City of Souls

turn at each of us, dark humor giving life to his eyes. He continued this cruel pantomime, glancing back and forth in exaggerated concern, before letting all expression drop from his face as his gaze arrowed in on Felix. Lifting one side of his mouth, his skeleton momentarily flashed, as if revealed on an X ray. Then his smile was back, and he was slipping a hand over Vanessa’s mouth and nose. She began suffocating immediately.

When I was younger I didn’t fully understand why it was so distressing to see a woman specifically brutalized by a man. As a victim, I’d identified with anyone who’d ever been forcibly overcome by another. Violence was impervious to gender, and it didn’t always come in physical form either.

It was only as I grew older, and especially once I’d gained strength no mortal woman or man could know, that I realized why this was such an abomination. Yes, using a physical force on someone smaller than you was immoral. But an attack on a woman was an additional insult-it was an attack on life itself. Every strong man-down to the worst rapist and murderer-had once been nurtured, if only for a small while, by the softness and solace of a woman’s body. To turn upon that was a desecration, and in our world-a matriarchal society where power was passed through the woman’s bloodline-it was absolute blasphemy.

And Felix-as good and strong a man as any-still took his solace in Vanessa. He reveled in her wit and smile, her laugh and, yes, her body. She was his soft spot. So, despite it being a safe zone, he lunged.

The Shadow conduits still didn’t appear. Their power was useless in a safe zone, but what could be done-what I didn’t know how to do the first time I was attacked in a safe zone-was to turn the attacking agent’s power against them. It was a more dangerous sort of power because, as any soldier knew, it was easier to defeat an enemy if they were already at war with themselves. It would have been enough for Harrison to face down Felix alone, but the Shadow troop timed their defense so perfectly it was clear they’d anticipated this response. When Felix was no more than five feet from Harrison, they all held up a hand, ringing him in silent negation.

He didn’t freeze, as I’d thought would happen to an agent trapped in a cloud of their own power. Instead he thrashed as he was lifted from the ground, fighting invisible bindings, like he was being pulled from every side at once. One hand clutched at his throat when he hit the ground, the other at his chest, and he flopped like a fish on a dry bank. This eventually dropped off into random twitches, pitching the Shadows’ laughter even higher.

I didn’t move, nor did any of the other agents of Light. I’d been warned against trying to help someone who’d breached a safe zone…warned too that no one would help me if I did the same. The bond between troop members was so strong that the negative energy would be transferred, and we’d both end up being strangled by our power.

No, not strangled, I thought, watching Felix heaving. Drowned.

“Anyone else want to try?” Harrison asked lightly as Felix continued to gasp. I swallowed hard. At least the gasping was an improvement. And his limbs had fallen still, so the power was abating, being reabsorbed. “How about you, little Kairos? I mean, you’re the cause of all this. Want to take a long shot at redemption?”

“Why don’t you give it a go, Harrison?” I said. “I mean, take out the Kairos, the woman of legend, and you’ll go down as one of the most powerful, badass Shadows of all time.”

His eyes flickered like he was briefly considering it, but a sneer quickly replaced the look. “In a safe zone? Do you think I’m stupid?”

“Yes. Ugly, foul-smelling, and inbred too.”

His gaze flat-lined. “Well, I’m not the single-handed cause of my entire troop’s collapse.”

“Nor am I.” I wasn’t responsible for someone else’s evil, even if I was the target.

“Oh, but you are. You broke your changeling, right? And breaking the changeling of Light, that one special little child, is what caused the manuals of Light not to be written. So now the children of the world can’t read of your antics in comic book form. Their fertile little minds don’t birth the dreams and power that give you the energy to fight us. Your entire troop is weakened.”

“We’re not getting weaker.”

He held out his bloodied hands. “We’re getting stronger, so it’s the same thing.”

Because their manuals were still being recorded, detailing the battle between good and evil, and sold in comic book shops all over the nation. The fact that manuals vital to our survival were masquerading as comic books wasn’t as oxymoronic as it might seem. There was something to be said for hiding in plain sight, and though truth might be stranger than fiction, in this case they were one and the same.

