Her son’s. On her chest was a pulsing glyph, and with every steady beat of the Scorpio sign, the hollows of her face lit up; unsmiling, severe. Vengeful.
I spread my palm flat, moving my fingers away from the ring that had called her to me, and she acknowledged me with a flick of her gaze as I propped myself back on my elbows, pulling my legs in tight. Joaquin shifted into a fighting stance. I’d have stood myself except I wasn’t sure what Tekla was going to do. But if there’d been a bunker to disappear into, I’d have ducked into it at that moment.
“Well, well.” Joaquin lengthened the words, his head coming up and fists tightening at his side, like he didn’t know he was moving because she allowed it. “If it isn’t the Scorpio figurehead. Come to save the Kairos? Or just happen to be in the neighborhood?”
Tekla didn’t even blink, and for the first time, even with two hundred yards between us, I could feel the combination of control and power that made her so revered among the troop. Swallowing hard, I wished again for that bunker. “Don’t mess with her, Joaquin. You’ll just make it worse.”
He spared me a glance, a kind of half-amused, half-annoyed sneer that turned to confusion when he scented my own rising nervousness. It wasn’t an act. The ring hadn’t just brought Tekla to me. The energy used to call her was like a taut rope linking us together. The room suddenly held the stillness of a vacuum, or the eerie abandonment of a coastline right before a monsoon. What was it Tekla had once told me? About the destructive power of vengeance?
I curled up tighter into myself.
Joaquin frowned, then expelled the scent from his nose, nostrils flaring as he turned back to Tekla. She still hadn’t moved. “I take it you’ve come to play, then. Two against one? Not good odds, but it’s not as if I haven’t raped and killed two women in one night before.”
When Tekla still didn’t speak, Joaquin’s own nervousness mounted, though it wasn’t nearly as high as it should’ve been. If he could feel what I felt-the raw rage gathering behind the fragile shell of that diminutive frame- he’d be on his knees already, begging for forgiveness. Instead his nerves heightened his arrogance…though the maze between them probably also had something to do with it.
“Or maybe you come here often…eh Tekla, old girl? Could this be a pilgrimage of some sort? Coming to pay your respects at the site where your son took his last cursed, gurgling breath?” He snickered, and I felt my chest tighten as the air grew thin around me. I gasped for breath, but Joaquin kept talking. “No offense to the Archer over here for the attempts I’ve made on her life, for the one I’ll make as soon as I take care of you, but I have to admit…Stryker was my favorite kill.”
It was like an airplane had lost its cabin pressure, and I had to put my hands to my temples as they began to pound, my eardrums tightening into a squealing ache. “Tekla,” I whimpered.
But she didn’t spare a glance, a thought, or an instant for me. With steps that started slowly, then accelerated, she strode right up to the point where the maze began. Then through it. And directly toward Joaquin. The electrical current that should’ve zipped through her body, frying her from the inside out, rose above her in noxious vapors, coalescing like storm clouds overhead. Joaquin gasped-or tried to as he backed up into me, he seemed to be having trouble breathing now as well-and I kicked at him, wanting to be as far from him as possible when this unnatural disaster struck.
Still striding forward, eyes locked on her target, Tekla lifted her arms. “Never utter my son’s name again.”
The cloud didn’t rain. It exploded. Downward, outward, shafts of fire sheared the air in blinding arrows, careening into what remained of the maze. Those walls too flared before shattering into thousands of shards, turning the warehouse into an asteroid field of electric slabs and searing light.
I tried to lift myself to my knees and crawl from the storm’s eye, but something rammed into my elbow, and the screech of living current whizzed through me. I dropped into the fetal position, crying out, but the sound was lost in the zing of live electricity. And in Joaquin’s screams cresting over me in waves of unseen horror.
Tekla drew closer, and the ripping winds sagged around me as she reached my side. Calm broke around my body, like a door had been slammed, and silence buzzed in my ears, though the rest of the warehouse was still fraught in chaos. I glanced up to find her hovering above me, protecting me. But I didn’t rise. Instead, I felt like I should genuflect.
