designed to imitate. Me. Before I’d been turned into a white-hot, slick-curved, brick-house blonde.

“Where is it?” My voice had turned unnaturally raspy for a woman. It happened when I was extremely pissed.

“His watch.” She shrugged, watching me carefully, eyes lingering on my bare feet. “I told him I could get a great deal on a
TAG
Heuer. He loves it.”

She sauntered across the powder room to perch herself on a stool designed like a mini-sawhorse, still holding the detonator aloft. I smirked as, one-handed, she began putting on lipstick in a shade I used to favor. Cute. She’d taken the blueprint of my former features—the way I wore my hair, the skin tone, and eyes—twisting the details in small ways to make them her own. The clothes she wore were still conservative, if a tad tighter than mine had been, and her jewelry was more dramatic, playing off deceptively delicate features.

Regan’s beauty regimen, and her near-pathological need to test me, had her slyly setting the detonator down and whipping out a simple black compact. Not trusting that this too wasn’t a detonator in disguise, I only watched as she used a cut sponge to reapply cover-up to a scar below her left ear. I wasn’t privy to how she’d gotten that one, but I knew Vanessa had nearly caught her three weeks ago with her hinge-bladed fan, and sure enough, Regan lifted her shirt to reveal the still-angry scores above her waist.

Unlike wounds from mortal weapons, conduits always left scars…again, if we survived them at all. Ordinarily one had to work to conceal the raised scars, but this concealer went on smoothly and the scar vanished, leaving her belly flawless in its mirrored reflection. Whoever had mixed the compound, I admitted grudgingly, had known what they were doing.

“Isn’t Ben even a little curious as to why his sweet ‘Rose’ has so many scars?” I asked acerbically. Now that my immediate plans for murder, mayhem, and revenge had been foiled, I decided to keep her talking until I came up with a plan B.

“Benny-boy sees what I want him to,” she retorted, perching herself on the counter, feet on the sawhorse as she dabbed at her right calf. “You should get your lab rats to engineer a compound like this. Isn’t it wonderful? Close to your coloring too.”

I narrowed my eyes. It was
exactly
my coloring. The Shadow surgeon who’d turned her into a younger, stinkier version of the old me hadn’t skipped any corners.

“So, am I doing a good approximation of you, Archer?” Since we were alone, she used my title—my sign on the Western Zodiac—openly.

“Please. You’re merely poaching.” I said, mindful of the device next to her as I watched her apply the makeup. It
would
be useful to have some of that for the mark on my chest. My glyph had burned me from the inside when I’d been captured in an underground cavern last month, and it still hadn’t quite faded. Regan had been responsible for that Kodak moment too. “Hurt him and I’ll finish the lobotomy your mother so clearly fucked up.”

Regan stiffened; star signs and conduits were passed down via the matriarchal line. Regan’s mother, Brynn DuPree, had indeed been fond of performing psychosurgery on known enemies with her ice pick…with an emphasis on the psycho. But, after a moment, Regan just continued smoothing on the concealer. “I can’t hurt Ben any more than you already have.”

Liar, liar
. “Let me put it this way, then. If he even comes down with a cold, I’ll punch so many holes through your body, it won’t hold embalming fluid.”

This time she paused in her dabbing, tilting her head my way. “But then Benny-boy would be suspicious, wouldn’t he?” A theatrical sigh. “Not to mention brokenhearted.”

“You flatter yourself.”

“And you kid yourself.” Her voice was harder now, lower and rasping like mine. She snapped her compact shut and dropped it on the counter, then picked up the detonator again, flipping it lazily in her hand. “You’re going to lose him. It’s only a matter of time.”

“Is this where I get to say, ‘To you and what army’?”

“You know what army. After all, you’re a member.”

I shook my head. “I’m only half Shadow.”

“And I bet that wakes you up at night,” she said, pushing off from the counter to stand. I couldn’t let her at my back, so I turned and we squared against each other in the center of the room. “It’s what drives you from your bed in the morning, and makes you want to carve your presence in this world. You want to step up and be someone. Leave a mark so that future generations remember your name.”

She ascribed the ambitions to me, but the detail made me think she was talking about herself. Interesting. “I hate to tell you this, sweetie, but they’re already going to remember my name.”

“You sound like your father.”

“Don’t—”

“—call him that, I know.” She rolled her eyes. “Get over it already. I’ve seen you in action,
Joanna
. I see the brutality that lives in your eyes when you look at me. You can’t tell me you’ve never had a baser impulse. That you’ve never laughed when someone else took a tumble. Wished a person who blew by you in the fast lane would overcorrect an inch. Or that you’ve never seen a pedestrian on Las Vegas Boulevard and just wanted to
swerve
?” I opened my mouth to say,
No, I hadn’t
, but she cut me off by holding up a hand. “I know you, and I don’t just mean who you are beneath the gloss and the polish and the tits. I know
you
.”

She knew my weaknesses, at least. It was how she’d tricked me before. But…

“If you really knew me, you’d walk away from Ben now.”

“And speaking of,” she sang, clasping her hands together like a schoolgirl, “you should check out some of his e-journals. Such a good record keeper, our little aspiring writer. There’s some interesting reading there.” She studied my carefully blank look, and laughed when the silence grew long. “Oh yes, I know you’ve bugged his computer. But if you’d read those entries, I doubt you’d be here. They’re part confessional, part penitence. You might be particularly interested in his actions involving a dead drug lord last summer in an urban cage known as Dog Run.”

Even the magic of overpriced makeup must not have been enough to hide my face draining of color, because Regan’s grin widened like it’d been cleaved.

“Or the fate of a young boy named Charles Tracy. Remember him?”

I hadn’t heard that name in years. Tracy had been a schoolyard bully who’d specialized in wedgies for the younger boys and used pudgy fingers to feel up any unfortunate girl in a skirt. Ben and I had ganged up on him at school, using the power of persuasion and our fists to make him stop. He’d dropped out of school altogether in junior high, and I hadn’t thought of him since.

“I’m not interested in the lies you’ve planted in his journals,” I told her shortly. She might have an advantage over me, but she had no right to touch on my past. “Or some fabricated story about a kid I haven’t seen in over a decade.”

“Aw, how sweet. Defending your one true love. Bad habits really are hard to break.”

The need to amputate her smile welled, and I took a step forward before I could stop it. “You mean bad habits like planting bombs around
my
lover’s house…ones you’re going to remove before anyone even thinks of making them go bang.”

She shrugged and pretended to study her nails. They were polished, but clear, as I’d have worn them. Another visual cue for Ben’s subconscious to latch on to.

“Those bombs,” she said evenly, “are less destructive than the anger and betrayal you planted by abandoning him twice. Do you have any idea how easy it’s been to water that particular emotional seed? As much fun as my mother said it could be.”

And Brynn DuPree had been a model Shadow agent.

“All it would take is one visit from me in my old skin, and you’d be nothing but a distant memory.” Over Regan’s shoulder I saw my reflection take another menacing step forward. It looked like someone else altogether; Olivia’s bright, bouncy features had sharpened like they’d been whittled into angry points, the butter-soft flesh a delicate cocoon for the skeletal darkness threatening to burst forth. Welcome to my fucked-up dual existence.