The Touch of Twilight

children, replacing Regan’s introductory letter with a love note she’d penned herself.” Gregor’s mouth twisted in distaste, and he must have tensed because Sheila squirmed in his grip. “When he responded with a letter more suitable for a lover than a daughter, Brynn simply told Regan there was no such thing as pure love. It was a weakness, one that always came with strings attached.”

“Why would you do that to your own daughter?” I mean, Shadow agent aside, wouldn’t any mother want to protect her daughter from that sort of flattening disappointment?

“I asked her, you know.” He nodded vigorously at my surprised expression. “I did. Right before I killed her. She said, ‘You agents of Light worship the idea of love, but we Shadows kill anything we feel the slightest affection for.’”

“She loved him?”

He nodded. “She said she did. And he loved the church…could’ve loved Regan. One thing Brynn couldn’t ever abide was competition.”

I remembered that; Regan taunting me over defending my lover, saying bad habits were hard to break. Brynn had certainly succeeded in her quest to twist her lover, and her daughter. And now Regan was using my first love against me. “Effective,” I murmured darkly, but strangely not feeling a bit sorry for Regan. Go figure.

Gregor looked at me sharply.

“I didn’t say it was right,” I said, fingering the palm-sized frame I’d dropped in my pocket, “just effective.”

And it confirmed something I’d already suspected. If there was something Regan couldn’t have-a place in her birth father’s life, a love to share that life with-then she wasn’t going to let anyone else have it either.

“Do you have a rash?”

“Oh, yeah.” I glanced down. The skin above my V-neck T-shirt was red to the point of being raw. I must have been scratching it for a while now. “I might.”

He glanced at my chest where the doppelganger had swiped at me, moving his eyes along the rest of my torso, pausing at my left arm where even I hadn’t noticed red bumps popping up over a new, and still sensitive, scar. “It’s spreading. You should have Rena make a salve for it,” he said, then grinned and imbued his tone with motherly censure. “‘I swear, sometimes you full-fledged star signs are worse than my initiates.’”

I grinned back. It sounded just like her.

But our levity dropped away when we reached the briefing room, where it was immediately clear there’d be no meeting today.

Tekla was there, but she didn’t note my arrival, nor did the others surrounding her. She was prone on the floor, and at first I thought she was crying, but then I saw she was only there for support. A keening rose from the circle, the bubble of people shifted as one, and I caught sight of Kimber, sobbing and splayed on the floor like a broken doll. The animist’s mask was lying on the ground beside her.

“I wanted to see my fate again…” Kimber was saying as Micah held her. Vanessa stroked her hair. “I didn’t think it would attack me. I didn’t know her ill chi lives in the mask…”

The her in question backed out of the room unseen and unsensed, ears roaring with blood while everyone else’s horrified attention remained fixed on Kimber. Even Gregor seemed to have forgotten me, and I placed his coffee on the ground outside the door before I ran.

My mind ticked with possible routes of escape: boneyard, cantina, locker room, other reality…no, no, no, no! Thankfully my movements were as rote as my thoughts, and I turned automatically to my sanctuary within the sanctuary.

Throwing open the door to the sparse, utilitarian room, I tossed my messenger bag on the large platform bed, but remained standing, palms to eyes, emptiness pressing in around me. I’d added little of myself to the room, choosing instead to leave it as it was when my mother lived here. The walls were white, relieved only by chunky end tables and floating mahogany wall shelves. Granted, there wasn’t enough room to do much more, but I could have added color in the form of a painting or photos or a rug overlaying the concrete floor. I could have added life in the form of a plant or a vase of flowers or mementos that would’ve truly made it mine, and I didn’t need a psychologist to tell me why I didn’t. The clothes I left hanging perfectly spaced in the closet-clothes not mine-told me I was in a holding pattern, a moratorium, waiting, still hoping she would come back.

“She’s not going to rescue you, Joanna,” I muttered darkly to myself as I rubbed a hand over my face, then jerked it away as I thought of the mask in the dojo. Rescuing wasn’t what I needed anyway. Tough love, the kind my Krav Maga instructor, Asaf, had used to bring me back from the walking dead, was more effective. Yet all I had was self-love, and a tenuous thread too. But I could fake tough. I could be my own trainer and mentor, wear yet a different hat for the time it took to see a way out of this trouble. Again.

Rescue yourself.

Okay, I thought, opening my eyes. I would do that. I strode into the bathroom and leaned into the mirror, trying to see any difference than there’d been a month ago, before the third sign had been revealed. I didn’t feel like I had bad chi. No stiffness or soreness, no loss of equilibrium or sudden bouts of vertigo. And wouldn’t there at least be something to indicate some sort of imbalance? Maybe not physically, but if I was destined to, oh, say, kill my own mother, there’d be something to indicate the predisposition, right?

Then again, did the Shadow agents wake up with heartburn every morning just because they had the desire to exterminate the soul of humanity? Did humans who killed other human beings spend their days feeling like a walking meat suit, unable to process emotion unrelated to their violence? I had to at least concede the possibility that just because I didn’t feel it didn’t mean it wasn’t there. If anything, I’d learned how to strip past the layers of my multiple identities and get comfortable analyzing my own interpersonal neuroses.

So what about Kimber’s accusation, her injury? She said it was bad chi; the Tulpa had rescinded his offer to allow me to join his troop for the same reason. Even the doppelganger, with her deadly focus on me, “the golden ring,” had said the spirit of the Kairos shouldn’t be shackled to a body with damaged chi.

I didn’t know. The only clear thing was that of all the problems plaguing me, the doppelganger was public enemy number one. Get rid of her and I’d nullify the danger posed to everyone by the chaos brought on by her violent ruptures of the fabric of our world. But would that entail having to work with dear ol’ dad?

I had to admit, if anyone knew how to move seamlessly along different realities, it was the Tulpa. I’d seen him call someone to his side with nothing more than a thought; disembodied, he’d once assaulted me using nothing more than the windy torrent of his breath. He clearly knew how to access alternate planes, what was possible as well as what was limited. And even given all that, he thought he needed my help. But at what cost to myself?

Meanwhile, I still had to figure out what to do about dear, sweet, smells-like-a-carcass-marinating-in-a-putrid- swamp Rose. In the past few months Regan had manipulated my relationship with Ben, made me infect my allies with a deadly virus, had me chasing my enemies-and my own tail-and nearly cost me my place in the troop. I could be philosophical about all this if she’d done those things just because I was Light. If she’d just killed me…or tried to. But she hadn’t, which made this personal. She wanted more than my death, but what? And why?

Learn that, and I could anticipate her next move. For now I prioritized: doppelganger, Regan, and then Tulpa. Eliminate these one by one, I thought, tapping the side of the sink, and surely my ill chi would take care of itself.

15

The next day found me back in mortal reality, sans Chandra. Despite Warren’s orders that we all remain partnered up, I no longer had to work to ditch her, probably because she’d suddenly-and not so subtly-paired up with Kimber, whose hear-me-roar girl power had fizzled into a feeble whimper. The initiate refused to even look at me as we all piled into Gregor’s cab for dawn’s crossing, and hid her face behind her thick blond plaits and shaking hands. I’d anticipated at least a modicum of resistance to my going it solo, but it seemed Kimber’s run-in with my ill chi had the others wanting to avoid the same, and though Warren didn’t confront me about what’d happened to the new initiate, he clearly hadn’t stuck up for me either. The others went their way, and I went mine.