The Touch of Twilight

by Vicki Pettersson

  “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 my dry throat, I’d have to let Vincent drift away in a slow death to cement that choice. “Look, someone else is causing the vibrational outbursts.”

  “Bullshit!” He spat and his eyes sparked red.

  “I don’t know how to manipulate matter!” That was it; my voice was gone, drier than dust, and fatigue began to smother me. There was no more sweat.

  “Your scent is all over it, Joanna! I want you to dismantle her energy, and maybe then I’ll consider sparing your life.”

  “Her?” I croaked.

  He growled, and I cooked.

  I struggled past the literal heartache, past my desire to rip my mask and clothing from my body, to rend my very skin from my bones if it meant relief, and focused all my remaining energy into building a cocoon around me, constructing a place inside this inferno where I could safely disappear. But as my walls began to shimmer, a mocking look passed over the Tulpa’s face, and I knew the big, bad wolf didn’t even need to puff to blow my house down.

  “You’d trade my life for the destruction of…” I pretended to falter, waiting for him to fill in the blank. At best I could relay the information to the rest of the troop later. At worst I’d know what I’d died for.

  But the Tulpa wasn’t in a helpful mood. “I’m not offering a trade. I’m telling you to come with me and begin the systematic breakdown of the double-walker—”

  “The wha—?”

  “Or make yourself comfortable.”

  Think, Jo. Think or fry. “But it’s not—”

  “Liar!” He didn’t even let me finish, and his red eyes gained heat, twin coals fired by unyielding fury. I knew how that felt, the blinding anger fueling that gaze, so I also knew he was past reason. Heat soared, burning and agonizing, and my litany of prayers dissipated until only one word remained. Please, please, please…

  “Break down the double-walker!”

  My mouth was so parched I had to be spitting ash. I tried to speak again and choked. My sandpaper tongue was expanding in my mouth. My organs shriveled inside me. “Don’t know how—”

  “I do.” And with those two words, air rushed over me, lifting sweaty strands of hair from my neck as two hands clamped down over mine. Relief was immediate, like I�
��d cannonballed into a cold plunge pool.

  I sucked in a delicious breath, as deep and thorough as I dared, then did it again. On my next inhalation, I glanced up to find that the Tulpa was no longer fixed on me. I twisted to follow his gaze, and discovered a surprisingly slight woman just behind me.

  She was short, barely five feet tall, and so pale her skin sparked off itself, causing her to glow with a soft radiance. If she was wearing clothing it was spandex-tight, merely rounding out her curves and muting her sex like a naked Barbie. Her hair swung down her back, snapping in effervescent waves, and I watched as a droplet fell to the floor, where it reflected the light blazing from the Tulpa’s eyes before it sizzled and was gone.

  Behind me the Tulpa roared. “Break it down!”

  The woman smiled…with sparkling spiked teeth. “I have a better idea.”

  And though she looked too fragile to resist a blown kiss, much less the Tulpa’s anger, she effortlessly scooped me up at the waist, her translucent, shiny fingers winnowing their way down to my ankles. I was so disoriented—and so relieved to no longer be cooking from the inside out—it took me a moment to realize I was floating. “Shit—wait!”

  The Tulpa protested too. “You can’t—!”

  “Just did.” Her voice, like her hair, was effervescent and snapping sharp, the syllables of her words running together in churning ripples to reverberate off one another.

  “It’s a law!”

  “Meant to be broken.” She waved the Tulpa away, and flashed those pointed teeth again, more pearl than white. She glanced up to find me watching. “Come. We must hurry.”

  “The mortal—” I began, flailing as she shifted her feet.

  “—is already dead.” She was studying the distance between the floor and the top of my head, and said it without emotion. “The Tulpa is animating him with residual energy.”

  “It’s an illusion?” I took my eyes off her long enough to gaze up at Vincent again. He was still rotating slowly, drifting closer to the center of the black hole, but too far removed now for me to make out the expression on his frozen face.

  “Yes, but the heat melting this building is not. Let’s go.” I’d floated higher, and she pulled me beneath the center of the black hole, straight-armed, like I was a kite. Wait a minute…

  The Tulpa objected as well. “You can’t shield her forever!”

  “Don’t need to,” she muttered, almost sounding bored. She grabbed my other ankle, steadying me, the coolness from her palms spreading through my body, though I knew it was unbearably hot. Even the steel beams looked to be sweating. “Creating and sustaining a black hole burns a massive amount of fuel. You’re running out of energy at an alarming rate, am I right? Besides, I could just take her back to Midheaven with me. You’ll never touch her there.”

  I didn’t think it was possible for the Tulpa to blanch, but he did, and wondering what, and where, Midheaven was, I looked up.

  That’s how I saw Vincent’s body suddenly stretch like spaghetti, his head whipping back in a sharp centrifugal swirl. For a moment I thought the rest of him would follow, but people weren’t meant to enter black holes, and in the next instant his body was rent by the tides of gravitational force, snapping, dissipating, destroyed so thoroughly, it was as if he’d never been. I swallowed down a scream. The woman and the Tulpa seemed not to notice.

  “Now scoot along, tulpa,” And she said his name like she would say cat or dog, like he was a thing and not a person. The black hole wobbled in the sky, and the Tulpa let out an infuriated but hollow yell.

  The woman turned her back on him and whispered to me, “Are you ready for this?”

  “No, no, no!” I said, suddenly panicked, knowing what she was thinking. “I was never good at science, but I know if you get too close to a black hole, there’s no escaping it. So maybe we can talk about fighting or shooting our way out of here instead. I-I’m really good at that.”

