The Touch Of Twilight (16 page)

I hadn’t been at it five minutes when a voice bloomed behind me. “Well, isn’t
this
an interesting coincidence?”

I whirled, then narrowed my eyes across the length of the storeroom as Regan DuPree stepped inside. Douglas followed her, though he’d now assumed the form changelings took when acting as protectors for their agents. His body looked like it’d literally been pounded into putty, his skin taking on the sheen of light reflecting off blackened water, blinding me to what was going on inside that pliant body. His jaw was misshapen, the softly curving cheeks of a preteen replaced by a hinged mouth the length of my skull.
All the better to eat you with, my pretty
, I thought, peering at the elongated teeth everybody in this world seemed to come equipped with but me.

For now Douglas only flanked Regan, swaying in a slightly nauseating motion, but if she needed protection from me he’d throw his aura over her like a supernatural cloak. Her true form would then appear, replacing this pseudo Joanna she’d donned for Ben, and Douglas’s prepubescent body would fall to the floor, emptied of his life force, nothing more than a vulnerable shell until his aura was returned.

Jasmine appeared then, looking bored and put-upon, and pushed past Regan without looking up from her cell phone. I couldn’t help but compare the sullen teen in front of me with my memory of the girl who had once been eager to help me, and had even consented to lay lifeless and fragile in a sea of jewel-toned pillows while I flitted around town wearing her aura. But whatever was broken in her was not on the outside.
I’ll fix it
, I silently swore, even as her gaze locked on mine, resentment clear in those giant eyes.

Li, my would-be changeling, followed her sister so closely, she kept trodding on Jasmine’s heels, clearly trying to get her to hurry. Jasmine slumped when she finally reached my side, and Li bounced on the tips of her tiny feet. Douglas snickered, a soft squishing sound, like slugs underfoot.

“A little sense of urgency would be nice,” I told Jasmine.

She rolled her eyes. “Maybe you should’ve snapped your fingers and whistled.”

“Why are you even back here if that’s how you feel?”

“It’s the rules,” Li provided, obviously anxious to help in some way. “We’re obliged to assist our agents in the designated safe zone where we derive our powers and have sworn to do our part in keeping the Zodiac balanced.”

Good to know. I turned back to Regan, who’d drawn closer, and just seeing the smug look on her face made my blood sizzle. “How’d you find me?”

Regan hesitated as she considered allowing me to go on wondering and worrying about that, but her changeling had already dug a cell phone from his pocket, holding up the answer in one blackened, gelatinous hand.

“Is he allowed to call her?” I asked Jasmine, as Regan bawled him out about waiting for her signal before answering questions, and hit him upside his head. The slap made a juicy sucking sound as she yanked her hand away.

“Boys.” Jasmine watched in disgust as his skull wobbled back into place. “You’d be amazed how much mileage you can get out of a wine cooler and a tittie magazine.”

“Actually,” Regan corrected, “it was a six-pack and a subscription.”

“Maybe I should start bribing you to do your job as well.”

“Why?” Jasmine said, studying her nails. “She already knows who you are.”

“Good point,” Regan said, studying her own. “And I also took down the license plate number of a car left overnight at a country bar on the outskirts of town. Know a guy named Lorenzo? Hunter Lorenzo?”

I froze momentarily, then quickly remembered he used a different surname as the head of security at Valhalla. His identity there was still safe, but if she could find that out so quickly, what else did she already know?

My hesitation made her laugh. “Relax, Archer. I’ll uncover his alternate identities eventually. But discovering this one was easy. After all, it’s plastered all over town.”

She threw a stack of loose-leaf flyers at me, hard enough to pelt me in the chest, though most went flying through the air, colorful as confetti. I shot Jasmine an annoyed glance as she picked away a flyer plastered to my chest. It was one of the street rags advertising sexual entertainment, peddled to tourists along the Strip. There had been a county law restricting the practice at one time, but the ban had been deemed unconstitutional, and the peddlers were as aggressive and ubiquitous as ever. I didn’t recognize the phone number printed below the “direct to your room” statement, but the man whose chest it was superimposed upon was definitely Hunter.

“Ew!” Jasmine dropped the flyer and kicked away another plastered against her Skechers. Li squeaked and covered her eyes with tiny hands.

