Vicki Pettersson - The Touch of Twilight

“Ignore this,” I spat, extending my middle finger so close to her face she went cross-eyed. I whirled, and this time her hand on my arm had my vision shifting to red.

“Look at you! You’ve got smoke coming from your ears! You try to downplay your differences but now we have to go back to the sanctuary and tell Warren you’ve done something none of us would even consider. Then he’s going to change your identity, and hopefully your personality, so that-”

“Oh, shut up, Chandra,” I yelled, and took out my anger on the scuttling movement I spotted from the corner of my eye. I missed my mark, due to temper and haste, and the sand scorpion froze, feeling the vibration of my foot slamming on the dusty desert shelf. Then it sped off, as blindly as the bat, to hide in the desert sand.

“You don’t know anything about me,” I told her, pissed that I couldn’t stop the whimper escalating in my voice.

Nothing of importance, I told myself as I wiped at my face. Nothing that…

Matters.

My head shot up as an image of Chandra causing life to bloom from a rocky outcrop with just the wave of her hand hit me hard. She was behind me now, bitching about the acridness of my anger spicing the air, but I barely heard her over her memory-voice telling me creating life was something we all could do. A static buzz swelled in my ears, the doppelgänger asserting that with my help she’d be unrestricted by worlds or planes or boundaries. Synapses fired with almost audible pings, and sizzled as they finally connected. Every thought, every word, every action given voice. It’s all channeled into one thing. Vibrations. Energy. Chandra had said it herself…

Matter is all that matters.

I blinked hard, as my own scattered thoughts began to crystallize. Then I turned to Chandra, frowning. “Have you ever heard about the boy, blind from birth, who gets around using echolocation?”

“What?” She shook her head, more in surprise at the topic shift than in negation. “No. Okay, yes. I think. Why?”

I began nodding to myself, the crystallized thought hardening into a stalactite of certainty. “Well, it proves a person, a mortal, can use vibrations to navigate the world like the scorpion, the bat.” The doppelgänger, who circumvents the proper channels in order to access our reality.

“So?” Chandra asked, holding up her hands.

I squared on her, and bit my lip. “So close your eyes.”

She did, exaggerating the action, half laughing as she lifted her chin. “You want to see if I can get around using echolocation?”

“No. It just makes it easier to do this.”

The blow was one of the hardest I’d ever delivered, and it not only knocked her backward, but flipped her over the wooden railing as well. Maybe it was because of what she’d said before-we both knew a fall wouldn’t kill her-and maybe it was because my anger still burned like a warm coal in my chest. But my fist caught her in the side of the head, and she was out before she stirred the dust on the canyon floor. I followed at a brisk pace, ignoring the Savior this time, and trailing a wispy thread of black smoke behind me. I confiscated her cell phone, used her belt to tie her hands together, and locked her in the cave doubling as a bathroom, lights off.

“Fine, so you’re right,” I muttered as I returned to the top of the canyon. “Biology has made me different.”

But I’d just figured out why the doppelgänger was blowing holes through our reality, and Chandra was only going to get in the way. I needed to find a way to stop those cosmic breaches, and after I did, I swore, nothing would come between Ben and me again. Not a Shadow, I thought, huffing dismissively. And not a Light.

I later learned the screams of rage could be heard for ten square miles around Ben’s house, which was where Regan had been when she placed her call to me. As for the explosion out at the correctional center, nobody other than Father Michael had been injured. It wasn’t my fault Regan’s homemade bomb had been designed for a slow kill, a poison meant to delay death, impart suffering, and burn a man from the inside out. It took five doctors, ten hours, and a strict quarantine, but even all that couldn’t save Regan’s father. Within the passing of a day, Father Michael was face-to-face with his Maker.

I’d heard the death of a parent could be felt by members of the Zodiac like a bullet to the breast. I’d never experienced it-my mother was still alive, and unfortunately my father was also-and I wondered if Regan had recognized the sensation immediately this second time, and how quickly she’d realized what I’d done with the bomb she’d placed in Ben’s home. I wondered what she’d felt when she discovered she’d murdered her own father.

Not that I got a chance to ask. She didn’t call again and wasn’t answering the number that’d shown up on my phone’s caller ID. But the subsequent eruption of destroyed window fronts and car windshields in Ben’s neighborhood spoke of a rage just winding up, telling me I’d hit the jackpot when guessing who her love and weakness and regret and hope was centered around. I reminded myself she’d been the one to throw down first. She’d targeted my first love, and had, over the past few months, attempted to wrench away every foundation-both supernatural and mortal-that’d stabilized me.

But who would’ve guessed even a month ago that she was the one with more to lose? And now she had, I thought, the flats of the desert a buttery blur as I sped back into town. Gone was the house her mother had bequeathed her, the father she denied, and the man she’d targeted because she was so covetous of what belonged to me. Not wanting to face Warren yet, I called Gregor and said we’d need to place extra surveillance on Ben’s home, though I didn’t say why. Then I disconnected and settled in to wait for Regan to show herself. It was only a matter of time.

I’d be ready.

The city’s annual benefit for the North Las Vegas Children’s Fund was always held two weekends before Halloween. Though it was a costume party and ostensibly linked to the popular holiday, the timing meant there’d be no competing events to distract the city’s moneyed and elite. Not that it mattered. This benefit was Vegas’s premiere fall function, and this year would see practically every major headliner on the Strip contributing performances. None of that made a difference to the kids at Master Comics, but they acted suspiciously like normal children when costumes and candy were involved, and since the event fell on a Saturday, Zane decided to close the shop early so the little rugrats could get their Halloween groove on early.

And so it was shortly after one, an hour after I’d left Chandra unconscious and tied up in the middle of a barren desert canyon, that Zane toddled up the spiral staircase to his personal living quarters above Master Comics to find me squatting in his flat.

“About time, dude,” I said, flipping through what looked like an original script to Whedon’s Serenity . My esteem for Zane grudgingly rose a notch. “I was beginning to think you never took a break.”

Comics, mail, graphite pencils, and pads went flying, and a steaming cup of black tea dropped to the floor in an impressive crash. Zane flung his arms out before him as if to ward off laser beams that might shoot from my eyes, and I lifted a brow and flipped another page. Man, I really missed Malcolm Reynolds. Zane stared at me a moment longer, then down at the luxury Persian rug, soaked with tea and studded with shards of expensive porcelain. He opened his mouth.

“Don’t blame me for that, man. It’s entirely too weird that you drink your tea like a prissy old Englishwoman.”

“Fine china elevates the experience,” he replied through clenched teeth, then bent over with a huff to collect his papers, slapping those that’d gotten soaked against his thick, jeans-clad thigh. His microwaved pot pie had landed facedown on the floor, but he flipped it back over and it looked salvageable. “That was my favorite cup and saucer.”