The Touch of Twilight

9

The derring-do of both sides of the Zodiac was recorded in comic book form. While that might seem imprudent, there were fail-safes in place to keep information from one side leaking to the other. For instance, the Shadow agents couldn’t read the manuals of Light, and vice versa, thereby eliminating the possibility of one side gaining dominance over the other that way. This prohibition didn’t apply to me since I was both Shadow and Light, but I’d recently taken the opportunity to compare the manuals written after my arrival with those written before, and noted a lot more detail being left out these days, or delivered in more obscure terms than in the time prior to my arrival on the paranormal scene.

Of course, agents on both sides of the Zodiac had attempted to glean knowledge from people known to follow one series of comics or the other, but all had found that those mortals inevitably gave out misinformation, enthusiastically relating the wider worldview of the Zodiac to a competing agent-information they already knew-while blithely forgetting the specifics of the latest manual. It was our micro-universe’s way of keeping the battle between Light and Shadow squared and properly balanced.

The kids who frequented Master Comics, however, weren’t just any mortals. They knew the stories and characters they were following were real, and were willing partners in our paranormal battle. They thought and spoke and dreamed of us, picked sides, and taught the other younger children the mythology of the Zodiac. As they grew up, leaving the energy and belief of their youth behind, our legacy then continued in the minds of the next generation. However, if they failed to pass this knowledge on before maturation, we wouldn’t merely be in jeopardy of losing the battle against our enemies, we’d actually cease to exist.

All the mortal children who knew of our world gathered at a comic book shop called Master Comics. Therefore it wasn’t only a natural place to look for back issues containing clues that might lead to the Tulpa’s demise, it was also a hotbed of exuberant fandom. Chandra and I swung into the store prepared for a preadolescent pop quiz. Instead we were met with dead silence.

“Smells like geek central,” Chandra said, glancing around. “Looks like geek central. But where are all the geeks?”

The comic and manga titles were ordered obsessively on floor-to-ceiling shelves, with a DVD section on the back left wall, a gamers’ paradise on the right. But the store was otherwise eerily empty. “I’m getting ghost-town vibes.”

Chandra was still standing just inside the door, looking ready to bolt if she had to. But Master Comics was a safe zone for all agents, neutral territory, so I moved farther into the shop, albeit warily. “Maybe they’re out buying Halloween costumes,” she said.

Except every day was Halloween in Master Comics. I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Carl’s already had his costume for six months.”

She glanced over at me. “What’s he dressing as?”

“All he’d say was it would be totally unexpected and out of character for him. My guess is he’s going as a normal kid.”

Chandra snorted. “Well, maybe they’re all at school.”

“Shut your mouth,” I scoffed, picking up an independent comic. “Besides, what about Zane?”

Zane was the owner of Master Comics, a loner in his late twenties who still hung with kids, but who was the creator of the Zodiac’s manuals as well. Anything going on in Las Vegas’s paranormal underworld would end up on the shelves within two weeks, depending on how quickly Zane could process and translate the storyline. The aforementioned boy-who-would-be-normal, Carl, was the series penciler.

“What the hell do you want?”

I jerked so quickly I dropped my comic, and frowned less at the sudden appearance of the kid who’d addressed us than at his tone.

“Excuse me?” I asked, bending to pick up the comic as I took in a beanpole body, wild hair, and fists hinged on bony hips. He was looking me up and down like I was rabid, and Chandra snorted again behind me.

“I said what are you doing here?”

“Well, I wasn’t looking for a dressing-down by a twelve-year-old,” I said, straightening.

“You must be the Archer,” the boy sneered, eyes cataloging me again. “Smart mouth, wall-to-wall tits-” Chandra snickered beside me and he whipped his gaze to hers. “And you’re the pretender. You probably followed her to a safe zone so you could take her out without anyone reading about it later. Crazy bitch.”

I’d have laughed but the little fucker was already on my nerves. “And you are?”

“Your worst nightmare.”

“Sweetie,” I said in my most condescending voice, “you clearly haven’t read about my nightmares.”

He feigned shaking with fear. I thought about throwing him over my knee and giving him the spanking he fully deserved, but knew how the episode would be depicted in the manuals. We may have violence, crime, and gore, but it was still primarily an American adolescent audience. Gruesome death was fine. Sex, verboten. “Where’s Zane?”

