The Touch of Twilight

this?”

“That’s the latest manual of Light. See where you’re confronting the Shadow Cancer in a classic honky-tonk bar?”

I flipped through the blank pages. “No.”

“Well I wrote it. It’s not my problem if it isn’t there.” And he went back to polishing the glass top, whistling as he worked.

“Let me see that.” Chandra yanked the not-manual from my hands. “Olivia, what did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said, wracking my brain. Had I?

“Actually,” Carl began, and I whirled on him. He shrugged sheepishly and spit it out. “You fucked up the evolutionary chi when you took off with Jasmine’s aura. It’s time for her to hand her post over to Li and move on like the twins, but she’s unable to mature without the whole of her aura. We told you not to wear it for too long.”

“We told her not to leave the shop with it,” Zane corrected from across the room. His head was still bent, but I could tell his teeth were clenched.

“You said not to wear her aura for over twelve hours. I gave it back well before then, undamaged.” The changelings’ ability to shield an agent from harm was due to the tractability of their aura. They could release their aura to us, allowing it to mold itself to our bodies so our true identities were seen, while our corporeal bodies remained protected. That’s why I’d borrowed her aura. It’d enabled me to appear to Ben as myself-looking and feeling exactly the same as he remembered me-so I could give him a kiss that’d probably saved his life.

It’d worked too. While the frail shell of Jasmine’s auraless body had been safely cocooned back at my high-rise condo, I revealed myself and my continued existence to Ben. The idea had been to simply comfort him, assuage the grief he’d been feeling over my apparent death, and kiss him in parting. But I’d miscalculated both his grief and mine, and after finding solace together, I’d left in the middle of the night, sneaking away without explanation, thinking it best. Treating him, I realized now, like he was a pawn. It was a gross understatement to say Ben had reacted badly, knowing I was alive, but furious at me for returning only to disappear again. That fury was what had opened the door to Regan, who’d been more than happy to let herself into his life.

But as much as I was to blame for that botched effort, I hadn’t screwed up when it came to Jas. I’d been extraordinarily careful to get her aura back to her under the twelve-hour mark. Her body hadn’t wasted away, her soul hadn’t expired.

“Wait a minute. Did I miss this issue?” Chandra yanked the comic from me, flipping through the pages faster as if that would make the story appear. She almost looked frantic.

“Come on, Chandra,” Carl said, holding his hand out for the manual. “You know how these things work. The events directly affecting the battle between Shadow and Light are withheld from Zane and me until the time when revealing it won’t tip the scales in favor of one side or the other. We didn’t know she’d caused irreparable cosmic damage, and therefore you didn’t either.”

“But we all know now,” Douglas said, and he laughed like he should be wringing his hands and twisting a mustache.

“So what does this mean?” I asked, ignoring him and motioning to the manual no one could read.

“It means you’d better fucking fix it,” Chandra said, causing Douglas to laugh harder. This time we both turned on him, and he instantly sobered. Chandra turned an equally dark gaze on me. “If they can’t read it, we don’t get their thoughts or energy or any of the good juju enabling us to do our job.”

I bit my lip and looked hopefully at Zane. He gave a short jerk of his head, knowing what I was asking. “You were clothed in the aura of the changeling of Light. The Shadow manuals haven’t been affected.”

I closed my eyes. Fuck. So while the Shadow mythology would continue to be written, their legacy continuing to grow, the agents of Light were stuck in a sort of supernatural moratorium. We would fall behind degree by degree, and eventually we’d lose ground in the fight for the city.

“Fix her!” Chandra yelled, frantic now.

I opened my mouth to yell back, realized my frustration, though equal, was misplaced, and whirled on Jasmine. “Leave!” I said, pointing to the door.

She scoffed, snapped her gum, and pulled out her iPod.

Carl pulled up beside me, looking up in dark exasperation. “That’s not going to work, Archer. You broke something inside her. Li is supposed to assume her position, but she can’t until Jasmine matures, and for that you have to repair her.”

I threw my arms into the air. “Well, what am I supposed to do? Order her to have her period?”

The boys around us started gagging. Jasmine reddened to a lovely rose-colored shade. And Li continued gazing up at me adoringly. Shit.

I sighed and knelt before her. “Jasmine. You really don’t remember who I am?”

She gave me a hard stare, and for a moment I thought I saw a flash of regret, the girl I knew waving at me from behind those deep oval eyes. Then she lifted her chin. “I know who you think you are. And I don’t think it’s appropriate to promote that sort of pathology in trusting children.”

I drew back at that, straightened, and found myself face-to-face with Chandra’s pointed glare. Again. “What?”

“You haven’t told anyone about this, have you?”

“I didn’t know about it until now!”

She began shaking her head madly. “It’s something a Shadow agent would-”

“Oh, don’t fucking start that again,” I interrupted, voice lifted to drown out hers. “I’m getting so tired of people saying the third sign of the Zodiac is the rise of my Shadow side! I’m not going to do anything to harm the agents of Light!”

“Except maybe you can’t help it. It’s like these kids hitting puberty and having to pass into adulthood. They may not want to, but biology helps determine one’s destiny. You may not want to be part Shadow but that’s your nature, as well as the Light. The sooner you start respecting that your compromised physiology has made you different-”

“She means a freak,” Douglas edged in.

“The sooner you can start approaching aberrant situations from a new beginning point.”

I wasn’t hearing this. I wasn’t a mutant, I wasn’t weird. I wasn’t a freak. “It was an accident!”

“It’s suspect,” she said simply, and I had no answer for that. She shook her head as she turned away. “You want me to believe it was accidental, you’ll have to make it right. Or else we’ll all pay the price.”

“Chandra, wait,” It rankled to call out to her, but she knew more than I did, and I could use her help on this one.

“No. I have to let Warren know about this.” She pushed open the front door, bells muting but not completely drowning out her muttered “Someone does.”

Some partner, I thought, watching her walk out the door, but I didn’t follow.

“Forget her, Archer. She’s deadweight.”

No, she was more than that. She was right. But I’d deal with Chandra-and the rest of the troop-later. Right now I needed to stay focused and use my gifts-gifts, dammit!-to read both the Shadow manuals and the Light. Given time and luck, I knew I could find clues to the original manual, which contained the secret to the Tulpa’s immortality. Killing him wouldn’t just fix the problem with Jasmine’s interrupted development, it would forever settle the question as to whether I could overcome my biology. After all, wipe out the Shadow and all you were left with was Light.

“Here’s the way I see it,” Zane started, when the door had shut behind Chandra.

“Oh God,” I said, turning to find him staring at me impassively. Zane made conspiracy theorists look like cheerleaders.

“You conned an impressionable young girl into giving you her aura, stole her chi, and broke the manuals detailing the exploits of the agents of Light. Your strength will grow because of your inclusion in the Shadow series, while the others in your troop will grow weak and impotent, and you can now rise to the head of your troop unchallenged.”

It almost seemed plausible…if you were a complete nutcase. I leaned onto his newly polished glass top. “Cute theory…and dead wrong.”

“Is that right?”