Dark and Stormy Knights

SHIFTING STAR by VICKI PETTERSSON

Skamar left her so-called Mediterranean-style apartment as she always did: after first sniffing the air to make sure there were no mortals about. She knew who her neighbors were, had watched them coming and going through the small peephole of the front door, and had even observed the older, professional woman upstairs leave a coffee cake on her doorstep. Perplexed, Skamar had mentioned the strange deed to her creator, Zoe, and was told it was a way to welcome her to the neighborhood. So Skamar had eaten the cake in one sitting—God knew her brand-new physical body needed the nourishment—and returned the cake plate to the woman’s doorstep before sneaking away.

The only person Skamar hadn’t been able to avoid was the man in 117B. He wasn’t always there, but he was annoying enough—and, she knew, interested enough—that it seemed that way.

“Morning, sunshine,” the man said again today, pointedly regarding her copper red hair. His ubiquitous coffee cup steamed fragrantly, his feet were propped on the patio railing, and his otherwise handsome face was marred by a shit-eating grin.

She’d have snarled that Skamar was Tibetan for star, not sun, but she never furnished her proper name to anyone. That was like giving permission to use her personal power, and she’d worked too hard to allow that.

“Vaughn,” she said stiffly, because he’d given his name freely, insisting she use his first. Vaughn Rhett. His obvious attraction crept over her amplified senses and was a heady combination attached to that slim build and open face. It made her skin crawl.

“Join me for a cup of coffee?” he asked, as always.

“No.” She only acknowledged him at all because she wanted to keep a low profile. It was the same reason she walked from the complex rather than soared. A redheaded woman circling like an eagle overhead would certainly attract attention. And the Tulpa, she thought, glancing at the crucifixion wounds in her wrists, would easily pinpoint her then.

“Just one?” Vaughn gave her that killer smile again, and his warm, dry scent pulsed over her to pool in her gut. “It’s French pressed.”

Skamar clenched her teeth and sped up. What the hell were you supposed to feel when someone so clearly wanted to stick his tongue down your throat? It would be so much better, she thought, if the man merely meant to stick a knife in her gut. She’d know exactly what to feel, and do, about that.

“You’re going to join me for coffee one day, sunshine,” he called after her, voice filled with such teasing laughter that it actually did remind her of the sun. “I promise you that.”

But by the time she exited the parking lot and hit the wide stretch of Flamingo Road, thoughts of Vaughn, the scent of his coffee and interest, and his meaningless promises dropped away. She stood taller, awareness expanding. Her body temperature was already marrying with the biting December air, a skill not unlike a chameleon’s ability to change color . . . and one specific to tulpas. As she walked, Skamar turned her mind to Zoe Archer and why her creator would summon Skamar in daylight hours, and to such a public place.

Yet an uncomfortable tingle, similar to what Skamar had felt under Vaughn’s clear gaze, rode the nape of her neck. Her first instinct was renewed annoyance at a fleeting wish for a cup of joe.

Her second was to duck.

The Tulpa’s frustrated cry arched banner red above her as she kissed pavement, and he halted in the next second, redirected midair, and sprinted back while she still sprawled. His flesh was molded into a thin, wiry, unassuming form today, but that was for mortal benefit. Snarling, she countered the steel-spined demon that lurked beneath.

He’d caught her fresh. Maybe he didn’t yet know that her biorhythms had taken on mortal flow once she’d achieved permanence in this world. How would he? He was still unnamed, only a half-realized entity, forced to describe who he was—the Tulpa—by what he was—a tulpa. Sure, his followers had to call him something, but it would never afford him the formidable kick of power she enjoyed with a given name.

So their next collision had Skamar’s fist blasting through his false visage, surprise spreading over a face that distended so far it should have cracked. Impermanence made the fucker hard to fight, but he still grunted and fell back. Before his features could rearrange themselves into the correct places, her fist plowed through his chest, penetrating all but the last thin membrane.

His scream was a mourner’s wail, though to Skamar it was a lover’s sigh. Unsurprisingly, he reverted to what had become his standard MO—ambush and retreat—and the wind cut in sharp whistles around their bodies. Panicked, the Tulpa glanced up at the empty expanse of baby blue sky, but Skamar knew he wouldn’t risk the small sonic boom triggered whenever they set to flight. Not in the middle of town. Those in Vegas’s underworld would converge in minutes, and neither of them wanted to face off against each other and their respective troops.

So they angled close to the closed restaurants and office buildings, leapt to rooftops in straight vertical shots, and ran the narrow walking paths like drag racers. When the distance actually lengthened between them, Skamar knew the Tulpa’s followers—worshippers whose energy could be summoned at will—had been ordered to gift him with thoughts providing greater speed.

But the gift, the energy, came at a price.

Halting, she hefted a boulder the size of her skull and launched it at his retreating form. The rock plowed into his neck, distending his head so far forward that it hung like a loose tooth off its last thread of gum. Knocked to the ground, he rolled, and Skamar broke into another sprint. Yet the Tulpa—somehow able to think despite near decapitation—allowed the rotation to propel him forward, and he resumed running. When the distance again increased and he disappeared onto Desert Inn Road, then around the Wynn Resort, Skamar slowed.

That’s okay, she thought, breathing hard. She’d learned something new of him. The fool had given up power for speed, and that was knowledge she could capitalize on. Every encounter aiding that was a success. And though she was now late for her meeting with Zoe, she had to smile at the memory of the Tulpa running from her, head literally held in his hands.

Ten in the morning and the Valhalla Hotel’s pool was already busy, with music more suited to a nightclub pulsing from hidden speakers and bikini-clad cocktail waitresses ferrying morning mimosas and Bloody Marys to hotel guests. Some, Skamar noted as she followed the perky blond attendant across the expansive deck, had clearly not slept for nights. She squinted against the pool’s reflection, amazed that even in the winter, even at Christmas, tourists thought lounging around a pool in Las Vegas was a hedonistic pleasure. The pools were heated, and the guests might feel like rock stars, but really . . . the outdoor Christmas tree was absurd.

“Ms. Belie is just over there, in the VIP cabana.” The blonde smiled back at her as they wound through a maze of marble pools, saunas, and outdoor showers. A row of elevated cabanas loomed above the lounge area like the tents of Roman generals. And in the last, reclined like a goddess, was a woman with a general’s steel spine. Zoe Archer.

