The Touch of Twilight

me again, but this time it was charged, zinging in the air, stabbing at my skin like rusty darts. He’d already hurt Vincent; I just wasn’t seeing it yet.

But then something went wrong. Perhaps the surrounding steel acted as a magnet for the Tulpa’s force, like a lightning rod beneath a blistered sky, but somehow the wires got crossed, and instead of merely sensing the residue of Vincent’s pain, I found myself on my knees, writhing with it.

Electricity spindled inside me, driven on a spiked axis through the top of my skull, splitting in my center, and arrowing out of the soles of my feet. Bolts of pain fired from my spine to cauterize my nerve endings, and the scent of something flash-cooking reached my nose before the membrane was seared and all scent blunted. But none of that was as painful as when the invisible axis was suddenly removed, like a flanged drill bit ripping through my center and out my skull. Minutes passed in long, blissful silence. When I could finally open my eyes again, the black hole blocked the entire night sky.

“That…that…” That was all I could manage. My tongue was singed. If I lived through this I’d bear the scars inside.

“Hurt?”

I gained my feet and shook off the brindled energy unsteadily, like a dog flinging water from its coat. “Felt familiar.”

“It should. It’s your power, inverted.”

My stomach dropped, and my knees actually buckled. Not more than a month ago a good deal of my power had been depleted in an electromagnetic maze. I’d survived it, barely, but there were abilities that’d been stripped from me and transferred to the maze’s creator, the Tulpa. It was why he’d sent me in there to begin with, and now the power he’d gained was being used against me…and an innocent.

I looked back up at Vincent, a man who’d lived a blissfully normal life until approached to be our cover, and the only thing I could think as I watched his slow rotation was, I’m sorry.

“You can’t save him, Joanna,” the Tulpa said, misreading my look. “Your power is what put him there, and nothing can escape the gravitational pull of a black hole. Besides, energy cannot be divided against itself. An agent,” he clarified, his words damning me, “cannot be divided against herself. You are Shadow, and the sooner you accept it, the sooner your weaknesses will become your strengths.”

I shook my head, refusing to be damned. “That is not my power holding him there. I would never do that.”

“You already have,” he said airily. “The reason this man is pinned up here like a science experiment is because of your hatred for another named Joaquin. A man, too, named Liam. Ajax and Butch before them. So the facts would seem to contradict you, Joanna. You have no qualms in dealing out death when it serves your purposes…you also seem to have a particular fondness for edged weapons.”

“I have a fondness,” I said sharply, “for eradicating evil from this earth. This man is an innocent.”

“No, this man is an object lesson!” And now his voice arched like a rocket, burning into space. “He’s here to show you how your own powers can be used against you when you are divided against yourself.”

I clenched my jaw, and the unnatural red cast tinting everything the black hole hadn’t eaten up told me my eyes, long black, had begun to glow. “Let. Him. Go.”

Smoke began to pool around us. “Make me.”

Which was what he wanted. He needed me to act against him so he could secure that energy too-expand it, invert it, use it against me. But Vincent was still in agony; I knew it. His petrified expression looked as though it was pleading with me, his bulging eyes begging for help. I wanted to end his torture, but I didn’t know if he wanted to live or die…or if I even had the power to give him that choice.

“Help,” I whispered, the word suffocated and ineffectual on the roiling smoke.

The Tulpa heard it anyway, and laughed. “Prayers, is it? And still you refuse to raise a hand.” He raised his own, talons beckoning as his laughter veered into a rumbling command. “Bend your knees and bow, Joanna. The only way to overcome is to succumb. Every person who has ever made a mark on this world had to first descend to the underworld.”

I glanced around at the encroaching smoke, at the black hole above, felt the emptiness below, and realized the elaborate lengths he’d gone to draw me here. A scheme, I suddenly realized, revealing an obsession. He’d told me what would happen if I continue to refuse him. We’d become enemies. He’d hunt me down. There’d be a war. Actually, I thought, biting my lip, the term he’d used was apocalypse.

“You’re not courting me,” I said, returning my gaze to those soulless eyes. “You’re targeting me.”

The explosion had been to draw me here, the smoke a way to get me alone. The mortal wasn’t targeted because he’d been a front for the Light, but because the Tulpa was going to make me choose. My life or his. Shadow or Light.

I sent up my prayer again, silent this time, forcing myself to look at Vincent. Somebody help me.

“I’ve lost my patience,” the Tulpa said, now that the realization someone was going to leave here in a body bag was plain on my face. “You can either join me or perish. But the fence you’ve been straddling, this effort to best me, must cease. One way or another, I will stop these chaotic outbursts.”

I did a mental double-take at his words. I knew my thoughts were coming slowly, the horror of seeing a man ripped from this world into the weightlessness of a mini-cosmos had made me sluggish, but this still seemed an abrupt change in subject. I studied the Tulpa and saw…well, nothing he didn’t want me to see. But there was another component to his measured dialogue, an accompanying aromatic flag that had my eyes fluttering shut and my nostrils automatically flaring.

Fear.

My eyes shot open, and the Tulpa growled. What could possibly scare him so much he’d rather kill me than have me know it? And how could I get him to tell me what that something was without our little therapy session turning into a bloodbath?

“Make a decision,” he said, vocal cords tight, brows pinched, mouth thin. “His life or yours. Shadow or Light. Now.”

“You can’t kill me this way,” I said as smoke continued to roil in. The weight was returning to the air, but it was different from before, ashy but not ionized, thick but not dense. “Take off that mask and you’ll suffocate too.”

“Oh, this?” he said, waving his hand through the air so he cut it in ribbons. It formed again in a thin, gray film. “This isn’t suffocation…it’s insulation.” And the lazy tendrils of smoke suddenly snapped like bands, congealing to form a barrier on all four sides so that I was in a solid box…and it was getting warm.

I looked up and found the sole means of escape. He hadn’t tried to obscure the black hole.

“I was very lucky to find this building,” the Tulpa said conversationally. “Anything other than steel would incinerate in this kind of heat.”

Including me. Moisture was being pulled from my body so fast, I was sweating in places I didn’t even know I had pores. I used my shirt to wipe at my eyes, but it felt paper-thin and hot, like it would burst into flame at any moment.

I glanced back at the Tulpa, who looked impossibly cool. “I, of course, can withstand this heat because of the protective shell I’m wearing. Not a mask, mind, but a swirling cloak of kairotic power.”

My power, I thought as my organs began to ache.

“See, the vibrational matter you’re so fond of manipulating can also be used against you…”

Still going on about the chaotic outbursts, I thought, tilting my head. It was getting hard to think-it felt like I was standing inside an oven-but it wasn’t any great mental leap to measure it against Regan’s earlier words. They thought we were responsible for the recent spate of vibrational outbursts. He thought I was. “It’s not me,” I told him, but he was on a roll and not listening.

“And like any vibration,” he explained as if he actually possessed patience, “the high crests and deep troughs create waves of radiation in a confined interior.”

Oh my God. Not an oven. A microwave. “But it’s-”

“Generated by heat and light.” He cut me off, smiling scathingly. “Faster, hotter, shorter…like a boiling ocean tide.” I gasped as he made that happen now, but the air was sucked from me. He growled his satisfaction. “Well, you’re the one who said ‘trial by fire.’”

My body screamed for cool air and water and escape, and damned if that black hole wasn’t looking good. He wanted that too. Me to either jump into oblivion, or choose him. If I did the latter, I thought, a swallow catching in