The Touch Of Twilight (8 page)

I jerked my head in the direction of the fixed star, proud of myself for how calm I sounded about the whole thing. So why were the others gaping at me with expressions of disbelief? All except Warren.

“What was she wearing?” he wanted to know. That was Warren, always picking up on the important stuff.

I rolled my eyes. “Nothing that I could see. Maybe a bodysuit, but it was made out of the same material as her skin.”

“Which was?” he prompted, like he knew there was more.

“Bubbles.” I winced at how stupid that sounded and amended my statement. “Maybe bubbles. Maybe Saran Wrap, I don’t know. It was hard to tell. Ouch.” I doubled up again.

Warren began mumbling to himself, his homeless mien taking on an authentic aspect, before his head snapped back my way. “Tell me what happened again, from the time you first saw her to the moment we scared her away. Don’t leave anything out.”

So leaning against the greasy auto shop fence, I recounted everything I could about Vincent’s death, our gravity-defying escape, and the way the woman made a point of bringing me to this portal. My chest was still on fire when I finished, but my breathing was even again, my glyph had faded, and the pain in my side was gone. Maybe I’d kept my spleen after all.

Warren grimaced, turning his sun-baked features into craggy ridges. “So she could have removed you from this plane earlier, but chose to bring you here first.”

“And I bet that’s the reason why,” Tekla said, jerking her head at the star shining like a ruby above the doorway.

I glanced from Warren, clearly disturbed, to Tekla, who only appeared resigned. Then I noticed the others were doing the same, curiosity as bold as question marks on their face. The whole troop, I realized, was seeing a colored portal for the very first time. And Micah—the most senior troop member next to Warren and Tekla—was studying it fervently.

“What is it?” I asked, able to straighten now.

Warren didn’t answer, turning away, running his hands over his head, but Tekla sighed heavily, her large eyes like dark globes in her thin face. “It’s a breach into the other reality. It’s the cause of all our vibrational chaos.”

“Which means?” Riddick prompted as he scratched his goatee.

“It means we’ve found the cause of the elemental outbursts.” Warren whirled again, rubbing at the back of his neck. “This woman, this being—”

“The Tulpa called her a double-walker,” I offered.

Tekla and Warren looked at each other. “This double-walker,” he said evenly. “She’s been tearing holes in the fabric of our reality instead of using the portals. There have to be a half dozen of them.”

“You mean that’s not a portal?”

Warren shook his head. “It’s an open wound.”

Limping forward to get a better look, I was breathing normally by the time I reached the shop’s door. My side had closed up too, which was a great relief. I wouldn’t die, at least not today.

Up close, it was easy to see why Warren called it a wound. The portal’s blazing light was as steady as any other, brilliant but for the deep red sheen that continually ran over its surface, like blood dripping, though it never fell. Yet the outline was less starlike the closer one drew, its edges jagged as though ripped. I reached up…

“Olivia! No!”

And gently rubbed a fingertip over the star.

Tekla was there, slapping my hand away…too late. A crack sounded as the star clamped down over my hand like a Venus flytrap, and my fingertips immediately went numb, dozens of stinging barbs puncturing the printless pads. An acute and tortured scream echoed across the parking lot. Then, just as abruptly, the tiny star released me, and all five points curled in on themselves, a fundamentally protective gesture.

We all stared questioningly at Warren, clueless superheroes, down to the last.

Warren looked like he wanted to scream as well, but instead blew out a breath and leveled a maddened look at me. “Okay, so this is the point where I tell you all not to peel off the scabs of the wounded reality.”

“No,” Tekla corrected sharply. “We passed that point about a minute ago.”

Warren shot her an equally livid glare…and another at me.

Ew, I thought, glancing back. Was that what I’d done? “Sorry,” I muttered, to him and the Universe.

“Why can’t we touch it?”

“You said there are others?”

“What’s a double-walker?”

“Well, that perked them right up,” Tekla said, walking away.

Warren sighed again, then looked off into the sky as if the answers to all our questions were written there. “Come on, then.”

“Where to?”

“Someplace safe.” And as he began limping away, I thought I heard him add, “With lots of alcohol.”