“Ms. Belie?” Skamar said with a raised brow, dropping into a chair opposite Zoe when the attendant had gone. “Why didn’t you just choose Ms. Conceal this time? Ms. Disguise, Ms. Pretense?”

Zoe always used some variation of the definition—Sham, Beard, and Twist being favorites. And she did it because . . .

“It’s more fun this way.” She waved a manicured hand in the air, sending the soft scent of spiced gardenias and warm vanilla wafting Skamar’s way. And after giving up her family, a life among the agents of Light, and all her powers with it, Zoe took her fun where she could get it.

“The Tulpa attacked again this morning,” Skamar said, noting Zoe had the poolside look down pat. Tanned limbs, a trim blue bikini, and a wide-brimmed straw hat over a long blond wig. In contrast, Skamar’s own thrift-store black and spotlessly pale skin clearly marked her as a poolside neophyte. “Ambushed me right outside my complex. Not what I would call fun.”

“You didn’t have to come,” Zoe said, sipping an icy red cocktail.

Ruthlessly unemotional. Typical Zoe. Skamar allowed a wry smile, remembering what it was like to live in the coiling gray matter of that one-track mind. To expect sentimentality from Zoe was to expect the sun to set in the east. She might appear pampered on the outside, drinking her frozen cocktails and nibbling on a fruit platter, but her actions and thoughts were as focused and militant as Skamar’s.

“You wouldn’t call unless it was important,” Skamar conceded, leaning back, though she didn’t have to come. She was no longer a thought-form, a doppelgänger birthed via the fierce concentration of Zoe’s mind. No, now that she was named, and a full-blown tulpa—willful, conscious, immutable—she was the most powerful being in the valley. Yet resisting Zoe’s call was still difficult. If Skamar were a magnet, Zoe would be sheet metal.

Zoe responded by tossing her a manila folder. After catching it midair, Skamar pulled out three photos, each of a preteen girl smiling with some degree of uncertainty. Personal information was stapled to a sheet on the back. “The Shadows are abducting girls of a certain type. A certain age.”

Skamar looked up. “It could be coincidence.”

“No. The Tulpa is looking for her.”

She wouldn’t say Ashlyn’s name. It was still a secret in Vegas’s underworld, the only thing protecting the child from it and the warring factions of Shadow and Light battling for the city’s soul.

Yet soon, thought Skamar, everyone would know who Ashlyn was. “Her second life cycle? She’s begun?”

Zoe shook her head. “Not yet.” But her tone said, Not long.

Agents on both sides of the Zodiac could pass as mortals when young, but puberty kick-started the pheromones that acted as a siren’s call to their enemies. This marked the second phase, or life cycle, of their development and was the most vulnerable point in a young agent’s life. Once Ashlyn’s hit, she might as well paint a bull’s-eye on her chest. Everyone would know she was Zoe’s granddaughter . . . and the Tulpa’s.

And if he found Ashlyn, he would raise and train her as Shadow, using her against the troop Zoe had been raised in. The Light. “So you want me to protect her?”

Zoe immediately scoffed. “The way you two brawl? You’d only lead him directly to her.” Yet she backtracked immediately, knowing the way the words would strike Skamar. “It’s not criticism. You’re more powerful than he is, smarter, too—”

“Stop complimenting yourself.” Because Zoe had created her that way.

Zoe smiled, but only briefly. “With a little more time and experience, I have faith you’ll prevail, my dear Skamar.”

Skamar detested the pride that shot through her chest. She shouldn’t care what anyone thought, even the woman who’d spent a decade birthing her—thinking her—into existence.

“No, I let that bastard get his hands on her once . . .” Zoe trailed off, and Skamar knew exactly which memory she was fingering. She’d almost lost her daughter and granddaughter to their common enemy. “I’ll do the guarding this time. Actually, I’m already doing more than that.”

A wispy smile threaded Zoe’s lips, and an unexpected emotion struck Skamar—green and sharp. She shunted it aside before it could bloom into scent.

Zoe pointed a finger back at the photos. “But they need to be found.”

Skamar shrugged. “Let the Light take care of it.”

“They can’t know about her. Not yet.”

Because the Light would be just as anxious to use Ashlyn. Zoe was fed up with the women in her family being used . . . a sentiment Skamar understood and shared. Yet she clenched her jaw and tossed the folder with the girls’ photos on the end of Zoe’s lounge chair. This quest would interfere with her pursuit of the Tulpa. “They’re mortal.”

“I’m mortal,” Zoe snapped, leaning forward, eyes fired. “And so is my daughter, the one who named you, and almost lost her life so you might have limitless power.”

“She did it for a child, not me.” Which was still unfathomable to Skamar. Joanna Archer had given up all supernatural powers for one mortal soul. What a waste.

“But you benefited.”

Skamar looked away. Zoe thought their obsession with killing the Tulpa was joint, but Skamar’s was different. When she was first birthed from Zoe’s mind in physical form, it had been as a doppelgänger, with the ability to mutate into different shapes. The precariousness of her state had frustrated her then. The inability to hold one shape for long had made her feel insignificant, like a ghost. But in some ways it had been freeing, too. Skamar now looked back on that time as someone else might look back on a carefree childhood. Maybe she’d wanted too badly to believe Zoe when she said becoming a full-blown tulpa would make Skamar the most powerful being alive. Maybe she’d been too greedy.

Because while claiming this mortal flesh had indeed provided her with the benefits of permanence—energy and power an unnamed being like the Tulpa could never tap into—its shortcomings were equally potent. The Tulpa—another being who’d walked into existence as a doppelgänger and knew what it was to be untouchable—had bested Skamar briefly and used her new body against her. She swallowed hard as she remembered him driving iron ties into her wrists and ankles before hanging her from a lightning rod and setting her up beneath a roiling sky. For all her strength, she’d been utterly helpless to free herself.

And that pain now stalked her dreams. The first time she woke with a pounding heart and sweat-soaked sheets, she was clear out the apartment door before realizing she wasn’t being chased. Not by anything more than memories, at least.

Her paranoia, too, was off the charts. Thus her avoidance of neighbors, small talk with strangers, and even something as simple as a cup of coffee with Vaughn.

