The Touch of Twilight

3

The density of the airless space lessened the closer I got to the building, and without it bearing down on-and in-me, I felt like I was suspended in space. Peacefulness threatened to slip over me again…until I glanced down to find the glyph on my chest warming like the coil of an electric burner, the razor-slim outline of a bow and arrow appearing like a beacon in the blackened sky. Warren was going to be pissed, I thought, before the prospect of imminent death pushed the worry from my mind.

Remaining perched on the jib wasn’t an option, and I couldn’t turn around and show my back. Backing up like a tightrope walker would take too long, and while I could feasibly jump to the platform below this one, even a cat needed to spot the ground. I couldn’t see shit, and didn’t see the purpose of breaking a leg just to flee an unseen threat. I might not heal in time to actually run away. So I continued forward, leaping to the steel scaffolding in a noiseless jump.

I ducked behind a bright red vertical beam, and had just caught my breath when a hoarse, off-key voice sang out over the lifeless air. “‘You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…’”

Now I wanted to jump.

“Tulpa,” I whispered, then charged the largest platform, dead center of the unfinished building. Not safe, but safer. I slipped halfway and ended up straddling the beam, my pelvic bone smarting under the weight of my fall. Jostling my conduit, I fumbled it like a second-string quarterback, and ended up lunging to catch it, my thighs clasped tightly around the steel. I ended up upside-down, thankful I wasn’t saddled with a man’s more fragile parts.

A chuckle joined the name-and me-still hanging in the air. “That’s me.”

It was him, I thought, righting myself. His description, his title, and his identity all rolled into one distinctly foreign word. A tulpa was an imagined entity, one wrought into being by thought rather than birth. For centuries Tibetan monks had practiced and perfected the skill of creating thought-forms real enough that they could influence the mortal realm, though the man who’d created this tulpa had been a Westerner. An evil one.

Even when drawn from the most benevolent mind, the creation of a tulpa was considered a dangerous accomplishment. Wyatt Neelson’s original intent was to use the thought-being for personal gain. The Tulpa couldn’t be killed. It could be sent into the most dangerous situations, deal with the most nefarious beings, and come out unscathed. Yet the Tulpa didn’t want to come out, and he quickly grew tired of the evil mind that had created and commanded him. Once he was actualized in the world, he began exercising his own will and judgment, and in the process, became even stronger and more wicked than his creator.

In short, the dude has some powerful fucking juju.

“You caused the vibrational chaos.” It wasn’t a question, but the way the air suddenly moved about me, whistling across all the empty floors below, I knew he’d given me an answering nod. It also gave me his approximate location. I angled sideways, putting a second pallet between us. “And there’s no one else here, is there?”

I didn’t need to feel the air shift to know the girl in the smoke-the one Felix had been so sure was Dawn, the Shadow Gemini-had really been the Tulpa. Able to take the shape and form of anyone he chose, he’d been reacting to Felix’s expectations. Like I said, powerful.

“Disappointed? I can call in some backup if you’d like.”

And do it with nothing more than a thought. “No, no,” I said airily, and quickly. “Let’s just keep this between the two of us.”

It wasn’t necessarily an improvement, but what were my options?

“Good. Because I think it’s time you and I cleared the air…daughter.”

I have mentioned this depraved, wrathful thought-form was my birth father, right? And he just loved to rub it in.

I tensed as the gases cleared around us, and peered from behind the pallet to find his outline materializing across from me, a breeze rushing in to surround his body, slowly expanding to leave a clearing on the unstable platform. From below it must have looked like a light had been turned on across the entire floor, though we were still standing in the pitch of night.

The first time my father had appeared to me, he’d been in the guise of an old-school casino boss; the Tulpa as Godfather-bada-boom, bada-bing. The last time, however, he’d been featureless as he threatened me in the backseat of his personal stretch limo. Knowing that he took the physical form of a person’s expectations, this unnerved me most. It might mean I hadn’t made up my mind about someone who believed manslaughter was a good tactic in getting your own way. Of course, he could have also been fucking with me. People loved to do that when you were new to the paranormal playing field.

