Vicki Pettersson - The Touch of Twilight

The jaw was slender and heart-shaped, the fragile skin smooth and too white. Frantically I wiped away the foam…and stared down into my mother’s waxy, sightless face.

I pivoted…and found the city rotting like a carcass beneath a scorching desert sun.

I could only stare as all the people I knew rotted with it.

“Olivia! Olivia! It’s off, stop struggling!”

It was only then I became aware of my voice, a sandpaper scream sawing through my brain. Get it off! Get it off! Make it stop!

A white-hot pain arched around my jaw as my cheeks parted from my bones, as if cleaved with a burning, jagged blade. “God! Oh God!”

“I had to,” said an unfamiliar voice. No, not unfamiliar. New. I opened my eyes, blinked back stinging tears, and saw Kimber staring down at me with those hard blue eyes. “The textbooks say it’s the most effective way of separating joined psyches. The skin should grow back.”

Skin? And should? I panicked, but then Micah pushed her aside, and my vision narrowed on him. His reaction would tell me whether I should worry, whether the biting cold all around my jawline was as serious as I thought. Whether the ripping of my own skin from my bones should be cause for alarm.

He wouldn’t meet my eyes as he spoke in an overly soothing voice, “It’s going to be fine.”

“Oh shit…” I began to cry.

“Shh.” He lifted his hands, fingertips pressing gently across my face. I was numb, and didn’t feel them. “No, it is. Your magic is already grafting the skin back in place. You’ll be as good as new in a few minutes.”

It would have been like consulting with any other doctor if he hadn’t used magic and grafting in the same sentence. Laughter wanted to bubble up out of me, except it couldn’t get past my throat, past the skin rent from ear to ear. I squeezed my eyes shut, and both wished for, and dreaded, my complete healing.

Because then I’d have to tell them of the vision contradicting all the premonitions they’d experienced. I opened my eyes and found Tekla ushering everyone from the room. Chandra was the last, and she looked back, met my gaze, and shuddered.

The sooner you start respecting that your compromised physiology has made you different, the sooner you can start approaching aberrant situations from a new beginning point…

Fuck you, Chandra, I thought, and let myself cry again. Just fuck you. Fuck the Tulpa…and fuck me too.

Half an hour later I was alone with Warren in what amounted to a crow’s nest above the cavernous expanse of Hunter’s workshop. There was a bed pressed against two walls near the back, a simple press-wood desk pushed against the forward railing, which was where I was seated, and nothing but a tattered rug in between. Hunter didn’t use the place often, preferring instead to return to the sanctuary each evening, crossing realities as faithfully as most people put in their nine-to-fives.

Half the troop had left, though Vanessa and Riddick were talking in low voices as they waited for their partners, while Hunter showed Kimber the conduit he was designing for her. I watched her gesture excitedly below us, beaming, no doubt telling him it was just how she’d envisioned it while wearing the animist’s mask.

The evil, life-sucking mask.

“It started with the Tulpa,” I told Warren, hands cupped around a cup of coffee so bad it was soothing for its heat alone. I’d shifted the chair so it was sideways to the desk, and Warren stood, cross-armed, five feet away, near the ladder leading below. “I distinctly saw him sitting in a throne above the entire city. He offered Las Vegas to me, said it could be mine.”

I told him the rest, the multiple masks, my mother’s face beneath. My mother who’d handed me a heart. My mother, whom I’d killed.

“Hm…” he said, like that was significant, looking out over the cavernous workshop.

“Hm, what?” I asked. Warren’s eyes were tight, whatever scene he was playing out in his mind superimposed over the inactivity of the workshop, but then they relaxed and he turned to face me.

“You can’t let what happened with the mask scare you. You’re a good person, Joanna. Even when you act impulsively, even when you’ve gone against my orders or spoken out of turn-”

“Who, me?”

He ignored that. “You’re doing so from a moral seat. More importantly, even if the third portent of the Zodiac is the rise of your Shadow side, I believe you’d find a way to overcome that and do what’s right.”

“I want to believe you,” I said, shaking my head, palming my cup. “But I just had a vision where I killed my own mother by hand, and I know myself-even this new version of myself-by now. The rage and exultation when my hands were around her throat…that was real.”

“And so was the horror when you realized who it really was.”

“Yeah, but by then it was too late!” And that was my constant fear. That no matter what abilities my kairotic powers gave me, my late entrée into this paranormal morass would leave me flat-footed when it mattered most. That was why I had problems sitting on my heels, waiting for direction. Besides, eight months of the strongest supernatural support couldn’t erase a decade of self-reliance. Other than Olivia, the people I’d counted on most had always abandoned me.

He leaned against the railing, reminding me of the way the Tulpa had shifted, his throne tottering on that thin ledge. Seeing my shudder, Warren winced, sighed, and dug into the pockets of his long, filthy duster.

“I wasn’t going to give you this yet. But since you seem to be a slave to that which you’ve seen both in visions and reality-”

“Hey!” I said, jerking so hard I spilled coffee over my hands and knees. I sat the Styrofoam cup on the desk, and flicked droplets from my wrists before wiping them against my pants. “The things I’ve seen could make grown men weep, then drool, then do nothing but rock in a corner for the rest of their lives.”

“Exactly.” He pulled out a crumpled stack of papers stapled together at the corner and handed them to me. “I checked into Regan’s account of what happened the night you left Ben alone with a man named Ernest Thompson, a.k.a., Magnum, in a barricaded alley called Dog Run. As you asked.”

I narrowed my eyes and cautiously took the papers from him, then scanned the first page. A drug dealer named Magnum had been found facedown in the dirt of a public housing lot, a single bullet to his head. The report called it self-defense, but I knew that wasn’t possible. I’d left Magnum knocked out at Ben’s feet just as the sirens from his backup came wheeling around the corner. There was no way Magnum had woken up and threatened Ben in those intervening seconds. The report began to shake in my hands.

“Why are you showing this to me now?”

“Joanna,” he said softly, and I shut my eyes so I didn’t have to see if the look on his face matched the pity in his voice. “Your back has been to the wall so many times I’m surprised you don’t have a permanent imprint there. But the person who did this had a choice and still took the lesser action, and that’s what a person’s Shadow side is. The wrong decision even under the right circumstances.” He paused, thinking by doing so he was letting that sink in, but what filled the gap was another denial. I hadn’t seen it, so maybe Ben wasn’t the one who decided to be this man’s executioner. Warren took a breath. “You need to let us erase his memory. It’s the best way to get rid of Regan. It’ll be a fresh start for Ben. And for you.”

I wiped at my eyes. “No.”

“Joanna-”

“No!” I screamed, crumpling the report in one fist.