Especially a cup of coffee with Vaughn. Because she might be new to the whole flesh-and-bone thing, but she’d watched these mortals long enough to wonder openly at the messy emotions that routinely marred their lives. So what if the blue heat in a man’s eyes suddenly made her stomach plummet into her knees? Or if his mouth, when not quirked in humor, looked like a beautiful destructive force? Feelings for another person were an unnecessary chaos. Intimacy gone bad would only open her up to more pain, more fear.

Fuck that.

But Zoe was right about Joanna. She had saved her from crucifixion, so that’s why Skamar finally nodded.

But she would also continue to hunt the Tulpa. It was the only way she knew to combat the night sweats and remembered fears. And when she caught that sadistic, mutable fucker? She’d string him up as he’d done to her. She’d let him rot so slowly that he’d sit as close to death as anyone could and still remain alive. Then she’d patch him up, nurse him back to near health, and do it all over again. Then the leader of the Shadows, too, would know pain and fear and paranoia.

He would know intimately, she thought as she stood, what it was to be touched.

An early spring wind kicked at Skamar like a hard leather boot, though winter still laced the air, lending it icy force. Physical discomfort had taken some getting used to upon claiming her corporeal form, but she tried to look on the bright side. Having to consider her clothing made her blend more naturally with humanity, and she was confident she looked like any other tourist as she patrolled the Boulevard. Though she was admittedly missing the yard-long pink plastic margarita cup. Yet once she’d entered the site of the first victim’s abduction—a giant mall centering the infamous Las Vegas Strip—it seemed all she really needed to do to blend was wander aimlessly . . . and buy a bunch of crap she didn’t need.

The place was decked out like the North Pole had puked on it, Skamar thought, making her way to the food court. It was there, claimed the newspapers, that a Caucasian man had approached the counter of McGee’s Muffin Shop, ordered a lemon-poppyseed pastry, warmed, before yanking the owner’s daughter, Lilly, from behind the counter. Some eyewitnesses claimed he’d then leapt a glass balustrade to drop thirty feet before disappearing, and the police hadn’t been able to decide whether they should ignore those onlookers altogether or look at them most closely.

So the muffin shop, now considered a crime scene, was cordoned off and dark, and mothers of young children steered their offspring from the storefront as if abduction were an infectious disease. Therefore Skamar hadn’t long to wait for an opportunity to leap the counter and disappear into the back room.

The giant stainless-steel mixers were clean, the counter-tops wiped. It was orderly for a place so abruptly deserted. Yet beneath the scents of flour and sugar—and a particularly noticeable half-open tub of hardening blueberry muffin batter—Skamar still recognized human. The most obvious one smelled of whittled wood, a signatory male scent, though one laced with peppery shock. Skamar dismissed it and ferreted out the other, one as faint as soft, boiled ginger. That had to be Lilly’s.

Shutting her eyes, Skamar memorized the hooks and nuances in order to track the girl later. When the door handle next to her began to twist, she jerked back to awareness and thought briefly of bolting back over the counter . . . but why give the mortals another far-fetched story? Besides, the ID cards Zoe had provided included one for a licensed P.I. She’d just tell the shop owner that one of the other families had hired her. Any man desperate to find his missing daughter wouldn’t question that.

Yet it wasn’t the owner who flicked on the lights and startled at the sight of her. Skamar was dumbfounded, too. Of all people, her annoying neighbor was the last she expected to see.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked in as unfriendly a voice as she’d ever heard. As if he had a right to question her.

Skamar flashed her license. “I should ask you the same.”

“Brass trumps paper.” Vaughn flashed his badge. “Now answer the question.”

“A cop?” was all she said, letting her arm fall. “You have a job?”

“You can complete actual sentences?”

Her eyes hardened, but so did his. This was a different Vaughn from the one who undressed her with his gaze each time she passed his balcony. This one was a cool opponent, and perversely she liked it. She also thought she could use it.

“You’re the lead detective, then?” she asked, gaining a mere perfunctory nod. “I was hired by the Brundage family to find their daughter. Maybe we could work together?”

That flat cop’s gaze met the suggestion as enthusiastically as a cat met water. Yes, Skamar thought. She liked this Vaughn very much. “Does that mean you have something useful to add to the investigation, or would I be the only one contributing to this working relationship?”

“I’ve just started,” she admitted with a tilt of her head. “But I’m good, dogged . . . and I was born to hunt the people who do this.”

He didn’t answer immediately, frowning as he looked around and then shuddering as his eyes fell on the bin of batter. The odd moment passed quickly, though. “You mean the monsters.”

She smiled briefly. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

Eyes narrowed, Vaughn considered her a moment longer, then offered up his own thin smile. “The third victim was abducted while sleeping. I’m headed to her house now if you want to come along.”

Skamar nodded her thanks, so relieved he’d agreed that she didn’t worry too much about why. Maybe he was suspicious and wanted to keep her close. Maybe it was another way to angle in for that damn cup of coffee. Whatever, Skamar thought, following Vaughn from the shop. She’d find a way to work it to her advantage. And the unusual step of working with a mortal might prove a good tactic. Busting through the Tulpa’s defenses via his front door hadn’t produced results, but maybe she could slip through the back this way. If she was really lucky, she might even catch him sleeping.

They were allowed into Debi Truby’s bedroom by parents so grief-stricken, they looked like the walking dead. Skamar had never scented so sharp an anguish before, and she wondered how such a little person could be so firmly anchored in a family that her absence set them all adrift. Debi’s father floated inconsequentially from room to room, and her mother looked as though she’d been yanked up at the root.

Meanwhile, this new Vaughn pointed out that there was no sign of struggle, forced entry, or unfamiliar fingerprints, which told Skamar little in the way of anything new. She confirmed that Debi was exactly Ashlyn’s age and that her youthful scent was impossible to distinguish from an initiate’s. That’s why the Shadows were casting such a wide net. They’d probably hold the girls until they started menses, returning them, memories erased, once it was clear they weren’t Ashlyn. Then again, they might just kill them.

But puberty varied from child to child, so Skamar couldn’t help wondering how many years Debi’s parents would have to walk the world in panicked despair. Or how many families would be fractured this way before the Shadows ended their search.

The unknown clearly bothered Vaughn as well. As they drove to the second crime scene, a schoolyard, he gnawed on his fingernails, gaze distant.

