City of Souls

by Vicki Pettersson

  I said, “You were once adamant about none of us going into Midheaven. You said it was twisted, and that it twisted people in turn.”

  “And now you see that I was right.” He motioned for me to follow him.

  I didn’t move. “Yes, but you refused to even acknowledge that it existed. And then you sent me there. So why did you open it up now?”

  Warren tilted his head. “Because I saw what Ben did to you. How sad you were, how screwed up. I don’t want you distracted again.”

  I ignored the sad and screwed-up remarks because they were inarguable. What I did take exception to was his determination that Hunter was a distraction.

  He sighed heavily and shook his head, like I was a teenager putting on a good pout. “It’s for your own good. Now let’s go.”

  I looked back at the lock. “Take it off. It’s agonizing over there.”

  “No,” he said flatly, and dropped back into the pipeline. “And here. You forgot this.”

  He threw something up at me, and I fumbled as it hit my chest. My mask. I tied it over my eyes where I was so Warren wouldn’t see my hands shaking, my face crumpling. I heard his slap-and-slide gait as he moved out of the way, and I dropped down into a low crouch. He kept walking, still expecting me to follow, but I didn’t move.

  “You know, superheroes never talk.”

  He kept walking. “What?”

  I spoke more loudly as I stood. “In the comics, I mean. You’ve got panels and pages of villains who get all this great dialogue, but the superheroes have to sit in silence and brood, you know?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I took a step forward. “I’m talking about those not-talking superheroes.”

  Now he sounded annoyed. “And?”

  My eyes began to heat beneath my mask. The red glowed prettily off the wet concrete walls. “Let’s chat.”

  He turned slowly, just his head, his body tense beneath his flowing trench. “About?”

  “How about Hunter? How you knew all along of his callboy cover, that he was hunting for a dark-haired woman. For Solange.” I flashed back to Warren and Hunter arguing in the panic room, and how the weight of the argument hung in the air when I’d arrived. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied by my inability to heal, I’d have sensed it then. “And you also knew that Hunter was Jaden Jacks.”

  His gaze was dead, his shrug an afterthought. We were both done with pretense. “Of course. I’m the one who gave him his new identity.”

  “How did the others not know?”

  “Ask Ben,” he said with a wry smile, because he knew I couldn’t. Ben’s memory had holes in it the size of moon craters. And Warren was intimating that he’d done that to his entire troop, without their knowledge, as well. He’d made them all forget about Jaden Jacks, just as I’d suspected. His smile made me want to puke.

  “You keep things from me.”

  “I tell you what you need to know.”

  “You use me,” I said in a harsh whisper, and my eyes turned into red flares behind my sockets.

  “Calm down, Joanna. You don’t want to call the Tulpa here, do you?” His strained voice told me he didn’t want me to. I calmed my breathing and swallowed down the acidic heat, but it continued to burn in my chest, so my eyes teared up. My emotions were too close to the surface, I knew, so I took another moment, let my breath out slowly, and eventually managed to dampen them.

  When I was done and had nodded, he motioned for me to walk with him. I did, but only because I was dying to hear his excuse. “Jaden Jacks—or Hunter, if you’d like—once fell in love with a Shadow. It blinded him, and cost an innocent child, a changeling, his life. Of course, that’s how I knew Hunter would glom onto you. You’re just his type.”

  A Shadow. Flawed.

  Don’t believe him…there’s nothing wrong with you…

  I shook my head. “Just to be clear, then…you sent me to Midheaven knowing it would hurt me.” I didn’t tell him about the power that I’d lost. I didn’t dare now. “And that it would take away pieces of my very soul?”

  “Yes.”

  I nodded, like this was a reasonable conversation to have. “You want me to hurt?”

  He turned on me so fast I almost ran into him, and now it was his eyes that were sharp with passion. “I want you to give yourself over entirely to the troop. Like your mother did. Like I have!” He pounded his chest once, then heaved a great breath. “Don’t you see? I must strip you down to nothing so I can build you into the Kairos, the strongest being in the history of the Zodiac!”

