Two minutes later I was still sitting there as Zell continued limbering up. “Is this going to take long?” I asked, smoothing a wrinkle out of my pinstriped slacks.
He cracked an eyelid, annoyance burning in his gaze. “Hey, you try rearranging the organs inside your body to host another person. It’s not exactly comfortable.”
I wanted to say, That’s called pregnancy, you big pussy, but I didn’t want him wondering how I knew. Besides, a pregnant woman’s body had nine months to rearrange itself. Zell had fewer minutes than that, and watching the way his chest cavity unnaturally gave way to the roiling going on in his belly gave me the heebie-jeebies. But when he finally did settle himself, I watched. I shuddered as his cry roiled over the high-ceilinged room, and scratched lightly at my own skin when his ripped, beginning at his bottom lip, straight down his middle like he was being butterflied. Finally there was nothing recognizable of Zell in the mass of pulsing organs and skinned bone, just the flaps of skin falling open and shut like fish gills against a skull that had whipped a full circle on his neck stump.
Inside out, the bloodied lids fluttered over the crimson orbs and I could practically see Zell’s thoughts extinguishing as the Tulpa took over his consciousness. “Ah, Mr. Trexler. It figures he’d be the one to receive your call. He regularly canvasses the shop by loitering in the adjacent alley. He likes to spook the children as they leave. I’ll have to tell him to cease now that I’ve told you of it.”
“I’m sure he’d appreciate that. Zell doesn’t seem too fond of me.”
“You’re not an easy person to like.”
I smirked. “Thanks, Daddy.”
“I take it you’ve reconsidered my offer to work together? Rid this plane of the double-walker? May I ask what prompted this change of heart?”
I smirked at his emphasis of the word heart. “I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s in everyone’s best interest to get rid of the doppelgänger as quickly as possible.”
If he’d had lips they would’ve pursed. “She scares you more than I do. I think I should be offended.”
“This plane is going to collapse under her continued attacks, and besides, she scares you too. I keep wracking my brain, wondering why, because I know it’s more than her ability to unbalance us all, not that I expect you to tell me. I’ll have to do a little research into the history of tulpas and doppelgängers.”
“So until then we join forces.” A bloodied stump of a tongue darted out to lick those nonexistent lips.
“Under one condition.”
Surprise twisted his features. “You’re making conditions now?”
“You can’t tell anyone we’re working together,” I said flatly. “I want this to be between you and me alone. We combine our powers and work together to eliminate the doppelgänger, but I don’t want anything to do with your troop.”
That was true enough, but it wasn’t all. What I really wanted was to keep this agreement between us from Regan. She’d been content to keep my Olivia identity to herself because not only did it give her an advantage over the other Shadows in securing my death, it gave her a sense of power to know something the Tulpa didn’t. However, she might spook if she found out the Tulpa and I were speaking. She might tell him about Olivia. She might kill Ben as a warning to me.
“I already told you,” the Tulpa said, scratching his rib cage. “You’re no longer welcome in my troop.”
I inclined my head. “Then you have no problem keeping your Shadow agents out of the loop.”
“Only if you’re kosher with abandoning the agents of Light for the time being.”
“I figured that was a given.”
The muscles in his cheeks stretched into a grin. “Agreed, then. So I’m going to give you a mantra that speaks to her natural frequency. The next time you see her, you must say it three times exactly the way I tell it to you. Saying it once will call her to you. Twice will bind her energy in place. The third time will bring me to your side.”
“I can do that?”
He chuckled darkly. “Oh, the things I can teach you, daughter.”
I went wide-eyed beneath my mask. “Like how to play catch? Roughhouse on the living room floor? Lessons on how to fend off unwanted advances…though it’s a little late for that, isn’t it?”
I hadn’t forgotten the Tulpa’s culpability when it came to the destruction of my entire adolescence, and he needed to know it. We might be working together now, but it was as a means to an end, and didn’t mean I liked it.
