The Neon Graveyard

by Vicki Pettersson

  In life, Felix had always worn a smile. But in death, he wore a mask. The ancient artifact was made of burlwood, with slitted eyes and elongated cheeks, its red mouth painted open in an agonized scream. No sound escaped it, though, because nothing could.

  Felix had also once walked tall. Classically handsome, with that frat boy grin, he’d been irresistible to young women who liked their men pretty. That handsomeness would have eventually firmed up, hardening his fine features into something more befitting his confident carriage, yet he hadn’t been allowed the dignity of walking tall from life. He hadn’t been allowed even to stand.

  Instead he hung upside down, and from the blood that had congealed inside his neck, chest, and shoulders, it appeared he’d been that way for a long time. It was as if something vital had been opened inside him, allowed to gush forth, causing him to drown internally on his own blood.

  “Joanna . . .” Urgency wrapped each syllable.

  “We take him.”

  I didn’t know how I got the words out. My voice was tethered to my heart by a wire, and left my body in a staccato beat. I reached, jerkily, for a stool, then raised myself next to the body. I’d already forgotten, though; I no longer had my knife. For some reason that was what brought on the tears. I turned to Carlos, my arms spread helplessly.

  “Here,” he said, once again acting, grabbing a welded ceremonial knife from a wall shelf filled with mystical hoodoos. He smashed the base against the doorjamb, and handed it to me without even looking over his shoulder to see if the noise had alerted someone to our presence. I nodded tearfully as I took it, thinking he was the truest friend I had.

  After that, I stopped thinking. Moving rotely, I freed another man I’d counted as a true friend, and together we carried him—Carlos hobbled by his leg, me by my grief—back into the outer office, headed again toward those windows.

  But I stopped, almost exactly where I had before.

  “What?” Carlos said, his infamous patience getting a thorough testing.

  I shook my head. “I’m not done yet.”

  “Jo?” Carlos looked perplexed, though he had to feel my rage building. I didn’t think I could get ahold of it, much less rein it in, even if I wanted to. It would be like trying to capture a tomcat with city slicker hands, except this cat had razor fangs and hooked claws and laser eyes that glowed red. Like a monster’s, I thought, letting it go. Like a tulpa’s. Like my father’s.

  So what I meant to say to Carlos was Hold tight. I’ll be right back. What came out was “Stay.”

  He swallowed hard, and stayed.

  God bless Solange for giving me back the power to create, I thought, heading back to the stupa. And Shen for teaching me how to harness it. Because creation was the exact power I needed to wreak total destruction.

  Imagine a torch into existence.

  I imagined a nuclear core.

  The warming light I’d accessed with Shen’s help in Midheaven flared again, though this time I didn’t beg for it. I demanded it. Heat radiated from my chest, already fueled by my anger, and grief made sparks shoot from the enlarging fury, which shot through my body like a pulse line.

  Closing my eyes, I held perfectly still as I concentrated on that power, allowing it to coalesce, gathering the energy from my limbs, pulling it all in. I’d never before felt anger wind up inside me, or had to rock on my heels just to keep it reeled in. I didn’t do it this time either. Instead I opened my eyes slowly and viewed the world through a cornea burn.

  I didn’t touch the wall, trying to will my palm to heat it, trying to set the Tulpa’s beloved stupa ablaze. That would be like sitting hearthside, coaxing flame to life. I didn’t try to do anything. Instead I took the scream that’d been building in my gut since seeing Felix—no, since seeing Hunter suspended above me in a webbed cell—and I fast-pitched it into the room, aiming for the apex, willing all thirteen walls to incinerate.

  The blowback knocked me into the office, and for a moment the only sound was an internal sizzle. My body was fine, but the inside of my skull felt aflame. It also felt good. If I had to choose a word, I’d even dare to call it righteous. It was a clean burning anger, and there was a fuckload of it.

  Carlos’s hand on my arm had us both jerking away. The fury I couldn’t control—that, I suddenly admitted, I didn’t want to control—was threatening to consume me, and as I stared hard up at him, I realized I was seeing everything through a red-gold cast. That thought, along with the flame-crackle from the next room, made me realize my eyes were glowing like my father’s. It seemed seeing red wasn’t just an expression in my family.