We reconvened at the Downtown Cocktail Lounge on Fremont Street, a touchstone in Vegas’s emerging entertainment district that was helping turn the promised downtown revitalization into less of a longstanding joke. The surprising thing about
DCL
was its refusal to cater to tourists. With a dim interior, low-key vibe, and not one overpaid celebutante or slot machine in sight, everything about it screamed “locals’ bar”...including the hidden front door.

However, watching tourists scratch their heads as they tried to find their way in was only part of the location’s appeal. It was also a newly designated safe zone, which explained why we were meeting there. We couldn’t be ambushed by Shadow agents in a safe zone—or tulpas or hopefully bubble beings—so they were good places to while away the hours between dawn and dusk. It was only in the fractional seconds of the sun and moon’s momentary truce that we could cross over into the safety of a true alternate reality, and not merely the flip side of this one.

There was also no better place to gather than one that served stiff cocktails and funky world beats via the DJ’s laptop 24/7. That too kept the children away. Warren put his hand in the air to call over the waitress as we settled ourselves around the large communal table. We spoke of nothing in particular until drinks were served, at which point I sucked down half the tonic-laced vodka before telling the others about the mask connecting me with the Tulpa, how it’d enabled us both to breathe beneath the massive weight of the black hole, and how his anger had been tinged with fright for the woman who bent gravity to her will.

Micah tilted his head, his analytical and scientific mind clearly whirring. As our troop’s Seer, Tekla was as sharp as they came, but even she looked perplexed. However, Warren, who’d taken time to change and shower so the
DCL
employees didn’t move the hidden door entirely upon his approach, perked up at this. “Olivia, I need you to think. Can you tell me what this being smelled like?”

“Sure,” I said, and closed my eyes to strengthen the memory. My sense of smell had dramatically improved with my metamorphosis at the age of twenty-five into something superhuman…but it hadn’t stopped after that. Experience and applied practice had increased my ability to distinguish textures and patterns in the delicate dance of air molecules, and I was developing a better language and vocabulary to describe sensory nuance.

My encounter with the woman was still fresh, so I easily picked apart the medley forming her essential scent. Despite the frightening encounter, it was a pleasure, for once, to dissect something not reeking of rot and decay. “The top note was herbal, like fresh-cut chives or sweet green onion, but lightly so, as if dug up too early. She was empty inside, so maybe that’s why it’s not more potent, like the scent could disappear with a puff of breath…” I trailed off, thinking of dandelion spores drifting in the wind, but didn’t say it. She wasn’t human, and so her genetic makeup would be different, but I had a hard time thinking of it as insubstantial. She’d clawed at me with sickle-sharp nails. She had substance…but what was it?

“And the heart note?” Warren pressed.

The most important and telling scent, that of her soul.

I frowned, trying to pinpoint it, but shook my head after a minute. It just wasn’t there. “It’s like a big white space in my mind. I can’t even locate the aromatic clues.”

Warren remained silent for so long, both looking at me and not, that I started to think he didn’t believe me.

“What was she, Warren?” Jewell asked, twirling around a strand of soft brown hair in one delicate hand. She was so silent I often forgot she was there, and I knew she felt out of her element, like she’d come so late to her star sign that she’d never catch up. But what she lacked in natural talent, she made up for in perseverance. The confidence needed to back it up would come with experience.

“Isn’t it clear?” Riddick, also new to his sign but lacking Jewell’s reticence, tapped his fingers on the polished tabletops. Light from the red votive candles made his smooth fingertips shine. “It’s the double-walker the Tulpa was talking about. The one he wanted Olivia to destroy.”

Nice to know he—and the Tulpa—had such faith in me, I thought as I gingerly fingered the claw marks still scoring my chest. It was both itchy and sensitive to the touch, and my palm felt wonderfully cool against the wounded flesh. I stilled my fingers when I realized Hunter was watching, but every other head was turned toward Warren.

“So what’s a double-walker?” Vanessa asked, reading my mind. “Someone who can walk freely on both sides of reality?”

“A logical conclusion,” Warren answered, absently swirling his glass. “But no. Its more common name is doppelgänger. Do any of you know what that is?”

“It sounds German.”

Vanessa arched a brow at Felix. “Got something against the Germans?”

