Finally, as the light grew larger and the hallway shorter, I could make out the shop beyond the doorway. There were chairs and shelves and-far, far off-the front door. I ran faster. Jasmine roared again. A figure stepped into the doorway of the passage, and I heard a gasp before Carl came barreling toward me as well.
“Carl, no!” He must not have seen the monster on my ass. “Move!”
He did…just enough to send his shoulder barreling into me. My breath left me in a whoosh, and I ended up on my back, Carl on top of me…Jasmine poised for attack at the tip of my head. But she wasn’t looking at me. Carl was yelling, telling me to calm down and let Jasmine get in front of me. His other instructions were hurried, mumbled, panted-something about mask, identity, hide-but I got the gist of it.
“What, Carl? What is it?” I asked as Jasmine squeezed past us with feline grace, limbs blackened to the point of opaqueness, stretching, elongating, and retracting as needed. No wonder she’d been gaining on me. She was a life-sized Gumby! So fixed was I on the sight of her gelatinous legs, I almost missed what Carl said next.
“Joaquin.”
Jasmine roared again, and ahead of me a shadow moved to block the light from the shop. All the breath left my body on a shaky exhale. My conduit was out of reach, dumped on the floor when Carl tackled me, and my glyph had failed to fire in warning. But Carl was right. Joaquin had arrived. And Master Comics had just turned into the little shop of horrors.
7
He wore no mask, though I’d have known who he was beneath it anyway. Silhouetted in the doorway where Carl had been moments earlier, he wore a suit that accentuated his frame, making his shoulders as broad as a linebacker’s, but narrow at the hips. Sugar-coated heat rose in roasting waves from his body, and the air in the hallway gave way to a cloying sweetness that clung to my nostrils, coating my throat. The scent was unmistakable, as was the man. He took a determined step forward.
Still down, I began backpedaling madly, knowing just how Linda Hamilton had felt against the Terminator.
“Stop, Archer. Stop!” Carl tugged on one of my legs. I shook him free and struggled to my feet, still backpedaling. Carl grabbed one of my arms and dug in. “Just let Jasmine stay in front of you. You’ll be fine.”
From a half crouch I looked again. And slowly straightened. Joaquin was still there, outlined in the doorway with one hand cocked on his hip, head tilted as he tried to peer around Jasmine. But she had grown, stretching to a cut-out form that eerily echoed mine, a shadowy barrier between him and me. I straightened, and she did too, my mirror image but tinged in a vibrant shade of violet that pulsed from her body with each beat of her heart.
“She won’t let you come to harm. That’s her job. Your identity’s protected as long as she’s between you.”
I turned my head toward Carl, to show I was listening, but kept my eyes on Joaquin. “So, what’s he seeing?”
“Nothing but your outline right now. And I do mean your outline. The real you. As you were before.”
I glanced at Carl. Jasmine, in front of me, mirrored the movement. “Really?”
He nodded. “If you want to be fully seen as you were before, then just step through her. She’ll try to echo the movement, but move a little faster and her aura will become attached to your own. It’ll mold and shape this body into your original frame. Right now it’s just like using a medium to reveal who you are. Step through her and you actually become the medium.”
I swallowed hard, but my heartbeat was slowing. Joaquin didn’t come any closer, and Jasmine didn’t look like she’d let him. “I don’t get it.”
“She’s the frame,” Carl said, motioning ahead, “you’re simply what’s being mirrored.”
It made sense in some unbelievable way I no longer questioned. Still. Step through another person so their aura could stick to my own? “I don’t think so.”
I did take a step forward, though, and when nothing happened-other than Jasmine mimicking the movement-took another. Reaching my bag, and the comics I’d dropped when Carl had plowed into me, I gathered them together and sought out my conduit, trying to ignore my shaking hands. Jasmine mirrored my movements exactly, keeping my Olivia identity hidden from Joaquin on the other side. A changeling, I thought, shaking my head slightly. And here I thought she was going to eat me.
Just as I began to compose myself, Jasmine roared. It sounded like the earth quaking at its core, and I realized too late that she was backing up as Joaquin charged forward. As wind rushed ruthlessly down the hallway, the pages of the manuals flipped madly before they were wrenched away from my grasp, and Carl’s voice faded as he flew backward.
“Hold still!” he yelled, his voice trailing off as he tumbled away. I held still. Jasmine backed into me. And like the slamming of a storm cellar door, the wind abruptly died. Rolling to my back, I hit the floor, and was looking up at a man who’d cleared twenty-five yards in less than a breath. My arm whipped up; I sighted his chest between the crosshairs of my conduit and fired.
Nothing happened.
“Worth a try,” Joaquin said, his smile shining in the light of my glyph, finally lit. He shrugged. “For both of us.”
And he turned and sauntered back into the shop. I watched until he disappeared before I breathed again. Then I looked down. My hands, I realized, wiggling my fingers. And my arms. I felt my chest…wonderfully unimpressive. My hand flitted to my hair. Mine-short, bobbed, brown-wonderfully mine. And other than everything being tinted in a deep violet hue, I looked like me. Me, Joanna. Me, me.
Then, letting my head loll to the side, I saw her. “Oh my God! Jasmine, no!”
She was her normal size again, curled in the fetal position, legs drawn tightly up to her little chest, eyes squeezed shut, a wince of pain on her frozen face. She wasn’t breathing.
“Don’t touch her!”
I let my hand fall short of her too-white skin as Carl skidded to a stop next to me, breathing hard. His dual faux hawk had divided and multiplied into a dozen different styles, and he stepped between me and Jasmine as if to protect her.
“We have to help-” I began.
“She’s fine,” he said, holding up his hands. I strained to get around him. “Archer! She’s fine.”
I licked my lips nervously as I glanced back down the hallway-no sign of Joaquin-then back at Jasmine. “She doesn’t look fine.”
“Well, she will be,” he clarified, looking down at her. “As soon as you give her aura back to her. She can’t move without it, of course. And she won’t live if you keep it beyond a twenty-four-hour period…oh, and if you happen to be injured or die while wearing it. But other than that, she’s pretty much just sleeping.”
Just a few little contingencies then. I swallowed hard. “She looks…waxy.”
“She’s fragile,” he admitted softly. “Like an egg with the yolk blown from the center. She gifted you with her vitality, her life force. Without it, she’s just a shell.”
Great. No pressure. My greatest enemy was one room away, and not only did I have to watch out for my life, but another that was connected to it.
“You look just like I pictured you,” Carl said, sizing me up, squinting one eye. “God, I’m good.”
I rubbed a hand over my face. “What the fuck just happened?”
“Jasmine did her job, that’s what. Changelings always protect their agents…even if the agent is too stupid to protect themselves.”
“Hey!” I snapped. “How was I supposed to know he’d rush me?”
“Joaquin. Enemy. Duh.” I grimaced because he had a point. “Now, are you just going to stand there, or are you going to go out and face your mortal enemy like a true heroine of Light?”