A new voice bloomed from the back of the shop. “I was giving a tour to the new changelings.”

Zane lumbered from the tunnel leading to the storeroom that doubled as his personal library. His apartment was located above the store, and between those three crucial amenities he never had to leave Master Comics. If his social skills were any indication, I thought as he passed by me with a grunt, he probably never did.

“New changelings?” Chandra asked, sidling up to the register. “Is it time already?”

He stared at her until she removed her hand from the glass case, then rubbed a rag over the whole thing. “It flies when you’re waiting to take over a star sign, doesn’t it?”

“What is it, asshole hour in here today?” Chandra asked, turning to me.

“Two-for-one special, apparently.”

Zane made a face, but before he could reply, a handful of children tumbled from the tunnel and into the shop. I didn’t recognize any of them, but they had no such problem, and they crowded around us like superhero groupies, firing questions as they grabbed at our clothing. How old were you when you learned to fly? When did you get super strength? What’s harder to break, a chair back or a spine? I glanced over at Chandra, panic mounting until I saw Carl saunter from the storeroom. He was dressed in unrelieved black, hair dyed to match and plastered to his head. Matching black eyeliner was meant, I was sure, to drive his parents nuts.

“Hey, Archer,” he said, pushing the younger kids aside, and smiling at my obvious relief. “Didn’t know you cared.”

Neither had I. But even though he was a hopeless mess socially and fashion-wise, he was both knowledgeable and helpful, and had been a good friend to me. “New changelings?”

“’Fraid so. Nobody older than nine.”

I looked around for a couple of bald heads. “The twins?”

“Lost to the horrors of puberty,” he said dramatically. “Their voices started cracking and they shot up an inch in one month. A week later it was as if they’d never known us. These five are the next batch, preordained to continue serving the Zodiac by spreading the legacy among others of their kind!” He grinned when I rolled my eyes at his rhetoric, and pointed out each of the children. “This is Dylan, Sara, Kylee, and Kade. That’s Douglas over there.”

Chandra and I nodded at each of the kids, who’d finally calmed, though Dylan was sucking hard on an inhaler, eyes wide. Beyond keeping the secrets of the Zodiac, changelings held a special place in our mythos. If agents from opposite sides of the Zodiac happened to appear in the shop at the same time, they turned into peacekeepers, using the ability to physically morph into a living shield-and the clever use of fangs-to deter the opposing sides.

But even they eventually stopped believing. I noted the absence of Sebastian, the changeling who’d acted as protector of the Shadow agents, and glanced again at Douglas, still sneering at me from the far corner of the room. “Sebastian’s replacement?”

“Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, huh?” Carl grinned, but I dismissed the kid now that I knew he was naturally antagonistic to the Light, and began searching for a little girl whose adoration of me bordered on idolatry, and whose natural inclination to help the Light, and me in particular, had proven priceless. I was already regretting not getting to say good-bye when she suddenly sauntered in from the hallway. I took in her crisp schoolgirl uniform, stumpy black pigtails, and smiled in relief. “Jasmine. You’re still here.”

She was followed by a smaller version of herself, a round-faced, glossy-haired, pixielike child who perked up as soon as she saw me.

“Yeah,” Carl said, nervously looking over at Zane. “We were going to talk to you about that.”

I motioned for him to hush and waved the two girls over.

“What’s up, Jas? How’ve you been?”

She looked up at me from beneath dark lashes. “Do I know you?”

“Oh, Jasmine,” her miniature replica said, voice trembling with excitement. “This is the Archer, esteemed member of troop 175, paranormal division, anti-evil, and preordained savior of the Zodiac!”

Jasmine whirled around and smacked the smaller girl upside her head. “I swear, if you don’t stop with that superhero shit I’m going to beat it out of you.”

The younger girl rubbed her head, fat tears welling in eyes as big as moons. “But, Jas, you’re the one who told me about the legacy of the Kairos and how the portents signaling her chosen side’s ascendancy over their enemies were already under way.”

“Yeah, I also told you the tooth fairy was real. Sucks to be eight.” She raised her hand to smack the girl again, and I grabbed her wrist, spinning her toward me. I let her jerk away, and she crossed her arms over her chest and proceeded to glare at me with unconcealed disdain.

