“It’s really not that bad,” Warren said, then backpedaled as Micah shot him a piercing stare. “I mean, you’re gorgeous. Nobody would ever think it was you.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said dryly. Then, tentatively, I lifted a hand to my face to feel for myself. Everything seemed normal until I got to my nose, or whoever’s nose this was. Mine had been broken in a sparring class, and the slight off-centeredness lent a sort of aquiline quality to my features, or so I chose to believe. In truth, I was deathly afraid of even the thought of surgery…a slight irony given the circumstances.
I let my hands trace downward. My lips were full, but still my own; my chin, however, dipped to a more heart-shaped point than I remembered. I felt for a strand of hair and lifted it, peering sideways. “I’m blond.”
“The package said ‘Platinum Perfection.’”
I let my head fall back again. The boobs, the voice, the face, the hair…I didn’t need a mirror to put it all together. Unbidden tears suddenly filled my eyes. I never cried, so my guess was that it too was part of this grand prize package. God, they’d fucked with my body and my hormones. “You’ve turned me into a…a…a bimbo!”
“Shh,” Micah said, patting my shoulder, trying to comfort me. “It’s the perfect cover.”
The perfect cover for a woman who wants her breasts to enter a room before the rest of her, I thought hysterically. One who relies on her looks to do the talking. One who doesn’t even take herself seriously!
“We all have our disguises,” Warren added helpfully.
“What?” I snapped angrily. “And ‘Yoda on crack’ was the best you could come up with?”
“I see you did nothing about her temperament,” Warren muttered.
“Some things even I can’t fix.”
I glared at them both, then spaced my words so that even with the come-hither soft-porn voice they’d know I meant business. “Get. Me. A Mirror.”
“Okay, but I’m warning you, it might be something of a shock.”
“More shocking than being whacked on the head with a steel baton?” I said sharply. “Or more shocking than waking up officially dead?”
More shocking than watching your own sister die? I didn’t say that. Instead, as Warren adjusted the slant of my bed, I held out a hand for the mirror. He gave it to me once I was propped up, and a fresh spasm of alarm sprung up in my chest as I felt their gazes, almost hungry, on my face. Taking a deep breath, I lifted the mirror and looked.
I felt my jaw moving, saw the reflected jaw working in the mirror, but no sound came out. I turned the mirror over, checked for a false back, pounded it against the bed twice, and peered into the glass again. Then I lifted my gaze to Micah’s anxious one. “It—It’s…Olivia.”
His face relaxed into a relieved smile.
“You’re Olivia,” Warren corrected, his own smile broad and hopeful.
I returned my gaze to the mirror. I certainly was.
And this time I passed out all on my own.
When I next woke, I was alone. The room was dark, and I thought briefly about calling for a nurse before deciding against it. Instead I reached for the stack of newspapers, but yelped when I lifted the first one. My fingertips were both sensitive and numb at the same time. I felt the structure and weight of the paper, even the fibers that comprised the page, but that was a deep knowledge, one born of previous experience. On the surface it felt like I was holding it between crystal gloves. I overturned my palm and stared.
My fingerprints were gone.
I tapped the pad of my thumb against my forefinger, expecting to hear a clicking like fingernails against glass, but there was only silence. The clink was felt, not heard, as if my bones were banging brittle and cold against one another. It was an odd feeling, slightly nauseating, though perhaps that would lessen with time. For now, I resolutely reached for the newspapers, prepared to feel trees screaming beneath my touch, and began to read.
The articles were stacked by date, most recent on the bottom, and the contents of each became increasingly surreal. They went into excruciating detail, not always flattering or correct, about me, my life, and my tragic demise.
The gist of the story was this: Joanna Archer had died after a botched break-in at her sister’s ninth-story apartment. I’d fought and struggled valiantly, but ultimately fell to my death along with my assailant, one Butch Lewis of Houston, Texas. However, I’d saved my sister’s life in the process.
How ironic was that? Hailed a hero in death when the reality was I’d been able to save no one. Including, it now seemed, myself. I sighed and read on.