  Horrified, I looked at him. “I’m a person,” I whispered.

  “You’re a weapon,” he shot back immediately, but at least he was cognizant of how he sounded. My sudden tears must have shamed him, or maybe they just pissed him off, because he explained the rest. “Regan was stalking you. She would have taken the opportunity to kill you if given the chance, no matter what the Tulpa wanted…as evidenced by her appearance at the kitchen tonight. So I got you out of the way for a while. It was for your own good. Besides, you’ve no room for righteousness. You knew Hunter was up to something too, and you never told me.”

  More clarity arrived: I’d been following Hunter, but Warren had been following me. “I had no idea he was working with Regan.”

  But a thought came quick on the heels of that, flitting through my mind like debris caught in a flood. “Not like you.”

  Warren stood so still he could have been a statue at Caesar’s Palace. Then he thrust out his hand. “Give me your conduit.”

  I laughed so bitterly it barely escaped my throat, but I handed the weapon over. What did it matter? I’d lasted this long without it. Besides, Warren had already proven I was no match for him. He was always one step ahead, plotting and planning and pushing us all about. I followed close when he began walking again. “You’re the one who let Regan know we were at the kitchen today, not Hunter.”

  I remembered the way he’d looked, pretending to be shocked by Regan’s arrival, deflated by her revelations and incensed by Hunter’s betrayal. It was a slam-dunk performance. He should just thank the Academy already. “You wanted that showdown so Regan would get Hunter out of the way once and for all.”

  Warren huffed unapologetically and picked up the pace. “Now you’re beginning to think like the Kairos.”

  “What about the troop, Warren? We’re weaker without Hunter.”

  “That’s why I put the lock back on. Now we can fill his star sign and the role of the weapons master, since he clearly isn’t coming back.”

  I thought of Hunter in Midheaven, dying of thirst. I had to remind myself he’d been there before, that I had an entire conversation with him as Jacks, and that he went back willingly. For Solange. Guess she really was worth all that.

  There’s nothing wrong with you.

  But this wasn’t about me, and wasn’t even about Hunter. This was about Warren. Was it really that simple for him? He just dropped agents when he no longer considered them strong, like Kimber, or useful, like me, or loyal enough, like Hunter? He erased his entire troop’s collective memory if that served his purposes?

  Warren wasn’t looking at me, but I know he felt, and probably smelled, my judgment. I was doing nothing to hide it. “Don’t you think I would have done things differently if possible?”

  I don’t know, I wanted to say. Suddenly I didn’t have a clue what he’d do. “It hurts, Warren. I was hurt over there, and Hunter will be too.”

  He laughed then, a bitter cackle that resonated in the pipeline like it was made of copper instead of concrete. “Well, what doesn’t kill you makes us all stronger, right?”

  I stopped, and feeling it, he did as well. He turned, and for the longest time I stared into the face of the man who’d introduced me into this world, who’d risked his life for mine, only to risk mine again, and all for reasons I couldn’t see. He didn’t want to make me stronger for my own sake. I knew that now. He would benefit from any strength I received, so essentiall
y he wanted me for the same reason the Tulpa did. Power. He held me in the troop like an Uzi or a grenade launcher or a rocket propeller.

  I’m a person.

  You’re a weapon.

  I nodded slowly, not in agreement, but because my neck felt heavy under the weight of all this new knowledge. Of the knowledge, I knew, that was still to come.

  He turned again without another word, and with the next curve, we found the exit. The darkness of the sky outside was as complete as it was in the tunnels, but this close to open air I could hear and feel the vibration of thunder, like the sky had a bellyache it couldn’t settle. There was no way that energized webbing would hold much longer.

  Even strong things, powerful things, I thought, shaking my head as I followed him from the pipeline, could only take so much.

  It was the morning of my twenty-sixth birthday, but you’d never know it by looking at the rumbling, midnight black sky. I was looking at my feet, so preoccupied with all of the other things that had kept me in the dark that I didn’t realize how quiet it was until Warren’s surprised gasp rose beside me. The horror in it, which was a prayer and curse and a realization all at once, made me want to duck for cover. Instead, I looked up.

