The Touch of Twilight

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 doppelganger 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