“These are crimes of opportunity,” he finally said out of nowhere. “These girls aren’t stalked. That’s usually a solo endeavor, and I’m certain there’s more than one person in on this. Maybe a cult . . . yet there’s no ritual, no social connection. Just similar looks.”

“And their birthdays,” Skamar added. He was so earnest that she felt compelled to help. She didn’t have a lot, but she knew that much. “They’re all born within months of each other.”

Vaughn frowned, made a note of it on his pad while driving, then sighed as he pulled into the school front’s horseshoe drive. They slipped through a narrow opening in the fence, where they stared out over the blacktop. Skamar could almost hear the echo of children’s laughter in the darkening yard.

“Why’s this so personal to you?” The question earned her a sharp look, but she only inched closer, genuinely curious about what she was scenting. It was an old emotion, dry but still cloying, like the cold ash of incense. “Don’t take offense. I’m good at reading people. These cases are touching you in a way others haven’t.”

Vaughn’s gaze locked on the gently swaying tetherballs, and his jaw clenched. “Remember when you were a kid, around nine or so, and you started playing chase with the opposite sex? It was both terrifying and exhilarating . . . though you didn’t really know why.”

Since she’d had no childhood to speak of, Skamar’s nod was a lie.

“The first girl I let catch me was named Anna. She had long brown hair and always wore those plastic barrettes. You know, the ones with bunnies on them? She smelled like blueberry gum, and I can still remember her laugh when she pressed her lips to my cheek. She said she wanted to taste my freckles. Then she raced off, left me standing with my mind in a full buzz.”

Skamar said nothing, mesmerized by the idea of this man as a freckle-faced boy and knowing now why he’d gone so still in the bakery. Blueberries.

“She was taken the next year from in front of her house. Nobody ever saw her again, not alive, and I would stare at her empty desk every day, remembering how she looked hunched over her work, hoping she’d just walk in the classroom, wearing those plastic barrettes, maybe say that she had just gotten lost.”

He looked down, biting the inside of his mouth, then back up at the sky, lost in his memories.

“That summer I went to the library, got permission to use the microfiche, and found her school picture alongside her obituary. I looked at that image staring back at me, and I swear I could fucking smell the blueberries.”

Skamar swallowed hard. “So it’s a quest for you? Like those medieval knights, fighting to protect the innocent?”

Zoe’s mind had been filled with those stories. She loved them, which was ironic because a former superhero shouldn’t wish to be saved by someone else. But Zoe had. She’d longed for it even while taking steps to save herself.

“Don’t joke about this.” Vaughn pushed away from the fence.

“I’m not,” Skamar replied, placing a hand on his arm to stop him, forcing him to look her in the eyes. She slid her fingertips down his arm, then led his to the scarred divots in her wrists. “I—I could have used a knight once myself.”

Vaughn froze before that hard expression fractured. Then he gave her destroyed arms a gentle squeeze, and Skamar sucked in a surprised breath. She’d revealed the scars for his sake, to show that bad things happened and it was impossible for him, a mere cop, to be everywhere at once. But the dizziness that shot through her was surprising . . . and it was also unwanted. Okay, so his story about a girl who’d died long ago touched her. But she couldn’t let his softheartedness do the same. That would be dangerous for them both.

“Do you have plans tonight?” he suddenly asked, still holding her wrists.

The question had Skamar blinking twice. She pulled away, but Vaughn’s grip tightened. “I’m not asking for a date. We can’t patrol the whole damn city at once, but we can be in the most likely places these girls are targeted. The Festival of Lights is tonight, and there’ll be an enormous teen presence. The Jameson Brothers are playing at eight.”

Skamar remained silent, having no idea who the Jameson Brothers were.

“We’ll stand out less if we go together,” Vaughn explained under her steady gaze. “Follow the girls who most fit the profile and see if anyone else is doing the same.”

She frowned. It was a long shot, though no more remote than canvassing the entire valley in hopes of stumbling upon some random abduction. “How many teens did you say will be there?”

“A few hundred. All screaming and giggling, probably at the top of their lungs.”

Skamar winced, and the teasing man she first knew, the one who visually undressed her from over his balcony wall, showed his face. Odd, but this time she almost didn’t mind. “C’mon,” he said, “you were a teen once. You remember what it’s like.”

Skamar had never been a teen and remembered nothing of the sort—not giggling with friends, not chasing boys in the schoolyard, not even blueberry gum and plastic barrettes. But she did remember hanging from a lightning rod like a sacrificial offering, and she was willing to try anything she could to reconcile that. “I’ll be at your place at six.”

The Festival of Lights was a month-long event, and while the first three weeks were a cacophonous celebration of family, the last one—and the last night in particular—belonged wholly to the valley’s teen population. It was held outdoors, on a refurbished ranch, because despite the carols being sung about sleigh bells and winter wonderlands, December in Vegas was relatively mild. The cold weather wouldn’t really strike until the new year, so the light jackets and festive scarves were mostly for fashion’s sake.

After excusing himself, Vaughn momentarily left Skamar in front of a faux North Pole, where a Santa smelling of peppermint and vodka was taking pictures with groups of girls too old be sitting on his lap. Skamar took the opportunity to scan the crowd without being watched by Vaughn or burdened by making small talk. She was still in search mode when he returned with a pastry, which she glanced at as if it were an alien life form.

“We’re here to work,” she said, crossing her arms.

“We’re here to blend,” he corrected, nudging her with something called a churro. She studied the stick of fried dough and cinnamon sugar, twisting it in her hand before taking a tentative bite. The warmth, the sugar, and the surprising cream-filled center had her eyes winging wide, and she looked up to find Vaughn watching her with a soft, amused gaze. It wasn’t the knowing look he shot her from behind his apartment balcony or the hard glaze that assessed her work. It was new, and when he reached up to wipe sugar from her lips, she found she couldn’t hold it and dropped her head.

Then he surprised her yet again. The steam from the coffee cup he’d been hiding warmed her face, and she jerked back, causing his amusement to turn into full-fledged laughter. “I told you we were going to share a cup of coffee, sunshine.”

His cockiness made laughter well in her, too, so she reached for the cup, muttering as she brought it to her mouth. “Stop calling me that.”

“What should I call you, then?” he said, angling again for her name.

