His inclining head fell well short of a nod, the only outward sign of his hesitancy. “You’re my daughter. I want you on my side.”
“Yet there’s something else you want more, isn’t there?” I said, and he suddenly looked less comfortable, though he hadn’t moved at all. I had to risk it, though. A mean game of push-and-shove would be more believable than a total and abrupt turnaround. Changing the subject before he could answer, I feigned ease. “Well, this mask has shown me that if things go your way, five minutes from now the entire troop of Light will be nothing more than a memory, but at least one of your agents will die with them. It’ll either be Zell…”
And here Chandra pulled out Zell’s ax and pointed the weapon at his back.
“Or Regan.”
I saw her jolt on the shelf above us, her mouth falling open before she knew what she wanted to say. Her attempt to catch the Tulpa’s eye failed because his were glittering excitedly, pinned on me.
“Trades are always tricky, and fraught with risk. Zell believes himself destined to die at your hands anyway. He almost deserves the fate; a belief that strong can only come to pass. Why would I exchange a perfectly solid star sign for him?”
Exactly the question I wanted him to ask. The mask hid my smile, and I held my breath until I was sure I could neutralize my voice. “Because Regan knows who I am beneath this mask. Beneath all my masks. She’s known my secret identity for months. She just hasn’t shared it with you.”
Truth rode over some people like a stampede. Confusion marred their brows like new thoughts were trying to break out in Braille over their foreheads. Then their expressions, their bodies, would slacken with lost hope. Yet other people, those who held little hope to begin with, didn’t move at all when their ideals were shattered, and not surprisingly, the Tulpa was this latter sort. Minus the “people” part. Because no mortal’s bone would’ve flashed like quicksilver to match his eyes, his hair, the nails that had spontaneously lengthened into honed points beyond the silvered skin.
Black mist, opaque against the stormy desert night, formed in half a dozen tendrils snapping to wrap around Regan’s body. They coiled like sinewy lassoes, jerked her half a foot into the air, and tightened so quickly, the plea forming on her lips was thrust from her body in a terrified gasp.
“Come.” It was said almost sweetly.
Rain began to drench the tiny canyon as Regan floated to him, like rope drawn through a pulley designed of his will.
“You’ve been given an inordinate amount of freedom, Ms. DuPree. From the time you were small it seemed to have been an expectation of yours. I blame your mother for that. How fitting that we should be reminded twice in one night that despite a matriarchal hierarchy, the mother’s lineage
“Let me explain-”
“It’s a lucky turn of events for the Archer, but…” He raised one pronged hand in the air. “Not so much for you.”
With a mere jerk of his wrist, the coiling mist yanked from Regan’s body, taking her clothes with it. The bonds dissolved immediately, and her clothes fell haphazardly across the dusty ground, like they’d tried to run off on their own. Before shock could set in at her nakedness, before she could even cover herself, the Tulpa also began stripping her of her identity.
Literally.
Raking his fingers through the air, the man who’d been dreamed into being flayed a woman born of this world. Five solid slashes formed down the front of her body like thick paper cuts, from her hairline all the way to the cracks between her toes. She went stock-still, momentarily wide-eyed, until the skin lifted and began to curl back from all edges on her face and body and limbs. Even her screams turned tattered, the cut muscles of her throat causing the sound to overlap in deep and anguished waves, while the Tulpa only watched, his face again lengthening into that unnaturally wide grin. He gave another finger wave, and muscle tore from bone.
“You took a vow-all of you!-to follow me and obey me in exchange for my patronage and power.” Despite the pattering rain and rising wind and twisting bolts firing above our heads, despite Regan’s screams of agony, the Tulpa’s voice remained conversational, slipping around us from every side. The ultimate ventriloquist’s trick. I hated it when he did that. “Have I let you down in some way? Have I not delivered all I promised and more? Have I failed to bring the agents of Light to their knees time and again?”
“No!” The Shadows yelled it as one, living up to their name, nothing more than a series of blurred outlines above us. Their sole distinguishing feature was the smoke billowing from their chests, refusing to be extinguished in the heightening torrent.
“No…” Regan’s pain-filled wail sounded a moment too late, a belated attempt to return to her leader’s good graces despite the flesh hanging from her in ribbons.
“Then please recall that while your service to me is voluntary,” he said to the rest of the troop while he continued gazing at her like she was a beetle under his boot, “once committed, your loyalty is not.”
He beckoned a final time, and Regan screamed until her vocal cords either snapped or split, and even the thunder couldn’t drown out the fracturing of all two hundred and six bones in her body.
I wanted to look away. The mask had merely revealed a truncated version of these events; it hadn’t shown the blood puddling beneath her bare heels or the carved organs peeking through her pink, tattered skin, or the way dust and grime and rain pummeled that brutalized flesh, each drop of rain a world of agony on its own.
“Vanity is something I normally endorse. But yours, Ms. DuPree, has been your downfall.”
Her downfall, but not her death. She wouldn’t expire from these injuries…but she wouldn’t recover from them either.
“Lindy. Dawn. Escort Regan to the other side of the ravine.”
“Halfway is fine,” I said, unable to hide my revulsion. He smiled.
Despite the carnage done to her body, of the humiliation of being reduced to nothing more than a lesson in subservience, and of the downright cruelty of his actions, Regan began to shake as she found herself suddenly flanked. “Sir, if you’ll just let me-”
“One more word and I’ll rip that lying tongue from your mouth with my teeth.”
The only sound she made after that was a soft squeal as her two guards grasped her tattered wrists. Chandra leaped from the canyon’s edge to drop with Zell behind me, and I almost began to breathe normally beneath my wooden guise. It was going to work.
Yet as Regan neared, the mask surprised me by flaring to life. Something was fluid in this situation again. Some decision had been made that could put my plans in jeopardy.
Wishing for my conduit despite its absence in the mask’s vision, I glanced sharply at Regan, but she was beyond any ability to form expression or thought, her glassy eyes fixed on Dawn. The Shadow Gemini had paused, searching the discarded clothing long enough to locate Regan’s conduit. She laughed as she threw the ice pick at the Tulpa’s feet, and Regan jolted, though her gasp was lost in a clap of thunder. I couldn’t help but empathize. I knew how it felt to have your conduit taken from you. It was like losing a limb.
I was watching Regan so closely, I almost missed the stare of the other Shadow, Lindy, as she and Dawn dragged the former Cancer closer. The mask suddenly sang to me in colors, obscuring my peripheral vision and admitting a sound as shrill as a home alarm. This wasn’t good.
I widened my stance, readied for a physical attack, but gasped when Lindy’s hooded eyes met mine. Thank God the mask concealed emotion as well as thought, because Lindy was none other than my longtime malevolent housekeeper, Helen Maguire. I hadn’t recognized her because I’d never seen her dressed in anything but frumpery, and was surprised to find she actually had a figure hiding beneath those loose black dresses. Blood pumping hard in my chest, I wondered how greatly it would screw things up if I reached out and snapped her neck.
My vision clouded again, but this time with a smoky heat that hardened my gaze. I glared at her with my father’s eyes, and suddenly the color in the mask died. Whatever thoughts she’d been having, any recognition or speculation she’d been entertaining, had suddenly been redirected. I still had an edge.
Time to hone it to a point, I thought, the exchange made, Zell safely behind the Tulpa, Regan held at arm’s length by Chandra behind me. “One final thing,” I told the Tulpa.
“Of course,” he said wryly. He was losing patience.
“I want your pledge that none of your agents will touch Kimber for as long as she’s immobilized by the impact of metamorphosis. The rest are fair game”-I shrugged-“as is she the moment the paralysis leaves her, but I’m Light
