by P. N. Elrod
Yet an uncomfortable tingle, similar to what Skamar had felt under Vaughn’s clear gaze, rode the nape of her neck. Her first instinct was renewed annoyance at a fleeting wish for a cup of joe.
Her second was to duck.
The Tulpa’s frustrated cry arched banner red above her as she kissed pavement, and he halted in the next second, redirected midair, and sprinted back while she still sprawled. His flesh was molded into a thin, wiry, unassuming form today, but that was for mortal benefit. Snarling, she countered the steel-spined demon that lurked beneath.
He’d caught her fresh. Maybe he didn’t yet know that her biorhythms had taken on mortal flow once she’d achieved permanence in this world. How would he? He was still unnamed, only a half-realized entity, forced to describe who he was—the Tulpa—by what he was—a tulpa. Sure, his followers had to call him something, but it would never afford him the formidable kick of power she enjoyed with a given name.
So their next collision had Skamar’s fist blasting through his false visage, surprise spreading over a face that distended so far it should have cracked. Impermanence made the fucker hard to fight, but he still grunted and fell back. Before his features could rearrange themselves into the correct places, her fist plowed through his chest, penetrating all but the last thin membrane.
His scream was a mourner’s wail, though to Skamar it was a lover’s sigh. Unsurprisingly, he reverted to what had become his standard MO—ambush and retreat—and the wind cut in sharp whistles around their bodies. Panicked, the Tulpa glanced up at the empty expanse of baby blue sky, but Skamar knew he wouldn’t risk the small sonic boom triggered whenever they set to flight. Not in the middle of town. Those in Vegas’s underworld would converge in minutes, and neither of them wanted to face off against each other and their respective troops.
So they angled close to the closed restaurants and office buildings, leapt to rooftops in straight vertical shots, and ran the narrow walking paths like drag racers. When the distance actually lengthened between them, Skamar knew the Tulpa’s followers—worshippers whose energy could be summoned at will—had been ordered to gift him with thoughts providing greater speed.
But the gift, the energy, came at a price.
Halting, she hefted a boulder the size of her skull and launched it at his retreating form. The rock plowed into his neck, distending his head so far forward that it hung like a loose tooth off its last thread of gum. Knocked to the ground, he rolled, and Skamar broke into another sprint. Yet the Tulpa—somehow able to think despite near decapitation—allowed the rotation to propel him forward, and he resumed running. When the distance again increased and he disappeared onto Desert Inn Road, then around the Wynn Resort, Skamar slowed.
That’s okay, she thought, breathing hard. She’d learned something new of him. The fool had given up power for speed, and that was knowledge she could capitalize on. Every encounter aiding that was a success. And though she was now late for her meeting with Zoe, she had to smile at the memory of the Tulpa running from her, head literally held in his hands.
Ten in the morning and the Valhalla Hotel’s pool was already busy, with music more suited to a nightclub pulsing from hidden speakers and bikini-clad cocktail waitresses ferrying morning mimosas and Bloody Marys to hotel guests. Some, Skamar noted as she followed the perky blond attendant across the expansive deck, had clearly not slept for nights. She squinted against the pool’s reflection, amazed that even in the winter, even at Christmas, tourists thought lounging around a pool in Las Vegas was a hedonistic pleasure. The pools were heated, and the guests might feel like rock stars, but really . . . the outdoor Christmas tree was absurd.
“Ms. Belie is just over there, in the VIP cabana.” The blonde smiled back at her as they wound through a maze of marble pools, saunas, and outdoor showers. A row of elevated cabanas loomed above the lounge area like the tents of Roman generals. And in the last, reclined like a goddess, was a woman with a general’s steel spine. Zoe Archer.
“Ms. Belie?” Skamar said with a raised brow, dropping into a chair opposite Zoe when the attendant had gone. “Why didn’t you just choose Ms. Conceal this time? Ms. Disguise, Ms. Pretense?”
Zoe always used some variation of the definition—Sham, Beard, and Twist being favorites. And she did it because . . .