  And saw my former doppelgänger hanging naked like a Norse god, draped above as though pinned to the World Tree. Skamar wasn’t just hanging, of course. Certainly not voluntarily. The physical body she’d attained only a month ago, the one she’d so aptly and ably used to battle the Tulpa, had been crucified. It was an old torment for a new being—torture using one’s own flesh.

  The blue jet and heat lightning of the failing sky showed flashes of cramped muscles, knotted into partial paralysis. Her limbs were overextended, bent at odd angles so that she hung like a broken doll. Wrought-iron nail heads had severed the new bones of her wrists, the arches of her feet folded together and fastened in the same way, though room for movement had been allowed. It was more painful that way; the smallest correction would shoot searing pain through her limbs and spine, all the way up into her brain. But perhaps worst of all, the abuse had caused the capillaries just beneath the skin to burst, and she was now sweating out blood along with her body’s water. Obviously weak and clearly in shock—eyes rolled far into her head, breathing strained and sporadic—she was also still alive.

  And once all the power, that’d accumulated over weeks of fighting between the two tulpas, was finally released from the bulging bowels of that iron-hot sky, she’d be more than that. She’d be a living conduit. A funnel for that energy via the pointed metal rising from her back into the sky.

  And the power, palpable as tin foil clenched between the teeth, would rain down on the only tulpa left alive. He was, I realized, on the verge of gaining all. A city of rubble and Shadows. Skamar’s death. Limitless power. That’s why he was smiling so broadly as he appeared from behind Skamar’s tortured form. My eyes darted to the steep banks of the storm drain, and I felt Warren doing the same, but I didn’t see anyone else.

  “My dear girl,” the Tulpa said, dapper in a black trench and gloves, matching scarf tied around his neck, a jet umbrella blocking the rain from his oiled hair. He reminded me of a Big Band crooner, all slick presentation and dreamy good looks. I swallowed hard and made sure the toggles on my mask were well secured. “Someone is going to have to talk to you about your temper.”

  Someone once had. I looked back at Skamar, tears welling. She’d been tethered to the makeshift lightning rod for some time—her wrists were tearing, blood clotting—but it was my anger at Warren that had brought her to this location. The Tulpa had felt it, and now she would die at the entrance to the world where she’d been birthed.

  My guess was that’s why he was alone. He’d flown there with Skamar as soon as he’d felt my anger. But his troop would find him soon, gladly gathering to watch Warren and Skamar and me all burn down to singed husks in this glorified ditch. I swallowed hard, willing my pulse and thoughts to calm as the sky brewed and belched overhead. They should hurry, I thought, swallowing hard. It wouldn’t be long now.

  The Tulpa shoved a hand in his pocket as he walked toward us, just like a normal man, though his skeleton popped like a black X ray every time the sky above us flashed. Rain peppered his umbrella, but the wind we saw knocking about debris twenty feet above, along the drain’s perimeter, didn’t touch any of us. The Tulpa was at the core of that stillness too. I felt it, taking up the slack as he drew closer.

  The moment elongated like a rubber band stretched to its max, and I knew that when it snapped, the sky overhead would snap with it. The city would lie in ruins, and all that tethered power would funnel into the too-still man before me.

  “Regan is dead,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Before she was ever birthed,” I said coldly.

  “Then she made an awful lot of noise for a corpse.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  “We were a bit rushed the last time I saw you. I didn’t get to ask how you are, what you’ve been doing…if you’d prefer a fast death or slow…”

  “You don’t want me dead.”

  “Not now,” he admitted, then smiled again. “But soon.”

  Because after the sky fell, after the power from the tulpas’ accumulated battles entered his body, he’d no longer need to keep me or Jasmine alive. Which meant Jasmine, wherever he’d stashed her, was still alive now.