Olivia Archer, reportedly in critical condition, had been relocated to a private facility where even her closest friends and family members, including the megawealthy Xavier Archer, were denied access to see or visit her. An anonymous source—and I had a pretty good idea who that might be—disclosed only that Olivia was stable but presently lying in a life-threatening coma.
I skimmed through the papers again, and thought, there it is. An entire life reduced to black and white. Summed up in a week, old news by the week’s end.
I picked up the mirror next to me and gazed again at a face I knew intimately well, and didn’t know at all.
“How?” I said aloud. Olivia’s singsong voice came out, but it was tinged with a weariness she’d never possessed. How was I supposed to look at her every day? It would be like facing a beautiful, accusing ghost, along with my own still-raw guilt over failing to keep her safe. But that wasn’t all I dreaded, and I knew it. Others looked at Olivia and saw softness and beauty and a feminine wealth of power. But I only saw weakness and vulnerability. A potential victim.
In turning me into my sister, Micah and Warren had unwittingly turned me into what I feared most.
“I saw you moving on the monitors.” I jumped, dropping the mirror guiltily, and looked up to find Micah peering through the doorway. He was waiting for an invitation. I nodded, and he came in, watching me like a keeper watches a caged lion. “Water?”
He poured from a plastic pitcher and handed me a paper cup. Then he folded his hands in front of his massive body and waited. The water was as crisp and fresh as any I’d tasted, and I finished it off at once. “Thank you.”
He smiled, reassured as he returned the empty cup to the table, then perched lightly on the side of the bed. He possessed amazing grace for such a large man. “How do you feel?”
I thought about it. None of the postsurgery blahs. In fact, I felt incredibly well for someone who was dead. Or in a coma. Much less who had marbles for fingertips. “Great, considering.”
“You should. You heal cleanly as well as quickly,” he said. “And I was very gentle.”
I knew it was his way of apologizing. “Thank you.”
His fleeting smile was swept away by furrowed brows and worry-filled eyes. “I thought you’d be pleased with the changes. I never stopped to consider how it might affect you to live in your sister’s body.”
“No offense, Micah, but all of this is new to me. Metamorphosis, people trying to kill me, never mind this acute—and cute, by the way—new sniffer.” My sigh reverberated dully throughout the room. “I had twenty-five years to grow used to my face, and now…I don’t recognize one thing about myself.”
I didn’t know who I was anymore. Joanna Archer? Olivia Archer? A twenty-first-century superhero, for God’s sake?
“Changing a Zodiac member’s identity after a supernatural incident is part of the clean-up process. This was a bit extreme, even for us. Usually we can prepare the subject better for change, but with you there simply wasn’t time. We don’t want to lose you, Joanna. You’re very special.”
I smiled humorlessly. Not special was sounding very good right now.
Micah sighed. “Look, I don’t know what Warren’s told you, but we’re on the verge of collapse. Three star signs have been killed in the past two months, and they weren’t novices either. They were full-fledged professionals, the elite—this generation’s Zodiac. Th
at’s why we had to act quickly to secure you and alter your identity. Nobody can know who you really are, do you understand?”
I didn’t, but nodded anyway.
“And nobody knew Olivia better than you, right? You can act and walk and respond the way she did. It’s a bonus really that you don’t have to remember countless mannerisms and develop a whole new personality. It simplifies things for you.” He paused. “It also has the added benefit of keeping you close to Xavier Archer.”
“I don’t want to be close to him,” I said. Micah said nothing, which I was beginning to recognize as a bad sign. “What?”
“He’s in the waiting room. He hasn’t left in three days.”
“No.” I turned away, folding my arms across my stomach. He was waiting for Olivia, I thought bitterly. Not me.
Micah nodded, agreeing readily, too readily, with my wishes. When he held out a hand, I regarded it warily. “You feel up to moving around a bit?”
