Oh God, how had I gotten here? After all my training, my preparation-my metamorphosis into something super, for God’s sake!-I’d still ended up back where I’d been a decade earlier. Pinned beneath all this evil. Helpless. Again.
No! I told myself, fear worming itself into my thoughts. I’m not a victim! And no matter what he did to me, I wouldn’t be made to feel like one.
So why did I suddenly wish I was dead?
A whimper escaped me at the thought.
Joaquin heard it and bent to me, pausing for a long moment before licking my face, starting below my jaw and ending on my cheek just below my mask. His tongue toyed with the edges of it briefly, as if seeking entrance.
It was all I could do not to scream. Not again! Not again! Not again!
He pulled back, but there was no reprieve as he pushed his groin against mine. I’d already known he’d be hard. “Tell me,” he said, almost lovingly, “in those deepest, darkest hours, when nobody’s watching, and there’s only you and the singular, compelling thought of me…” He paused until I looked at him. “Do you touch yourself?”
I jerked away, giving him the reaction he was looking for, and his laughter washed over me like a violent summer storm, beating against my skin, and me with nowhere to take cover. Oh God, I thought. I should have listened to Warren. I shouldn’t have left the sanctuary. I should never have tried this on my own. I’d wanted vengeance at any cost…but now that it was too late, I realized the price was too dear.
“I do love it when you’re predictable, Joanna,” Joaquin said, still chuckling as he caressed my arms with his fingertips. They felt like worms and snakes, and all the crawling things that lived in this underground grotto. Despite myself, I started to shake. “The predictable ones are so much fun. Less challenging, true, but then I was never one to do something simply for the challenge.”
No, he’d done it for the joy he derived in seeing his victim beg and scream and cry, and especially for the humiliation. If I hadn’t known that before, I knew it now by the way he worded his thoughts, singling me out, then lumping me in with the rest of his victims, like I was nothing special to him. Just another body, another tooth in the jar.
One thing he was right about, though. I was predictable. And that’s what Warren and the others had been saying, what Regan had capitalized on, and the hubris that, even for a heroine, could only lead to one place. Capture.
So I concentrated on not crying or screaming or begging…and ignored the question: why couldn’t I have realized all this five minutes earlier?
“The Tulpa will kill you,” I whispered, mouth as dry and parched as the desert ceiling above as I played the only card I had left. I closed my eyes when I said it because I’d never thought I’d have to use it. I didn’t want to admit it now. But it was true, and Joaquin knew it.
There was no response. Unnerved by the silence, I opened my eyes again, and found Joaquin staring at me ruefully. “My life,” he finally said, “is about finding out exactly what hurts people most. And when I find it, that one thing that’ll break the human soul, I use it to make those people beg me to hurt them. It’s like a giant chessboard, really. You position yourself just so, bide your time, wait until your opponent has committed, and then watch the surprise bloom on their face when they realize they’ve ended up in exactly the place they claimed they wanted to avoid.”
He ground against me in demonstration, a slow and sensuous dry hump, taking something meant to be beautiful and turning it inside out. But it was his words that had my breath quickening. Dammit, Jo, don’t let him in! But it wasn’t an order anymore. It was a plea.
“Your Tulpa is no different,” he said, continuing. “He knows who I am, what I am, and what I’d do if I got my hands, my cock, on you.” He ran his fingers over my hair, pausing at my mask, caressing my face. “His precious Kairos.”
He paused here, stilling to hold up a finger. “Let me clarify. He doesn’t just know this, he expects it. That’s why he’s kept me in his organization all these years. That’s why he didn’t kill me as soon as he discovered the girl I’d attacked all those years ago was his daughter. In a way, he wants me to finish what I started. That way he’s absolved, you see?”
A tear slipped from the corner of my eye.
“And then there’s you. That beaten and broken little girl who grew up to be a woman with a chip on her shoulder that spans the Strip. You may not have known it before now, but you sought this out. You want me to hurt you. You expect it. And you’d be disappointed if I didn’t.”
“That’s not true,” I said, but my voice was barely a whisper, like I had no conviction left inside me. Like I didn’t even know who I was anymore. Or had never known myself at all. Oh, God…
“It is.” He smiled serenely and rocked into me again. “That’s why you’re here now. You need to feel the pain because beneath all this peroxide and silicone and shit,” he said, flipping a blond curl from my shoulder with disgust, “pain forces you to remember who you really are. It lets you know why you exist, why you wake every dawn and retire each dusk. I anchor you to this existence, Joanna. I give your days meaning and purpose.”
I tried to shake my head, but the bindings held me fast, and the invisible ones-the ones he was talking about-held my tongue. Don’t let him be right, I pleaded silently. I don’t see myself as a victim. I never have.
Had I?
“When I hurt you, Joanna,” he said, his soft whisper at odds with the hand that had lifted to twist my nipple between ironclad fingers, “when you think of me hurting you, it puts you in your place beneath me…and that, my dear, is where you feel most safe.”
I cried out, unable to stop myself, eyes tearing with the pain of both his actions and his words, and cried out again when I realized I was pissed at myself for doing so. Like it was my fault, and the blame for his actions lay solely with me. And anything was better than that. So I wished for unconsciousness, I wished for death…I wished, as he wanted, that I’d never survived this the first time.
Those wishes rose like noxious fumes escaping the earth…only they’d been stewing deep inside my core all these years, rich, like emotional deposits lain down one atop the other, waiting for the right person to come along and mine the vein.
This, I suddenly knew, was the real me. Me, giving Joaquin exactly what he wanted.
As he scented it all, his throaty laugh rose in tandem with my voice, and he twisted harder, his amusement reverberating through his body, joy in every noxious breath.
I shut my eyes, the only movement I had left to me, and there was a gusting boom, like a cannon going off. I looked up to find spiders and worms and vermin and rats and reptiles all slamming to the floor in a explosion of dust, followed by five bodies dropping to the ground like precision-guided bombs, chests glowing like beacons.
Goddamn, I thought, choking on a cry of relief as Joaquin’s weight disappeared. I loved having superhero friends.
Joaquin made the only offensive move he could, lunging for my conduit still lying on the pine table. Hunter’s whip flicked out, the tail knocking the conduit from reach, sending a stinging barb into the soft tissue of Joaquin’s palm. He yelled in rage and pain, and I was gratified to see his glyph now puffing away like a teepee’s smoke hole. Hunter yanked back on his whip, but the barb had only caught the fleshy part of Joaquin’s hand, no bone, and it ripped away, freeing Joaquin again.