So it was with relief that I realized he was the one doing all the projecting here. There was no disguise to soften the demonic visage looming across from me, though he stopped short of letting me smell the rot of his soul, and the organs stewing inside. Even the monsters, it seemed, were vain.

But he didn’t try to hide the arching bones angling his ears into high horns, or the ashen skin stretching from the hooknose and over his hairless skull, all the way to his spear-tipped crown. I’d had a glimpse of the long talons curving his hands into deadly points before, so they weren’t as shocking as they otherwise would’ve been, but the ropy, veined spikes impaling his shoulders and spine made me shudder. I swallowed hard and said the only thing I could think of. “Please tell me I didn’t get your overbite.”

His twisted lips curved even further. “It’s a mask, daughter. Rather like the one you’re wearing, though with a dual purpose.”

“You mean you’re actually uglier than that?” Note to self: work harder on controlling Shadow side.

“This veneer enables me to breathe normally when the cosmic dust from the black hole crowds back in around us.”

So it was a black hole…of sorts. That explained why the others had been unable to locate even a molecule of oxygen to suck on. However, it didn’t explain why the Tulpa could control it at will. Or how. “What happens if you take your mask off?”

His responding smile pulled his cheeks into sharp triangles, and my pulse began to hammer as he lifted his hand. But even before he ripped his own face away-the mucus and straining muscles tearing like the innards of a pumpkin-my vision narrowed to a pinprick, tingling darkness closing in fast. The air departed so quickly, blackness rushed in like the first tide of a monsoon, burying me beneath its pressurized weight. It held me upright as it closed in on all sides, and I suddenly realized I was going to die that way. It pissed me off. And I never did get to see his face.

My only consolation was that he was dying as well. Maybe he’d pushed too hard and the weight of the world was preventing him from returning the mask to his face, but a shudder like a sonic boom ricocheted through the unfinished structure as he fell to his knees. Ah well, I thought sluggishly. Taking out the leader of the Shadow side wasn’t a bad legacy to leave behind. Too bad the breath had been crushed out of me, trapping that taunt in my thoughts.

That’s what you get, I thought, fading. Show-off.

Then sound flooded over me like my head had been plunged under water. The weight lifted, I fell to my knees, and the Tulpa’s greedy gasps for breath sounded like the wind over mountain steppes and plateaus, whistling and harsh, and with a whipping force.

He hadn’t been lying, I thought in wonder, as my vision cleared so I could watch him struggle to his feet. We were somehow connected; I breathed because he breathed. The implication would’ve had me wincing just moments before. Now I found it a relief. He couldn’t kill me without committing suicide…at least not that way. It bolstered my confidence.

“Is this where you try to convince me to come to the Shadow side or die in an airless, soundless vacuum?” I asked, grasping my conduit between both hands. It still hung limply from my tingling fingertips, not that it mattered. The Tulpa couldn’t be killed even with magical weaponry. No one knew exactly how to kill him yet…which helped make these confrontations all the more disconcerting.

“No, because then this would also be where you deny me. Again.”

I stepped out from behind the pallet. It wasn’t helping against the Tulpa anyway. “Wow. Psychic in addition to being evil incarnate.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere.” His eyes narrowed, “Fast.”

But bravado was the only weapon I had left. Almost every time I’d met this fucker I’d ended up beaten, bloodied, and broken. But he wanted something this time, and it was clear he wouldn’t kill me until he got it. So could I figure out how to kill him before that?

Yet I’d have to be careful not to project my intention, or expend any excess energy in doing so. The Tulpa had a way of prevailing over, and gaining power from, the people who tried to kill him. Like Yoda, there was no try. You either succeeded or failed, and so far…well, the Tulpa had just grown more and more powerful. He wasn’t anyone’s imaginary friend anymore…and he had a fuse as short as a third-world dictator.