“It’s more fun this way.” She waved a manicured hand in the air, sending the soft scent of spiced gardenias and warm vanilla wafting Skamar’s way. And after giving up her family, a life among the agents of Light, and all her powers with it, Zoe took her fun where she could get it.
“The Tulpa attacked again this morning,” Skamar said, noting Zoe had the poolside look down pat. Tanned limbs, a trim blue bikini, and a wide-brimmed straw hat over a long blond wig. In contrast, Skamar’s own thrift-store black and spotlessly pale skin clearly marked her as a poolside neophyte. “Ambushed me right outside my complex. Not what I would call fun.”
“You didn’t have to come,” Zoe said, sipping an icy red cocktail.
Ruthlessly unemotional. Typical Zoe. Skamar allowed a wry smile, remembering what it was like to live in the coiling gray matter of that one-track mind. To expect sentimentality from Zoe was to expect the sun to set in the east. She might appear pampered on the outside, drinking her frozen cocktails and nibbling on a fruit platter, but her actions and thoughts were as focused and militant as Skamar’s.
“You wouldn’t call unless it was important,” Skamar conceded, leaning back, though she didn’t have to come. She was no longer a thought-form, a doppelgänger birthed via the fierce concentration of Zoe’s mind. No, now that she was named, and a full-blown tulpa—willful, conscious, immutable—she was the most powerful being in the valley. Yet resisting Zoe’s call was still difficult. If Skamar were a magnet, Zoe would be sheet metal.
Zoe responded by tossing her a manila folder. After catching it midair, Skamar pulled out three photos, each of a preteen girl smiling with some degree of uncertainty. Personal information was stapled to a sheet on the back. “The Shadows are abducting girls of a certain type. A certain age.”
Skamar looked up. “It could be coincidence.”
“No. The Tulpa is looking for her.”
She wouldn’t say Ashlyn’s name. It was still a secret in Vegas’s underworld, the only thing protecting the child from it and the warring factions of Shadow and Light battling for the city’s soul.
Yet soon, thought Skamar, everyone would know who Ashlyn was. “Her second life cycle? She’s begun?”
Zoe shook her head. “Not yet.” But her tone said, Not long.
Agents on both sides of the Zodiac could pass as mortals when young, but puberty kick-started the pheromones that acted as a siren’s call to their enemies. This marked the second phase, or life cycle, of their development and was the most vulnerable point in a young agent’s life. Once Ashlyn’s hit, she might as well paint a bull’s-eye on her chest. Everyone would know she was Zoe’s granddaughter . . . and the Tulpa’s.
And if he found Ashlyn, he would raise and train her as Shadow, using her against the troop Zoe had been raised in. The Light. “So you want me to protect her?”
Zoe immediately scoffed. “The way you two brawl? You’d only lead him directly to her.” Yet she backtracked immediately, knowing the way the words would strike Skamar. “It’s not criticism. You’re more powerful than he is, smarter, too—”
“Stop complimenting yourself.” Because Zoe had created her that way.
Zoe smiled, but only briefly. “With a little more time and experience, I have faith you’ll prevail, my dear Skamar.”
Skamar detested the pride that shot through her chest. She shouldn’t care what anyone thought, even the woman who’d spent a decade birthing her—thinking her—into existence.
“No, I let that bastard get his hands on her once . . .” Zoe trailed off, and Skamar knew exactly which memory she was fingering. She’d almost lost her daughter and granddaughter to their common enemy. “I’ll do the guarding this time. Act
ually, I’m already doing more than that.”
A wispy smile threaded Zoe’s lips, and an unexpected emotion struck Skamar—green and sharp. She shunted it aside before it could bloom into scent.
Zoe pointed a finger back at the photos. “But they need to be found.”
Skamar shrugged. “Let the Light take care of it.”
“They can’t know about her. Not yet.”
Because the Light would be just as anxious to use Ashlyn. Zoe was fed up with the women in her family being used . . . a sentiment Skamar understood and shared. Yet she clenched her jaw and tossed the folder with the girls’ photos on the end of Zoe’s lounge chair. This quest would interfere with her pursuit of the Tulpa. “They’re mortal.”
