The Touch Of Twilight (32 page)

I narrowed my eyes, and my fingers flexed automatically. “Don’t,” I said coolly.

“Olivia!” Warren had moved into my peripheral view, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off my doppelgänger. She was boxed in, but I was boxed in with her.

“I’ll let you say mine,” she cajoled, drowning out his voice, ignoring him completely. He was behind her now, but couldn’t get at her through the walls, and she knew it. The rest of the troop had spread out evenly around the perimeter, but she didn’t spare any of them a glance either.

I shook my head. “I don’t know yours.”

“Olivia.” Warren’s voice again. “Break down your walls on my go.”

He began to give the others orders, I saw all conduits lift—Vanessa’s steel fan flicking open, Felix’s edged boomerang, a flanged mace, hooks, and a short pole that flared into a four-tined military fork with the press of a button—but my double still didn’t seem concerned. Her liquid tongue darted out, and her gaze no longer rested gently on mine. “If you’re not going to soldier toward your destiny, then I’ll do it for you, but one way or another, you’re going to give me what I want.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Don’t hold your breath.”

And as Warren raised his arm, I closed my eyes and wished the walls away.

Her response was a bubbling whisper. “You mean like her?”

I opened my eyes in time to see Warren tackle her, but he fell through her body like it was made of mist. An instant later, all that remained of her was crazed, bittersweet laughter.

“Dammit, Vanessa! I told you not to break the circle!”

But Vanessa was kneeling over Kimber, wrenching the mask from her face. It gave in her grip with a sharp popping noise, and then Kimber took the deepest, loudest, greediest breath I’d ever heard. I winced. The mask couldn’t kill her, so she’d been suffocating all this time. It must have felt like eternity.

Felix turned to me while Micah and Chandra tended to Kimber. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. She didn’t do anything.” Though the conversation had left me more confused than ever. What the hell did she want from me? A noun? Two aspects and a referent? At least it was no longer my heart.

“How can you say that?” Vanessa said, turning to look up at me so her long ebony curls whipped around her face. “Look at Kimber.”

“Oh.” I swallowed hard, looking at the blue-lipped, pale-skinned initiate. “That.”

Kneeling on her other side, Micah looked up at me in disbelief. “Don’t tell me…”

So I didn’t. But once Kimber had finally regained her color, her breath, and her wits, she made sure not to leave anything out.

• • • *
      

I was duly reprimanded for forcing the animist’s mask upon Kimber, even though no one else had known doing so would trap her breath inside it either. I would’ve pointed out Kimber was uninjured—even initiates couldn’t be killed by anything fashioned by a mortal’s hand—and that she’d only fallen semi-immobile because it was hard to think when you couldn’t breathe. Yet that would’ve brought her absolute vulnerability to the doppelgänger to the forefront of the conversation, something I wasn’t especially anxious to point out.

Of course, Kimber pointed that out for me as well…and was summarily reamed for pretending to see portents of evil and unmitigated horrors when she clearly had not. Warren stripped her of the right to leave the sanctuary again until after her metamorphosis, and as far as I was concerned, we were even. Yet one look at Kimber’s sullen face and it was clear she didn’t feel the same. Fine. So I knew she’d continue working to usurp my position in the troop…and she knew I’d be ready.

“But how did the doppelgänger get in?” Tekla asked, once only she, Warren, and I remained in the dojo. Warren was staring up at the apex of the room distractedly, clearly wondering if its pyramid shape had anything to do with it. I just shook my head because the more pressing question was
What did she want?
“One noun, two aspects…” I wrapped my arms around my middle and shook my head. I had no idea what that meant.

“Nouns have two functions,” said Tekla, standing across from me. “They describe and they refer. She mentioned your senses, and that your Shadow side was a referent, what lives inside of you. Does any of that make sense to you?”

“Nothing. You?”

“No, but I’m not the one a doppelgänger broke into the sanctuary to have a chat with.”

“Because she’s a part of me,” I murmured, running my hands over my face and hair. “At least that’s what she said. Made from the same cloth. Everywhere I am.”