She only narrowed her eyes, but when he linked her arm through his, she didn’t pull away. His size gave the illusion that he was the stronger of them, she reasoned, and his body heat and the low rumble of his voice were a relatively pleasant duet accompanying an unpleasant task.

So they walked arm in arm, threading through enough teens that the hormones practically flattened the air molecules. As Vaughn had predicted, most were giggling girls, clustered and texting, hair-tossing and bouncing with more energy than twelve-week-old puppies. At one point, a piercing chorus of squeals went up so close to Skamar that her eyes actually crossed. But the uniformity in scent made it simple to ferret out the aberrant one . . . and it was one Skamar knew well.

“What is it?” Vaughn asked, feeling her stiffen. He followed her gaze to a man standing near the fence, a protective arm draped over the shoulders of a glassy-eyed girl. Her head was hidden beneath a thick brown ski cap, and their coloring was so alike that anyone who didn’t know better would take him for her father.

The ability to change shape and form was so convenient, Skamar thought, stepping forward. Too bad for the Tulpa that his black slush aura was always the same.

“It’s Debi,” she whispered. The Tulpa was obviously using the girl as cover while he canvassed the crowd for another victim. He knew, then, that she wasn’t the one. And if the Tulpa was attending to the matter personally, Zoe was right. He was hunting their granddaughter.

“I see him.” Vaughn spoke too loudly. The Tulpa’s gaze rolled as though his head were riveted to his shoulders. He noted and dismissed Vaughn, and fastened his attention on Skamar. With a twitch of his lips, he angled the girl away, and they headed in tandem toward the main stage.

“Break up,” she ordered Vaughn, but he was already pushing through the tight pods of pubescent girls, all seemingly on a mission to slow him down. The warm-up band had just taken stage, and the singer yelled for everyone to raise their hands. Amid the excited screaming, the Tulpa lifted his own hand as he turned to grin at Skamar. Then he slipped around a vendor’s stall sparkling with lights and ornaments and disappeared.

Skamar knew the Tulpa was expending more energy than usual on this new physical form and was further limited by having to drag along a mortal. This knowledge—along with the phantom smell of blueberries and the memory of Debi’s shell-shocked parents—had Skamar zigzagging like a speed skater through the tightly packed crowd. If she got to him before he found a solitary spot, she could separate him from the girl . . . and take a shot at doing the same with his life.

A small clearing on the asphalt lot and a large burst of speed put her within arm’s reach. Being forced to drag Debi along unobserved had slowed him significantly. Perhaps he should have held on to his strength, she thought wryly. Yet he dodged when Skamar leapt, elongating creepily to slide behind a wall of portable toilets. Laughter greeted Skamar even before she whipped around the corner . . . as did a harsh, unmistakably canine growl. Yet halting abruptly, she saw no one but the Tulpa, now pulling Debi into an unyielding headlock. The girl didn’t protest or even blink, though her face was quickly turning red.

“Let her go.”

“Since when do you care about anyone or anything but my demise?” His dark eyes, fastened on her face, had gone as black as his aura.

“I care about many things,” Skamar lied, inching forward. “Not that I’d turn down the opportunity for a little payback.”

“Still sore about that little crucifixion prank?” The features on his face shifted, shimmered, then resolidified. Despite his pleasant tone, he was expending a lot of energy. “It was a lark, I was just having a bit of fun. It would be so much more convenient if you just got over it.”

Skamar took a step forward, testing him. “I’m not here to make life easier on you.”

“Another way that we’re shockingly alike.” He whistled, and the ground next to Skamar’s feet moved.

She jumped at the sight of a greyhound, slight and wiry . . . and completely translucent. It glistened now that it was moving, undulating in pearly waves like all doppelgängers. Greys weren’t known for their aggressive natures, but canine wardens loathed anyone connected with the Light. And as Skamar had been created in the mind of a former agent of Light, she was certainly that. The dog snarled, baring teeth as long as crystalline spikes, its mouth bubbling with opalescent saliva.

She had time only to think how clever it was to create a warden doppelgänger before the Tulpa spoke. “Bandit . . . kill.”

And he named his creature right in front of Skamar, the same way she’d been named and afforded additional power . . . and with the same effect. The beast’s body was instantly inked, and it lunged at Skamar with a speed only she possessed.

“Motherfucker!” A bullet followed Vaughn’s cry, fired so close that Skamar’s ears rang with the aftershocks. It entered the newly created hound, and the creature yelped . . . then grew a good three inches all around. However, the interruption gave Skamar the opening she needed, and she leapt at Bandit while yelling at Vaughn to hold his fire.

The dog’s gaping mouth was level with her face, and Skamar shoved her hands inside of it to yank the impossibly sharp incisors in opposite directions. Bandit yelped as she ripped apart its hard palate. Then she bit into the hound’s neck, jerked her head, and tore out its larynx. She kept ripping with her teeth, literally consuming half of the animal—and its magic—because the only way to kill a tulpa, even a canine one, was to turn its own magic against it. Thus only another tulpa could do that.

Skamar’s vision swam, her mind clouded, and time leapt forward in the strange stop-motion jerks of battle-born fugue. Using the animal’s magic, she dismembered its energy and form, and when she’d finished, the body lay in pieces around her, the thought that had created his spirit was only memory . . . and the Tulpa and Debi were gone. Cursing, she began to rise before remembering Vaughn.

The cop was no longer standing. Shock had leached the color from his skin, and he was slumped against the last blue portable. Witnessing the object of his lustful fantasies feasting on the blood of a mutant hound was apparently more than he’d expected to see. And, she noted coolly, at some point between firing that bullet and when she’d cracked the last bone in Bandit’s body, Vaughn had repositioned his gun, setting its sights on her.

Their eyes met, and Skamar rocketed forward. After knocking aside the weapon, she lifted Vaughn clean from his feet, to propel him into a pickup at the lot’s edge. She crowbarred his neck until his feet began to kick like an upturned beetle’s—still lots of life in the limbs, though no amount of scrambling would allow escape.

“Get it all out,” Skamar rasped, pushing on his stomach so that the last of his breath wheezed from his lungs. She then wiped Bandit’s blood from her chin, put her mouth to Vaughn’s—beneath eyes widening in horror—and began to suck.