“I take it from the look on your face that Olivia Archer didn’t know she was going around on the arm of a professional escort?” Regan giggled maniacally. “My God, what will happen when that news breaks? ‘The Heiress and the Call Boy’ would make a great cover story, don’t you think?”

Xavier would have a stroke. I tried to cover, though. “You think you’re telling me something I didn’t already know?”

And did Warren, or the others? Was I the only one in the dark about Hunter’s erotic side work?

“Oh, I
know
I am. Though you have Benny-boy to thank for that priceless spot of dirt. All I gave him was that plate number. Superior detecting skills for a mortal, that one, and for some reason he’s highly protective of his dead girlfriend’s little sister.” She tilted her head, the spark in her eye hardening to flint. “In fact, he’s now so determined to find something to take to the authorities on Mr. Lorenzo, you’d think he was worried the man might be after her inheritance.”

Which told me she was about to plant that seed in Ben’s mind, further aggravating his suspicions.

The shop was technically a safe zone, but these changelings were still green. I was willing to bet I could drag her outside and pummel her to pulp in the parking lot before they even knew what was happening. It was worth a shot, and I transferred my weight onto the balls of my feet.

Regan thought I was straightening up. “Oh, the Kairos gets angry. Could this be the ‘rise of your dormant side’—the third sign of the Zodiac come to life? Take notes, Douglas. We’re in the presence of greatness here. Are you shaking in your high tops?”

Douglas actually looked down. Regan rolled her eyes. “Breaking in new changelings is a bitch.”

I made a face, though I happened to sympathize.

“Guess that leaves me to sum up the situation without the wisdom of the adolescent set. So how’s this for a pithy little roundup?” She sauntered to the center of the room, and I angled to keep her in view as she dropped her weight on the arm of one of the chairs. Douglas shadowed her. “Your real boyfriend is about to hop in the sack with your mortal enemy, and your fake one is getting horizontal with everyone else.”

“That’s just nasty,” Jasmine told me, leaning against a bookshelf crammed with Shadow manuals.

“But the surprising thing is that a man like Lorenzo would need to pimp himself out at all.” Regan took a slow breath. “After all, I’d do him for free.”

“Even that would be charging too much.”

Regan’s left eye twitched and she rose to her feet before she could stop it. I closed the space between the fireplace and me and saw alarm flash in her eyes. Steady, I thought, staying myself where I was. I didn’t want to spook her too soon.

“Jasmine!” Li pulled her sister into view, straining with the effort. “Help her!”

Jasmine yanked away and Li toppled onto her butt. “Get bent, runt.”

Li looked up at me in bereft helplessness.

“Don’t worry, Archer. That lazy bitch can’t help you in any way that matters.”

“Hey!”

“Oh,
now
you protest?” I muttered to Jasmine, who was suddenly standing attentively beside me. “And do I look worried to you?”

Regan’s brows rose. “If you’re not you should be. Your cover identity is starting to unravel at the edges. It’s only a matter of time now.”

“Does that mean you’re ready to show your hand? Let the Tulpa know his daughter is posing as…” I mouthed,
Olivia Archer
, erring on the side of caution, not wishing to risk the information leaking into the manuals. Paranoia, one of the few superstitions we
did
entertain.

Thoughts, actions, and even conversations with an enemy remained private unless the acting agent willed their actions to be known. Otherwise we’d never be able to make love or have a meal, or even go to the bathroom without worrying it would end up on the glossy cover of a graphic novel. Our private moments and thoughts, the same ones mortals kept secret from others—and sometimes themselves—those things remained hidden. Right now these confrontations between Regan and me were parries and thrusts of a personal nature, but if she ever chose to truly strike, the world would know it.

“Not quite yet.” She edged herself back onto the armchair and shot me a sly look. “Though I could tell him about
other
family members.”

My teeth clenched, but I relaxed when I realized she would only hint at my daughter’s existence as well. She didn’t want to talk about Ashlyn in front of the changelings, and wouldn’t risk the girl’s name showing up in the Shadow manuals either. An empty threat then, I thought, relaxing marginally.

“Or,” she continued, “I could make this really interesting. Even the playing field a bit. Show you
my
true identity.”

Why? I wondered, instantly distrustful. “You’d better not. You’ll scare the children.”

She remained undaunted. “But don’t you want to know what exactly Ben is fucking, say, this time next week?”

That was why.

