Vicki Pettersson - The Touch of Twilight

“Then let me ask you something else, Warren. I know you said this other world, this Midheaven, doesn’t exist-”

“It doesn’t, and she’s not there, Jo,” he said quietly, and this time the understanding in his voice made me wince. “The myth that is Midheaven, the fairy tale? It’s like something out of a horror flick. It’s a twisted place, as the story goes, a giant pocket of distended reality, and it changes people. If it did exist, and if your mother had been there all this time, she wouldn’t be the woman you once knew. She wouldn’t even be someone you’d like to know.”

“But how else could she so thoroughly drop off the face of the earth?” How else could she have left me so completely?

“She didn’t. She’s a mortal. She’s on this plane, and I think she’s still in this city.”

I leaned in, my eyes searching his face in the dark. “Can you scent her?”

“No.” He shook his head. “But she’s still out there. She’s working on behalf of the Zodiac in some way. She’s doing some small part-whatever she can in that mortal skin-to help us. I know that.”

“How?”

This time he was the one who drew closer, and his voice was surprisingly fierce. “Because I know her, and that’s what she does. She’ll never stop. Not until she’s dead.”

But was he only saying that so I wouldn’t be tempted to look for her myself? I could never tell with Warren.

My goodness, is that a mask or blinders? Either way, it works brilliantly.

I shook the doppelgänger’s voice from my head and squared my shoulders.

“Okay,” I told Warren, lifting my chin. “But I have one other thing to ask of you.”

He looked wary until I explained myself, then smiled as if he understood. He couldn’t-he didn’t know what it was to love a mortal-but he swore he’d look into Regan’s account of what had happened in Dog Run, and I was satisfied enough with that. I had to know that the thug I’d left lying unconscious in the dirt of that ghetto alleyway, alone with Ben, had still been alive when the cops had arrived seconds later.

However, Warren did have one condition. He made me swear not to go after Regan again until our business with the Tulpa, and the doppelgänger, was resolved. After agreeing, I followed him to a building-sized shoe made of silver fiberglass and light bulbs, the only thing separating our sanctuary from the rest of the world. I donned the mask that barred the supernatural security system from detecting-and attacking-the Shadow in me, and followed Warren down the steep chute.

My fingers remained crossed the whole way down. Regan might be a lesser worry than the other two nefarious beings angling for my life, but with a little rub of my metaphorical heel, she’d soon get smaller still.

I’d never had to explain myself to my sister, and that was one of the things I missed most after she died. Olivia alone had known me in and out; she knew what had driven me to learn to fight, she knew the reason I’d picked up photography and the safety I felt hunched behind that lens, and she understood why I took both skills onto the neon-slicked streets at night. Olivia knew both why I hunted and why I cried.

And when our mother left us when I was sixteen, and she three years younger, Olivia alone had known how much that had truly hurt.

Percentages and statistics abound about the disorders shadowing abandoned children into their adulthood, and they’re not pretty. For a long time it looked like I’d end up one of those depressing statistics. By the time my mother disappeared I’d also endured assault, near death, and an unwanted pregnancy. I was then raised by a man who blamed me for all those things, one who piled my mother’s abandonment on top like a little something extra. In short, my entire youth was an emotional Molotov cocktail, but with Olivia’s consistent, gentle help, I had picked the fucker up and thrown it right back at the world.

Surprisingly, during this time Olivia’s worldview hadn’t altered much at all. She was considered a flighty creature, her naïveté and mercurial nature attributed to too much beauty and money and an inherited position at the top of Vegas society. But I knew my sister as well as she knew me. She was lively but she was also stubborn; she stuck when my mother ran, and nursed me back to health with a powerful combination of admonishment, challenge, and tough love. She’d cried and begged and yelled, forcing me to climb from my sickbed if only to get away from her.

She’d been there in the beginning, when as a preteen I’d first fallen in love with Ben; she’d been there in the middle-with me in the desert when I was attacked coming home from his house-and she’d been there at the end, alive long enough to see it all come full circle, when time and maturity erased the guilt and shame keeping Ben and me apart, and the romance we all thought had been lost forever was reignited.

The only thing Olivia never knew was that I was the reason she had died.

That night, the genesis of my twenty-fifth year on this earth, had marked the onset of my metamorphosis into the supernatural realm. Opposites attract, and when my pheromones flared with my burgeoning powers, I was tracked by my enemies-the Shadows-and marked for death. They succeeded only in killing the kindest, purest love I’d ever known, sending Olivia to her death in my place.

Warren had saved me, and then begun schooling me in the finer points of paranormal warfare, but along the way they’d had to arrange it so my former life-and everyone in it-was wiped from existence. My sole constant, my sister, was dead and gone. My life as Joanna Archer was over.

But my obsession with Ben was not.

What can I say, except the man haunted me? He invaded my consciousness in the same way the ocean washes up on the beach, with sweeping tides of longing and regret, and with such power and raw force, I often woke with the taste of salt from my tears clinging to my skin. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t bitter over what I’d lost…twice. Sometimes, even awake and allegedly in control of my emotions, I’d be scouring this city like an avenging angel when a glimpse of dark curls, broad shoulders, and an easy gait would cause my breath to hitch painfully in my throat. Each time it was like a fresh wound carved over my heart, reminding me again of what was no longer mine.

The shared dreams, entrusted secrets, and heartfelt promises. The softest lips, hardest body, and sweetest tongue. The man who promised to love-always and only-me.

Because, Regan aside, I was to blame for the dark turn Ben’s life had taken. If not for my death the second time, he wouldn’t have thrown off the constraints of his badge, his shield, to become a P.I. And if I hadn’t let him know I was still alive, only to disappear on him yet again, there’d be no bitterness shellacking his gaze, turning it into a cold, hard thing. No, if Ben was susceptible to Regan’s machinations, it was because I had injured him, enabling her…and now I needed to do something about it.

Once again, I turned to Olivia. I clicked on her computer, and bent over the keyboard, my face awash in the bluish-green light. I was intent on finding out for myself if Regan’s words were true. A part of me couldn’t help thinking I should let him go, that the kindest thing I could do for Ben Traina was to allow him to fade into the ebb and flow of a normal life and erase my existence from everything but his past.

But I needed to know if he was capable of killing a man in cold blood. And no matter what I found-because I was a hero, because I was responsible-I then had to get him back.

Olivia Archer-heiress, minor celebrity, and Louis Vuitton addict-was also a computer genius. Self-taught, she had run an underground website operating as a sort of clandestine cocktail party for hackers worldwide, a soiree that put some serious weight behind the term networking . She’d been able to circumvent top-level security systems with no more effort than it took to apply liquid mascara, while I still had trouble seeing the need for either. My way of getting around computer passwords was to punch a hole through the center of the screen.