  “Okay, shooting. We’ll do that.” She turned her wicked grin on me. “I’ll be the propulsion. You’re the rocket.”

  And she bent her shimmering knees and shot into the air with an explosion to match the Tulpa’s initial blast. I—we, because the woman was still anchored to me—shot past him so fast, he was still staring at the spot where we’d been standing, and the vertebrae in my neck cracked with the pressure of our ascent. There was a sucking sound, the breach and subsequent burst of the black hole disintegrating behind me, and then we were free, darting through the crisp night, Vegas spread below us like a hard, glittering pool. Wind whipped my hair and whistled in my ears, and through the weight of the night air I could hear the woman screaming delightedly behind me. At least someone was having fun.

  And then, as we slowed to an apex, the Tulpa’s words revisited me. Glancing down, I realized what basic universal law this woman had broken.

  Gravity, I thought frantically, and immediately began falling.

  4

  The great planets revolving around our sun are subject to the same basic law that had an apple thrumming Newton on his brilliant beaner. We—an iridescent woman who scoffed at the Tulpa’s empowered rage, and me—had broken that law, and while I was sure there’d be cosmic hell to pay for the breach, I was hoping it wouldn’t be due until well after we’d landed.

  And yet I couldn’t help but be awed. Supernaturals could jump—damned high too—but we couldn’t fly. Outside of a steel bird, I’d never seen the entire town spread below me like a bright LEGOLAND replica, and my cannonball shot over its center made me feel momentarily possessive of everything below me, and unreasonably proud. The city’s peace in the clear, cool night put me in mind of a snow globe at rest, all the glitter and sparkle winking up at me from the earth’s floor, as if the world’s orderliness depended only on perspective. Wind rippled in my mouth as I smiled back…and then, with only a hundred feet left between the ground and me, that bitch let go.

  Fifty feet, thirty feet—the descent more dizzying than the initial blast—I felt my hair fluttering like a banner behind me as I streaked toward hard earth. I acclimated myself enough to know where we were heading—a swath of dirt outside the old rail yard’s fence—but that wasn’t my most pressing interest. As the ground rushed up at me, the speed had my once-mortal instincts recoiling. I pinwheeled in the air, anticipating the crash, wondering if bent knees, proper form, and superhuman healing was enough to get me out of this one, and so the movement spied from the corner of my eye barely registered.

  It was the woman, or possibly just part of her, slipping beneath me to break my fall like a trampoline. I spotted the nucleus of a glimmering sheet of…well, something, and trying not to think too hard about what that something was, I landed as hard as I expected…right into its pillowing middle. It shot me back up, dangerously high, so I endeavored to return to its middle upon each subsequent bounce, and when I was bounding only as high as a single-story building, it disappeared entirely, so that I landed in a bone-jolting crouch on the gritty earth. When I looked up, the pale pearl of a woman, still ethereal and pretty and radiant as an opal, was standing beside me.

  I opened my mouth, but she cut me off with one word. “Portal.”

  So we weren’t out of danger yet. My mouth snapped shut, and I followed her back into the tight weave of city blocks, both of us canvassing the doorways and windows for a small, variable star. I watched her sail along in front of me, knowing I should think of something intelligent to ask or say, but she didn’t seem inclined to talk until we were well away from the Tulpa, and that was fine with me. My insides were still raw and bruised and burned.

  Lately I’d been trying to avoid using the portals. I’d last accessed one during a training session where we were attempting to spot false entries, which we’d discovered had been set around the city like mousetraps to ensnare us until the Shadows could check them, and kill us. Although it’d been daylight on this side of the portal, the sun had flipped around on itself on the other side of that supernatural gateway, and I walked into a
replica of the street I’d left, but for the darkness blanketing the earth while the heavens were spotlit by the sun. The alternate reality was colorless, with a silver-gray haze reducing everything to a shadowy line drawing. It had also been bitingly cold…unbearable to a desert rat like myself, and the whole experience had totally creeped me out.

  Yet I was the one who spotted our first portal marker positioned above a planked-over window, and I veered to it. I’d already ripped the wood from the casing when I felt the woman’s cold hand on my back, causing me to jolt. It reminded me of that alternate reality, and I shuddered.

  “Not this one,” she said, her phosphorescent features shifting with eerie undulations, like breath over the surface of a bubble that wouldn’t break. “Too close.”

  I wasn’t sure why that mattered, as no one could follow once the portal closed behind us, but she was already moving away, so I followed. Maybe she was a part of that reality, I thought as I hurried to keep up, because her touch—never mind her look—wasn’t human. And maybe she’d been in the threshold of a nearby portal when she heard my frantic prayer, fighting boundaries and barriers to come to my rescue. I couldn’t imagine how many laws that would be breaking.

  “Need to get back immediately?” she asked, whirling on me suddenly. I backed up two paces, nodding. Warren and the others would be worried. She inclined her head like she’d expected that and turned away, motioning for me to follow again. Normally I didn’t do passive, but after my rescue I was inclined to let her take the lead.

  “Thank you,” I blurted out, speed walking to keep pace as the image of Vincent roiling helplessly in space replayed itself in my mind. “It’s not enough, but I don’t know what else to say. You saved me, you outplayed the Tulpa. I’ve never seen a black hole before, so I wouldn’t know how to escape it…and how’d you do that flying—?”

  “Dear, you’re babbling.” Shimmering, she cut me off with a slanted look, and I took a deep breath, not caring if she could scent my relief, my shock, and my exhaustion on the exhale. One side of her gleaming mouth quirked, but she kept those sharp teeth hidden as she jerked her head to the left.