“Jasmine. What’s happened to you?”

Zane cleared his throat behind me. “Why don’t you read the manual she’s featured in and find out?”

A changeling featured in the manuals?

I turned in time to catch the comic he’d flung at me, fumbling it against my body before drawing it away to study it. My picture was on the front, drawn in black and white against a livid red background, and I scowled at Carl-he’d drawn me top-heavy again-before flipping to the last page. Why read it? I’d lived it. It was just a question of where this issue ended.

Yet the last page was blank, as was the one before that. I skipped back until I finally found some text, Carl’s bright panels coming to life a third of the way into the issue. The new changelings oohed and aahed as they realized they were standing in the room where I’d first confronted my then arch-nemesis, Joaquin, but the panels ended abruptly, right as Jasmine was seen taking on her changeling form. I closed the manual and waved it at Zane. “How about finishing it first?”

“It is finished.”

Alarm skirted through me, and I scented a fresh wave of it springing from Chandra as well. “You’re not going to write the series anymore?”

Surely I’d misheard. That would mean disaster for my troop, and Zane would probably be drooling and babbling incoherently by week’s end. I’d seen what happened when he was blocked before. It wasn’t pretty.

“Of course I’m going to write them.” He held his hand out, motioning for me to return the manual. “Why should my head explode because you refuse to make amends?”

Power-hungry asshole, I thought, rolling it up and slapping it back into his palm. Was that what this was about? I’d asked Jasmine to use her shielding abilities to help me outside the confines of the shop last month, something Zane instructed the changelings never to do. “So you’re going to keep the kids from reading the manuals just because you’re holding a grudge?”

“I’m not the one keeping them from reading them,” he said, and tossed me a second comic. “You are.”

I snatched it out of the air, and the kids crowded closer, necks craning. But I looked down to find this one entirely blank. It was bound like a traditional comic, but even the cover was a glossy white sheet. “What’s this?”

“That’s the latest manual of Light. See where you’re confronting the Shadow Cancer in a classic honky-tonk bar?”

I flipped through the blank pages. “No.”

“Well I wrote it. It’s not my problem if it isn’t there.” And he went back to polishing the glass top, whistling as he worked.

“Let me see that.” Chandra yanked the not-manual from my hands. “Olivia, what did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said, wracking my brain. Had I?

“Actually,” Carl began, and I whirled on him. He shrugged sheepishly and spit it out. “You fucked up the evolutionary chi when you took off with Jasmine’s aura. It’s time for her to hand her post over to Li and move on like the twins, but she’s unable to mature without the whole of her aura. We told you not to wear it for too long.”

“We told her not to leave the shop with it,” Zane corrected from across the room. His head was still bent, but I could tell his teeth were clenched.

“You said not to wear her aura for over twelve hours. I gave it back well before then, undamaged.” The changelings’ ability to shield an agent from harm was due to the tractability of their aura. They could release their aura to us, allowing it to mold itself to our bodies so our true identities were seen, while our corporeal bodies remained protected. That’s why I’d borrowed her aura. It’d enabled me to appear to Ben as myself-looking and feeling exactly the same as he remembered me-so I could give him a kiss that’d probably saved his life.

It’d worked too. While the frail shell of Jasmine’s auraless body had been safely cocooned back at my high-rise condo, I revealed myself and my continued existence to Ben. The idea had been to simply comfort him, assuage the grief he’d been feeling over my apparent death, and kiss him in parting. But I’d miscalculated both his grief and mine, and after finding solace together, I’d left in the middle of the night, sneaking away without explanation, thinking it best. Treating him, I realized now, like he was a pawn. It was a gross understatement to say Ben had reacted badly, knowing I was alive, but furious at me for returning only to disappear again. That fury was what had opened the door to Regan, who’d been more than happy to let herself into his life.

But as much as I was to blame for that botched effort, I hadn’t screwed up when it came to Jas. I’d been extraordinarily careful to get her aura back to her under the twelve-hour mark. Her body hadn’t wasted away, her soul hadn’t expired.

“Wait a minute. Did I miss this issue?” Chandra yanked the comic from me, flipping through the pages faster as if that would make the story appear. She almost looked frantic.