He folded one claw over the other. “Anybody can do it, provided they know how. This specific combination of words is set on the same vibrational plane as her energy.”
More vibrations, I thought ruefully. “And you know what that is, how?”
The answer flashed over his face. “I read it the moment I laid eyes on her.”
I grunted. Of course he had. “So it’s a spell.”
“You can think of it as a prayer if it makes you feel better,” he said, his smile mocking. “But it’s really alchemy.”
“Alchemy that can kill her,” I clarified.
He rolled his eyes, causing bloody tears to form in the inverted ducts. “You haven’t been listening. She’s pure energy. She can’t be killed. But she can be absorbed back into the universe, made harmless, dissolved back into raw matter like all spirits upon death. Then our world will regain its original cosmic resonance.”
And we could go back to killing one another. So, then, the equally important question was “And what about me?”
“You’re free to leave as soon as she’s bound. No need to stick around.”
Which was fine by me.
“Yet there is one more little thing.”
I folded my arms over my chest, but inclined my head so he’d continue.
“A condition of my own.” He lifted his chin, and I saw red beads, like sweat, rolling down his throat. “If you use this mantra to get rid of the doppelgänger, then as soon as I exterminate her, you must come willingly to the Shadow side. You come into my domain, learn what I have to teach, give me a chance to show you everything you didn’t know you were missing.”
I suddenly felt like a fish on a line. “You mean if I use it, I belong to you.”
“It makes sense, doesn’t it? I’ll have saved you, and the world, from her cannibalistic designs, her basic destructive force. You’ll owe me.”
And it was a good way to facilitate the rise of my Shadow side. I shook my head. “I’ll never owe you a damned thing.”
“Not if you’re dead,” he quickly agreed, narrow tongue darting out to lick at the corners of that inverted mouth. “The only other way to stop her chaotic attacks on this reality’s plane is to give her what she wants. You watch, each time you run into her and don’t bind her with my magic, she’ll have taken on more of your appearance, your mannerisms, your aspect. The collapse of this world aside, wait much longer and you won’t even have the ability to choose sides. She’ll just take over your life. A new model…one that will make the old one obsolete.”
He watched me steadily through Zell’s blood-slicked orbs, but I said nothing for so long, he must have despaired of an answer at all. He shifted on his feet. I sighed and met his gaze. Just because I had the mantra didn’t mean I had to use it. And at least using it was a known risk. So much about my double—my twin, as he called her—was still unknown. I finally nodded.
“Good. I figured you wouldn’t be willing to speak in a foreign language—”
When the words were powerful enough to bind another being into place? “You got that right.”
“So I’ve translated the mantra for you from the original. You must repeat it exactly as I do.” His eyes rolled back into his sockets to show only white as he pulled the words from memory. “‘I, Joanna Archer, pledge…’”
“I, Joanna Archer, pledge—”
“Not now!” The irises whipped forward in his skull, flaring red. “You don’t want the energy released before its time. My God, the thing
s you don’t know! Just repeat it silently over and over again. Memorize it.”
I did. But as I did, I thought. He wanted me to bind the doppelgänger so he could come along and destroy it. Yet basic science held—and he’d said himself—that energy could never truly be destroyed, only transmuted into a different state. The Tulpa had called it alchemy, stressing that inflection and tonal intonation were important. I didn’t know anything about mantras, but I did know they had to be directed at something…someone.
“So what do I call her?” I asked, thinking the damned thing might backfire on me.
“Call her nothing. Her name isn’t needed for the spell to work.”
“You mean the prayer?” I said dryly.
The remark didn’t require an answer, and he didn’t give one. He just turned away and began to head toward the long hallway.
“Wait! Aren’t you going to…” I waved up and down at the length of his host body when he turned to regard me, one hairless brow cocked.
He smiled, dripping blood. Zell’s suit was shot. “Not quite yet.”
