The Touch of Twilight

“The last time I saw you,” I said to the Shadow agent who entered the storeroom, “You were hemmed in by a bunch of children who were using you as an electric pincushion.”

Zell Trexler didn’t know I was there, and if my voice hadn’t caused him to jump and nearly fumble the ax he’d drawn in the adjoining hallway, the words would have. Though a senior Shadow agent, Zell was afraid of me. Or at least very wary. The first time we’d met he’d been absolutely certain his leader, the Tulpa, knew all. But the Tulpa hadn’t known of my existence, and Zell had been further blindsided two months later when it was prophesied that if the third sign of the Zodiac came to pass, he would die at the Kairos’s hands. My hands. I knew this because of my ability to read the Shadow manuals, so even though Master Comics was a designated safe zone, he still blanched when he saw me striding his way. I anticipated his instinctive reaction to run, and shifted my eyes to the threshold, throwing up a wall to block his path.

The Shadow Scorpio nearly peed his pants. “You can’t hurt me here!” From the nerves straining his vocal cords, it sounded more like he was trying to convince himself.

“Then why are you backing away?”

“What do you want?” He put a cart with all the latest manuals between us, the glyph on his chest sparking to life despite the lack of danger. His cheekbones pressed against the thinning skin of his face, an aggressive reflex to fear, like a cobra’s flaring hood.

“A sense of purpose, enthusiasm for my work, and a good retirement plan,” I told him, leaning against an aisle divider. “What about you?”

He smirked, licking his lips as he visibly calmed, though that also could’ve been because I was talking and not shooting. “What do you want?” he repeated more coolly.

“An audience with your leader.”

“The Kairos wants to convene with the Tulpa?” he sneered, but I could practically read his thoughts like a ticker was inching its way over his forehead. The rise of the Shadow side.

I rolled my eyes. “The third sign is the rise of the dormant side. It doesn’t mean I’m joining the Shadow side.”

“What else could it possibly mean?”

Good question, but I didn’t let him know I thought so. “It means the Shadows need to find themselves a new Seer. The whack job on the corner of Sinatra Boulevard gives more accurate prophecies than your psychic.”

He swallowed hard. He was wearing a suit, and I wondered what he’d been doing when I “called.” “So what do you want with him?”

I looked at him like he’d just flatlined.

Zell folded his arms over his deceivingly slender chest. “I’m not calling him until you tell me why.”

I sighed like he was testing my patience. “Let me tell you how this is going to play out, Zell. The Tulpa wants to talk to me. I’ve decided to talk back. You, a peon prewired to do his bidding, are here to facilitate that conversation. So you can channel the fucker now, or I’ll call him to me with my mind, and he can climb through your chest cavity to reach me. Capisce?”

Zell swallowed hard, and I gave him a couple of moments to swallow that hard pill. He was a senior Shadow agent, I wasn’t even half that, yet I could usurp his authority at will. I could ask for his death, and for that of all his allies, and if it meant my coming over to the Shadow side, chances were the Tulpa would grant it. It was clear he hated me for it; he stared at me without blinking for so long it was as if he’d frozen there, then he cracked his neck in preparation, first one side and then the other. I backed off and took a seat in one of the leather armchairs.

Two minutes later I was still sitting there as Zell continued limbering up. “Is this going to take long?” I asked, smoothing a wrinkle out of my pinstriped slacks.

He cracked an eyelid, annoyance burning in his gaze. “Hey, you try rearranging the organs inside your body to host another person. It’s not exactly comfortable.”

I wanted to say, That’s called pregnancy, you big pussy, but I didn’t want him wondering how I knew. Besides, a pregnant woman’s body had nine months to rearrange itself. Zell had fewer minutes than that, and watching the way his chest cavity unnaturally gave way to the roiling going on in his belly gave me the heebie-jeebies. But when he finally did settle himself, I watched. I shuddered as his cry roiled over the high-ceilinged room, and scratched lightly at my own skin when his ripped, beginning at his bottom lip, straight down his middle like he was being butterflied. Finally there was nothing recognizable of Zell in the mass of pulsing organs and skinned bone, just the flaps of skin falling open and shut like fish gills against a skull that had whipped a full circle on his neck stump.

Inside out, the bloodied lids fluttered over the crimson orbs and I could practically see Zell’s thoughts extinguishing as the Tulpa took over his consciousness. “Ah, Mr. Trexler. It figures he’d be the one to receive your call. He regularly canvasses the shop by loitering in the adjacent alley. He likes to spook the children as they leave. I’ll have to tell him to cease now that I’ve told you of it.”

“I’m sure he’d appreciate that. Zell doesn’t seem too fond of me.”

“You’re not an easy person to like.”

I smirked. “Thanks, Daddy.”

“I take it you’ve reconsidered my offer to work together? Rid this plane of the double-walker? May I ask what prompted this change of heart?”

I smirked at his emphasis of the word heart. “I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s in everyone’s best interest to get rid of the doppelganger as quickly as possible.”

If he’d had lips they would’ve pursed. “She scares you more than I do. I think I should be offended.”

“This plane is going to collapse under her continued attacks, and besides, she scares you too. I keep wracking my brain, wondering why, because I know it’s more than her ability to unbalance us all, not that I expect you to tell me. I’ll have to do a little research into the history of tulpas and doppelgangers.”

“So until then we join forces.” A bloodied stump of a tongue darted out to lick those nonexistent lips.

“Under one condition.”

Surprise twisted his features. “You’re making conditions now?”

“You can’t tell anyone we’re working together,” I said flatly. “I want this to be between you and me alone. We combine our powers and work together to eliminate the doppelganger, but I don’t want anything to do with your troop.”

That was true enough, but it wasn’t all. What I really wanted was to keep this agreement between us from Regan. She’d been content to keep my Olivia identity to herself because not only did it give her an advantage over the other Shadows in securing my death, it gave her a sense of power to know something the Tulpa didn’t. However, she might spook if she found out the Tulpa and I were speaking. She might tell him about Olivia. She might kill Ben as a warning to me.

“I already told you,” the Tulpa said, scratching his rib cage. “You’re no longer welcome in my troop.”

I inclined my head. “Then you have no problem keeping your Shadow agents out of the loop.”

“Only if you’re kosher with abandoning the agents of Light for the time being.”

“I figured that was a given.”

The muscles in his cheeks stretched into a grin. “Agreed, then. So I’m going to give you a mantra that speaks to her natural frequency. The next time you see her, you must say it three times exactly the way I tell it to you. Saying it once will call her to you. Twice will bind her energy in place. The third time will bring me to your side.”

“I can do that?”

He chuckled darkly. “Oh, the things I can teach you, daughter.”

I went wide-eyed beneath my mask. “Like how to play catch? Roughhouse on the living room floor? Lessons on how to fend off unwanted advances…though it’s a little late for that, isn’t it?”

I hadn’t forgotten the Tulpa’s culpability when it came to the destruction of my entire adolescence, and he needed to know it. We might be working together now, but it was as a means to an end, and didn’t mean I liked it.

He folded one claw over the other. “Anybody can do it, provided they know how. This specific combination of words is set on the same vibrational plane as her energy.”

More vibrations, I thought ruefully. “And you know what that is, how?”

The answer flashed over his face. “I read it the moment I laid eyes on her.”

I grunted. Of course he had. “So it’s a spell.”