I have mentioned this depraved, wrathful thought-form was my birth father, right? And he just loved to rub it in.
I tensed as the gases cleared around us, and peered from behind the pallet to find his outline materializing across from me, a breeze rushing in to surround his body, slowly expanding to leave a clearing on the unstable platform. From below it must have looked like a light had been turned on across the entire floor, though we were still standing in the pitch of night.
The first time my father had appeared to me, he’d been in the guise of an old-school casino boss; the Tulpa as Godfather-bada-boom, bada-bing. The last time, however, he’d been featureless as he threatened me in the backseat of his personal stretch limo. Knowing that he took the physical form of a person’s expectations, this unnerved me most. It might mean I hadn’t made up my mind about someone who believed manslaughter was a good tactic in getting your own way. Of course, he could have also been fucking with me. People loved to do that when you were new to the paranormal playing field.
So it was with relief that I realized he was the one doing all the projecting here. There was no disguise to soften the demonic visage looming across from me, though he stopped short of letting me smell the rot of his soul, and the organs stewing inside. Even the monsters, it seemed, were vain.
But he didn’t try to hide the arching bones angling his ears into high horns, or the ashen skin stretching from the hooknose and over his hairless skull, all the way to his spear-tipped crown. I’d had a glimpse of the long talons curving his hands into deadly points before, so they weren’t as shocking as they otherwise would’ve been, but the ropy, veined spikes impaling his shoulders and spine made me shudder. I swallowed hard and said the only thing I could think of. “Please tell me I didn’t get your overbite.”
His twisted lips curved even further. “It’s a mask, daughter. Rather like the one you’re wearing, though with a dual purpose.”
“You mean you’re actually uglier than that?” Note to self: work harder on controlling Shadow side.
“This veneer enables me to breathe normally when the cosmic dust from the black hole crowds back in around us.”
So it was a black hole…of sorts. That explained why the others had been unable to locate even a molecule of oxygen to suck on. However, it didn’t explain why the Tulpa could control it at will. Or how. “What happens if you take your mask off?”
His responding smile pulled his cheeks into sharp triangles, and my pulse began to hammer as he lifted his hand. But even before he ripped his own face away-the mucus and straining muscles tearing like the innards of a pumpkin-my vision narrowed to a pinprick, tingling darkness closing in fast. The air departed so quickly, blackness rushed in like the first tide of a monsoon, burying me beneath its pressurized weight. It held me upright as it closed in on all sides, and I suddenly realized I was going to die that way. It pissed me off. And I never did get to see his face.
My only consolation was that he was dying as well. Maybe he’d pushed too hard and the weight of the world was preventing him from returning the mask to his face, but a shudder like a sonic boom ricocheted through the unfinished structure as he fell to his knees. Ah well, I thought sluggishly. Taking out the leader of the Shadow side wasn’t a bad legacy to leave behind. Too bad the breath had been crushed out of me, trapping that taunt in my thoughts.
That’s what you get, I thought, fading. Show-off.
Then sound flooded over me like my head had been plunged under water. The weight lifted, I fell to my knees, and the Tulpa’s greedy gasps for breath sounded like the wind over mountain steppes and plateaus, whistling and harsh, and with a whipping force.
He hadn’t been lying, I thought in wonder, as my vision cleared so I could watch him struggle to his feet. We were somehow connected; I breathed because he breathed. The implication would’ve had me wincing just moments before. Now I found it a relief. He couldn’t kill me without committing suicide…at least not that way. It bolstered my confidence.
“Is this where you try to convince me to come to the Shadow side or die in an airless, soundless vacuum?” I asked, grasping my conduit between both hands. It still hung limply from my tingling fingertips, not that it mattered. The Tulpa couldn’t be killed even with magical weaponry. No one knew exactly how to kill him yet…which helped make these confrontations all the more disconcerting.
“No, because then this would also be where you deny me. Again.”
I stepped out from behind the pallet. It wasn’t helping against the Tulpa anyway. “Wow. Psychic in addition to being evil incarnate.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere.” His eyes narrowed, “Fast.”
But bravado was the only weapon I had left. Almost every time I’d met this fucker I’d ended up beaten, bloodied, and broken. But he wanted something this time, and it was clear he wouldn’t kill me until he got it. So could I figure out how to kill him before that?
Yet I’d have to be careful not to project my intention, or expend any excess energy in doing so. The Tulpa had a way of prevailing over, and gaining power from, the people who tried to kill him. Like Yoda, there was no try. You either succeeded or failed, and so far…well, the Tulpa had just grown more and more powerful. He wasn’t anyone’s imaginary friend anymore…and he had a fuse as short as a third-world dictator.
“Sit down.” He waited until I found an upended bucket before settling across from me. Even crouching, he was over five and a half feet tall. A fine mist draped his lower stomach, where I assumed he kept his valuables, and I found myself uncommonly grateful for his discretion. I let my gaze fall to his barbed toes and wondered if the name of my pedicurist would be enough to let me live. “We need to have a little talk about vibrational resonance.”
“I forgot to bring my notebook.”
“I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version.”
“Okay, but my tutor won’t approve.”
A growl rumbled through his body, and the platform shook beneath me. “It’s time for the third sign of the Zodiac to come to pass. The first sign was the revelation of the Kairos-the chosen one-my daughter.” There was a note of pride in his voice, but the multiple attempts on my life rather blunted the charm. “The second was a cursed battlefield, which you not only managed to survive, but brought most of your current troop through in fighting form.”
His emphasis of the word most wasn’t lost on me. I gave him a look he probably recognized from his own mirror, because he chuckled again.
“Which brings us to the third sign. The reawakening of the Kairos’s Shadow side.”
I held up a hand to stop him cold. “I don’t believe that’s what it means.”
See, these signs of the Zodiac had nothing to do with the astrological wheel, as one might initially believe. No, the signs were portents instead, indications that one side in the fight between good and evil was finally gaining dominance over the other, and doing it with my help. So while my willingness to switch to the Shadow side was theoretically feasible-with the gift of free will and a serious breakdown in my personal mores-what the latest portent actually said was that the Kairos’s dormant side would soon reawaken. I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I was pretty certain I wasn’t going to start acting against humanity any time soon.
Obviously the Tulpa disagreed. “Our mythology tells us that under Pluto’s influence the woman born of the Archer sign will have a death, a rebirth, and a transformation into that which she once would have killed. Even though she begins her journey with the spirit of a dilettante, her light is soon eclipsed and given weight. There is a descent into the underworld, and she will soon see the unseen.”