Vicki Pettersson - The Touch of Twilight

The warehouse stilled below, but Warren didn’t let the sound or sudden blooming smoke bother him. The alarm clock across from me reflected red-hot eyes in the glass front, but he didn’t let that scare him either. He waited, cross-armed, until my breathing had evened again, the smoke clearing. “I don’t have to ask your permission, you know.”

I knew. He could take chunks of memory away and Ben would become the person he’d have been if I’d never entered his life. And he wouldn’t think or speak or dream of me ever again. I pressed the palms of my hands to my eyes until I saw black spots, then pulled them away as a sigh stuttered from my chest.

“What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?”

I don’t know if he was more taken aback by the whimper in my voice or the change in subject, but Warren only stared, eyes jumping around my face like it was a puzzle he needed to put together. I managed a tired smile and smoothed the report back out over my knees. “You don’t have to tell me every little detail…in fact, don’t. Just your first thought.”

He shrugged after another moment. “Okay.”

“Now let me guess. You don your superhero cloak. You pound your chest. You yell, ‘Up, up, and away!’ and run from the Batcave, catapulting into the air.”

“You’re mixing up your superheroes.”

I looked at the man who was both troop leader and bum. That was the truth.

“If I’m on the streets,” he began, crossing his legs at the ankles, leaning back and humoring me, “I take a piss and try to find some food. If I’m in the sanctuary, I take a piss, a shower, and then try to find some food.”

“I told you not to tell me.” I winced, and he laughed, and it was suddenly a little easier between us. “The point is, you don’t wake up thinking, Hey, I’m going to save the world today! Right?”

He lifted a brow. “Do you?”

“No,” I said, but before he could ask anything more I leaned toward him, lowering my voice. “I wake up and think, There’s some fucker out there with a knife in his pocket. He’s going to go a little postal today. And he might do it around Ben .”

I licked my lips, aware of Warren’s gaze on me now, absent of humor. I stared back, equally serious. “I think about the people out there with too much artillery and too little brains and how today they might start firing, again, around Ben.”

“And what about the other two million inhabitants of our fine city?”

“Do you consider each and every one of them every time you intervene in human drama?” I replied shortly. “Maybe you should, and maybe I should too, but I’m too preoccupied with the one who best represents goodness and fairness and kindness to me, who represents them all.”

Warren slid the photo of Magnum back under my nose, a reminder that after an intervening decade I might not know Ben at all. But that wasn’t true…because if I didn’t know him, I couldn’t love him. And I did.

One side of Warren’s mouth turned up in a wry, humorless smile. “And what if you wake up one day and he’s the fucker with the knife and the mean opportunity?”

I shook my head. “I tell myself the truth. He’s under the influence of Regan, who comes from a long line of women who enjoy destroying the virtue in a good man. And then I remind myself that he spent years before that under my influence, and I don’t mean to let him get away without a fight.”

“So it’s a game?” he said quickly.

“Sure,” I said lightly, though it wasn’t. “A game of chance. And I want mine. Because I know if I can get him to talk to me I can fix this.” Because no matter what was printed on these pages or what Warren thought Ben might have done to another mortal on a night when he was cornered like a wild animal…I knew he’d listen. And if he listened I could alter whatever Regan had fucked up inside him already.

Warren shifted where he sat and I found I couldn’t meet his eye, not with tears in my own. I glanced back down at the warehouse, and saw Hunter placing the foam template I’d handled earlier in a locked cabinet shoved against a concrete wall. When I’d finally recovered my voice, and was sure it wouldn’t crack in my throat, I whispered, “Not yet. Please.”

I saw him stiffen from the corner of my eye, shift uncomfortably, and knew I’d said the wrong thing. Pleading was a weak emotion, and Warren responded best to the logic of the mind. “You need to focus on the Tulpa.”

I started to laugh. The sound spiraled, escaping me in a raw and wild vortex, like a tiny tornado tearing through the workshop. The agents below fell silent again and looked up, trying to see what was so funny. It made me laugh even harder.

“Focus on him,” I gasped, wiping at my eyes, then bent over to pick up the papers I’d caused to splay all over the floor. More calculations and drawings, more templates, more weapons. I tapped them on the desk in a halfhearted effort at neatness before tossing them down. “Every one of us is so fucking focused it’s like living under a microscope.”

And I told him what the Tulpa said about the doppelgänger being fixed on me , that a fleshly relic-my heart-would allow her full physical manifestation, and that she’d stop at nothing to get it. I also told him the Tulpa no longer wanted me as one of his Shadows. “I have ill chi . He said we could work together to kill the double-walker because I had as much to lose as he, but that’s all he wants.”

I picked up my now-cooling coffee, and thought again of my unyielding hands around my mother’s neck. Maybe the Tulpa was right. If that’s what the future held for me, maybe I was a danger to everyone around me.

Warren had straightened during my telling and was absently running a hand over the scruff at his neck. “And he claimed to scent your pheromones every time the doppelgänger ripped a hole into this world? Did he say exactly what that smelled like?”

Of all the bits of information to latch on to. I rolled my eyes. “Are you listening to me? The Tulpa asked me to work with him.”

Warren’s eyes found me again, and he shrugged. “Then you have a decision to make.”

“What?” I drew back so suddenly, my coffee sloshed in my cup. I was making a mess of the crow’s nest, I thought, rubbing at the wet floor with my shoe. Warren offered a handkerchief, but I took one look and knew if I touched it I’d add vomit to the mix. Did he have to take his vagrant persona so seriously? “Okay, Warren? Not to shoot myself in the foot here, but aren’t you at all worried the third sign of the Zodiac is the imminent rise of my Shadow side? Isn’t that your greatest fear right now, what with my biology permanently on the fence and all?”

“Why? Because the Tulpa wants you to work with him?” He leaned against the railing again, rubbing at his bad leg. “I’m not concerned with what the Tulpa wants. It’s you I’m concerned with. And, Jo?” He leaned forward to loom over me. “You’ve proven yourself, okay? Sure, you fuck up regularly, and you’re stubborn, and your quest to keep Ben in your life is one of the stupidest-”

“Thank you,” I said loudly before he could screw up the rest of his compliment.

Warren smiled. “Besides, the Tulpa is obviously more worried about this doppelgänger than he is about you.”

“He said she could be some long-lost twin of mine. He told me one of his agents would have to meet with me if I decided to work with him to get rid of her.”

That unseeing look came over Warren’s face again. Suddenly he was backing down the wooden staircase. “I have to go.”

I threw my hands up into the air, palms up. “Oh, sure. Don’t mind me. I’ll hang out here. A sitting target for heart eaters and other things I never knew went bump in the night.” My voice had escalated with true panic, so I wasn’t surprised when his head popped back up.