I didn’t, but my body ached so much from the lengthy immobilization that I took his hand and stood for the first time in days. Dizziness rolled into my head, but eventually I nodded to Micah that I was okay. He led me across the room to a chair situated next to a full-length mirror. “Sit here. Just get used to being upright for a while.”
I knew what he was doing. He wanted me to get used to my face, and to seeing myself the way the world now saw me. He swiveled the chair on its casters so I was in front of the mirror, and pulled a nearby table forward. Then he did something completely unexpected. Lifting a brush from the drawer inside the table, he began to comb through my hair.
How could a large man have such a gentle touch?
“I knew your mother, you know,” he remarked, ignoring the way I stiffened. He just continued to brush gently from the ends of my hair to the roots, curling each section softly around his fingers before laying them aside. My eyes drifted away from my face and I began to see the dance of his fingers, that inborn surgeon’s skill. “You’re a lot like her, actually. You have the same cheekbones…well, had. Anyway,” he hurried on when I frowned, “your mother was gorgeous. And deadly. She could do things with a combat cane that I never saw before, or since. To tell the truth, I had a bit of a crush on her. We all did, I think.”
I still said nothing.
“She gave up everything to infiltrate the Shadow Zodiac through Xavier. It’d be a shame to have all that work go to waste now.”
I shook my head, causing the waves he’d just set about my face to tumble this way and that. You don’t understand what you’re asking, I wanted to say. I couldn’t face the world like this. Olivia was born feminine and soft. I was about as pliable as new leather. Instead, I muttered, “I don’t know how to be a superhero.”
Micah smiled gently at that. “Nobody’s born knowing how. We’re just born with specific gifts. Think of the things you’re naturally good at, those that you loved to do as a child. When a new recruit begins his or her training, we build on those gifts. Eventually they develop into weapons, and those can be used against the enemy.”
“Are there that many ways to kill a Shadow agent?”
Piling my hair upon my head, pinning strands here and there in a close imitation of Brigitte Bardot, he hummed, a melancholy sound that resonated throughout his entire wide body. “About as many ways as there are to die.”
But death was easy, I thought, watching him. No more than a mere breath away. As close yet as distant as a stranger in your bed. Like my real parents. “Is my birth father really trying to kill my mother?” I asked Micah.
“I’m not sure I’m the one who should be telling you this,” he murmured, eyes on his fingers. “What exactly has Warren told you about your birth father?”
“Only that I was born on both his and my mother’s birthday, which makes me unique somehow. And that he’s the leader of the Shadow side of the Zodiac. Our enemies.”
Micah nodded. “And he’s a powerful leader too. Before him we had no problem balancing the Zodiac. We were practically invincible.”
“What makes him so different?”
“He’s a Tulpa.” At my blank look, he shook his head. “Cripes, you really don’t know anything, do you? A Tulpa. A person who’s been created rather than birthed.”
Images of the Tin Man and the Scarecrow flashed through my head. Then a rib being pulled from a man’s side, the man himself formed with clay. “Created how?”
“Someone imagined him into being.”
I stared at him wordlessly.
“I know,” Micah said, holding up a hand, “it’s not something our western culture can easily understand but the eastern philosophers accept it readily as fact. Think about it. Take someone with the concentration of a Tibetan monk. Now have that person apply all his thought and energy into visualizing a being. The power of a disciplined mind is so profound, so mighty, that it can actually imagine that being into existence. That entity becomes their Tulpa.”
“But…you can’t imagine a person into existence. It’s not possible.”
“Sure it is. That’s the power of the mind, isn’t it? What you tell yourself is true becomes true for you. We all have the power to create in one form or another.”
I thought of painters, writers, mothers. “Yeah, but not everybody uses it.”
“Ah, but this person did use it, and he used it for evil. He imagined a being both strong and wicked. One strong enough to rule a group of nefarious beings as instructed, with no question or conscience. But the creator didn’t count on one thing.”
“What?”
Micah smiled wryly. “Once the Tulpa gained enough clarity and substance in the originator’s mind, it became independent. It took on a form and personality of its choosing, then began acting out of its own consciousness. Began ruling and doing as he liked.”