Mortals were so ignorant, thinking the soul lived in the eyes. The soul lived in the breath, threaded to the heart and mind in invisible strings, which pulsed with ethereal life. Skamar tugged on the brightest of these and was surprised at how little time it took to lift the memory of the last few minutes. Vaughn gradually relaxed, and she slowly lessened her hold, finally allowing life-giving inhalations to alternate with the small cocktail straw sips she still used to pull that memory clean.

Vaughn shifted, which she allowed because it was expected. His body and mind would create a new story for how and why they got there. The human mind was so weak that it was easily altered. Or maybe, she thought, frowning as she pulled away, it was that strong. All shifting, adaptable beings had to be, right?

Yet what Skamar didn’t expect, and somehow still allowed, was to be pulled close again. The new story developing in Vaughn’s strong/weak mind was clearly a romance. His mouth fastened on hers this time with a dizzying warmth, an enveloping she’d never before felt yet somehow still welcomed. She returned the kiss, her first, with a shocking urgency. In spite of that, or maybe because of it, she pulled away. Licking now tingling lips, she warily eyed Vaughn . . . who eyed her mouth dreamily.

“How did we—” But he broke off abruptly, putting a hand to his mouth and coming away with blood.

“He punched you,” she lied, flushing. Hey, she wasn’t the one who’d turned the memory cleanse into a kiss!

But it was already forgotten. Vaughn startled again, then fumbled his phone from his pocket. Face already expectantly grim, it fell further as he read the text, and Skamar didn’t have to be told why.

She sighed. “Where?”

“A park in Centennial Hills. The girl’s father tried to intervene this time. It looks like he was attacked by a dog, of all things.” Vaughn squinted into the sky, searching for a memory as he canvassed the stars, before shaking his head. “Isn’t that strange?”

Skamar just nodded, stood, and turned away to hide her bloodied clothing. Touching her hand to still-tingling lips, she thought, Yes. It was all very strange indeed.

The latest victim’s name was Theresa, she’d been born within two months of Ashlyn, and her father was mad with grief. He screamed and ranted about mutant hounds until the nurses held him down and sedated him by force.

Meanwhile, the police were just as frustrated. Vaughn fumed about lacking funds and manpower, and Skamar listened with her usual detachment, wondering if this was what “life” was all about. What was the point of opening yourself up to people or caring about things if they could eventually be used against you? Why even have a child if her potential absence resulted in a crater being carved in your chest?

She posed a softer version of this question—one that didn’t make her sound as if she didn’t understand the mortal state—to Vaughn when he finally fell silent.

“Because it can be so good, too,” he said, though he looked pained as he said it. “Knowing that the worst might someday happen doesn’t mean you avoid the risk of loving someone. It only means you seize the good when and where you can.”

Was that what she’d felt in that darkened parking lot? While stinking of warden blood and having just taken a life, was that what she’d inadvertently done? Was that why Zoe’s daughter, Joanna, had willingly offered up her life for a mortal child’s? And mostly, Skamar wondered, Was it worth it? She studied Vaughn. He certainly believed so. Funny how when she looked at him now she saw not his physical weakness, that fragile humanity, but his strong spirit, which seemed directly related to that belief. She could suddenly see how in the simplest of things—an invite for a cup of coffee, a small flirtation, a kiss—he seized his life as fervently as she clung to hers. Seizing life . . . and choosing good.

Skamar was still preoccupied by this when she joined his undercover unit the very next night. They were outfitting a female cop so young-looking that only her scent gave her away as a mature woman. Yet mortal girls verging on puberty were olfactory blank spots in the mind, just like the initiates born in underground sanctuaries and raised to fight on either side of the Zodiac. Therefore this plan to plant the officer in the audience during an evening magic show—where a magician would oh-so-conveniently pick her for his disappearing act—was flawed from the beginning. The Shadows would never fall for it.

The one thing it did have going for it was the proximity to another gathering of teens. Yuletide Magic raised money for underprivileged children while easing the social consciences of parents who otherwise seemed hell-bent on spending an insane amount of money on plastic trinkets for their offspring. Yet Skamar remained skeptical.

“This isn’t going to work,” she muttered as Vaughn jerked at the neck of his rented tuxedo.

“Why not?” he asked, frowning at his bow tie. It had been her idea for him to pose as an amateur magician, ostensibly to draw the girls close to him and possibly the kidnappers as well. In reality, she wanted only to keep him out of the way. The run-in at the Festival of Lights two nights earlier had shaken her—even if Vaughn didn’t remember any of it. She wouldn’t want anyone that close to the Tulpa. Never mind a man in possession of a surprisingly kind heart, dry scent, and lips that made hers tingle.

“Too obvious a setting,” she lied, as there was no way to explain about the decoy cop’s scent.

“Ah, sunshine,” he said, grinning as he pulled a springy bunch of colorful flowers from his tuxedo pocket. He offered them to her. “All you have to do is believe in magic.”

Skamar crossed her arms until he tucked the flowers away, though her heart skipped a couple of beats and her mouth quirked at one side when he shot her a roguish wink. Be careful, she found herself thinking.

Frowning, she wondered where that particularly human worry had come from, and turning away, she almost missed the Shadow entirely. As the bait took to the stage and the undercover officers fanned out about her, Skamar saw Dawn, a petite, unremarkable-looking woman . . . except that she was also the Shadow Gemini. She was speaking with a girl perched at the audience’s edge, gesturing animatedly to an exit door. Whatever she said made the girl’s eyes pop with excitement, and though no more than five feet from the nearest undercover cop, their body language indicated they were together. Dawn shepherded the girl toward a door leading backstage, and just as they gained the threshold, she shot Skamar a sweet smile over her shoulder.

Skamar glanced over to see if Vaughn had noticed, but he was now surrounded by half a dozen children who wanted him to hop inside his Plexiglas box, pull the curtains shut, and make himself disappear. It was clear that disguise had backfired.

Meanwhile the plant was onstage, ostensibly being hypnotized, and all other eyes were fixed firmly on her. It didn’t matter. Skamar was the only one who could keep Dawn from escaping anyway.

She raced through the door and gained the backstage area in time to see the girl yanked behind an arching black scrim. Using the darkness to cover her unnatural speed, Skamar instantly closed the gap between them. Braced for attack—by a warden, by other waiting Shadows, maybe even by the Tulpa—she wasn’t ready for a conversation. But Dawn stood across the vast expanse of the stage, one hand holding a knife to the girl’s throat, the other muffling her sobs.

