It was an automatic response; the ruthlessness and nerve that’d propelled him to the top of the competitive gaming world had him calling my bluff while countering with one of his own. Usually it served him well. But not now.
I shrugged. “I’ll survive.”
“How?” His voice was a tad hoarse, and he cleared his throat, adding a sneer to his words. “How will someone like you survive? You have no skills, no real education, you’ve never even won a talent contest.”
I pressed my hands against his shiny desk, leaning forward to keep the bitch-slap with his name on it from knocking him off his feet. “And why is that, Daddy? Why have you always been hell-bent on keeping me in my place, a box marked, ‘Look, but don’t touch.’ A pretty one, but a box no less?” I straightened as his eyes widened. He was finally facing me fully. He was finally listening. “You never hear or see me. You refused to even consider I might have an opinion, and now look at me. I’m like a property you acquire, wealth you hoard, a company you collect because you can.”
“You’re becoming hysterical.”
I was acting like Olivia, but speaking for myself…and he’d never seen my kind of hysterical. I lifted my chin and returned his earlier sneer. “Mother would have never allowed you to do that to me.”
And that was said for both of us. Xavier was breathing hollowly now, much like when he’d been chanting, his movements measured as he returned to his desk and deliberately lowered himself into the soft leather chair.
“But she did allow it, Olivia,” he said, leaning back, eyeing me from the relaxed pose of an attentive tiger. “She allowed it by her absence. By abandoning her family. She left and never looked back. I wanted to make you into a better woman than she was, that’s all.”
So that’s the lie he told himself so he could sleep at night, I thought. One of them, anyway.
“You made me,” I said evenly, as Joanna, as myself, “into a shadow of what I could have been.”
Xavier didn’t even blink. “I’ve given you a place in this world. Is that really so bad? If your mother had been more like you-”
“-she wouldn’t have left you,” I finished for him, amazed it had taken me this long to see it. That was it. He’d smothered Olivia with money and baubles and coddling because he didn’t want to lose her. In some corner of that useless heart, he might even love her. It was nice to know…but for the fact that his involvement with the Tulpa made him indirectly responsible for her death. “She couldn’t have left you.”
He didn’t deny it. “I just want to keep you close.”
Inhaling deeply, I pretended to consider that. Though anger had me shaking inside, I was used to holding my tongue around Xavier, and as I angled around the desk to take his hands in mine-careful not to let him feel the unnatural smoothness of my printless fingertips, or the tensile strength in my palm-I smiled.
“And I want to be close to you as well.”
He was silent for so long, even the house seemed to hold its breath around us. There was almost an audible exhalation when he finally said, “Tell me again why you want this?”
“Because I want to be like the parent who raised me. The one who stayed and stuck. I want to be like you.”
He rubbed a hand as large as a ball mitt over his face, and I knew I’d won. “I’ll think about it.”
“Thank you, Daddy,” I said, and exited his office before my eyelids caught in a permanent flutter. I had finally gotten him thinking, and that was the best I could hope for right now.
Or so I thought.
Chandra was back in the drawing room, seated awkwardly on the window seat, but she stood to fall wordlessly into stride with me as we exited. We skipped down the palatial white steps, hopped into my car, and I rolled the engine over, still silent. I glanced up to find Helen’s pinched face peering at us from the living room windows, though she drew back when I waved, retreating into the house that so completely defined her existence. The gates were already opening as I gunned down the drive, though I waited until we’d left the compound and had reached the first stoplight before turning to Chandra. “You look smug.”
“It’s all that goop you made me put on my face.”
“And?” Because there was more.
And she lifted the handbag I’d made her carry, opening it wide enough to reveal a blackened face stretched in a long, silent scream. The light changed. A car honked behind me. I looked from the mask in her purse back up into her face. And for the first time since we’d known each other, Chandra and I exchanged real smiles.
9
The derring-do of both sides of the Zodiac was recorded in comic book form. While that might seem imprudent, there were fail-safes in place to keep information from one side leaking to the other. For instance, the Shadow agents couldn’t read the manuals of Light, and vice versa, thereby eliminating the possibility of one side gaining dominance over the other that way. This prohibition didn’t apply to me since I was both Shadow and Light, but I’d recently taken the opportunity to compare the manuals written after my arrival with those written before, and noted a lot more detail being left out these days, or delivered in more obscure terms than in the time prior to my arrival on the paranormal scene.
Of course, agents on both sides of the Zodiac had attempted to glean knowledge from people known to follow one series of comics or the other, but all had found that those mortals inevitably gave out misinformation, enthusiastically relating the wider worldview of the Zodiac to a competing agent-information they already knew- while blithely forgetting the specifics of the latest manual. It was our micro-universe’s way of keeping the battle between Light and Shadow squared and properly balanced.
The kids who frequented Master Comics, however, weren’t just any mortals. They knew the stories and characters they were following were real, and were willing partners in our paranormal battle. They thought and spoke and dreamed of us, picked sides, and taught the other younger children the mythology of the Zodiac. As they grew up, leaving the energy and belief of their youth behind, our legacy then continued in the minds of the next generation. However, if they failed to pass this knowledge on before maturation, we wouldn’t merely be in jeopardy of losing the battle against our enemies, we’d actually cease to exist.
All the mortal children who knew of our world gathered at a comic book shop called Master Comics. Therefore it wasn’t only a natural place to look for back issues containing clues that might lead to the Tulpa’s demise, it was also a hotbed of exuberant fandom. Chandra and I swung into the store prepared for a preadolescent pop quiz. Instead we were met with dead silence.
“Smells like geek central,” Chandra said, glancing around. “Looks like geek central. But where are all the geeks?”
The comic and manga titles were ordered obsessively on floor-to-ceiling shelves, with a DVD section on the back left wall, a gamers’ paradise on the right. But the store was otherwise eerily empty. “I’m getting ghost-town vibes.”
Chandra was still standing just inside the door, looking ready to bolt if she had to. But Master Comics was a safe zone for all agents, neutral territory, so I moved farther into the shop, albeit warily. “Maybe they’re out buying Halloween costumes,” she said.
Except every day was Halloween in Master Comics. I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Carl’s already had his costume for six months.”
She glanced over at me. “What’s he dressing as?”
“All he’d say was it would be totally unexpected and out of character for him. My guess is he’s going as a normal kid.”
Chandra snorted. “Well, maybe they’re all at school.”
“Shut your mouth,” I scoffed, picking up an independent comic. “Besides, what about Zane?”
Zane was the owner of Master Comics, a loner in his late twenties who still hung with kids, but who was the creator of the Zodiac’s manuals as well. Anything going on in Las Vegas’s paranormal underworld would end up on