“Come on, Chandra,” Carl said, holding his hand out for the manual. “You know how these things work. The events directly affecting the battle between Shadow and Light are withheld from Zane and me until the time when revealing it won’t tip the scales in favor of one side or the other. We didn’t know she’d caused irreparable cosmic damage, and therefore you didn’t either.”

“But we all know now,” Douglas said, and he laughed like he should be wringing his hands and twisting a mustache.

“So what does this mean?” I asked, ignoring him and motioning to the manual no one could read.

“It means you’d better fucking fix it,” Chandra said, causing Douglas to laugh harder. This time we both turned on him, and he instantly sobered. Chandra turned an equally dark gaze on me. “If they can’t read it, we don’t get their thoughts or energy or any of the good juju enabling us to do our job.”

I bit my lip and looked hopefully at Zane. He gave a short jerk of his head, knowing what I was asking. “You were clothed in the aura of the changeling of Light. The Shadow manuals haven’t been affected.”

I closed my eyes. Fuck. So while the Shadow mythology would continue to be written, their legacy continuing to grow, the agents of Light were stuck in a sort of supernatural moratorium. We would fall behind degree by degree, and eventually we’d lose ground in the fight for the city.

“Fix her!” Chandra yelled, frantic now.

I opened my mouth to yell back, realized my frustration, though equal, was misplaced, and whirled on Jasmine. “Leave!” I said, pointing to the door.

She scoffed, snapped her gum, and pulled out her iPod.

Carl pulled up beside me, looking up in dark exasperation. “That’s not going to work, Archer. You broke something inside her. Li is supposed to assume her position, but she can’t until Jasmine matures, and for that you have to repair her.”

I threw my arms into the air. “Well, what am I supposed to do? Order her to have her period?”

The boys around us started gagging. Jasmine reddened to a lovely rose-colored shade. And Li continued gazing up at me adoringly. Shit.

I sighed and knelt before her. “Jasmine. You really don’t remember who I am?”

She gave me a hard stare, and for a moment I thought I saw a flash of regret, the girl I knew waving at me from behind those deep oval eyes. Then she lifted her chin. “I know who you think you are. And I don’t think it’s appropriate to promote that sort of pathology in trusting children.”

I drew back at that, straightened, and found myself face-to-face with Chandra’s pointed glare. Again. “What?”

“You haven’t told anyone about this, have you?”

“I didn’t know about it until now!”

She began shaking her head madly. “It’s something a Shadow agent would-”

“Oh, don’t fucking start that again,” I interrupted, voice lifted to drown out hers. “I’m getting so tired of people saying the third sign of the Zodiac is the rise of my Shadow side! I’m not going to do anything to harm the agents of Light!”

“Except maybe you can’t help it. It’s like these kids hitting puberty and having to pass into adulthood. They may not want to, but biology helps determine one’s destiny. You may not want to be part Shadow but that’s your nature, as well as the Light. The sooner you start respecting that your compromised physiology has made you different-”

“She means a freak,” Douglas edged in.

“The sooner you can start approaching aberrant situations from a new beginning point.”

I wasn’t hearing this. I wasn’t a mutant, I wasn’t weird. I wasn’t a freak. “It was an accident!”

“It’s suspect,” she said simply, and I had no answer for that. She shook her head as she turned away. “You want me to believe it was accidental, you’ll have to make it right. Or else we’ll all pay the price.”

“Chandra, wait,” It rankled to call out to her, but she knew more than I did, and I could use her help on this one.

“No. I have to let Warren know about this.” She pushed open the front door, bells muting but not completely drowning out her muttered “Someone does.”

Some partner, I thought, watching her walk out the door, but I didn’t follow.

“Forget her, Archer. She’s deadweight.”

No, she was more than that. She was right. But I’d deal with Chandra-and the rest of the troop-later. Right now I needed to stay focused and use my gifts-gifts, dammit!-to read both the Shadow manuals and the Light. Given time and luck, I knew I could find clues to the original manual, which contained the secret to the Tulpa’s immortality. Killing him wouldn’t just fix the problem with Jasmine’s interrupted development, it would forever settle the question as to whether I could overcome my biology. After all, wipe out the Shadow and all you were left with was Light.

“Here’s the way I see it,” Zane started, when the door had shut behind Chandra.

“Oh God,” I said, turning to find him staring at me impassively. Zane made conspiracy theorists look like cheerleaders.