  For his part, Carlos looked like he didn’t recognize me, his brows furrowing over his one good eye, Felix prone by his feet. I don’t know what he saw in me, if it was my father’s aspect that put such abject horror on his face as he stared down at me, or a foul characteristic all my own. All I could think was how nice it would feel—how very peaceful it would be—to step into the stupa, the flame, and simply burn.

  “We have to go!”

  I shook my head and realized Carlos was yelling. He was also sweating, the muscles in his throat pulled tight as he glanced nervously over his shoulder. Looking back, he pointed at Felix—poor Felix, already dead—and I knew he was right. They both deserved better than this. So I settled my rage—or at least moved it aside—and heaved Felix with Carlos, making for the window and our escape.

  But at least I’d sent a fireball into the Tulpa’s life first.

  16

  “He’s been soul sacrificed.”

  Emerging from her workroom, Io pulled off her plastic gloves, Buttersnap bumping her side as she closed the door behind her. Carlos and I had been banned to the anteroom while she worked on Felix—Carlos because he wasn’t exactly useful with his lack of mobility and sight, me because I couldn’t sit still. Even now, my leg bounced, my fingertips rapped, and my nerves jangled with the residual energy from blowing up the Tulpa’s stupa.

  “Jo?” Carlos’s hand on my arm made me jump.

  “I guess I already knew that.”

  But Io’s confirmation was still a jolt. She’d been working for the last two hours to pry the mask from Felix’s face, but I’d dealt with the mystical objects before and I knew it wasn’t possible. They were animistic, created for and by a culture that believed everything, even inanimate objects, had a soul. The masks possessed by the Tulpa were particularly unique. They directed soul energy from the wearer and converted it into raw energy for the Tulpa. He might have ordered Felix killed, but it hadn’t been a wasted death.

  I’d seen the mask forced on a human being before, smoke billowing from the eye and mouth holes as the wearer suffocated inside, and I couldn’t help but wonder, however unwillingly, about Felix’s last moments—what he’d thought, how he’d felt—and just how long the Tulpa’s torture had lasted.

  Carlos sat stoically, and I shut my eyes and sucked in a deep breath, trying to mind-blank. The embers of my fury were still there, ready to flare with even an errant thought, but burning down the cell wouldn’t serve us well. It certainly wouldn’t bring Felix back.

  I glanced up at Io as she leaned over to check on Carlos’s injured eye. His leg was already healing, but Io had already confirmed his eye would not. “So is Felix’s soul still in there?”

  Gently lowering Carlos’s bandage, she nodded. “The mask is clinging to the body even though that has begun to rot. My guess is that the Tulpa tried to strip him of his soul, and Felix kept him from doing so by joining with the psyche already living in the mask. He’s essentially hiding there.”

  I flinched from the thought. The idea that there was still some sort of consciousness locked in that wasted body was too horrible. Yet I liked the idea that Felix had fought until the end. “So he bested him. Even in death.”

  “Yes, but now he’s stuck.”

  I nodded. Like any living thing, the animist masks were fickle. I’d forced one on another agent once and she’d been helpless to detach it. She wo
uld have suffocated endlessly, years even, if someone hadn’t removed it for her. Yet I’d donned the same mask willingly, twice, and while it’d helped save my troop and hometown the second time, the time before that it’d ripped the flesh from my face. “Does he know . . .”

  “That he’s dead?” Io finished for me. Every bit of her great globe eyes was black with sadness. “I imagine so. But he’s too afraid to pull away. I’ll either have to force the mask from his face, or cut it. But I can’t remove the mask without taking . . . you know.”

  I held up a hand. “Leave it.” I wanted to remember Felix as he was in life; his face pristine, always with a ready smile. Not skinless and ripped from the bone.

  “Jo, we can’t bury him with the mask,” Carlos said. “Never mind that it’s a powerful totem and artifact. His soul is still trapped inside. Do you understand?”

  I nodded. We’d be burying him alive.