  “In the meantime, we’ll pass the time with a little story.” He sauntered forward, straddling the runoff flowing between his wide stance. Red sprite lightning joined the fray to sear the storm clouds overhead, and I shuddered. It was all I could do to keep my eyes from darting to the banks of the ditch. I could run, but I wouldn’t get far, so I decided to keep him talking until I figured out something better. My sarcasm was an excellent stall tactic.

  “Because you want to appear more human to me? More relatable? Have a real touching father and daughter moment?”

  “Because I want the story of my birth recorded,” he said in that velvet voice, before smiling. “But don’t worry. We’ll still have our touching moment.”

  The sky squealed like rusted wheels above us. It wasn’t any sound a sky should make.

  “See, the lack of a recorded name, the very thing this one sent you on a quest for,” he gestured to Skamar but didn’t look at her and refrained from saying her name, “has meant much of my story has, over the years, remained in the dark. It has robbed me of additional power…until now.” He smiled serenely as he glanced up at the cracking sky. “And that just won’t do.”

  I imagined, as he obviously was, what the power a recorded birth would give him. He’d probably tried to get this history recorded before, but the manuals chronicled our dual sides in action. Telling the story at the moment Skamar died, or while he killed the Kairos, practically guaranteed its inclusion. Granted, we already knew the generalities of his past and creation, but the more of his story that was brought to life in the Shadow manuals, the more belief and energy he’d receive from the young minds who so eagerly devoured the tales within. He still couldn’t be named—only a tulpa’s creator, or a descendant, could do that—but coupling the story of his birth with the amassed energy swirling overhead would make his already formidable strength unrivaled. And I couldn’t imagine him more powerful than he was now. I didn’t want to.

  Warren groaned beside me, clearly thinking the same thing. I could feel his desire to flee, his mind winging to the rest of the troop, muscles twitching with the need to get them to safety…wherever that might be. A quick death here—and the Tulpa would give him that; the slow one had a “reserved” sign on it for me—would mean leaving their fate unsecured and unknown. I glanced over to find him breathing heavily, the thought unbearable.

  The rivulets of water were swiftly turning to inches, assailing the tunnels and pressing coldly against our ankles. Unconcerned, the Tulpa twirled his umbrella. “Did you know that a tulpa’s consciousness takes form prior to his body? It’s true, though it doesn�
��t happen all at once. No, it’s like that sky above, parts lighting up before burning out, awareness flickering, like an old television. There’s a gestation process just like for mortals, though the progress isn’t physical. You know when you can feel someone watching you?” He didn’t wait for a response. “Well, that’s what it feels like for another consciousness to take form in your mind. It crowds out the things you’d ordinarily think of, pushing some aside, like moving boxes into storage, and tossing out others altogether.”

  The drainage from the entire valley was flowing over the Tulpa’s ankles by now, though he hadn’t altered his stance. We were lucky not to still be inside—the system was filling up far faster than a foot per minute.

  “So you’d think that someone creating a person out of layered thought would clue in to the fact that the selfsame being could read their every intention. There was nothing my creator could hide. I knew why he was making me, how he planned to use me, when he needed to take a shit. I knew all of it practically before he did. Being unencumbered by a physical body has its advantages…right, doppelgänger?”

  He still didn’t say Skamar’s name, even now that it would afford her little strength. She didn’t move. The Tulpa smiled again when he saw me watching her, though his face fell as his eyes landed on my troop leader.

  “Going somewhere, Warren?” He said it just as Warren’s foot moved. We both fell still. The Tulpa took one step forward. “Because I’m not done with my fucking story.”

  Above us the sky sparked, a tiny sizzle of electrified power singeing the air to escape, finding Skamar. It was only a fissure crack in the dam of clouds, but it arrowed through Skamar and into the Tulpa, the electricity enough to make her scream…and him glow.

  Pulsing with the trace amount of heat lightning, he smiled. “Don’t worry. You’re not the only man who has thought of abandoning his charge.”

  I looked at Warren too, but he wouldn’t meet my gaze. He’d been about to bolt? Without me?