“My friends and I want to show you a little magic trick,” Dawn called out in a singsong voice.

Skamar laughed harshly. “You mean you and your invisible friends, Dawn?”

“Better than mortal ones,” Dawn said, offering up her own harsh laugh. “Especially at a magic show. I mean, it’s just so easy to make them go poof!”

Then both Dawn and the girl dropped from sight, a trapdoor swinging shut above them. Skamar ran, intending to give the door one hard stomp, but she came up short, Dawn’s final words—and the accompanying grin—finally reaching her mind and stopping her heart.

After bolting back to the theater, she nudged aside surly teens and offended parents to stand in front of the glass magic box. Vaughn was gone, the curtains were pulled shut, and the whole box vibrated with energy. Swallowing hard, Skamar grasped the tassel at the box’s side and pulled open the curtains.

A warden as giant and black as hell’s gaping mouth lunged at her, banging against the Plexiglas front with rabid fury. Screams erupted behind Skamar as the dog rocketed into the glass. Ignoring the chaos behind her, she reached for a note taped to the box’s front. A single word was spelled out in block letters on Valhalla Hotel stationery, one that brought back such an intense memory of pain that she actually sagged.

Valhalla was where. Vaughn was who. Now was when. As for the what? The Shadows weren’t making her guess at that: “CRUCIFIXION.”

Crumpling the note in her hand, Skamar bolted.

Skamar didn’t own any weapons. Shadows were immune to them, so knives and guns were more irritants than deterrents, and the Tulpa was impervious to all weaponry—even the magical ones crafted for Zodiac agents. Skamar couldn’t complain about that too much since she shared the immunity as a tulpa, but it was also why she had to take on the Shadows, and whatever trap they’d set, all alone.

Besides, the thought of something happening to Vaughn because of her was suddenly unacceptable. It set off such a panic in her chest, it was as if her lungs had grown wings. She had to stop it or—yes—die trying.

So Skamar skirted slot machines, floor attendants, and oblivious patrons of the Valhalla Hotel and Casino and followed the meaty, furred scent of Shadow wardens into the heart of the property. When she passed the twenty-four-hour café, the girls’ scent joined the hounds’, causing her heart to skip a beat. She rounded the gift shop, one of four, and felt a mental punch as Vaughn’s scent was added to the mix. The olfactory triptych was impossible to miss—a rabid fury matched only by a throbbing fear.

The scents led into a showroom, the grandest she’d ever seen, and home to one of those freaky acrobat shows Vegas visitors couldn’t get enough of. Multileveled pools and water features pitted the room’s center, and as it was obviously the show’s “dark” night, the Coliseum-like theater was empty.

Yet there was still a show going on.

Deep drums pounded through the cavernous room, while refitted spotlights blazed upon the platforms suspended above two pools of water. One held the four girls—bound and cowering in the rounded middle, facing drowning if any of them even wobbled. Their pool had been blackened into shimmering opaqueness.

The other platform held Vaughn Rhett. He was suspended over a sparkling blue pool, though he faced exactly the opposite problem in his potential death. Lifted to his toes by a makeshift series of pulleys and levers, he would suffer crucifixion if his platform suddenly gave way. And though Skamar didn’t move, didn’t even blink, something inside of her screamed. Her palms also began to sweat as she recalled the acute ache ratcheting up her arms from the giant nails the Tulpa had driven into her wrists. Her calves cramped up reflexively, and she closed her eyes, swaying as she remembered her ribs pressing against her lungs in a slow suffocation. Her normally sharp mental admonition to pull it together might as well have been a kitten’s plea.

“Decisions, decisions.”

Her eyelids flipped open, and her gaze landed on the ringmaster to this wet, twisted circus. The Tulpa stepped onto the walkway separating the two pools, surrounded by three doppelgänger hounds, their bodies shimmering and frothing, refractive and nauseating. When Skamar said nothing, the Tulpa grinned and took a bow.

“Choose platform A and you’ll save four innocent, albeit relatively useless, lives. My pets, then, will have to feast on something else.” He placed a hand on the flat head of the nearest warden. It growled liquid menace. “Choose the second, and you’ll save only one life—though one that’s been trained to save many.”

Skamar said nothing. She was trying to still her shaking hands, hidden behind her back.

“No choice!” Vaughn’s voice was strained as the rope around his neck drew tighter. “Save the girls!”

He didn’t realize his words made her decision more difficult, not less.

The Tulpa smiled. He knew it. “Well, it’s a conundrum either way. I’ll leave you to it.”

He began to turn, and Skamar acted out of instinct. Letting out a battle cry, she dove not for Vaughn or the girls, but for the Tulpa. Yet even as she flew forward, he rocketed straight into the air, yanking at ropes he’d had concealed behind his back. The platforms, one attached to each of his wrists, twisted from the pools. The girls fell. Vaughn screamed.

Unable to cease her forward motion, Skamar could only drop to the walkway where the doppelgänger hounds lunged, all three striking at once. Skamar’s screams spiraled throughout the theater as the drumbeats increased, syncopated with the girls’ terrified cries and, just as they hit the water, the Tulpa’s booming laugh. “Permanence must be a bitch.”

Skamar was too busy working a jaw full of luminous razors from her left calf while shielding her throat with her other hand. Yet the wardens were almost impossible to see in the reflected light of the tanks, eerie undulations appearing through their not-flesh. A strange sensation began to overtake her, one she’d only smelled on others before but recognized immediately—pure, sharp panic.

When the third hound took a chunk from her back, she arched forward and knew the next would claim her heart. Ironically, it was that sharp pain of teeth piercing skin that brought Skamar back to her senses. She hammered one snarling beast on its head, less to fend it off than to anoint it, naming it even as it regained its balance. “Dasher!”

He shuddered, the forced moniker giving him form as Skamar whipped around, kicking the second. “Dancer!”

The third animal again found her back. “Prancer!”

The power of permanence rippled through them, just as it had done when she’d turned from doppelgänger into a full-blown tulpa. It gave them the same momentary pause she’d had, too, and in that moment she launched herself backward. When they continued their midair attack, the wild snaps of the first two dogs found each other instead. Too far gone with battle lust, and too newly born in their permanent state, they writhed madly, tearing at each other’s bodies.