The Tulpa’s maze was annihilated. All that remained of the walls were flying bits, some small as ice cubes, others large as icebergs, each jagged piece visible, and careening toward a swirling vortex under which, I realized, was Joaquin. Like bees swarming, the heightening mountain en-shrouded his body, only a bloodied foot or hand appearing before being attacked, and drawn back into the core. All I could make out between snaps of light was the gleam of steadily pooling blood widening on the floor. More blood, I thought, than one body could hold.
As haphazard and total as the destruction was in the warehouse, the only scratch on me was on my elbow. I gained my feet as the roar in the air softened, and straightened when it was silent enough to hear my breath rattling in my chest. Intermittent grunts came from the pile of debris, usually preceded by a sharp sizzle or crackling pop. The scent of electrocuted flesh permeated the air, and suddenly I wasn’t so happy to have my breath back.
I turned to Tekla, who kept her eyes on Joaquin and the swarm until it died off altogether. I wondered briefly if she was seeing what I did, or if she was remembering as well; the night her son was taken from her, the blood that had seeped over the floor then, the weight of his severed head in her lap. Then the Tulpa’s maze dissolved completely.
Take that, Tulpa.
I stepped forward, my footsteps like gunshots in the silence, until I stood over a body so mutilated and burned I barely recognized it as a person, much less Joaquin. He was still alive, though his limbs were no longer intact, severed bits lying in awkward angles, like an abandoned puppet loosed from its strings. His flesh smoldered in places where the larger sections of wall had struck, imbedding themselves to fry through skin and muscle and tissue, cracking against bone. The smaller injuries, surface ones, merely cleaved off digits, or dug themselves into organs, revealing finely sheered sections of his core where flaps of skin waved like bloody flags.
His nose no longer existed. The soft flesh of his cheeks looked like they’d been carved almost with purpose, and his thin-lipped mouth extended ear to ear, the full set of his teeth revealed in a permanent smile. His bones were black, but I knew they’d been that way before, and my eyes wandered to his glyph, still heating his ravaged chest in irregular, smoky beats. I looked at it, hating it, despite all the carnage wracked upon the rest of him.
I glanced at Tekla and saw the same nothing in her eyes that I felt in my chest, and without looking at me she held out her conduit, useful again now that the Tulpa’s maze had been annihilated. Heart in my throat, I nearly reached for it before sighing and shaking my head. I’d made a vow.
I turned back to Joaquin, and his eyes, the only part of his face not completely rearranged, ran wildly from Tekla’s face to mine. “You want us to hurt you,” I told him, throwing his words to me back in his face. “You expect it. And you’d be disappointed if we didn’t.”
Okay, so I didn’t need vengeance anymore…but I still loved having the last word.
Joaquin’s lower jaw hinged open as if to speak, but blood pooled down his chin from the stub of his tongue, and Tekla fired before any sound could gurgle out. A palm-sized anchor imbedded itself into the center of his glyph. She fingered a release button, and the chain attached to the anchor retracted, yanking Joaquin’s black and bloody heart out with it. His glyph snuffed out like a candle beneath Tekla’s gentle breath, and a whiff of sooty smoke joined the cloying rot saturating the warehouse air. The kill spot would impress generations to come.
33
“Do you like to fly?” the Tulpa asked after I’d settled myself across from him in the stretch limo, careful not let the door latch shut behind me. We were parked in an elongated lot just off Sunset and Eastern, watching the planes take off and land at McCarran in a carefully choreographed dance across the night sky. There weren’t many coming in these days, though authorities had begun letting healthy people go home once an anonymous caller had explained how the virus was being spread, and how to test for its presence.
“I wasn’t aware I could,” I finally said, as a jet powered into the air in front of us. The Tulpa was making me pick up the antivirus in person, and-after I’d made him swear not to kill me, order me killed, or have me followed