“I’m mortal,” Zoe snapped, leaning forward, eyes fired. “And so is my daughter, the one who named you, and almost lost her life so you might have limitless power.”
“She did it for a child, not me.” Which was still unfathomable to Skamar. Joanna Archer had given up all supernatural powers for one mortal soul. What a waste.
“But you benefited.”
Skamar looked away. Zoe thought their obsession with killing the Tulpa was joint, but Skamar’s was different. When she was first birthed from Zoe’s mind in physical form, it had been as a doppelgänger, with the ability to mutate into different shapes. The precariousness of her state had frustrated her then. The inability to hold one shape for long had made her feel insignificant, like a ghost. But in some ways it had been freeing, too. Skamar now looked back on that time as someone else might look back on a carefree childhood. Maybe she’d wanted too badly to believe Zoe when she said becoming a full-blown tulpa would make Skamar the most powerful being alive. Maybe she’d been too greedy.
Because while claiming this mortal flesh had indeed provided her with the benefits of permanence—energy and power an unnamed being like the Tulpa could never tap into—its shortcomings were equally potent. The Tulpa—another being who’d walked into existence as a doppelgänger and knew what it was to be untouchable—had bested Skamar briefly and used her new body against her. She swallowed hard as she remembered him driving iron ties into her wrists and ankles before hanging her from a lightning rod and setting her up beneath a roiling sky. For all her strength, she’d been utterly helpless to free herself.
And that pain now stalked her dreams. The first time she woke with a pounding heart and sweat-soaked sheets, she was clear out the apartment door before realizing she wasn’t being chased. Not by anything more than memories, at least.
Her paranoia, too, was off the charts. Thus her avoidance of neighbors, small talk with strangers, and even something as simple as a cup of coffee with Vaughn.
Especially a cup of coffee with Vaughn. Because she might be new to the whole flesh-and-bone thing, but she’d watched these mortals long enough to wonder openly at the messy emotions that routinely marred their lives. So what if the blue heat in a man’s eyes suddenly made her stomach plummet into her knees? Or if his mouth, when not quirked in humor, looked like a beautiful destructive force? Feelings for another person were an unnecessary chaos. Intimacy gone bad would only open her up to more pain, more fear.
Fuck that.
But Zoe was right about Joanna. She had saved her from crucifixion, so that’s why Skamar finally nodded.
But she would also continue to hunt the Tulpa. It was the only way she knew to combat the night sweats and remembered fears. And when she caught that sadistic, mutable fucker? She’d string him up as he’d done to her. She’d let him rot so slowly that he’d sit as close to death as anyone could and still remain alive. Then she’d patch him up, nurse him back to near health, and do it all over again. Then the leader of the Shadows, too, would know pain and fear and paranoia.
He would know intimately, she thought as she stood, what it was to be touched.
An early spring wind kicked at Skamar like a hard leather boot, though winter still laced the air, lending it icy force. Physical discomfort had taken some getting used to upon claiming her corporeal form, but she tried to look on the bright side. Having to consider her clothing made her blend more naturally with humanity, and she was confident she looked like any other tourist as she patrolled the Boulevard. Though she was admittedly missing the yard-long pink plastic margarita cup. Yet once she’d entered the site of the first victim’s abduction—a giant mall centering the infamous Las Vegas Strip—it seemed all she really needed to do to blend was wander aimlessly . . . and buy a bunch of crap she didn’t need.
The place was decked out like the North Pole had puked on it, Skamar thought, making her way to the food court. It was there, claimed the newspapers, that a Caucasian man had approached the counter of McGee’s Muffin Shop, ordered a lemon-poppyseed pastry, warmed, before yanking the owner’s daughter, Lilly, from behind the counter. Some eyewitnesses claimed he’d then leapt a glass balustrade to drop thirty feet before disappearing, and the police hadn’t been able to decide whether they should ignore those onlookers altogether or look at them most closely.