So Harrison had an ugly, foul-smelling point. Despite our demigod status in this smoggy, bright valley, our micro-universe was as fragile as a rain forest’s. Knock out one little organism, and suddenly the whole ecosystem was thrown off balance.

“So you’re not the almighty savior of the Zodiac,” Harrison pushed, with a lift of his chin. “You’re a hindrance to your troop.”

Though I’d gotten better in recent months at controlling my anger, I decided Harrison could use a reminder of just whose daughter I was. So I opened the darkness in my heart, locked in the middle of the light one, and lifted my lids to reveal a gaze as smoldering and bright as the sun’s flashing core. I let my cheekbones rise to press at my skin, and felt it pull tight across my forehead. I imagined my skull gleaming, almost glowing white against my skin, while the rising pressure and the smoke from my pores brought to life a pounding headache. I ignored that until I knew my dark eyes-the only thing visible beneath my mask-had completed their transition into glowing red coals. When Harrison shuddered involuntarily, violently, I smiled sweetly and let the demonic mask fade.

Yet he recovered quickly…and came back for more. “That’s just a parlor trick. We’ve no real use for you.”

“Then why do you want her so badly?” Hunter piped up, arms folded over his chest. His expression was shuttered, like he was observing events that didn’t involve him, but I knew better. Hunter was a tactician and warrior, and wasn’t so much at rest right now as he was coiled and waiting.

Meanwhile, Felix was finally sitting up, head hanging forward and mouth open, like his power was pouring from his throat.

“I don’t.” Harrison began idly picking through the pastry case, lifting and considering a good half-dozen sweet buns before replacing them, leaving a trail of Vanessa’s blood on each one. He turned his attention back to me. “But your daddy does, and he’s been doing everything in his power to get to you.”

I thought of what I knew about the Tulpa’s power: the ability to touch people in their dreams, take over his agents’ bodies and turn them inside out, and how he could stud the sky with black holes, insert someone inside them, and make it all disappear. And those were only the homicidal abilities I’d seen firsthand. He’d been at rest for much of the time I’d known him, trying to court me into joining his troop, and abandon the Light for the Shadow. He was beyond that now, and as lethal as his wrath had been in the past, it was nothing compared to the complete, unbridled hatred he felt for me since our last encounter. Great.

“Then what do you want?”

“Right now?” He stuffed a moon cake in his mouth and spoke around it. “A cappuccino.”

Felix struggled to his feet but didn’t move forward. “You prick-”

“Shhh…” Harrison put a bloody finger to his lips. “He’s coming…”

And in a strange unspoken harmony, agents of both Shadow and Light turned toward the wall of windows to watch the Shadow leader, the Tulpa, drop as if from the heavens, landing onto the false pagoda patio like a descending UFO. Of course, a living being that had been created rather than birthed really was as otherworldly as all that. I swallowed hard and stepped forward to face him because he was also my opposite on the Zodiac. The Shadow Archer. Their troop leader.

My birth father.

A tulpa was a thought-form; a being so vividly imagined it became an actual person. Tibetan monks had honed this skill for centuries through visualization, meditation, and extreme discipline, though this tulpa had been birthed from the mind of a westerner…and a twisted one at that. Once actualized, the Tulpa had become unnaturally powerful. There was no known way to kill him. In fact, if we attempted to do so with one of our conduits, the energy put behind the attempt actually funneled more power into him. So we battled his agents, while searching hopefully for his invisible Achilles’ heel, but steered clear of direct battle with him whenever possible.

Yet we’d recently discovered that the nature of his birth was also his weakness. His creator had been killed before he could gift the Tulpa with a name, so his title was his name. His ability to alter his appearance entirely was a power, but it was also a sign that he lacked permanence in the world, and that was a weakness.

His appearance today was a cross between a Wall Street executive and a construction worker, interesting, as