“Sit down.” He waited until I found an upended bucket before settling across from me. Even crouching, he was over five and a half feet tall. A fine mist draped his lower stomach, where I assumed he kept his valuables, and I found myself uncommonly grateful for his discretion. I let my gaze fall to his barbed toes and wondered if the name of my pedicurist would be enough to let me live. “We need to have a little talk about vibrational resonance.”

“I forgot to bring my notebook.”

“I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version.”

“Okay, but my tutor won’t approve.”

A growl rumbled through his body, and the platform shook beneath me. “It’s time for the third sign of the Zodiac to come to pass. The first sign was the revelation of the Kairos-the chosen one-my daughter.” There was a note of pride in his voice, but the multiple attempts on my life rather blunted the charm. “The second was a cursed battlefield, which you not only managed to survive, but brought most of your current troop through in fighting form.”

His emphasis of the word most wasn’t lost on me. I gave him a look he probably recognized from his own mirror, because he chuckled again.

“Which brings us to the third sign. The reawakening of the Kairos’s Shadow side.”

I held up a hand to stop him cold. “I don’t believe that’s what it means.”

See, these signs of the Zodiac had nothing to do with the astrological wheel, as one might initially believe. No, the signs were portents instead, indications that one side in the fight between good and evil was finally gaining dominance over the other, and doing it with my help. So while my willingness to switch to the Shadow side was theoretically feasible-with the gift of free will and a serious breakdown in my personal mores-what the latest portent actually said was that the Kairos’s dormant side would soon reawaken. I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I was pretty certain I wasn’t going to start acting against humanity any time soon.

Obviously the Tulpa disagreed. “Our mythology tells us that under Pluto’s influence the woman born of the Archer sign will have a death, a rebirth, and a transformation into that which she once would have killed. Even though she begins her journey with the spirit of a dilettante, her light is soon eclipsed and given weight. There is a descent into the underworld, and she will soon see the unseen.”

“Day-um.”

His face froze, registering nothing. I swallowed hard. “I’m ready to forgive your adolescent dalliance with the agents of Light and extend to you, once again,” he said tightly, “the offer to reign at my right-hand side.”

The side, in history and mythology, reserved for the second-in-command. He was speaking literally too. I’d seen it in the Shadow manuals. A solid gold throne elevated on a red-carpeted dais. But still an underling. Still under his thumb. I nodded thoughtfully, before stilling. “Screw your mythology.”

He surprised me by looking amused. It stretched that graying skin in all the wrong directions, and I found I preferred his scowl. “This is your final chance to reconsider. Normally you’d get only one warning, but paternal duty obliges me to extend one last olive branch before wiping you from the face of the earth.”

“My lineage is matriarchal, same as anyone else’s…no matter who my father is.”

I was prepared for him to lose it, readied for a battle cry to sound across the sky, and tensed for his attack. But he merely studied me with sunken eyes before abruptly steering from the topic. “I understand my new Cancer is targeting your old boyfriend. She was dogged even as an initiate, raised by the ward mothers to be as cold and scheming as her mother. Yet I could stop her with a word. I can save your mortal love. I can give you Regan…like I gave you Joaquin.”

My heart was pounding, and it took all the control I had to keep my face impassive beneath my mask. I held my breath until I was sure my desperation wouldn’t be sensed on the next exhale. “You didn’t give Joaquin to me,” I said, bitterness bright on the air as I led him away from the subject of Ben. If the Tulpa found out I still cared for him, he’d be dead within the hour. “I took him for myself.”

“So take Regan as well. She can be yours…for a small price.”

“You mean my soul?” I scoffed like I didn’t care about Regan or what she was doing. Besides, one didn’t need superhero senses to scent bullshit. “Regan DuPree can’t take out a want ad without tripping over her own nonexistent dick. I can kill her at will…and do it without reverting to my Shadow side.”

One brow quirked like a dart. “Not yet a full year as an agent, and already so sure of your skills?”