“But who would imagine such a thing in the first place? And why?” I asked, earning myself a look of ironic amusement.
“Why is simple. Power. Immortality. If you can create a living being out of nothing more than the gray matter in your mind, knowing that if you just give it enough substance it’ll live forever, then a part of you will live forever as well.
“As for who?” Micah chuckled humorlessly. “Well, that was the million-dollar question. The great mystery of our world. The axis upon which all our fates hinged. It was the mystery your mother was intent upon figuring out.”
And she had. It took her years to do it, but eventually she came upon a mortal named Wyatt Neelson, a westerner who was a fervent student of Tibetan lore. However, he hadn’t limited himself to Tibetan studies, or Buddhism, but was a self-taught student of all world religions. His original goal was to create his own religion, an amalgamation of those things he most fervently believed in.
Very Jim Jones of him, I thought wryly as Micah went on.
“But then he got distracted by the idea of a Tulpa. I mean, why coerce, convince, and hope that people will follow you when you can create a being who will compel, even force, them to do so?”
Why, indeed. So Mr. Neelson set about creating an entity that wouldn’t age, and couldn’t be killed—a god among mortals. He figured it’d be much easier to convince people to give in to their weaker natures—hate, lust, greed…all of the seven deadlies—than to convince them to do good. He quit studying the religious doctrines and focused solely on meditation, harnessing the power of his mind, dedicating fifteen years of his life to creating the Tulpa.
“See, we don’t know if the Tulpa can be killed—we haven’t found a way yet, at least—but Zoe thought if we could somehow kill its creator, maybe it would sever any lingering power between the two of them. Create a gap. We could then act upon any resulting weakness, infiltrate the Shadow organization or kill the Tulpa outright.”
“So my mother got close to this Tulpa in order to find out who his creator was?”
“She spent years gaining his trust, concealing her identity, masking her scent. It wasn’t easy, but she was dogged.” Micah shook his head in adm
iration. “So convincing that sometimes even we wondered whose side she was on. Yet, she always came through with some small bit of information that would give us an edge, or stop an attack, or save a Zodiac member’s life along the way.”
“She was gaining his trust.”
“Getting in tight.” Micah nodded behind me. “And she used whatever means she had to in order to get there.”
Including her body. “He never thought his greatest enemy would be in bed with him.”
“Most men wouldn’t.” Micah placed his hands on my shoulders, causing me to look up and meet his eye. “Don’t think she didn’t love you, Jo. You wanted to know who your father is, and I’m telling you. He’s pure, unfiltered evil.” I flinched. “But he bedded down with pure goodness and didn’t even know it. She had the option to rid herself of the pregnancy, but even knowing that keeping you would risk everything she’d worked for, she didn’t. She wanted you. More, even, than she wanted him.”
She had wanted me. But she had left me too. “So what happened?”
He smiled, but it was reserved. “She succeeded.”
“She did?”
He nodded. “Just in time too. It wouldn’t be much longer before the Tulpa could see she was pregnant, to smell she was pregnant. But she found Wyatt Neelson, and immediately killed him herself. Got away clean, and disappeared like smoke.
“Problem is, every time you kill someone, not only do you destroy their signature scent, you leave your own in its place, like a calling card. Great when you want the recognition, but hell on subterfuge. When the Tulpa found out it was your mother who betrayed him, he became crazed.”
“But did he become weaker?”
Micah shook his head. “Stronger. It was like cutting the strings from a puppet only to discover you’d freed it from shackles. The belief of the other Shadows was already strong enough to keep him going, so he was free to destroy and rage and run the Shadow organization the way he wanted. And what he wanted, more than anything, was to find Zoe and crush her.
“Here’s the genius of it, though. While he was looking far and wide, she masked her scent, created another new identity for herself, and took up with Xavier. Snuck back in and hid right under the Tulpa’s nose. You were born shortly after—Xavier’s child, for all the world knew.”
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