“Shut that door and I’ll scream so loud, that pudgy mortal will fire you on the spot.”
“So do it,” I said, stepping back, challenging her with words alone. “Because then she’ll come running back here, and that’s the last thing you want. Isn’t it?”
I’d put it together after her appearance in the sanctuary. She’d fled both times my troop had arrived to save me, but not because she was afraid of them. It was because she couldn’t take on my form when distracted by so many other conflicting faces and energies. Confronting me was pointless unless we were alone.
One side of her mouth lifted like it was unattached from the rest of her face, and as unnerving as that was, it was also confirmation I was right.
“So you do exercise that muscle in your head after all. Wouldn’t know it by your flat-footedness back at your sanctuary.” She sneered at the irony, and I didn’t blame her. I’d been no safer there than I was now.
I took another step backward.
“Hey, if you want to soul-stalk someone else, be my guest.” I had mugs to polish.
“It would be significantly easier on us both if you would just figure it out.” She stepped forward, still all iridescent curves, though there seemed to be a sharpness of light that gave her a molten look, like honeyed chrome. She was getting closer to solidifying. “You wouldn’t even try to give me a proper noun.”
Couldn’t, not wouldn’t. The latter implied a choice, and I’d had too few of those lately. I blew out a breath, and she copied the look. “Listen, your attitude and your riddles annoy me. If you’re not going to tell me straight up what you want, then lose my supernatural phone number. I don’t want to hear from you again.”
“I can’t just tell you. It’s a tandem law in both our worlds.” She was annoyed, and it made her voice sound like static and crossed wires, turning her every syllable into a hiss.
“And exactly what other world are we talking about?”
“I told you before.” Her marble eyes rolled a three-sixty. “Midheaven.”
The myth. Great. My imaginary friend came from an imaginary world with imaginary laws. I felt a sudden urge for an imaginary cocktail. “Well, I’m still playing catch-up with our Universe’s”-apparently flexible-“boundaries. Wanna run that rule by me again?”
Her frame was diaphanous in the harsh storeroom light, and parts of her body came in and out of view as she stalked back and forth in front of the closet. “Words, spoken aloud, are given life and vitality. The spoken word becomes record. Think of weddings or vows of office. Nothing comes into being until thought is given voice via the breath of a living being. That, and action.”
It was the same thing the Tulpa had told me when giving me the mantra; why he hadn’t wanted me to say it aloud then. Nothing happened if I merely thought about binding her. But if I spoke the words the power would be released, the doppelgänger would die…and I’d belong to the Shadows.
But maybe I could use it without using it.
“Action, huh?” I bit my lip like I was considering it, and the doppelgänger mirrored the movement, lips shifting, nose twisting, then twisting back. For a flash second, I recognized myself. “Action like tearing the veil between two parallel worlds?”
Her eyes blazed. “The right word from you and it’ll all stop.”
“Oh, I know.” And I told her about the mantra, left out the Tulpa’s conditions, and watched as color drained again. A tremor passed over her, the bubble wavering but not bursting. I smiled, and this time there was no mimicking movement. “I want the vibrational chaos to stop. Let our reality heal. And leave me alone.”
I finally seemed to have an edge. Unfortunately, as with many, this one came with a steep fall.
“Leave you alone?” If she’d had brows they have risen up her forehead. “Darling, would that I could, but what am I supposed to do instead? Get a real job? Pimp drinks at the gaming tables? Entertain at children’s parties?” She pursed her lips, and bubbles flew from her mouth by the dozens.
Irritated, I waved them away, and glanced over my shoulder to make sure we were still alone. All I needed was Ginny or Janet coming in to find me talking to the mops. “How about creating your own identity, like any other person?”
“Please. Most people don’t even create their identities,” she scoffed. “They just stumble upon them. Just like Regan stumbled upon the woman you attacked in that dark street.”
I fell still. “You saw that?”
“I saw that, then Regan ambush you, and the way you cried like a baby afterward.”
She’d been there, and she hadn’t helped. “And let me guess? You wouldn’t have cried if you were me?”
“It wouldn’t have happened if I were you, though it did make me wonder.” Shimmering color rose again like a wave inside her. “If you were that torn up over one person, how would you feel about thousands?”
I opened my mouth.
“Uh-uh,” she warned, and lifted her arm to point one razored nail above the doorway. “One little poke, and Valhalla will crumble.”
A fissure appeared above the doorframe, a slim almost-shaft of light lasering through the alternate reality and into ours, and I quickly snapped my mouth shut again.
“Don’t even fucking think about it,” she warned, voice as sharp as her nail. Above me, the building rumbled.
I cursed my stupidity. I shouldn’t have used the mantra as leverage. “Okay, I’ll try to figure out your little riddle, but you have to stop that.”
The doppelgänger smirked. “You’ve got forty-eight hours.”
Was that it? That would make it the day of Kimber’s metamorphosis. “I’m kinda busy on Sunday. Maybe you could get back to me during the workweek?”
She didn’t even dignify that with an answer. “Figure out my ‘riddle’ or give me your beating heart, it really makes no difference to me, but if I don’t have one of those things by the end of that period, I won’t just take down this hotel, I’ll pulverize this city.”
Her willingness, the easy way she said it, stole my breath. “You have no conscience, do you?”
“You could always give me yours.” She batted her lash-less eyes prettily, before squaring on me again, all business. “No? Then let me be clear. I’ll take the energy I need, one way or another, and I’ll take more than your heart. I’ll take over your life, and sweetie? I’m already close. One more viewing and I’ll have you.”
She was close. I could see it in the colors swimming inside her, like concrete being mixed before it solidified, though this would form skin.
A noise sounded outside the room, and she glanced that way, orbs shifting oddly to give her a cross-eyed look. “I’d prefer the other option, if you figure it out. It’s the most powerful, it’ll mean we can coexist in this world, she’d prefer it, and-of course-it’s something the Tulpa wants to prevent more than anything.”
Before I could ask again who “she” was, the doppelgänger lunged close. I jerked back, but if she’d really been trying she’d already have me. “Just mark my word, Joanna Archer. I will survive, no matter the cost…and I know you understand the need to survive, don’t you, dear?”
And her face suddenly morphed into an exact approximation of my younger one, streaming with imagined tears, and an unholy cry that ricocheted off the shelves behind me. Glass tinkled, my blood went cold, and the stack of masks on the shelves behind me clattered to the floor. But the sound was gone as quickly as it came, and all of her swirling color and power was gone in that same instant. It’d taken everything out of her, but it had also done the job. She had briefly become me, my history laid bare on her face, and I was shaken.
“Two days,” she said, voice nothing more than a bubbly whisper, and then she swirled like a mini-hurricane taking form and flight, and whirled through the room, and out the vent near the doorway.