“Trial by fire speeds along the learning curve.”

“Call me a skeptic, but I’d like a little demonstration.”

And he finally moved, not to attack, but like a stage magician conjuring his latest, greatest illusion. A flip of his wrist, those talons whipping upward, and an inky ball bloomed over our heads. The nucleus was controlled, but it grew steadily, eating up the air again with as much efficiency as a vacuum cleaner.

A speck appeared in the center of the hole, growing larger within the limitless void.

“What is that?” I whispered, my mouth dry, as the object took shape, first as a luminous five-tipped star…then as a splayed-limbed human being. I gasped, and found myself with a mouthful of rancid vanilla, a flavor that always accompanied the compounded scent of torment and fear.

“You mean who,” the Tulpa corrected conversationally. “That’s the man who agreed to be used as a tool against me.”

“Where-?” I couldn’t finish. Where had he come from? The man was full-sized now, suspended above us and rotating slowly, still centered in the ever-expanding void. His face was fixed in a pained expression, and though he was spinning, the shirttails of his plaid flannel shirt didn’t sway. It was as if he’d been frozen in a block of black ice.

“He’s been here the whole time, dear. That’s part of the mystery, the magic, of black holes. He’s been watching you from beyond the event horizon, even as he inches toward its center.”

“Let him go.”

“I can’t. What you’re seeing now is only a product of the curvature of space-time. This was him an hour ago.”

“You can, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” I began shaking my head slowly, then faster, unable to tear my eyes away from the petrified, lost mortal. “He’s an innocent. He only knew how to work surveillance equipment.”

“Ah, but you knew. And you enlisted him. Engaged him. Endangered him.”

And the mortal was paying for our-my-hubris. “Don’t hurt him,” I whispered, not knowing if I was telling him or asking.

The Tulpa’s face cracked in a grin, and he waved his hand in my direction, causing molding vanilla to wash over me again, but this time it was charged, zinging in the air, stabbing at my skin like rusty darts. He’d already hurt Vincent; I just wasn’t seeing it yet.

But then something went wrong. Perhaps the surrounding steel acted as a magnet for the Tulpa’s force, like a lightning rod beneath a blistered sky, but somehow the wires got crossed, and instead of merely sensing the residue of Vincent’s pain, I found myself on my knees, writhing with it.

Electricity spindled inside me, driven on a spiked axis through the top of my skull, splitting in my center, and arrowing out of the soles of my feet. Bolts of pain fired from my spine to cauterize my nerve endings, and the scent of something flash-cooking reached my nose before the membrane was seared and all scent blunted. But none of that was as painful as when the invisible axis was suddenly removed, like a flanged drill bit ripping through my center and out my skull. Minutes passed in long, blissful silence. When I could finally open my eyes again, the black hole blocked the entire night sky.

“That…that…” That was all I could manage. My tongue was singed. If I lived through this I’d bear the scars inside.

“Hurt?”

I gained my feet and shook off the brindled energy unsteadily, like a dog flinging water from its coat. “Felt familiar.”

“It should. It’s your power, inverted.”

My stomach dropped, and my knees actually buckled. Not more than a month ago a good deal of my power had been depleted in an electromagnetic maze. I’d survived it, barely, but there were abilities that’d been stripped from me and transferred to the maze’s creator, the Tulpa. It was why he’d sent me in there to begin with, and now the power he’d gained was being used against me…and an innocent.

I looked back up at Vincent, a man who’d lived a blissfully normal life until approached to be our cover, and the only thing I could think as I watched his slow rotation was, I’m sorry.

“You can’t save him, Joanna,” the Tulpa said, misreading my look. “Your power is what put him there, and nothing can escape the gravitational pull of a black hole. Besides, energy cannot be divided against itself. An agent,” he clarified, his words damning me, “cannot be divided against herself. You are Shadow, and the sooner you accept it, the sooner your weaknesses will become your strengths.”

