The Touch Of Twilight (42 page)

“I don’t want to forget him.”

“You don’t want
him
to forget you.” He shook his head in disagreement. “You’re holding on to a Ben that doesn’t exist because you’re holding on to a Joanna that no longer exists.
You
don’t exist.”

I straightened on the spot. “I’m right here!”

“But you’re not present! If you were, you’d stay with me!” And he pounded his bare chest so hard the echo thudded through me. He ran a hand over his hair, pulling at it in frustration. “You want everything to be like it used to, but it’s okay to change, Jo. Growth doesn’t have to be painful. It’s natural for a person to change their mind. Even to admit they were wrong.” A humorless snort escaped him, but I only stared, and he fell back against the wall again, deflated. When he next spoke, his voice was again soft. “You can even change your heart. You can do it in an instant.”

I didn’t believe him. Certainly not in this instant. Because
You don’t exist
still hung on the air. “Maybe you can. I can’t.”

“Won’t.”

“Semantics.”

“Truth.”

“Hurts!” I countered, yelling suddenly. He should stop. Now.

“Maybe,” I said, after a hard swallow, “I just prefer him.”

He scoffed, expression shuttering again. “You prefer the idea of him…but the white-picket fantasy will never be yours,
Archer
. Your fence will always be coated in blood. Don’t drag him into it.”

I smirked. “Your concern for him is touching.”

“I’m concerned for you.”

No. Like everyone else, he was concerned for himself. “I love him.”

The words didn’t even faze him. “If you did you’d never have let her near him.”

That mobilized me. I clamored down the rickety staircase in haste lest I really think about what he was saying. “I just hope you find someone who feels this strongly about you someday. Then you’ll understand.”

Let him sulk and scheme alone, I thought, kicking a foam template out of my path as I headed across the vast open space of the warehouse. Because that person couldn’t be me. My mind had been made up long ago. It wasn’t a matter of just doing something new or dropping treasured memories like they were refuse. It was a matter of following through and sticking it out and making the life you wanted—and
needed
—for yourself. My life. With Ben. Period.

Hunter was at the railing now. I could tell because his voice shot over the empty warehouse like it was fired from his body. “I doubt it. Your
violent need
,” he said, throwing my words back at me, “has completely
fucked
me.”

I stopped in my tracks, the warehouse too silent after the sure-footedness of my heeled boots. I wanted to keep walking but I couldn’t leave him like that, not after what we’d done and shared and knew.

“Don’t,” he called from over the balcony, a warning and a command. “Don’t you look back now.”

“But—” I was already half turned and could see his strong naked silhouette from the corner of my eye.

“You’ve made a commitment with your head and your heart. A backward glance is an apology. And an insult. Better to stick with your bad decisions.”

And I
had
made my decision, long before he’d ever come into the picture. So despite the waves of pungent bitterness assailing me from behind, I began walking again. I needed to compartmentalize if I was going to effectively go after Regan…and Ben. I’d bottle this night up and let time wash it away, because there was only one way to fill the lack creating that hole inside me, and it couldn’t be accomplished with another man’s body.

So I strode out into the crisp autumn day, turning into the chaotic center of my hometown, the sharp scent of Hunter’s hostility lessening the farther I walked.

I didn’t look back.

Regan didn’t bother taking Ben hostage. She didn’t need to. He’d probably risen like the dead from that coffin-shaped bed and followed the crook of her little finger as she led him away from the chapel and sheets the color of blood. I followed their olfactory trail—rot and smug satisfaction mingling with the scent of their lovemaking, a figurative and conspicuous middle finger in my direction—until his vanished through the threshold of his modest home, and hers disappeared altogether.

She’d gotten what she wanted from him, and injuring him was unnecessary. Not to mention too easy. She’d rather do as her mother had before her, and let the man corrode from the inside out, a slow corruption of his mind that would torture him and me both. And watching him deteriorate, growing shifty-eyed as he began smelling like something rotted and rancid, was much more fun than a swift death. So she’d simply left him at home to sleep off their lovemaking, disease incubating inside him.

