Vicki Pettersson - The Touch of Twilight

Yet the last page was blank, as was the one before that. I skipped back until I finally found some text, Carl’s bright panels coming to life a third of the way into the issue. The new changelings oohed and aahed as they realized they were standing in the room where I’d first confronted my then arch-nemesis, Joaquin, but the panels ended abruptly, right as Jasmine was seen taking on her changeling form. I closed the manual and waved it at Zane. “How about finishing it first?”

“It is finished.”

Alarm skirted through me, and I scented a fresh wave of it springing from Chandra as well. “You’re not going to write the series anymore?”

Surely I’d misheard. That would mean disaster for my troop, and Zane would probably be drooling and babbling incoherently by week’s end. I’d seen what happened when he was blocked before. It wasn’t pretty.

“Of course I’m going to write them.” He held his hand out, motioning for me to return the manual. “Why should my head explode because you refuse to make amends?”

Power-hungry asshole, I thought, rolling it up and slapping it back into his palm. Was that what this was about? I’d asked Jasmine to use her shielding abilities to help me outside the confines of the shop last month, something Zane instructed the changelings never to do. “So you’re going to keep the kids from reading the manuals just because you’re holding a grudge?”

“I’m not the one keeping them from reading them,” he said, and tossed me a second comic. “You are.”

I snatched it out of the air, and the kids crowded closer, necks craning. But I looked down to find this one entirely blank. It was bound like a traditional comic, but even the cover was a glossy white sheet. “What’s this?”

“That’s the latest manual of Light. See where you’re confronting the Shadow Cancer in a classic honky-tonk bar?”

I flipped through the blank pages. “No.”

“Well I wrote it. It’s not my problem if it isn’t there.” And he went back to polishing the glass top, whistling as he worked.

“Let me see that.” Chandra yanked the not-manual from my hands. “Olivia, what did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said, wracking my brain. Had I?

“Actually,” Carl began, and I whirled on him. He shrugged sheepishly and spit it out. “You fucked up the evolutionary chi when you took off with Jasmine’s aura. It’s time for her to hand her post over to Li and move on like the twins, but she’s unable to mature without the whole of her aura. We told you not to wear it for too long.”

“We told her not to leave the shop with it,” Zane corrected from across the room. His head was still bent, but I could tell his teeth were clenched.

“You said not to wear her aura for over twelve hours. I gave it back well before then, undamaged.” The changelings’ ability to shield an agent from harm was due to the tractability of their aura. They could release their aura to us, allowing it to mold itself to our bodies so our true identities were seen, while our corporeal bodies remained protected. That’s why I’d borrowed her aura. It’d enabled me to appear to Ben as myself-looking and feeling exactly the same as he remembered me-so I could give him a kiss that’d probably saved his life.

It’d worked too. While the frail shell of Jasmine’s auraless body had been safely cocooned back at my high-rise condo, I revealed myself and my continued existence to Ben. The idea had been to simply comfort him, assuage the grief he’d been feeling over my apparent death, and kiss him in parting. But I’d miscalculated both his grief and mine, and after finding solace together, I’d left in the middle of the night, sneaking away without explanation, thinking it best. Treating him, I realized now, like he was a pawn. It was a gross understatement to say Ben had reacted badly, knowing I was alive, but furious at me for returning only to disappear again. That fury was what had opened the door to Regan, who’d been more than happy to let herself into his life.

But as much as I was to blame for that botched effort, I hadn’t screwed up when it came to Jas. I’d been extraordinarily careful to get her aura back to her under the twelve-hour mark. Her body hadn’t wasted away, her soul hadn’t expired.

“Wait a minute. Did I miss this issue?” Chandra yanked the comic from me, flipping through the pages faster as if that would make the story appear. She almost looked frantic.

“Come on, Chandra,” Carl said, holding his hand out for the manual. “You know how these things work. The events directly affecting the battle between Shadow and Light are withheld from Zane and me until the time when revealing it won’t tip the scales in favor of one side or the other. We didn’t know she’d caused irreparable cosmic damage, and therefore you didn’t either.”

“But we all know now,” Douglas said, and he laughed like he should be wringing his hands and twisting a mustache.

“So what does this mean?” I asked, ignoring him and motioning to the manual no one could read.

“It means you’d better fucking fix it,” Chandra said, causing Douglas to laugh harder. This time we both turned on him, and he instantly sobered. Chandra turned an equally dark gaze on me. “If they can’t read it, we don’t get their thoughts or energy or any of the good juju enabling us to do our job.”

I bit my lip and looked hopefully at Zane. He gave a short jerk of his head, knowing what I was asking. “You were clothed in the aura of the changeling of Light. The Shadow manuals haven’t been affected.”

I closed my eyes. Fuck. So while the Shadow mythology would continue to be written, their legacy continuing to grow, the agents of Light were stuck in a sort of supernatural moratorium. We would fall behind degree by degree, and eventually we’d lose ground in the fight for the city.

“Fix her!” Chandra yelled, frantic now.

I opened my mouth to yell back, realized my frustration, though equal, was misplaced, and whirled on Jasmine. “Leave!” I said, pointing to the door.

She scoffed, snapped her gum, and pulled out her iPod.

Carl pulled up beside me, looking up in dark exasperation. “That’s not going to work, Archer. You broke something inside her. Li is supposed to assume her position, but she can’t until Jasmine matures, and for that you have to repair her.”

I threw my arms into the air. “Well, what am I supposed to do? Order her to have her period?”

The boys around us started gagging. Jasmine reddened to a lovely rose-colored shade. And Li continued gazing up at me adoringly. Shit.

I sighed and knelt before her. “Jasmine. You really don’t remember who I am?”

She gave me a hard stare, and for a moment I thought I saw a flash of regret, the girl I knew waving at me from behind those deep oval eyes. Then she lifted her chin. “I know who you think you are. And I don’t think it’s appropriate to promote that sort of pathology in trusting children.”

I drew back at that, straightened, and found myself face-to-face with Chandra’s pointed glare. Again. “What?”

“You haven’t told anyone about this, have you?”

“I didn’t know about it until now!”

She began shaking her head madly. “It’s something a Shadow agent would-”

“Oh, don’t fucking start that again,” I interrupted, voice lifted to drown out hers. “I’m getting so tired of people saying the third sign of the Zodiac is the rise of my Shadow side! I’m not going to do anything to harm the agents of Light!”

“Except maybe you can’t help it. It’s like these kids hitting puberty and having to pass into adulthood. They may not want to, but biology helps determine one’s destiny. You may not want to be part Shadow but that’s your nature, as well as the Light. The sooner you start respecting that your compromised physiology has made you different-”