I shook my head, refusing to be damned. “That is not my power holding him there. I would never do that.”

“You already have,” he said airily. “The reason this man is pinned up here like a science experiment is because of your hatred for another named Joaquin. A man, too, named Liam. Ajax and Butch before them. So the facts would seem to contradict you, Joanna. You have no qualms in dealing out death when it serves your purposes…you also seem to have a particular fondness for edged weapons.”

“I have a fondness,” I said sharply, “for eradicating evil from this earth. This man is an innocent.”

“No, this man is an object lesson!” And now his voice arched like a rocket, burning into space. “He’s here to show you how your own powers can be used against you when you are divided against yourself.”

I clenched my jaw, and the unnatural red cast tinting everything the black hole hadn’t eaten up told me my eyes, long black, had begun to glow. “Let. Him. Go.”

Smoke began to pool around us. “Make me.”

Which was what he wanted. He needed me to act against him so he could secure that energy too-expand it, invert it, use it against me. But Vincent was still in agony; I knew it. His petrified expression looked as though it was pleading with me, his bulging eyes begging for help. I wanted to end his torture, but I didn’t know if he wanted to live or die…or if I even had the power to give him that choice.

“Help,” I whispered, the word suffocated and ineffectual on the roiling smoke.

The Tulpa heard it anyway, and laughed. “Prayers, is it? And still you refuse to raise a hand.” He raised his own, talons beckoning as his laughter veered into a rumbling command. “Bend your knees and bow, Joanna. The only way to overcome is to succumb. Every person who has ever made a mark on this world had to first descend to the underworld.”

I glanced around at the encroaching smoke, at the black hole above, felt the emptiness below, and realized the elaborate lengths he’d gone to draw me here. A scheme, I suddenly realized, revealing an obsession. He’d told me what would happen if I continue to refuse him. We’d become enemies. He’d hunt me down. There’d be a war. Actually, I thought, biting my lip, the term he’d used was apocalypse.

“You’re not courting me,” I said, returning my gaze to those soulless eyes. “You’re targeting me.”

The explosion had been to draw me here, the smoke a way to get me alone. The mortal wasn’t targeted because he’d been a front for the Light, but because the Tulpa was going to make me choose. My life or his. Shadow or Light.

I sent up my prayer again, silent this time, forcing myself to look at Vincent. Somebody help me.

“I’ve lost my patience,” the Tulpa said, now that the realization someone was going to leave here in a body bag was plain on my face. “You can either join me or perish. But the fence you’ve been straddling, this effort to best me, must cease. One way or another, I will stop these chaotic outbursts.”

I did a mental double-take at his words. I knew my thoughts were coming slowly, the horror of seeing a man ripped from this world into the weightlessness of a mini-cosmos had made me sluggish, but this still seemed an abrupt change in subject. I studied the Tulpa and saw…well, nothing he didn’t want me to see. But there was another component to his measured dialogue, an accompanying aromatic flag that had my eyes fluttering shut and my nostrils automatically flaring.

Fear.

My eyes shot open, and the Tulpa growled. What could possibly scare him so much he’d rather kill me than have me know it? And how could I get him to tell me what that something was without our little therapy session turning into a bloodbath?

“Make a decision,” he said, vocal cords tight, brows pinched, mouth thin. “His life or yours. Shadow or Light. Now.”

“You can’t kill me this way,” I said as smoke continued to roil in. The weight was returning to the air, but it was different from before, ashy but not ionized, thick but not dense. “Take off that mask and you’ll suffocate too.”

“Oh, this?” he said, waving his hand through the air so he cut it in ribbons. It formed again in a thin, gray film. “This isn’t suffocation…it’s insulation.” And the lazy tendrils of smoke suddenly snapped like bands, congealing to form a barrier on all four sides so that I was in a solid box…and it was getting warm.

I looked up and found the sole means of escape. He hadn’t tried to obscure the black hole.

“I was very lucky to find this building,” the Tulpa said conversationally. “Anything other than steel would incinerate in this kind of heat.”

