“Valhalla is the Tulpa’s house,” Hunter said, nodding. “You need clarity, intention, and your sixth sense combined to enter safely, but to reach the center of his quarters, you need to be able to throw him off your trail. Create barriers of your own.”
“And destroy the artificial walls he’s created to throw me off of his.” I sighed thoughtfully and sipped at the cooling peppermint.
Hunter nodded. “Can you do that?”
I sipped again, and this time the tea settled like a brick in my gut. I looked back at him. “No.”
He nodded slowly, and to himself. “But you’ll try anyway.”
My response this time was a mere whisper. “I have to stop Joaquin. Find Ian. Try to find an antidote to this virus.” Save Ben. Save the girl. Save myself. “I have to at least try.”
“I know,” he said, laying a hand over mine. It was as warm and comforting as the tea. I glanced again at Hunter. I’d never seen him like this before; gentle, understanding, almost paternal. “And as you’ve already made that choice, there’s only one more question you need to ask yourself.”
I waited.
His mouth quirked, his eyes narrowed, and there was the sexy weapons master I knew. “Who do you want walking beside you?”
“Oh, Hunter. I can’t-”
“-ask me to do that,” he interrupted again, rolling his eyes. “I know. But I’m the one doing the asking here. So. What’s it going to be?”
“Yes.” The word rushed out of me on a relieved exhale. Dying alone, after all, had such little appeal. “God, yes. Of course. If you’re sure.”
He smiled at me again, a grim little thing, and lifted a hand to brush back one of the tendrils hanging in my face. “You don’t have to ask that either,” he murmured.
Then he rose to leave, saying something about rest, that we’d leave the following dusk, but stopped in the doorway to send me a hard look over his shoulder. I pulled my eyes away from the shattered reflections of my many selves, and bit my lip. “I only ask one thing of you. Stay honest about your intentions. Anything less will kill us both.”
I flushed because he felt he had to say it, even though I knew I deserved it after last night’s hysterics, but lifted my chin in what I hoped was a convincingly determined look. “I want to bring Ian back. I want Ben safe. I want my…the child’s safety ensured as well.”
I said nothing about vengeance or making Joaquin pay for what he’d done to me. No request to let me be the one to kill him. I didn’t say it because I finally saw those dreams for what they were: violent distractions. Finally Hunter nodded. “All right, then. Let’s go get Joaquin.”
He disappeared back into the living room, and I sipped my tea and let my eyes travel back to the mirror.
“Yes,” I said, eyeing all my shattered selves. “Let’s go get that bastard.”
We found a portal a block away from Valhalla, and entered to find the world awash in a blanket of white.
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” I said, testing the depth of the snow with one leather boot before glancing back at Hunter, still huddled in the doorway of the souvenir shop we’d come through. “We can’t walk into that hotel and cross back to mortal reality with snow on our feet and in our hair. It’ll be a dead giveaway.”
“And the alternative is?” he asked wryly, looking at the snow like it was acid. “Walk through the front door?”
No, we couldn’t do that. Now that Joaquin knew my real identity, he’d be looking for me-mask or no mask. This reality was still our best shot. “Let’s find another portal.”
He shook his head. “It’s not the portal, it’s the timing. It just happens to be snowing on this side of reality right now.” He shuddered, and I don’t think it had anything to do with the cold. Like me, Hunter was a desert rat. Anything this cold and white was simply…unnatural. “Can we wait it out?”
I glanced up at the thick blanket of clouds roiling overhead, and doubted it. This, along with the colorless landscape, was the other major difference on this side of reality. While the physical surroundings matched what one would find in the real world, the more fluid variables, like weather, were particularly unstable. Step through a portal on a bright blue summer day, and you were likely to find vicious winds circling the valley as if stalking their prey. A parched winter day might yield rainbows arching overhead, crisscrossing in shades of gray, though no less glorious for it. So while we might find a portal to enter closer to Valhalla, it would only minimize the trudge, but change nothing. Besides, this one had already sealed behind us.
“Let’s go,” I said reluctantly, and plodded out into the street, arms wrapped around my already chilled body. Across the road a shirtless kid skateboarded home in the dusk of his sweltering reality. I glanced back, following the dual footprints leading to the aural smears of light directly behind Hunter and me, and wished we had something to cover them with. The prints, not the smears. Those dissipated within seconds, though the vibrant colors seemed to hang longer in the heavy winter air, and I briefly wondered if the troops back east considered this a problem. Hunter followed the direction of my gaze and read my thoughts.
“Hindsight and all,” he said, turning forward again.
“Yeah. I’ll make a note to add snowshoes to my shopping list.”
After that we fell silent, and I kept my mind off my numbing limbs by going through our plan to infiltrate Valhalla step by step. First, we had a good operative in Hunter, as he knew the property, was in uniform, and had already established the habit of varying his shifts. His colleagues wouldn’t think twice at him showing up for the swing shift on a Tuesday night, though we were hoping he wouldn’t have to show himself on that side of reality at all. I’d follow behind him as we tried to locate the same portal we’d found weeks earlier, and see if there was an antidote to the virus somewhere in that lab. That was our first priority.
Second, one of us had to search out a secondary portal while the other was busy in the lab. I hated to split up, but if Ian and my computer were being held in Valhalla, as I suspected they were, it was the most expedient way to conduct a search of the vast property, despite doubling the prospects of running into a Shadow agent. If that happened, and I thought that a big if since the Shadows all still seemed to be on their extended summer vacations, I expected to encounter only one at most. And there were still two of us.
Finally, we had to find a way to move Ian and the computer off property, and that would probably be the trickiest part. Ian was mortal and could only be moved along the natural plane, but we’d have to deal with contingencies as they came. I was ticking through the various ways that scenario could play out when Hunter suddenly spoke.
“Uh-oh.”
I stopped dead in my tracks. “What ‘uh-oh’?”
“I thought this might happen. You’re bleeding again.”
“Wha-? Fuck. No!” I whirled around myself, first one way, then the other. “Why me? Why not you?”
“Thanks for your concern,” he replied wryly, before pointing at the ground where crimson-colored aura pooled around my feet. “They must have the place sensored or something, to alert them to your presence on this plane. I thought it might be all of us-all agents of Light, I mean-but they probably don’t have a DNA sample for each of the agents of Light, so it must be just you.”
“But how would they have a sample of my-”
I broke off and met Hunter’s steady eyes, realization dawning in tandem. “The Tulpa,” we said at the same time.
“They must’ve used some of his DNA, some skin cells or something to experiment with.”
“How does an imagined being have DNA to start with?” I said, frustrated with the logic.