I watched him walk out, dripping fluids, and moments later heard screams of terror pinging within the shop front. It sounded like a roomful of children were being massacred. I rolled my eyes and removed my mask, pulling down my tight bun to run fingers through my hair.
As the screams died out front, I wondered why the Tulpa was being so reasonable about all this. Agreeing to disagree wasn’t in his nature, and I could feel the synapses in my brain aching to fire, but the new connections weren’t being made. There was something he wasn’t telling me, something he needed me for beyond binding the doppelgänger. Who knew? Maybe Kade and Dylan could help me figure out what that was as well. Until then, agreeing to work with him to rid our city of the doppelgänger was the only constructive thing I could do.
Zane didn’t even look up as I left the Master Comics. He’d flipped the sign to closed on the glass door, and enlisted those changelings who hadn’t fled to help him clean up the blood Zell’s entrails had smeared over the stumpy blue-gray carpeting and—more disturbingly—the front window. I didn’t know exactly what the Tulpa had done out here, but it looked like he’d wiped the place down with his pancreas. And though I didn’t think it was entirely fair, the dark looks of the remaining changelings had me acknowledging I had released a force I couldn’t control upon them. Even Li merely shot me a closed-lip smile before throwing a blood-soaked paper towel in a lined wastebasket. I silently swore that next time I had to call on the Tulpa I’d do it in a different safe zone. One with fewer preteens to scare.
I drove north, figuring I’d head downtown to scout the location in the Jaden Jacks manual before heading back to Olivia’s high-rise apartment. Sure, the Shadow agent’s trail had long gone cold, but I knew better than most that you could see the most amazing things if you just followed the streets.
Besides, I thought as I raced down Paradise, I couldn’t get back to the sanctuary tonight anyway. Dusk had already split, and if Warren wanted me to return at dawn he’d call, though I didn’t think that would happen. Not after Kimber’s harrowing experience with the mask-o’-death. I didn’t care what he’d said in the crow’s nest about trust; I knew the welfare of the troop came first with him. The care and feeding of my ego was no match for his sense of duty, and they’d probably all been relieved to find Gregor’s cab one occupant short when they’d crossed over at dusk.
He’d help you, a small, needy voice said inside me.
Yes, Warren would help me if I asked. But I’d told the Tulpa I wouldn’t involve my troop, and had no doubt he’d know if I reneged on the promise. The mask we’d stolen caused me to wonder about the other tools at his disposal. It made me question, too, how he’d learned of the mantra he’d given me to use against the doppelgänger.
I was so taken by this riddle that I passed right by the Holsum Design Center before I realized it was First Friday, and that parking would be impossible along any of the side streets. I whipped a U-turn to park at the Government Center on Grand Central Parkway, and waited there with other pedestrians for the trolley to come along and ferry us to the heart of the event.
First Friday was a monthly art festival, billed as a block party for the artistic set. Once a month the historic downtown area morphed into a showcase for street performers, local bands, fledgling restaurants, and antique stores. Old railroad homes once housing nuclear families were now rented by sculptors, photographers, and painters, and the city-funded trolley clanged along a circuit of exhibits, bars, and vendor booths that acted as an urban showroom for local talent.
To say the crowd was eclectic was a gross understatement. Teens sporting a decades-old punk rock look they thought they’d originated bumped hips with aging hippies and chic soccer moms for whom bohemian sensibility was more of a fashion statement than a way of life. I’d attended First Friday religiously before becoming Olivia and had even considered using one of the low-rent artists’ cottages on Colorado to showcase my photography, but alas. Saving the valley from noxious, demonic monsters had taken precedence. Scratching lightly at the rash underneath my turtleneck, I fought off nostalgia for a time when my greatest preoccupation had been framing and capturing the injustices mortals inflicted on one another. Ah, the good old days.