Warren put his hands on his hips, still straining as he gazed at the pyramid’s apex. He was clean-shaven, clothed in white…obviously taking the night off from indigence. “You know, for the girl who’s supposed to be the savior of the Zodiac, you’re pretty high-maintenance.”

At least he sounded more bemused now than angry. I watched him bend to pick up the animist’s mask, groaning softly as he put all his weight on his good leg. “I want you to keep this,” he told me, holding it my way. “Put it in your room, lock it up. I know you won’t put it on, and I don’t want to risk anyone else”—and here he looked sharply at Tekla—”being tempted to do it.”

“Including yourself, I presume?” Tekla said, coloring slightly. I’d seen her in a rage before, and the stillness surrounding her now, like a vacuum opening up around her, was the calm announcing that storm. I swallowed and shot Warren a hard look, but he knew Tekla’s moods too, and had already looked, and moved, away.

“Yes, including me,” he conceded, and the air loosened again.

Great, I thought, glancing down at the painted face as a stonelike dread settled in my belly. My horrific visions and Xavier’s stolen soul essence had been enough to skeeve me out before, but now the mask could endlessly suffocate an agent as well. No way would I be able to sleep if it was secreted away in my room. The best place for it would be back outside Xavier’s office, in the reconstructed stupa. That would keep it out of the hands of those who wanted to use it as a supernatural bong for their next visionary fix, and it would also give me an excuse to once again visit, and study, my dear old housekeeper, Helen Maguire. It was the only cause I had to smile as we all exited the Orchard.

There was no time to return the animist’s mask to Xavier’s the next day. Instead, I went to visit one Laura Crucier, a coma patient at Sheep Mountain Medical’s
ICU
, who lay completely motionless, just as she had days earlier when someone had left her unconscious at the hospital’s entrance. Apart from the machinery angled around her bed like electric sentinels, the main difference now was the clustering flowers and frames and stuffed animals adorning every available flat surface. Asleep, she was an island unto herself. In the living world, she was deeply loved.

“The Archer Foundation has found itself in the enviable position of a budget surplus this year,” I told the hovering hospital administrator, without removing my eyes from Laura. I could envision her greasy hair shining and swinging. I wanted to bulldoze some color into her cheeks. The man remained behind me, giving me room, but I could scent oiled anxiety leaking from his pores. It battled in the air against the dozens of waterlogged roses. “I heard from a friend of a friend of Ms. Crucier’s story and the wonderful job you’ve done with her.”

“Well, we have hope that, with time and continued care, she’ll recover.”

“Fully?” I asked, turning to face him for the first time.

He looked for a moment like he’d been blinded by a camera’s flash, and his smile stuttered over his face as he backtracked.
Olivia
, the heir and benefactress and socialite, blinked. Waiting. “Well, no one can say for sure, but we certainly haven’t given up hope.”

I turned again to face the unconscious woman, the silent moments counted off in Laura’s heartbeat. I knew the man was waiting for me to speak first, that the hope and time and continued care he’d spoken of would be made infinitely easier with what he wasn’t asking. And while he continued not asking for money, and I continued staring, and Laura’s heart kept beating, I couldn’t help but think,
How could I have not been able to tell the difference between a Shadow and a mortal?

These bodies, these mortal shells, were as fragile as blown glass, accumulating nicks and scratches and chips in the surface over the years, unless like Olivia, they were carelessly dropped, allowed to shatter into pieces. I, of anyone, should’ve been able to tell; I’d lived as a mortal, had the aspect of a Shadow, and possessed an alleged Light facet that should’ve been able to stop that blow before it landed. Regan was right; I had to start taking responsibility. I was almost a year in the Zodiac, a year without my sister, whose life and body was also destroyed because of me, and I wouldn’t believe I’d learned nothing in that time. I couldn’t keep accidentally chipping away at other people’s lives. Otherwise, it’d all been for nothing.

I finally turned from Laura’s bed, checkbook in hand, my answer as silently bold the man’s question. I decided it needed further clarification.

“Make sure she’s cared for,” I said evenly, and held out my hand for a pen.

