The Touch Of Twilight (47 page)

“A mind can create life. You know that better than anyone, don’t you?” I said as the sky above paused to take a breath between rounds. The Tulpa looked a little less amused as thistles from the wall of fleshy giants corralled him into the center of the circle, a bleeding Zell edged in tightly behind him. “And, in some cases, two minds are better than one.”

The only reason he hesitated to blow the thorny barrier apart was because it would deplete the precious energy he’d been rebuilding to turn on me. His pinched expression betrayed his impatience, though, and I knew that when he finally did get free, there’d be no more chatting.

“Now where were we?” I hurried on, drawing as close as I could to the ring of cacti and still remain in his line of focus. I needn’t have worried; my words were compelling all on their own. “Ah, yes. A name. Proper, informal, common, given; one noun, two aspects, a sense and a referent…a name like…
Skamar
.”

Rain gusted around our tight rings, the sky fired above, and smoke ballooned from the Tulpa’s feet like he was a shuttle about to rocket into space. It had been a jolt, probably because it was what he dreaded most, but nothing else happened, and he lifted his chin, straightening again.

“I looked it up,” I told him, before he could interrupt. “I took it from the Tibetan language. It means
Star
. You told me when you gave me the mantra that a name wasn’t needed, but you lied. A name is everything, isn’t it? A name is all.”

In spite of my important and devastating discovery, he actually relaxed. “Fool. She has to be here to receive it.”

While the sky erupted behind me again, where Kimber was still pinned to the canyon floor, I inched forward until all that separated me from the Tulpa was a single jutting thorn. In the pause between fire and thunderous crack, I tilted my head. “Fool. She’s right behind you.”

And Zell rose up behind the Tulpa, yanking his ax downward so that flesh fell open in a perforated line all the way from his pubis to his throat. Fresh blood poured over his chest, and a hand that was only partially materialized—the lower half still shining like the light off an iridescent bubble—reached out to strangle the Tulpa. The doppelgänger—now a tulpa via the power of a given name—shed Zell like a snakeskin…then leaned over the Shadow leader to take a ravenous bite.

She had the advantage of position, surprise, and the power of a recently consumed organ to give her strength…even if the heart had belonged to a Shadow. Yet experience, a violent will to live, and, yes, finally fear, powered the Tulpa into action. The bubble of stillness around us popped as they fought for the offense, blood flowing from the fleshly bodies they’d been so sure they wanted.

The succulent wall didn’t hold for long; the cacti ripped away in fleshy chunks, barbed darts impaling themselves on wheeling limbs and soft cores. Chandra and I backed up as the two tulpas whipped past us and back toward the canyon now flooded with water and blood…and unfortunately, Kimber.

We glanced at each other, then bolted after them.

The Tulpas fought like snarling dogs, whipping over their own malleable bodies to re-form in superior position. Evenly matched, they fell into the gorge and churned across the canyon floor like a snarling dust devil, so out of control that our fear was realized just as we skidded to a stop at the canyon’s lip. They careened into Kimber so hard she was knocked from place, and the bolts of lightning were riveted to them instead. Screaming in liquid voices of agony, they loosed themselves, then continued their homicidal tumble through the arroyo, around stained glass bends, leaving only shards in their wake. The lightning found Kimber again, and Chandra and I breathed a sigh of relief.

The Shadow and Light had scattered, no one left in the crevasse of earth where the fight had originated. I pulled off the now-useless animist’s mask, gasping as cold stormy air whipped over my sweaty face. Chandra licked her lips, her own face pearly with rain, hair plastered to the sides of her head as she squinted against the whistling wind. I realized, too late, she was watching the metamorphosis she so longed for, and she turned in response to my stare.

“You should go.” She had to yell it, and I nodded to let her know I’d heard.

I should. Skamar would take care of the Tulpa. The other agents were battling elsewhere, but if any Shadows returned I’d have no way of defending myself. Yet…

“Kimber—”

“I’ve got her.”

And I knew she did. With nothing but a stolen conduit, dreams of a future in this troop, and a whole heap of imagination, Chandra had helped to save us all. So I nodded, then ran, leaving her as the protector of the canyon, and letting her go down in her rightful place in the manuals. The last woman standing.

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.”