Including me. Moisture was being pulled from my body so fast, I was sweating in places I didn’t even know I had pores. I used my shirt to wipe at my eyes, but it felt paper-thin and hot, like it would burst into flame at any moment.

I glanced back at the Tulpa, who looked impossibly cool. “I, of course, can withstand this heat because of the protective shell I’m wearing. Not a mask, mind, but a swirling cloak of kairotic power.”

My power, I thought as my organs began to ache.

“See, the vibrational matter you’re so fond of manipulating can also be used against you…”

Still going on about the chaotic outbursts, I thought, tilting my head. It was getting hard to think-it felt like I was standing inside an oven-but it wasn’t any great mental leap to measure it against Regan’s earlier words. They thought we were responsible for the recent spate of vibrational outbursts. He thought I was. “It’s not me,” I told him, but he was on a roll and not listening.

“And like any vibration,” he explained as if he actually possessed patience, “the high crests and deep troughs create waves of radiation in a confined interior.”

Oh my God. Not an oven. A microwave. “But it’s-”

“Generated by heat and light.” He cut me off, smiling scathingly. “Faster, hotter, shorter…like a boiling ocean tide.” I gasped as he made that happen now, but the air was sucked from me. He growled his satisfaction. “Well, you’re the one who said ‘trial by fire.’”

My body screamed for cool air and water and escape, and damned if that black hole wasn’t looking good. He wanted that too. Me to either jump into oblivion, or choose him. If I did the latter, I thought, a swallow catching in my dry throat, I’d have to let Vincent drift away in a slow death to cement that choice. “Look, someone else is causing the vibrational outbursts.”

“Bullshit!” He spat and his eyes sparked red.

“I don’t know how to manipulate matter!” That was it; my voice was gone, drier than dust, and fatigue began to smother me. There was no more sweat.

“Your scent is all over it, Joanna! I want you to dismantle her energy, and maybe then I’ll consider sparing your life.”

“Her?” I croaked.

He growled, and I cooked.

I struggled past the literal heartache, past my desire to rip my mask and clothing from my body, to rend my very skin from my bones if it meant relief, and focused all my remaining energy into building a cocoon around me, constructing a place inside this inferno where I could safely disappear. But as my walls began to shimmer, a mocking look passed over the Tulpa’s face, and I knew the big, bad wolf didn’t even need to puff to blow my house down.

“You’d trade my life for the destruction of…” I pretended to falter, waiting for him to fill in the blank. At best I could relay the information to the rest of the troop later. At worst I’d know what I’d died for.

But the Tulpa wasn’t in a helpful mood. “I’m not offering a trade. I’m telling you to come with me and begin the systematic breakdown of the double-walker-”

“The wha-?”

“Or make yourself comfortable.”

Think, Jo. Think or fry. “But it’s not-”

“Liar!” He didn’t even let me finish, and his red eyes gained heat, twin coals fired by unyielding fury. I knew how that felt, the blinding anger fueling that gaze, so I also knew he was past reason. Heat soared, burning and agonizing, and my litany of prayers dissipated until only one word remained. Please, please, please…

“Break down the double-walker!”

My mouth was so parched I had to be spitting ash. I tried to speak again and choked. My sandpaper tongue was expanding in my mouth. My organs shriveled inside me. “Don’t know how-”

“I do.” And with those two words, air rushed over me, lifting sweaty strands of hair from my neck as two hands clamped down over mine. Relief was immediate, like I’d cannonballed into a cold plunge pool.

I sucked in a delicious breath, as deep and thorough as I dared, then did it again. On my next inhalation, I glanced up to find that the Tulpa was no longer fixed on me. I twisted to follow his gaze, and discovered a surprisingly slight woman just behind me.

