Why wouldn’t I be? I’d been born on his birthday-exact date, exact time-yet another herald of the Kairos legend. But what he was-other than the darkest of the Shadows-was another legend entirely. Because the very definition of the word Tulpa was rooted in Tibetan mysticism: it meant materialized thought. And it meant my birth father was a being who’d been created rather than born.
Created, I thought, pushing off from the fence, by someone with a profound amount of energy, perseverance, patience…and, if you asked me, too much time on his hands.
So how do you wrap your brain around the idea that your birth father first existed as a thought form? Well, first you had to get on board with the idea that thought was just another form of energy; same as desire, belief, love. But energy was a powerful, volatile thing, and if a person-and not just a supernatural, but a mortal too-could visualize something so completely even their own mind was fooled into believing it existed, they could generate that thing in their life. If they were adept enough, they could even create a separate being. A Tulpa.
But if what I knew about the Tulpa was enough to fill a thimble, his knowledge of me was even smaller. At first he’d only known that I was the new Archer of Light, his opposite on the paranormal Zodiac, and that alone would’ve been enough to make him wish for my destruction. But as our lineage was matriarchal, he also knew my mother was Zoe Archer, once his greatest love, now his greatest enemy. With her in hiding for the past decade, he was all too willing to take her betrayal out on me.
And then he discovered I was his daughter as well, and the tactics had changed. He was now trying to recruit me to the Shadow side, an approach that obviously wasn’t sitting well with all his evil, stank-ass minions.
I was jolted from my thoughts by Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” pealing from my handbag. “Not now, Cher,” I muttered, peering down at the glowing face of my cell phone. But duty had me answering anyway.
“Where did you go?” she asked without preamble. “One minute you were there, the belle of the ball, and then next you were gone.”
“I got…sick.” I mustered up a cough as I left the alley. “Decided to head home early.”
“Oh, honey! Do you want me to come over and play nurse? I have a great product to loosen up congestion. It contains pig placenta and no preservatives!”
“No!” I swallowed, softened my tone, and said, “No, Cher. But thanks. I’m just going to work on the computer for a bit, and then go to bed.”
Which was as big a lie as any I’d ever told. While Olivia had been a closet geek beneath all the peroxide, gloss, and L’eau d’Issey, the computer guru bit was something I’d had to drop as soon as I took over her identity. I could impersonate a bubble-brained socialite, but a self-taught computer genius was a bit beyond my second-rate dramatic skills. Luckily, most people who knew her in real life, as opposed to cyberspace, didn’t know about her surprising, and sometimes illicit, little hobby.
Another pause, this time with Cher mentally ciphering what I meant by this. “Starting up your business again?” she asked carefully.
As if, I thought, rolling my eyes. I’d never even gotten Olivia’s blasted machine to work, even after inputting every word I thought she might use as a password-Archer, her birth date, Prada. Nothing worked.
“No, I…I forgot my stupid password.”
“Oh. Want your backup disks?”
Backup disks? I blinked as I slipped past a stray dog, unnoticed. “Uh…you still have them?”
“Of course. Locked in the floor safe just like you told me. Momma tried to move them into the safety deposit box, but I told her you needed easy access for times like this, you know?”
I did a quick mental calculation. Dusk set at seven-fifty tomorrow. Joaquin would allegedly be at the shop four hours before that. So I could feasibly squeeze in a visit to Cher, grab the disks, kill my arch nemesis, and still manage to cross over to my troop’s headquarters no later than mid-dusk. And that brought the first true smile to my face since I’d found out about the bachelorette auction.
So Cher agreed to meet the next afternoon and made me promise to rub vapors over my chest for my cold, but as we hung up I’d never felt better. There were secrets stored on those disks that had to do with me. My past.
Maybe even my mother.
Because I had questions for Zoe Archer, and they weren’t just of the where-ya-been? variety either. She was the only agent who’d ever gotten close enough to the Tulpa to try and ferret out a weakness to be used against him, to sleep with him. To make him vulnerable.
And that was what I was most curious about. How to find him, hurt him, kill him. I’d vowed on our first and only meeting that I’d do all those things. Ruin anything with the Archer insignia on it-which included all of Xavier Archer’s businesses-and commit my every waking moment to destroying him and the Shadow organization. He’d suffer for all the cruel deeds he brokered in this valley, and more importantly, for authorizing the attack that had devastated me a decade earlier.
So I left the abandoned streets behind me, heading home as I thought of death and destruction. Wanting to cause it all myself.
Sometimes I was such a daddy’s girl.
5
The greatest benefit in taking over Olivia’s identity was not having to learn a whole new set of mores, thoughts, and values. We’d essentially held the same worldview and basic ideals, and though our approaches to life differed in many ways, our bond had been a tight one. I’d sworn to her that I’d never leave her, that I’d guard her from anyone who wanted to harm her in either word or deed or thought, and I had.
Except once.
Thus, the downside in taking over Olivia’s identity was having to look at her beautiful face in the mirror every day since I broke that promise, and meet the blaming eyes framed by all that blond, burnished glory.
It was also ironic that her appearance-so delicate, so conspicuous, so laughably clichéd-was what protected me now. The dichotomy between how I looked and how I felt was one of the greatest jokes I’d ever seen played out in life, and the worst of it wasn’t even that I’d been turned into every hetero male’s wet dream…though it had once seemed that way. No, the worst part was knowing Olivia had kept the promise I had broken-she was now protecting me-and that was something I was going to have to live with for the rest of my life.
So the next day I turned into a gated community, pulled in front of a sprawling single-story home, and gamely headed up the long, sloped drive to face the second hardest part about being Olivia.
Her friends.
If people were food, Cher and her mother would be dessert. Their thought processes were about as dense as powdered sugar, their lives as airy as angel food cake. Fortunately, beneath all the peroxide, M·A·C makeup, and designer clothes were two hearts that had truly loved Olivia. And, apart from a mystifying penchant for Brazilian waxing, they weren’t too bad themselves. I was grateful Olivia had known such true friendship while alive and did my best to keep both Cher and Suzanne from ever suspecting the truth.
“Hello!” I called out as I opened the door to Suzanne’s ranch-style house, having learned long ago not to knock. I passed directly through the tiled foyer to land in a combined living and dining area that stretched across the middle of the house. The place had surprised me at first. I’d expected something flashier from Suzanne, whose “More is more” motto had practically been branded onto my eardrums within the first hour of meeting her, but the beige rugs and cream couches were offset only by textures; silk, chenille, cotton-and patterns; weaves, brocades, and cross-stitchings. An entire wall of black and white photographs, matted in beige, served as the home’s focal point. There was a montage clearly detailing Suzanne’s family and friends-her early life, her late husband, and countless depictions of Cher and, of course, Olivia. I turned from the wall and called out again.