I left him there too and headed to the Strip to begin my search for Regan. It was the most populous, transient area of town, and if I were she, this is where I’d hide from me. I started at the north end, closest to the chapel where I’d last seen her, and started walking south. Tourists streamed around me like bright, chattering banners, but I never veered from the stiff, almost militarily precise stride that took me down the center of the walkways, my senses thrown outward, searching, but my gaze straight ahead.

Usually the dusky autumn afternoons distracted me. I always felt on the precipice of something profound in October, like I was walking a tightrope in the thin light between the past and the future, suspended over the unknown. This had never been truer than it was today, but unlike Octobers past, my upended hourglass into the future was now a ticking bomb. And when a breeze swept across the sidewalk in front of Planet Hollywood, skittering leaves and dust from City Center, it was accompanied by a rush of static bristling across the power line overhead. The sharp crackle followed me across Harmon, growing louder until the line sparked and sizzled overhead. When the mortals started noticing it, heads and hands pointed upward, I altered course to end up behind a strip mall composed entirely of souvenir shops. The last grain of sand had fallen in my hourglass. I’d cleared the tightrope safely, and now my unsafe future was here.

A click, more solid than static, sounded behind me.

“You’re early,” I said, without turning around.

“I’m hungry.”

I opened my mouth, the Tulpa’s mantra ready to trip from my tongue, but a sliver of sound shot past me and the air between me and the back of the pink stuccoed strip mall splintered like a web. I held my breath lest reality fracture on my exhale.

“Don’t even think about it.”

I did turn now, and found the doppelgänger dressed like me in dark jeans, a long-sleeved black tee, with a messenger bag slung across her body from her right shoulder. Of course, her dark clothing was relative. Layers and layers of the same mutable substance composed her body and clear face, and her outline now darkened into near-opaqueness, though anyone could still see she wasn’t human. Yet her hair no longer bubbled from shaft to end. She’d found my old style and copied it precisely. I was getting so tired of people doing that.

“You’re depressed.” Her voice no longer rippled in long echoes from that see-through throat, and I wondered how she’d managed to copy my tone, my cadence. Of all things to imitate, voice had to be the hardest.

“I’m tired.” And maybe a little depressed. The desire to curl into a fetal position was almost palpable.

“No, it’s more than that.” She tilted her head, eyes catching in the thin light. Those hadn’t changed at least. They still swirled like clouds caught beneath glass. “Could it be because the Shadow Cancer has your mortal lover?”

“Why bother asking the question if you already know the answer?”

She shrugged a slim, muscled shoulder and casually perched a hand on the bag at her side. Like we were just chatting, I thought wryly. As if she wasn’t here to kill me. “I wasn’t sure you knew about their carnal escapades…the way he took her on the park bench. How she opened to him on that rooftop.”

I closed my eyes. Regan was “marking” the city so no matter where I went, seeking her, I’d smell them, and I’d know.

“You two collected famous quotes as children, didn’t you?”

My eyes flipped open like shades. “How’d you know that?”

She ignored the question, continuing her dramatic monologue. “You swapped them back and forth in a secret language all your own, an ode to the love blossoming between you like a rose. And as we know, ‘A Rose by any other name…’”

Smartass. I waited for her to finish the quote, but she suddenly looked distracted, head twisting slowly from side to side like she was trying to work out a kink, or dislodge a thought. The drawn-out silence continued until I finally realized that no, it hadn’t. Buzzing, so faint at first it was like a swarming hive approaching from a distance, grew louder, but then the doppelgänger shook her head violently, her neck stretching so thin it was no wider than a candy cane. I thought, and was hoping, it’d snap, but then the buzzing dropped off like a switch had been flipped. The doppelgänger’s skull righted itself, a bit bobblehead-esque at first, but normal enough once she’d stilled.

“If she hasn’t gotten it by now, she won’t,” she muttered, like someone was standing beside her. She caught my raised brows, and almost looked embarrassed. “Give me your heart.”