  “That bastard. He did this on purpose,” I said, tears welling. Death was one thing, even murder could be done cleanly. But this sort of brutality was literal overkill. “Felix was good. Pure Light. The Tulpa hated him for it.”

  But how on earth had he gotten to him? The Shadows had never even come close to capturing Felix before. He’d been a senior agent before he’d even turned twenty-seven, he was as paranoid as a terrorist, as disciplined as a navy SEAL.

  Io inclined her head. “The sacrifice was messy too. I think the Tulpa is becoming desperate in his search for a way into Midheaven.”

  I smiled cruelly at that. “Then he’s out of luck. Unless he has another stupa lying around.”

  The news that the Archer estate was ablaze hit the airwaves before we’d even exited the city. Of course, firefighters raced to put out the inferno in this valley’s first family’s storied home, but the stupa was gone. I’d seen to that.

  So the Tulpa would have no more reason to strip other people’s souls in an effort to power his entrance into another world. Not that it was any consolation where Felix was concerned.

  “And now for you,” Io said, heading my way with a loaded syringe.

  I eyed it warily. “It won’t hurt the baby, right?”

  “Not at all. Can’t say the same for anyone who scents that child in you, though.”

  I winced. “It’s really that strong?”

  “Girl, you smell like hothouse flowers, and wind ferried from the moon’s craters. It’s life, green and full. Promising and perfect.”

  I knew it shouldn’t, not now, but for some reason that made me want to smile.

  So as Io set about prepping my arm to inject a compound that would hide the scent of my pregnancy from anyone with the supernatural sense to discern it, I turned my mind back to the Tulpa, and his attempt to enter Midheaven.

  “At least there’s nothing over there anymore. I half wish the Tulpa had found a way in. I could have blown up the stupa with him locked on the other side.”

  “But then he’d have what he desires,” Carlos said. “You don’t want that, do you?”

  “Solange destroyed most of that world,” I said, pressing a cotton ball to my shoulder where Io had administered the masking agent. “There’s nothing else there.”

  Though that was a lie. Hunter was there. Which meant soon I would be too.

  “You’re forgetting about the child. The Tulpa still wants to rule and control and use the Kairos.”

  I sat back. Of course. Hunter’s child with Solange. A kid who was half Shadow and half Light. The only person, other than me, to have ever been both. And wasn’t that, she, who everyone wanted?

  Solange initially fled to Midheaven so she could keep that power, as the child’s mother, to herself.

  Hunter had followed, if not for the same reasons, then with the same ruthless purpose.

  Even Warren had sacrificed agents, betraying those raised in his beloved troop, in the obsessive quest for this one fated individual.

  Glancing again at Carlos, I couldn’t help rethink his reasons for entering Midheaven. He’d said it was to free the rogue men trapped there, but even his emerging troop of grays would benefit from luring the child back as a rogue.

  Was that why he’d left without telling me? Had he been so intent on finding that child before the Tulpa or Warren that he too had risked my life, and Hunter’s, to do so?

  I swallowed hard, trying to dampen my growing confusion. Carlos would sense it if I wasn’t careful. His brow was already beginning to furrow. I wanted to trust him, but I was so used to lies and betrayal that it was more surprising when people treated me well.

  “May we have a minute, Io?” Carlos asked softly.

  “You kicking me out of my own wing?” she said, but was already ambling away, her hair backlit like a lampshade from the nearby torch. Knowing Carlos and I couldn’t speak of Midheaven in front of her, she disappeared around the corner without another word.

  Carlos turned back to me. “Do you know what a chimera is?”

  A random question, I decided, but I’d go with it for now. “Do I want to?”

  He shook his head, but told me anyway. “It’s a creature designed with multiple animals parts. The ancients believed that—”

  “Wait, let me guess. The Greeks, right?”

  “You know this one?”

  I scoffed. “They get around.”

  “Well, the Greeks believed chimeras were immortal creatures. Fire-breathing monsters with the body of a lioness, the tail of a snake, and the head of a goat.”

  “A family pet, then,” I said wryly, unable to see what this had to do with anything.

