Vicki Pettersson - The Touch of Twilight

“Another secret revealed among the troop.” He lifted his leg as if to take a step from the gorge’s rim…and gently floated to the canyon floor instead. His flesh looked like a lustrous silver parachute, unlined and glowing, as midnight air rustled his clothes. Once his feet touched ground, he asked, “How long before the new mole inside your sanctuary shares it with us?”

“There’s no one else,” Micah said, calling his bluff.

“So confident,” said the Tulpa, tilting his head, electric eyes firing. “So sure. I guess that makes you suspect number one.”

“There’s no one else,” Warren said, backing Micah up, and I wondered if he was even aware of how the circle tightened around Kimber at his words, with me on the outside. No one seemed to note it, though. No one but the Tulpa.

“Ah, except for the sole agent who remains now, as always, divided between us.”

“I’m not divided anymore.”

“Step back, Joanna,” Tekla commanded, deliberately making room for me next to her. It temporarily loosened the ring, creating an obvious breach among them, though the Piscean gap between Riddick and Hunter still stood out more. Even linked, there was nothing they could do about that, and I knew the Shadows, whispering and shifting up on the canyon’s rim, saw it too. Adele, as the opposing Pisces, would be particularly drawn to it.

A second bolt of lightning suddenly speared at Kimber’s feet, sizzling as it lifted the hairs on our bodies, showing off the depths of its immense power, though it was just the warm-up act. I closed my eyes, steadied myself on a breath, then looked straight at the Tulpa.

“No.” The dense air thickened even more. I licked my lips and tasted sky. “As you said, Tekla, this is not a time for grandstanding. But it isn’t just a metamorphosis either. This is the third sign of the Zodiac come to pass. Tonight marks the rise of my dormant side.”

The ring instantly tightened around Kimber, my spot again swallowed by their bodies.

“I know what fate awaits me at the end of this night, and where my future lies.” I chose my words carefully, raising my voice so it could be heard over the storm already railing above us. By the time those swollen clouds broke it’d be too late. “While my fellow troop members have seen only success through the eyes of this mask, I see the truth.”

The Tulpa smiled wryly. “You figured it out.”

I waited until the sky had finished crackling. “What? That you’ve planted masks all over the city to draw on the power of the public?” Shrugging, I lied. “It was easy.”

“Tell that to Warren.”

I did. “It’s how he’s been getting energy,” I said, though it looked like Warren had figured that one out for himself. “At one time he would’ve forced people to don the masks, stealing their soul essence to yield energy for his animation, but he knew you’d be looking for that. What you wouldn’t be looking for was a souvenir sold in the Valhalla gift shop, one worn to every Las Vegas event imaginable.”

One quick phone call to Janet had confirmed all the masks worn at last month’s Swingers’ Ball had been generously donated by the Valhalla gift shop. And all the power in the wearer’s thoughts and emotions and soul had been ferried right back to the Tulpa.

“All this time…” Warren began.

But time was short. I looked up as the sky fell unnaturally still, and even though the clouds could be seen spinning and roiling via the bolts firing within, the silence was the same that waylaid the land before a tsunami. So I kept my eyes on the sky, and finished for him.

“All this time mortals have been wearing these masks willingly, their vitality leached from their body in bundled packages of soul power. They’d stumble home in a fog, wondering why they had a headache at the end of the night-if they’d drunk too much, if it was just jet lag, or if it was Vegas working its late night magic.” Still others, like Xavier, put on the masks in worship, and who knew how many of those willing victims were out there, giving up bits of their soul they could ill afford to miss? “But an animist’s mask, like this one, is even more powerful. This is a weapon that was designed with superheroes in mind, right?”

The Tulpa inclined his head, and in that same unnervingly gentle voice, took up the telling. The absentminded professor schooling us all. “It shows an agent of Light exactly what they hope to see of the future. It gets them to let down their guard, then it feeds their thoughts directly to me.”

Now Chandra, who’d stolen the mask, looked guilty, and Warren looked positively ill. He’d willingly donned the mask, and from the way he began to sway, I had a feeling it was more than once. He’d certainly done so after choosing Cathedral Canyon as the site for Kimber’s metamorphosis, thus the Tulpa’s appearance here. The only thing to be thankful for was that the mask only revealed the future, not the past. Otherwise the Tulpa would already know of my transformation into Olivia, and I wouldn’t be standing here now, alive, the only one still able to spin lies and hide thoughts.

Hunter was the first to find his voice after I’d explained all this to them. “Why did the mask adhere to your face? Why’d it choose you to reveal the future to?”

“Because you’re the Kairos?” Micah guessed.

“Because you’re part Shadow?” said Regan from the ridge.

“No.” Though those things were undoubtedly a part of it. “Because I’m the only one in a position to do something about it.”

The Tulpa began to laugh, his voice no longer gentle as it boomed over the canyon to equal the power of the thunder roiling above. “Your position, darling, is at the bottom of a canyon, surrounded by enemies, with no conduit, and a troop of agents facing imminent death. Or so I saw from this end.”

“And when’s the last time you checked?” I snapped, unable to help myself. “Fates can change quickly…and I’m the only one wearing a mask now.”

“And what, pray tell, do you see?”

“I see, I see,” I sang in a childhood rhyme, before my voice fell to a growling scratch. “…something bloody.”

The energy in the mask wobbled, the Tulpa’s spike of concern a sudden factor. It was too early yet for either of us to act, so I whirled to face Warren, again playing the traitor’s card. “I’m sorry, but our fate is already written. I told you the first time I put this thing on that destruction awaits the agents of Light.”

Micah whirled toward the top ridge, and the woman he’d counted as his closest friend. “And Chandra? You’re helping her?”

Chandra couldn’t look at him. “Trust me…it’s for the best.”

“Chandra’s the one who told me I had to respect that biology has made me different,” I said, because we could all sense her wavering. “She’s the one who made me face the consequences of my Shadow side.”

“So it seems you do have some betrayers in your troop after all.” The Tulpa’s grin widened so far it was beyond normal, and no longer handsome. “My daughter and the girl you betrayed for her. Too bad your Kairos is really my Kairos.”

I shook my finger in his direction like I was chiding one preschooler for swatting at another. “Not so fast. Shadows never do anything unless there’s a trade involved. If I’m to come stand at your side, I want something in return.”

“Name it.”

“I will,” I said, smiling at his word choice. “So…anything?”

His inclining head fell well short of a nod, the only outward sign of his hesitancy. “You’re my daughter. I want you on my side.”

“Yet there’s something else you want more, isn’t there?” I said, and he suddenly looked less comfortable, though he hadn’t moved at all. I had to risk it, though. A mean game of push-and-shove would be more believable than a total and abrupt turnaround. Changing the subject before he could answer, I feigned ease. “Well, this mask has shown me that if things go your way, five minutes from now the entire troop of Light will be nothing more than a memory, but at least one of your agents will die with them. It’ll either be Zell…”