Surely I’d known it was going to come to this? Otherwise why leave Ben with Regan last night? Why leave Hunter, who could have helped, today? Wandering the world in search of Shadows was only possible if there was still a world to wander, and sacrificing myself was the only way to ensure that. So I’d go down in the manuals as a hero, my death would return Jasmine’s
chi
to her in full, and it would certainly put a definitive ending to the question of the suspected “rise of my Shadow side.”

Still, fighting to the death was one thing, but simply lying down and submitting? I’d sworn that off a decade ago. “I don’t know why you can’t just tell me the answer to your riddle. A sense and a referent. One noun, two aspects. Especially now, when you’re going to kill me anyway.”

It’d be nice to know what—other than the city’s survival—I was dying for.

“That’s right. You don’t know. That’s exactly the problem.” As she took a step closer, the planes of her cheeks rippled, then settled into an unsettlingly familiar upward curve.
One last viewing, and she’ll have you
. “Look, if I could have told you before now, don’t you think I would have? You’d have figured it out long ago, we’d both have what we need. But like anyone, my actions must speak for themselves.”

“Your actions?” I scoffed, unable to help myself. “Well, let’s see. You’re unforgivably careless with the vibration of matter, and you want to kill me just so you can gain more power. So, all in all, your actions tell me you’re no different than the Tulpa.”

She froze at the insult, lips trembling slightly before they clamped shut. I stared at her. She stared back. Oddly, it went on this way for a while. When I still said nothing, she finally sighed. “I can’t wait any longer. I
am
sorry.”

The static sounded again, which would’ve been telling if I’d recognized it early enough. Before that could happen I was sprawled on my back, breath knocked from my chest, shocked that someone who had yet to take full corporeal form could weigh so much. The doppelgänger’s eyes glittered as they bored into mine, then raced over my face, seeing past the breathy, soft Olivia exterior to what was beneath. There was a slight adjustment to her nose, I saw it shift and stick, her heart-shaped chin squaring, the eyes deepening. When they darkened, the clouds disappearing in a pupil of black—literally the eye of the storm—I knew I was fucked.

She licked her lips, and I saw her teeth had squared in her mouth, the middle two slightly crooked, but only if you knew to look. I swallowed hard. Almost there. Almost me.

“I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I really am on your side. I have been all along. But another agent of Light will figure it out. Eventually.” She sighed, like she was imagining things differently, then sighed again. “Maybe it’s like that mask. It’s just too close to your face to see it clearly.”

I turned my head to find the animist’s mask sprawled right next to me. I hadn’t yet gotten a chance to return it to Xavier’s and had forgotten I even had it with me until now. It must have fallen out of my bag when she’d tackled me, and it stared up at the sky of splintered reality like it saw something I couldn’t.

I had a thought, smiled slightly, and gazed at the fragile webbing above us, as if at the same spot the mask had pinpointed. The doppelgänger, looming over me, frowned. Then she turned her head to see what I did, which gave me my chance. “You can eat my heart, but you’re not going to become me.”

I’d had enough of people doing that, and I slapped the mask over my face before she could turn back around.

I jerked beneath her, head flying back to hit the concrete with the g-force of pure chaotic violence. The doppelgänger howled above me, but the mask was already fusing greedily to my skull. The synthesis happened in the snap of fingers, and colors too bright to see swirled behind my lids like whipping snakes. I couldn’t see out, and felt for a moment like I couldn’t breathe either. I concentrated on that alone, breathing in and out, and eventually the dizziness lessened, colors fading until I was deathly calm and the mask only pulsed gently against my cheeks.

Then it all ceased, and this time there was no vision, no dream, to replace it. My mind was whitewashed, shallow breathing echoing loudly in my ears, punctuating the silence, my thoughts lost even from myself.

“Olivia?” the doppelgänger asked, then “Joanna?”

“What?” Hollow…like the mask.

“What do you see?”

She meant what did I think about what I saw…but I saw nothing. “J-just so you know, you can’t remove this mask. It has adhered to my face.” Better. Almost like myself.

“No shit,” she said, her weight shifting as she fell back on her heels. “Not until the trapped stream-of-consciousness has played your future out in full. After that it will release, and I can look until my little heart is content…no pun intended.”