• • • *
      

The second stop of the day, the second reason I couldn’t return the animist mask to Xavier’s mansion, was prompted by my twisted paranormal attempt at being the good Samaritan. I’d decided I wasn’t the only one who needed to start taking responsibility for her actions. Regan was going to as well. It was a two-hour trip out to the Desert Valley Correctional Center, but on the way there I had plenty of time to rehearse my cover story—I was a reporter for a true crime magazine doing a feature on recovery programs for pedophiles—and I also had time to figure out what I was going to say to Regan DuPree’s mortal father. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. On the relatively rare occasion an agent of Light had turned to a mortal for companionship, they’d done so out of love. However, Shadows scoured humanity for a vessel where their own dark attributes could stew and spawn and therefore be given additional purchase in the world.

So I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the guards had brought me a being with horns and a tail, but the thin, blinking, and bespeckled man who dropped into the plastic chair across from me had me blinking back. He picked up the wall phone with a hand that would have been elegant were it not for the scars scoring his wrists and palms. I might have felt some pity for him then, except the crosshatching of scars on his fingertips were especially thick. The former Father Michael had worked hard, and with some degree of success, to rid himself of his fingerprints. I had a feeling the wounds on his palms and arms had been due to slips in concentration rather than any deliberate attempt to harm himself.

There was also an odd angularity to the man’s face, and after a moment I realized it was because his features—jaw and cheekbones and brows—should’ve been placed on someone larger. The rest of his face was sunken, aged before its time, though unlined and pale from the lack of sun. His deep-set eyes sat passively on mine, though it felt like they looked everywhere at once. I saw another scar on the hollow of his neck, a perfect square raised so thickly and neatly, it had to have been traced by a blade over and over again. I realized it represented the collar on a priest’s frock and thought of the nerve it would take to cut so deeply and precisely right next to one’s own jugular. Father Michael, for all his humanity, had the grit of a Shadow.

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” he asked in a silky voice, when we’d finished looking each other over.

I neither agreed nor disagreed, in case this call was being recorded. “I know your daughter.”

Something akin to emotion passed over his face, and his lids flared a bit, nostrils widening as his tongue darted out to wet his lips. “Did she send you?”

“She’s why I’m here.”

He smiled now, and his cheekbones rose into sharp angles. It was like his face was made of putty; the grin changed him entirely. How many faces, I wondered, did this man have? “It’s amazing you found me. I know I’m not in the manuals, I’ll never be worthy of that, but it’s important that you know, that she knows, the human element weakens nothing. In fact, knowing my weaknesses has made me a master at pinpointing them in others. Like my daughter, I bet. She probably has incredible focus, right? An uncanny ability to wait out even the greatest threat to her survival?”

I thought of the first time I met Regan, how she’d betrayed a senior Shadow in an elaborate effort to get to me. How she’d risked even the Tulpa’s wrath. How she was stalking me through Ben. “Actually,” I said softly, “she’s a lot like her mother.”

He let out a wistful sigh as he remembered the woman who’d steered him directly into lifelong incarceration. “A great beauty, then, but with no patience for sentiment. I often think about her. Not Brynn, she always took care of herself, but my daughter. I always wondered how she fared growing up under the care of a woman devoid of sentiment.”

That little nugget snagged my attention. “What do you mean?”

Father Michael’s eyes blazed again as he realized he knew something I didn’t. I had a feeling it’d been a long time since he’d been able to talk about our world with someone. Good.

“Brynn DuPree only had passion for one thing. She was determined the Cancerian star sign stay in her direct bloodline. She wouldn’t even entertain the idea of it passing on to her younger siblings, much less anyone in the extended family. That’s why she didn’t mate with a man of the Zodiac, choosing instead to propagate with a mortal of the same sign. Thank God she settled on me.” He crossed himself in a sincere mockery of piety.

“Why would that cause Brynn to turn to you?”

“The men of the Zodiac actively court a woman who can improve their lineage, but because the line is matriarchal, the women can turn to a human for their needs…if they find one worthy of them, someone whose humanity provides them with an even greater strength of will and resolve than the male members of the Shadow Zodiac.”

Which was exactly what Regan had said about Ben. I fought off a wave of fear so strong it felt like nausea.