“Well, the umlaut thing is kind of annoying.”

“Can we please focus here?” Warren muttered, stirring his whiskey.

“Don’t be shallow,” Riddick told Felix. “I love the Germans.”

“You’re an American who’s never even left this city, much less the country,” Felix countered. “What do you even know about the Germans?”

“I know they’re not French.”

“Focus!” Warren’s yell silenced the whole lounge. Even the DJ’s beat seemed to momentarily pause. Riddick had the sense to look abashed, and the rest of us averted our eyes, but Felix—no stranger to his leader’s admonitions—only sipped at his rummed-up Coke.

“Okay, geez. Double-walker, doppelgänger…no clue. Enlighten me.”

“A doppelgänger,” Micah informed us, “is a living person’s ghostly twin. Usually evil.”

They all looked at me.

I choked on my drink. “Who, me? A double of me? No way—that thing didn’t look anything like…either one of mes.”

Though not everyone knew I was Joanna Archer beneath Olivia’s glossy exterior, they did know I wasn’t the ditzy socialite I presented to the rest of the world. With them I was the Kairos, purported savior of the paranormal realm, steadfast troop member, with a sharp demeanor and acid tongue to match. Basically I was myself…but cuter.

“No, but it smelled like you.” Warren smiled grimly. “As a double, it’s still shaping, taking its clues from studying you.” I recalled how hungrily the woman had watched me, and how she could form and re-form at will. “The more impatient doubles, those most greedy for life, have been known to attack their living counterparts.”

I nodded wryly. “You mean eating my heart would be a good way to more fully materialize in the physical world.”

He shrugged. “In short.”

Great. So I had two strong, evil, ethereal beings after me. I signaled the waitress for another drink.

Sitting with her hands folded in her lap, Tekla took up the lecture. “Most doppelgängers aren’t this strong. Their sphere of influence is limited to causing confusion in their double’s life—appearing to family and friends, haunting their double, mimicking them, or at best giving bad advice. They’re the paranormal equivalent of a knock-knock joke.”

“Well, anyone who thinks that thing is funny didn’t stick around for the punch line.”

Brown eyes swimming with sympathy, Vanessa put her hand over mine.

“Here’s what I want to know,” Hunter broke in for the first time. “Why was she trying to convince Olivia to enter that particular portal?”

Warren nodded at Tekla to continue.

“A doppelgänger can’t just walk into this reality if she didn’t originate here. She has no opposite or negative. No flip side. Her energy—or lack of it—doesn’t register, and so the portals won’t allow her passage.”

“Okay, but what’s she doing over there? Or over here?”

Well, the “over here” was apparent. She wanted me, whom she’d dubbed the golden ring.
In both my worlds…

So, then, as to the “over there”...

“That must be the other world she was talking about.” I sat up straighter, looking at Vanessa and Hunter, Felix and Riddick in turn. “She told the Tulpa she’d take me with her. That he’d never touch me in the middle of heaven.”

I remembered this because I’d looked up into the sky then, searching for her meaning, and watched a man disintegrate instead. I closed my eyes now, but opened them again in time to catch the rest of my troop exchanging strained looks. I shifted my gaze to find Hunter frowning at me. “Do you mean Midheaven?”

I didn’t know—did I? I frowned back.

“But that’s not a world,” Jewell blurted out. “It’s an angle in the birth chart.”

“Right,” Felix added, sprawled in his chair. “Basic astrology. It’s located in the house of reputation…what we want to be known for.”

“The Tenth House,” Tekla confirmed, nodding.

“Well, it’s what the bubble lady said,” I retorted, a little too sharply before slumping. These people had been raised in the sanctuary, trained in fields of astronomical study—including astrology—from birth. I didn’t have that advantage. My mother had shielded me from any knowledge, study, or course that might attract the attention of the Shadows. Or help me now.

Vanessa blew a dark curl from her forehead and leaned my way. She had a way of imparting information like she was telling a secret, and it’d served her well as a reporter. Shoot, I knew what she was doing and it still worked. “I think she was messing with you, Olivia. Midheaven as a place is a myth. As Tekla said, it’s nothing more than an angle on the astrological chart…an important one, but it’s not a physical location.”