  “Hardly. And even though such a creature is unlikely—”

  I snorted. Among the unlikely things I’d seen in the past year were doppelgangers that turned into tulpas, children who morphed and stretched into protective changelings, alternate dimensions and realities and worlds, and—let’s not forget—Real. Life. Superheroes.

  I specialized in the unlikely.

  “There are doctors today who have worked hard, enlisting biology, botany, and a healthy imagination to create chimeras out of disparate entities. Are you following me?”

  “Sure,” I nodded, rolling my eyes. “Some mad scientist tried to stick the limbs of a monkey on a beanstalk, then glued it to a dachshund just to see if it would bark.”

  Carlos gave me the world’s blankest stare. “Joanna, I understand you’re upset, but try to be serious.”

  “No, you be serious!” I yelled, before I could stop. “Someone I once cared for—still care for!—was just soul sacrificed, and you’re talking about some nonexistent creature the Greeks cooked up for storytime while gathered around their goddamned fire pits!”

  “No,” he said, with a gentle shake of his head. “I’m trying to get you to see that with the right tools and . . . mindset, it’s possible to bring something to life, to keep something alive, that shouldn’t be.”

  “Are you talking about him?” I said lowly, pointing back to the room where Felix lay, trapped in his own deteriorating body.

  “No,” he defended, clearly feeling my banked anger rise. “I’m talking about what you just saw in Midheaven. What we just killed there.”

  I drew back. I thought back. Then I sat back, swallowing hard. “Th-that . . . thing? The spider thing? That was a chimera?”

  I tried to recall its specifics, what parts might belong to what sort of animal. The spider part was obvious. It crawled about that web with unnatural ease, despite having no more limbs than I. I had no idea what sort of creature had lent its milky white eyes, though. Or the hairlessness that made it look marbleized. Maybe both were a natural result of biding in the dark. Were there such things as albino spiders? I opened my mouth to ask, but Carlos was shaking his head.

  “That wasn’t a creature made of disparate parts, Joanna. Unless you count the patchwork bits of soul from every person who has ever passed through Midheaven proper.”

  “Are you telling me Solange busted up her sky of soul gems, and made that . . . thing, a chimera,
with the energy instead?”

  “The sky was a sort of power plant. Energy to feed it all along. And it was never for Solange.”

  “So she killed everyone in Midheaven, and erased all the elemental rooms from existence, in order to feed their souls to her pet monster?”

  “It wasn’t a monster, Joanna.” He bit his lower lip. “It was a child.”

  Shock, then disgust flooded me so quickly I felt like I was freezing and burning at the same time. Time and vision constricted, along with the air in my chest, and I was suddenly no longer sure if I was standing or seated.

  But I was absolutely certain that I was going to toss my cookies if I didn’t get a grip. Fast.

  And as the shock wore off, the reality sunk in, my sudden understanding helped steady me. I mean, only one thing would keep Solange from hoarding every ounce of soul energy for herself. One reason alone would have her siphoning the power fueling that twisted world, eradicating its rooms and reducing the men and the women who’d dwelled there to talking heads—backup generators, I realized. Reserves, if she needed them.

  The only real reason to take a life, I decided, or many lives, was to save another—either yours or someone you loved. And with Solange, it was the latter. With Solange, it was her child.

  Hers . . . and Hunter’s.

  I lunged for the corner as bitterness coated my throat. Carlos waited in silence, and as my body recoiled violently, trying to separate itself from my thoughts. I wondered how he could be so calm. Maybe he’d gotten all his freaking out over with when his eye was being retrofitted with a priceless gem. Maybe he’d been around the child, the chimera, long enough that it no longer fazed him. But it fazed me. I shuddered, remembering the way it’d screamed when I nicked it with my blade, how it’d scrambled away, and Solange had soothed it with gentle, mad words. I heaved again.

  I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to know what went into keeping that thing-child alive because knowing would never allow me to understand Solange. Nothing would. Even after all I’d seen and done in the Zodiac world, I literally couldn’t wrap my brain around that kind of mad ambition. Maybe at one time she’d possessed an understandable desire—to birth the Kairos, to be the mother of a child meant to change the supernatural underworld—but that desire had morphed and soured into an unhealthy obsession. And a wish granted at any cost was, in truth, a curse.