Cheat the Grave

drop.

He jerked his head. “Come with me.”

And a giant pulse, a vibrational flash, had me stepping forward before I could stop it. I went with the impulse, though reminded myself to be more on guard as we returned to Xavier’s office. If he really suspected me, I might end up grabbing hold of a knife and thrusting it into my own belly.

“Ever see one of these?” He pointed with his cane to a booklet lying on Xavier’s great dark desk. A comic book. A manual.

I fought to keep my expression neutral. If the Tulpa was asking me about it, the people in my building, and what I knew of Xavier’s religious habits-all while attempting to hoodoo me into eliciting the truth-then I wasn’t even close to being off the hook.

“Yeah,” I said as calmly as I could. “My sister used to read those rags.”

“Did she ever show you one?”

“Joanna knew I’m loyal to Vogue. ”

“Not her,” he said through clenched teeth. “The girl. In your building. Did she ever try to give you one of these?”

“Of course not. I mean…she’s cool.”

The Tulpa lifted his chin. “There are cool things in there. Look for yourself.”

I glanced down and recognized the Shadow Pisces, Adele, caught in profile on the cover. Her face was iron, black smoke billowing behind her as she stared back at me. I feigned a shudder. “Her outfit is atrocious.”

“There are other pictures.”

He wasn’t going to let up, so I sighed and took the manual. Opening it, I demonstrated what he was really interested in. The manual didn’t come to life in my hands. No thought bubbles appeared above the heads of the featured Shadow agents. No cracks of battle or death cries lifted into the air. An agent of Light would have been zapped by the Shadow manual with the first touch.

I flipped through the pages faster, and the tug on my mind lessened. I finally threw it back onto the desk next to Xavier’s folder and said the one thing I hoped would have him backing off. “This is a very strange conversation.”

The Tulpa, never one to want to appear odd in front of mortals, broke with that desire and stared straight into my eyes. Another pulse of thought energy throttled through me, this one so violent I saw white. “Well, I think you have some very strange questions, Olivia. Some strange suspicions of your own. I think you came in here to discover the answer to one of them in particular.”

And he withdrew the photo Cher had given me earlier, clearly stolen from my body while I was having a tea party with Hunter in the wild forests of Midheaven.

That alone would be enough to have my head swimming, grasping for an answer. But the additional mental tug and weight returned, like he’d captured my gray matter on a hook and was pulling me to an unknown shore. Flipping open Xavier’s binder to a marked page, he slid it in front of me, and there, beneath Xavier’s infamous tight-assed script, was the haunting symbol I’d been searching for. The one on the chest that had borne me paranormal weaponry.

The same one the Tulpa grasped tightly in his hands now.

23

I abandoned the idea of killing the Tulpa in lieu of finding a way not to get killed. But he wasn’t going to make that easy.

“Tell me what you know of this emblem,” he ordered.

“You’re right-I saw it the other night, my friend took a picture of it for me because it looked familiar, and now I know why. It was in the binder.”

He remained unmoved. Literally. “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did Xavier tell you?”

I blinked. “Teal and lavender are my best colors?”

The Tulpa’s eyes narrowed into slits while his nostrils widened. “Let me be clearer, Olivia . What has he told you about this image?”

I opened my mouth to reply but nothing came out. I stretched my vocal muscles but they only thinned in my throat, aching like the worst case of strep I’d ever had.

The Tulpa’s eyes flashed, sunlight burning over onyx, and his voice lowered about five octaves below Barry White’s. “You are dreaming, understand? When you wake, you’ll remember nothing of this conversation. But you will, always, tell me what I want to know. Now. What did Xavier reveal of the Serpent Bearer?”

I let my gaze lose focus, though my mind was as sharp as his tone. Serpent Bearer? My genuine confusion seemed to infuriate him. He moved a fraction of an inch-really just an extension of his neck-and willed his personal energy forward. I went airborne, sucking in a breath just in time for the fireplace to knock it back out. Muscles cringing around my spine, my legs shorted out, dropping me to my ass on the stone hearth. The next inhalation brought me no relief, but it did bring me a big fat wallop of mental manipulation. My eyes drained of moisture, the lids refusing to shut. I then rose like a marionette willed from above to slump before the Tulpa, while the power holding me there snaked like fingers in my brain.

“What do you know of the Serpent Bearer?” he repeated, voice rumbling, hypnotic and infuriated.

“Nothing,” said the probing power slipping out in my voice. But even through the tingling mental fog, I could see he didn’t believe me. There were too many small coincidences, things that didn’t add up-or worse, that did. Olivia shared a father with Joanna Archer, a penthouse in the same building, she had stumbled into this hidden room, possessed this symbol both in a book and a photo. Taken all together, it was probable I knew something. The Tulpa was intent on figuring out what.

His refinement was gone, replaced with an aggressive warrior’s stance, and the illness that forced him into a wheelchair last week, and to carry a cane today, shed like a cast-off blanket. His aura flickered and bulged, and his true visage flashed: the barbed shoulders and spine, the whipping tail, the teeth like daggers and eyes of fire.

“Tell me what you know!” The too-low baritone thrust like shrapnel, pinning me back to the fireplace. The leaded windows shattered behind their heavy draperies. Yet he didn’t whip the door clean off its hinges a second later.

No, that was done by another monster altogether.

Fear hit me like a natural disaster, and the cry that burst from my mouth echoed through the room to thrust the Tulpa’s probing power from my body. Seeing the direction of my petrified stare, the Tulpa whirled just in time to avoid Mackie’s viciously curling blade. Clearly mistaking him for some sort of defender, Mackie ignored me for the moment and faced off against someone who also wanted me dead.

I doubted the Tulpa had ever seen anyone like Sleepy Mack before…I wasn’t even sure he knew who he was. But he bared teeth as sharp as Mackie’s were jagged, and power burst like an A-bomb as he tackled him. Smoke poured from his malleable body, and vibrations whipped at me in waves, not threatening to smash me against the wall-I was already there-but to send me right through it. Mackie soared backward too, body half catching on the door frame before the power flipped him back outside. The Tulpa strode forward, but paused to shoot a warning growl at me.

It cost him. Mackie plowed into his stomach like a line-backer, and the thing that was my father distended to absorb the blow like putty. Mackie’s face twisted and he wailed like a tornado siren before redoubling his efforts. Feinting like a madman, he flicked the blade from one hand to the other before swiping upward in an unlikely blow.

The Tulpa was fast…but he lost two fingers.

I screamed again involuntarily, not out of any sort of empathy, but because a magic that could injure a tulpa was that frightening. The Tulpa’s fingers twitched on the ground, before steaming and dissolving into nothing. All that remained was black blood streaming from his left hand. Then the Tulpa’s own surprised and infuriated cry joined mine.