She was short, barely five feet tall, and so pale her skin sparked off itself, causing her to glow with a soft radiance. If she was wearing clothing it was spandex-tight, merely rounding out her curves and muting her sex like a naked Barbie. Her hair swung down her back, snapping in effervescent waves, and I watched as a droplet fell to the floor, where it reflected the light blazing from the Tulpa’s eyes before it sizzled and was gone.

Behind me the Tulpa roared. “Break it down!”

The woman smiled…with sparkling spiked teeth. “I have a better idea.”

And though she looked too fragile to resist a blown kiss, much less the Tulpa’s anger, she effortlessly scooped me up at the waist, her translucent, shiny fingers winnowing their way down to my ankles. I was so disoriented-and so relieved to no longer be cooking from the inside out-it took me a moment to realize I was floating. “Shit-wait!”

The Tulpa protested too. “You can’t-!”

“Just did.” Her voice, like her hair, was effervescent and snapping sharp, the syllables of her words running together in churning ripples to reverberate off one another.

“It’s a law!”

“Meant to be broken.” She waved the Tulpa away, and flashed those pointed teeth again, more pearl than white. She glanced up to find me watching. “Come. We must hurry.”

“The mortal-” I began, flailing as she shifted her feet.

“-is already dead.” She was studying the distance between the floor and the top of my head, and said it without emotion. “The Tulpa is animating him with residual energy.”

“It’s an illusion?” I took my eyes off her long enough to gaze up at Vincent again. He was still rotating slowly, drifting closer to the center of the black hole, but too far removed now for me to make out the expression on his frozen face.

“Yes, but the heat melting this building is not. Let’s go.” I’d floated higher, and she pulled me beneath the center of the black hole, straight-armed, like I was a kite. Wait a minute…

The Tulpa objected as well. “You can’t shield her forever!”

“Don’t need to,” she muttered, almost sounding bored. She grabbed my other ankle, steadying me, the coolness from her palms spreading through my body, though I knew it was unbearably hot. Even the steel beams looked to be sweating. “Creating and sustaining a black hole burns a massive amount of fuel. You’re running out of energy at an alarming rate, am I right? Besides, I could just take her back to Midheaven with me. You’ll never touch her there.”

I didn’t think it was possible for the Tulpa to blanch, but he did, and wondering what, and where, Midheaven was, I looked up.

That’s how I saw Vincent’s body suddenly stretch like spaghetti, his head whipping back in a sharp centrifugal swirl. For a moment I thought the rest of him would follow, but people weren’t meant to enter black holes, and in the next instant his body was rent by the tides of gravitational force, snapping, dissipating, destroyed so thoroughly, it was as if he’d never been. I swallowed down a scream. The woman and the Tulpa seemed not to notice.

“Now scoot along, tulpa,” And she said his name like she would say cat or dog, like he was a thing and not a person. The black hole wobbled in the sky, and the Tulpa let out an infuriated but hollow yell.

The woman turned her back on him and whispered to me, “Are you ready for this?”

“No, no, no!” I said, suddenly panicked, knowing what she was thinking. “I was never good at science, but I know if you get too close to a black hole, there’s no escaping it. So maybe we can talk about fighting or shooting our way out of here instead. I-I’m really good at that.”

“Okay, shooting. We’ll do that.” She turned her wicked grin on me. “I’ll be the propulsion. You’re the rocket.”

And she bent her shimmering knees and shot into the air with an explosion to match the Tulpa’s initial blast. I-we, because the woman was still anchored to me-shot past him so fast, he was still staring at the spot where we’d been standing, and the vertebrae in my neck cracked with the pressure of our ascent. There was a sucking sound, the breach and subsequent burst of the black hole disintegrating behind me, and then we were free, darting through the crisp night, Vegas spread below us like a hard, glittering pool. Wind whipped my hair and whistled in my ears, and through the weight of the night air I could hear the woman screaming delightedly behind me. At least someone was having fun.

And then, as we slowed to an apex, the Tulpa’s words revisited me. Glancing down, I realized what basic universal law this woman had broken.

Gravity, I thought frantically, and immediately began falling.