“You conned an impressionable young girl into giving you her aura, stole her chi, and broke the manuals detailing the exploits of the agents of Light. Your strength will grow because of your inclusion in the Shadow series, while the others in your troop will grow weak and impotent, and you can now rise to the head of your troop unchallenged.”

It almost seemed plausible…if you were a complete nutcase. I leaned onto his newly polished glass top. “Cute theory…and dead wrong.”

“Is that right?”

“Hey, Mr. CSI, why don’t you let the agents worry about the detecting work, so you can continue playing armchair quarterback in this particular playing field?” I straightened and he dove for his Windex. “Now I’m looking for-”

“The original manual, blah, blah.” He sprayed fervently, and I took a step backward as he tapped his head with his index finger, rag in his hand. “You don’t think I already know? It’s not here, we don’t have it. Move on, little girl. Go play in someone else’s sandbox.”

He wished, I thought as he dismissed me with his frenzied polishing. Zane’s lifelong quest was to find and possess the original manual, but no one knew exactly why. Certainly he’d be able to auction it off to the highest bidder, making himself a multimillionaire and incurring the debt of the Tulpa’s slayer in the process…but I didn’t think he was after mere money. He was too passionate about his work, and when he wasn’t drawing manuals, he was poring over them; studying them, dissecting them. It made me wonder if he’d ever had the opportunity to hold out on us; if maybe there was something Zane knew that had never made it into the written text.

“You’re a dick,” I told him lightly.

“Yeah, well at least I’m not an evil, chi-stealing bitch.”

My hand was on his throat before I even knew I’d moved and there was a sooty cast to the air, not unlike the smoke that’d swirled in Xavier’s lair, though this didn’t have the overlaying trail of incense to soften the odor. Glancing down into the spotless glass case housing Star Wars collectibles, I saw a fabulous hairdo and two eyes glaring like burning black marbles. I loosened my grip on Zane’s neck.

“No,” I said, dusting his shoulders, though he was wearing a ratty Farscape T-shirt and not a suit. I ignored both his flinch at my suddenly deep voice and the surprised exclamations from the group of the kids now backing away from me. I cleared my throat, but I was still angry, and my words scratched at my larynx. “You’re not a bitch. You’re just a mortal with a God complex. So remember who the fuck you’re talking to.”

I didn’t know if it was fear or anger that had him shaking, but his hands were unsteady as they knocked mine from his shoulders. “You touched me,” he said, in an incredulous whisper. “You’re not allowed to touch the record keeper!”

Obviously.

Carl put a hand on my arm now that the smoke had literally cleared. “Hey, Archer. Look, maybe you should go.”

His rebuke shamed me. I glanced around at the wide-eyed kids-including Jasmine-and frowned. What was I doing?

“It’s the rise of her Shadow side!” Douglas called from behind a carousel displaying the entire Anita Blake series. “The third sign of the Zodiac is coming to fruition!”

“Wait…I can feel it,” I said, turning his way and putting one hand to my chest. Douglas’s head popped out, eyes going wide. “Yes, here it comes…”

Carl stepped forward. Zane stepped back.

“It’s amazing,” I said loudly, my face going slack as I stared into an unseen distance. “It’s here…oh my God, it’s the rise of…”

An unnatural hush overtook the shop.

“My middle finger.”

I smirked at Douglas and he scowled back.

“Bitch!” he yelled, before ducking back behind the Executioner titles.

“Evil, chi-stealing bitch,” I corrected, before turning again to Zane. He was looking at me with renewed disgust. This is what we, in the grown-up world, call irony. “Can I go look in the archives now?”

“Whatever,” he muttered, picking up his pencil. “Just don’t ask me to help you.”

I didn’t; instead I told him to do something anatomically impossible as I whirled to the storeroom.

“You can go alone, and you may even look at the covers of the ancient ones.” He made them sound like artifacts rather than comic books. I’d have laughed but I wasn’t so sure that they weren’t. “But if you even think about slipping one from its protective cover, I’ll know it, and I’ll charge you. Handsomely.”

I sneered back at him and pulled out a wad of bills Xavier had thrown me in hopes that I’d forget about my pipe dream of getting a job. “Take cash?” I said, and smiled prettily, turning away before he could answer.