Most of the pedestrians hopped from the trolley at Antique Row, where the majority of shops and galleries were located. I waited until we’d picked up steam again, heading farther into the urban weave of surface streets until I saw a brightly lit building I remembered from past visits. It wasn’t a designated stop, so as soon as I was sure no one was looking, I jumped from the back of the trolley, hitting the wide parkway, immediately altering direction. Had anybody been looking, and blinked, they would’ve missed it. Paranoia: my new art form.
I arrived at another building, this one from the seventies that the city was billing as historic, right next to one from the fifties that almost was. I paused there to take in the scents of grilled veggies and salsa wafting from the nearby Mexican restaurant, and remembered the time Ben and I had come down here as teens. The block across from this had been one giant souvenir warehouse then, and we’d emptied Ben’s pockets of change, divided it, and split up to search out the perfect gift for each other…one that could be had for $2.73 or less. I’d gotten Ben a wallet with a faux sheriff’s badge, and he’d given me a plastic ring with a diamond the size of my earlobe. I still had it—or, at least, I knew where it was—stuck inside a secret cubbyhole of an antique desk in Xavier’s mansion.
Now his prison, I thought, as a lone cab inched its way past the building and up the street toward the beehive of activity on Antique Row. And revisiting it, and Helen, was something else I needed to get to. Though it wasn’t at the top of my supernatural to-do list, even if Xavier had looked ill. He’d phoned in his fate upon accepting the Tulpa’s patronage. Giving up your soul essence to help keep another being animated was bound to take it out of a person.
The souvenir warehouse was gone now, and sections of the boxy brick facade had been painted by different artists. The bright canvas was then divided into three stories with a red steel staircase perched off one side. There was a glass-blowing studio at street level drawing a big crowd of onlookers, a tapas bar on top, which would see its best business as an after-party to the event, and an infamous tattoo parlor sandwiched in between where some pop starlet had made one of many mistakes on a drug-fueled binge that’d landed her at the drive-up chapel after this…and on the cover of the tabloid papers by sunup.
I gazed up at the wide, open windows of the ink parlor, idly wondering where Hunter had gotten the tattoo I’d seen on his shoulder. It was intriguing that he believed fear and desire were flip sides to the same coin, as if one couldn’t exist without the other. Did I believe that? I wondered, as a burly man leaned over the windowsill, saw me looking, and waved at me to come on up. Hunter had made no secret of his desire for me, so it made me wonder if there was a bit of him fearing me as well—or, at the ver
y least, the intensity of the attraction. So, then, was his recent decision to pursue me in spite of the danger…or because of it?
I pointed at my watch, signing to the man I had somewhere to be, and waited for another cab to pass before crossing the street, annoyed by the way my thoughts had flitted back to Hunter rather than sticking on Ben. I knew what was bothering me, what kept my psyche sliding from the thought of him like wheels over an oil slick. Warren’s report and Ben’s alleged homicidal turn had coupled with his refusal to speak with me, and I suddenly felt like I didn’t know the man at all. Distance and bitterness and whatever had crawled into Ben in the years since I’d first known him had me unable to guess what he wanted anymore, so it wasn’t any surprise Hunter’s relatively simple desire to bed me was easier to face in comparison.
I reached Casino Center, pulled out the manual the boys had shown me, and held it up, aligning the skylines. There. The exteriors of the surrounding buildings had changed, but the streets had not. The same alley disappeared behind the artist’s tents now pitched before Third Street, across from one of the city’s most popular antique stores, The Funk House. The first changeling had been killed in that alley, and I needed to slip in there. But it’d be best to approach it from its opposite, less populated, side, so I headed out onto Main Street, where I slipped past Dust, an edgy gallery with contemporary exhibits, and had just passed a store devoted to overpriced urban footwear—a DJ working two tables, the minimalist concrete room packed with teens—when I saw the cab again. I knew it was the same one because there couldn’t be two drivers canvassing this area with a wool jeep cap turned backward. This time, however, he wasn’t doing a slow crawl; impatience wafted from his open window as he waited for the pedestrians to clear, the backseat of his cab empty. That’s how I knew I was being followed.
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