Meanwhile, Skamar propelled the third dog, so recently existing in a liquid form, into the giant tank of water where the girls had already sunk. Release and relief came immediately, and as the third hound lost its breath and life to the black liquid, she dove past the pooling of her own blood to search out the drowning girls.

Blindly, she flailed around until grabbing rope, or hair, or something that wound easily about her hands, then used her legs to thrust herself and the girls straight out of the tank. She dropped the gasping girls on the center platform and braced for the Tulpa’s counterattack, only to find the cooling bodies of the hounds destroyed by their own magic.

And then she looked up.

The sensation of flying was an afterthought. She was back on the ground so fast, a tortured man cradled in her arms, that the girls were still sputtering on hands and knees. But Skamar forgot them for now. How odd, she thought, removing the rope from Vaughn’s neck, that the Tulpa hadn’t missed a trick. After all, she wouldn’t have expected a patently unreligious being to remember the spear in the side.

Though Vaughn’s larynx was crushed, his neck hadn’t snapped, leaving him to bleed out slowly, as the Tulpa had no doubt intended. Holding the man, Skamar thought of the boy who’d once borne kissable freckles. Tearing up, she could almost smell blueberries. “You did it, Vaughn. You saved those girls. Just like one of those medieval knights.”

She didn’t know if it was the small white lie or her tears dropping to his face that did the trick, but his eyes fluttered open long enough to reveal recognition touching his gaze. “Your . . . name . . .”

It wasn’t even a whisper, only his lips moving, but she read them and whispered back, “Skamar. It means star.”

And he somehow managed to reward her with a full smile, though the shockingly brave look twisted quickly into an anguished wince. Then as she held him, as she cried for the first time ever, her fragile knight died.

Skamar hadn’t opened the door to the apartment in days, never mind left it, so when she allowed Zoe in—and even that had taken a few moments of dull, uninterested consideration—her creator winced at the smell, and then in sympathy. It was the latter emotion that made Skamar want to slam the door shut.

Zoe, in yet another pretty if nondescript disguise, perched on the rented sofa’s side. “So, the Tulpa thinks he’s won. That you’ve gone into hiding . . . injured, licking wounds, beaten.”

“I don’t care what he thinks.” Though she did, of course. Thought created reality, and the Tulpa’s mind was a dangerously fertile place. But even the idea of facing him was too much effort right now.

“He’s still after my granddaughter.”

Skamar clenched her jaw, not looking at Zoe. “Well, I don’t know how to kill him. Obviously.”

Zoe repositioned herself in front of Skamar, who—deeming it too difficult and pointless to move—had simply sunk to her knees just inside the door. Grasping those knees, Zoe squeezed. “Just because you’re born for a particular task doesn’t mean you don’t have to work at it, or that it doesn’t come with a price. In fact, if you’re really born to do something, chances are you’ll die doing it, too.”

“Great.” As ruthlessly unemotional as always. This time Skamar didn’t smile.

Zoe reached for her shoulders. “But meanwhile, you have to live.”

“I don’t even know what that means!” Skamar pushed away from Zoe’s touch, even though there was nowhere to go. “You never taught me that, Zoe! All I know is that the first person I opened myself up to in this world is dead because of me. And you know what? They all die! They’re all weak and fragile and . . .”

“Mortal?” Zoe asked quietly.

Skamar clenched her jaw so hard, she thought her teeth would crack. “If that’s life, if this is it . . .” She motioned around at the crappy apartment, but more important, the sorrow stinking up the air, a pain surely even Zoe could scent. If this was life, she continued silently, she wasn’t sure she wanted it. Even for the chance to kill the Tulpa.

“This isn’t life,” Zoe said, taking Skamar’s face in her hand and forcing her gaze. “This is experience.”

“What’s the difference?” Skamar muttered, trying to shake the touch away.

Zoe held on, her smile bittersweet. “Experience is what happens when you don’t get what you want in life.”

Skamar was mortified when her face crumpled. “It hurts,” she whispered.

For just one moment, only one, she’d given herself over to something good, and look what had happened. She shook her head. “How do you do it?”

Zoe answered with a question of her own. “Would you rather it never happened? That you’d never met a human who made you want to open up? That either he or you hadn’t existed?”

No. Somehow she couldn’t wish that.

“You did the best you could,” Zoe said, then swallowed hard and bit her lip. “How about allowing me to try and do the same?”

Skamar frowned, only belatedly realizing what Zoe was asking. “Let you in again? No.” She shook her head. “My mind is my own now.”

Zoe inclined her head. “Yes, but that doesn’t mean you can’t lean upon others. Let someone else take the reins for a while.”

Give up even more power? Even more control just for the opportunity to share the burden? Depend on someone else to thrive? Open, even a fraction, to love?

“I don’t want control over you, Skamar,” Zoe said, misinterpreting her silence, though she’d have been right enough only days before. “I want to give you a moment of peace. I feel . . . somehow responsible.”

“For sending me after those girls?” Skamar shook her head, thinking of the families, their tearful reunions . . . the scent of blueberries. No. She knew now that it had been the right thing to do.

“No.” Zoe bowed her head. “For birthing you into a world already waiting to cause you pain. It’s a mother’s shame.”

It was the first time Zoe had ever admitted feelings for her beyond ownership, and Skamar was so shocked that she didn’t pull away when Zoe took her hand. And after another moment, she leaned against Zoe—strong against the weak—and eventually closed her eyes and gave herself over. One moment wouldn’t hurt anything, right?

And then there was the familiar feeling and scent of Zoe moving around in her mind. She relaxed into the meditative rhythm, the reassuring words—affirming, positive, and, when the one-way conversation turned to that of the Tulpa, positively homicidal.

“I’m so proud of you, Skamar,” Zoe said in conclusion. “Now rest, dear.”

Yes, she thought, drifting off as Zoe let herself out. She was going to need all the energy she could get if she was to continue this fight. And while still unwilling to give up her life for others, maybe—just maybe—she could live for them. Giving a fair shot to good people was a worthwhile pastime, right? It was something she could pursue in Vaughn’s honor.

When she wasn’t hunting the Tulpa, of course.

The New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the Signs of the Zodiac series, Vicki Pettersson was born and raised in Las Vegas. She still lives in Sin City, where a backyard view of the Strip regularly inspires her to set down her martini and head back to the computer. Check out the latest at www.vickipettersson.com .