She gestured to Douglas before I could answer, and he completed the transformation from jellied shadow to roaring monster. His outline wavered as if a chill wind had swept over him, and the scrawny preteen frame thinned even further. He was the width of a dime as his mass expanded outward and upward to mirror Regan’s. He looked like the ugliest paper doll I’d ever seen. Then he pivoted in front of her, she took one step forward, and their bodies married. His husk—all the parts she didn’t need—fell away, hitting the ground like stoneware. He didn’t move again, and the new Regan, the real one, grinned.

In relative terms, she was pretty. Joaquin, our enemies’ Aquarian, was the last Shadow I’d glimpsed from behind the viscosity of his changeling’s aura, and he’d been all ebony bone and rot, skin hanging from him in blackened strips of aged decay. Regan, in turn, was merely skinless, like some barbaric beauty treatment had shaved it all away, and her blood had dried around her muscles, making her look like she’d been dipped in a thin layer of burgundy candle wax.

Her glittering, pale blue eyes stood out against this dull sleekness, though I spotted a section near her collarbone where the blood had scabbed over unevenly, like a human’s would. It was trailing fresh blood and pus, and when she saw I’d noticed, she began worrying it with her fingers, icy eyes daring me to react. I spotted the white bone of her elbow peeking at me through the ruins of her flesh, still smooth but with a hairline crack, and knew that fissure would widen. Every time she moved, some other muscular system popped open and began to bleed, and though she was meaty—unlike Joaquin—she was still rancid. The wriggling I saw pulsing inside her chest wasn’t from a beating heart.

I decided to wait and drag her from the shop when she wasn’t so gooey. “Let me guess? You guys start decaying as soon as you metamorphose into full-fledged agents, am I right?”

“Duh,” Jasmine said to me. “I could, like, totally smell her from here. And I have allergies.”

“I’m not decaying,” the living corpse said evenly. “I’m becoming more deific, like my ancestors before me.”

“No,” I said, playing along. “You’re simply not aging well.”

The insult was right up Jasmine’s alley. “I’d recommend a face lift…if she had a face.”

“Now, Jas,” I chided. “She’s better off sticking to the basics. Eight hours of sleep, plenty of water…multiple skin grafts.”

Under the “Rose” persona, Regan’s reaction would’ve been no more threatening than a hair toss. But now she snapped her head back and forth, like a snarling dog, her emotions as exposed and raw as her mucus and muscles. As she struggled to regain her composure, I wondered again why she would show me this. I found out as soon as she resumed looking like a mere zombie, instead of a psychotic zombie. “I have a message from your father.”

I sighed. Of course she did. And that’s why she’d sought me out…though it still didn’t explain the freak show. “Let me guess. He wants to make good on all the back payments on my child support?”

Muscles ruptured as she clenched her jaw. “It’s about the doppelgänger that saved your life last week.”

Which confirmed Warren’s suspicion as to who, or what, the woman was. And that the Tulpa knew it too. I quirked a brow at Regan. “And he sent you?”

That didn’t make sense. If the Tulpa thought Regan knew where to find me, he’d have pummeled it out of her and come after me himself. At that point my Olivia Archer cover would be moot.

“He sent a message-by-minion.”

Li put her hands to her cheeks and gasped. Jasmine groaned and pulled out her cell phone again, checking out. I stood blank-faced, pretending I knew what that was.

“I just happened to be the first one to find you.” Her shriveled lips quirked. “Imagine that.”

From her words I gathered a “message-by-minion” was something that applied to all Shadow agents, a mandate that couldn’t be disobeyed. Apparently it also meant Regan had to take her reluctant revelation a step further. Literally. She widened her stance, lifted her arms in the air so the muscles split and bled, and took a moment to steady herself before lowering into a backbend. Her decaying spine cracked in five places.

Jasmine glanced up from her text messaging, unimpressed. “There’s a girl at my school named Cindy who can totally do that. She’s been in tumbling and gymnastics since she was, like, three and can touch her nose with her…”

Regan shuddered, and her ribs ruptured in her chest cavity. They splintered upward, jagged edges pricked with scraps of muscle, while toothpick-sized bits sprang out like thorns to keep enemies at bay. Unnecessary, I thought, swallowing hard. I didn’t want to get any closer. Her exposed ribs swung like they were on hinges, knit together on the opposite side, and her head rotated a hundred and eighty degrees on her neck.