So the muffin shop, now considered a crime scene, was cordoned off and dark, and mothers of young children steered their offspring from the storefront as if abduction were an infectious disease. Therefore Skamar hadn’t long to wait for an opportunity to leap the counter and disappear into the back room.
The giant stainless-steel mixers were clean, the counter-tops wiped. It was orderly for a place so abruptly deserted. Yet beneath the scents of flour and sugar—and a particularly noticeable half-open tub of hardening blueberry muffin batter—Skamar still recognized human. The most obvious one smelled of whittled wood, a signatory male scent, though one laced with peppery shock. Skamar dismissed it and ferreted out the other, one as faint as soft, boiled ginger. That had to be Lilly’s.
Shutting her eyes, Skamar memorized the hooks and nuances in order to track the girl later. When the door handle next to her began to twist, she jerked back to awareness and thought briefly of bolting back over the counter . . . but why give the mortals another far-fetched story? Besides, the ID cards Zoe had provided included one for a licensed P.I. She’d just tell the shop owner that one of the other families had hired her. Any man desperate to find his missing daughter wouldn’t question that.
Yet it wasn’t the owner who flicked on the lights and startled at the sight of her. Skamar was dumbfounded, too. Of all people, her annoying neighbor was the last she expected to see.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked in as unfriendly a voice as she’d ever heard. As if he had a right to question her.
Skamar flashed her license. “I should ask you the same.”
“Brass trumps paper.” Vaughn flashed his badge. “Now answer the question.”
“A cop?” was all she said, letting her arm fall. “You have a job?”
“You can complete actual sentences?”
Her eyes hardened, but so did his. This was a different Vaughn from the one who undressed her with his gaze each time she passed his balcony. This one was a cool opponent, and perversely she liked it. She also thought she could use it.
“You’re the lead detective, then?” she asked, gaining a mere perfunctory nod. “I was hired by the Brundage family to find their daughter. Maybe we could work together?”
That flat cop’s gaze met the suggestion as enthusiastically as a cat met water. Yes, Skamar thought. She liked this Vaughn very much. “Does that mean you have something useful to add to the investigation, or would I be the only one contributing to this working relationship?”
“I’ve just started,” she admitted with a tilt of her head. “But I’m good, dogged . . . and I was born to hunt the people who do this.”
He didn’t answer immediately, frowning as he looked around and then shuddering as his eyes fell on the bin of batter. The odd moment passed quickly, though. “You mean the monsters.”
She smiled briefly. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
Eyes narrowed, Vaughn considered her a moment lon
ger, then offered up his own thin smile. “The third victim was abducted while sleeping. I’m headed to her house now if you want to come along.”
Skamar nodded her thanks, so relieved he’d agreed that she didn’t worry too much about why. Maybe he was suspicious and wanted to keep her close. Maybe it was another way to angle in for that damn cup of coffee. Whatever, Skamar thought, following Vaughn from the shop. She’d find a way to work it to her advantage. And the unusual step of working with a mortal might prove a good tactic. Busting through the Tulpa’s defenses via his front door hadn’t produced results, but maybe she could slip through the back this way. If she was really lucky, she might even catch him sleeping.
They were allowed into Debi Truby’s bedroom by parents so grief-stricken, they looked like the walking dead. Skamar had never scented so sharp an anguish before, and she wondered how such a little person could be so firmly anchored in a family that her absence set them all adrift. Debi’s father floated inconsequentially from room to room, and her mother looked as though she’d been yanked up at the root.
Meanwhile, this new Vaughn pointed out that there was no sign of struggle, forced entry, or unfamiliar fingerprints, which told Skamar little in the way of anything new. She confirmed that Debi was exactly Ashlyn’s age and that her youthful scent was impossible to distinguish from an initiate’s. That’s why the Shadows were casting such a wide net. They’d probably hold the girls until they started menses, returning them, memories erased, once it was clear they weren’t Ashlyn. Then again, they might just kill them.
But puberty varied from child to child, so Skamar couldn’t help wondering how many years Debi’s parents would have to walk the world in panicked despair. Or how many families would be fractured this way before the Shadows ended their search.