“Day-um.”
His face froze, registering nothing. I swallowed hard. “I’m ready to forgive your adolescent dalliance with the agents of Light and extend to you, once again,” he said tightly, “the offer to reign at my right-hand side.”
The side, in history and mythology, reserved for the second-in-command. He was speaking literally too. I’d seen it in the Shadow manuals. A solid gold throne elevated on a red-carpeted dais. But still an underling. Still under his thumb. I nodded thoughtfully, before stilling. “Screw your mythology.”
He surprised me by looking amused. It stretched that graying skin in all the wrong directions, and I found I preferred his scowl. “This is your final chance to reconsider. Normally you’d get only one warning, but paternal duty obliges me to extend one last olive branch before wiping you from the face of the earth.”
“My lineage is matriarchal, same as anyone else’s…no matter who my father is.”
I was prepared for him to lose it, readied for a battle cry to sound across the sky, and tensed for his attack. But he merely studied me with sunken eyes before abruptly steering from the topic. “I understand my new Cancer is targeting your old boyfriend. She was dogged even as an initiate, raised by the ward mothers to be as cold and scheming as her mother. Yet I could stop her with a word. I can save your mortal love. I can give you Regan…like I gave you Joaquin.”
My heart was pounding, and it took all the control I had to keep my face impassive beneath my mask. I held my breath until I was sure my desperation wouldn’t be sensed on the next exhale. “You didn’t give Joaquin to me,” I said, bitterness bright on the air as I led him away from the subject of Ben. If the Tulpa found out I still cared for him, he’d be dead within the hour. “I took him for myself.”
“So take Regan as well. She can be yours…for a small price.”
“You mean my soul?” I scoffed like I didn’t care about Regan or what she was doing. Besides, one didn’t need superhero senses to scent bullshit. “Regan DuPree can’t take out a want ad without tripping over her own nonexistent dick. I can kill her at will…and do it without reverting to my Shadow side.”
One brow quirked like a dart. “Not yet a full year as an agent, and already so sure of your skills?”
“Trial by fire speeds along the learning curve.”
“Call me a skeptic, but I’d like a little demonstration.”
And he finally moved, not to attack, but like a stage magician conjuring his latest, greatest illusion. A flip of his wrist, those talons whipping upward, and an inky ball bloomed over our heads. The nucleus was controlled, but it grew steadily, eating up the air again with as much efficiency as a vacuum cleaner.
A speck appeared in the center of the hole, growing larger within the limitless void.
“What is that?” I whispered, my mouth dry, as the object took shape, first as a luminous five-tipped star…then as a splayed-limbed human being. I gasped, and found myself with a mouthful of rancid vanilla, a flavor that always accompanied the compounded scent of torment and fear.
“You mean who,” the Tulpa corrected conversationally. “That’s the man who agreed to be used as a tool against me.”
“Where-?” I couldn’t finish. Where had he come from? The man was full-sized now, suspended above us and rotating slowly, still centered in the ever-expanding void. His face was fixed in a pained expression, and though he was spinning, the shirttails of his plaid flannel shirt didn’t sway. It was as if he’d been frozen in a block of black ice.
“He’s been here the whole time, dear. That’s part of the mystery, the magic, of black holes. He’s been watching you from beyond the event horizon, even as he inches toward its center.”
“Let him go.”
“I can’t. What you’re seeing now is only a product of the curvature of space-time. This was him an hour ago.”
“You can, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” I began shaking my head slowly, then faster, unable to tear my eyes away from the petrified, lost mortal. “He’s an innocent. He only knew how to work surveillance equipment.”
“Ah, but you knew. And you enlisted him. Engaged him. Endangered him.”
And the mortal was paying for our-my-hubris. “Don’t hurt him,” I whispered, not knowing if I was telling him or asking.
The Tulpa’s face cracked in a grin, and he waved his hand in my direction, causing molding vanilla to wash over me again, but this time it was charged, zinging in the air, stabbing at my skin like rusty darts. He’d already hurt Vincent; I just wasn’t seeing it yet.
But then something went wrong. Perhaps the surrounding steel acted as a magnet for the Tulpa’s force, like a lightning rod beneath a blistered sky, but somehow the wires got crossed, and instead of merely sensing the residue of Vincent’s pain, I found myself on my knees, writhing with it.
Electricity spindled inside me, driven on a spiked axis through the top of my skull, splitting in my center, and arrowing out of the soles of my feet. Bolts of pain fired from my spine to cauterize my nerve endings, and the scent of something flash-cooking reached my nose before the membrane was seared and all scent blunted. But none of that was as painful as when the invisible axis was suddenly removed, like a flanged drill bit ripping through my center and out my skull. Minutes passed in long, blissful silence. When I could finally open my eyes again, the black hole blocked the entire night sky.
“That…that…” That was all I could manage. My tongue was singed. If I lived through this I’d bear the scars inside.
“Hurt?”
I gained my feet and shook off the brindled energy unsteadily, like a dog flinging water from its coat. “Felt familiar.”
“It should. It’s your power, inverted.”
My stomach dropped, and my knees actually buckled. Not more than a month ago a good deal of my power had been depleted in an electromagnetic maze. I’d survived it, barely, but there were abilities that’d been stripped from me and transferred to the maze’s creator, the Tulpa. It was why he’d sent me in there to begin with, and now the power he’d gained was being used against me…and an innocent.
I looked back up at Vincent, a man who’d lived a blissfully normal life until approached to be our cover, and the only thing I could think as I watched his slow rotation was, I’m sorry.
“You can’t save him, Joanna,” the Tulpa said, misreading my look. “Your power is what put him there, and nothing can escape the gravitational pull of a black hole. Besides, energy cannot be divided against itself. An agent,” he clarified, his words damning me, “cannot be divided against herself. You are Shadow, and the sooner you accept it, the sooner your weaknesses will become your strengths.”
I shook my head, refusing to be damned. “That is not my power holding him there. I would never do that.”
“You already have,” he said airily. “The reason this man is pinned up here like a science experiment is because of your hatred for another named Joaquin. A man, too, named Liam. Ajax and Butch before them. So the facts would seem to contradict you, Joanna. You have no qualms in dealing out death when it serves your purposes…you also seem to have a particular fondness for edged weapons.”
“I have a fondness,” I said sharply, “for eradicating evil from this earth. This man is an innocent.”
“No, this man is an object lesson!” And now his voice arched like a rocket, burning into space. “He’s here to show you how your own powers can be used against you when you are divided against yourself.”
I clenched my jaw, and the unnatural red cast tinting everything the black hole hadn’t eaten up told me my eyes, long black, had begun to glow. “Let. Him. Go.”
Smoke began to pool around us. “Make me.”
Which was what he wanted. He needed me to act against him so he could secure that energy too-expand it, invert it, use it against me. But Vincent was still in agony; I knew it. His petrified expression looked as though it was pleading with me, his bulging eyes begging for help. I wanted to end his torture, but I didn’t know if he wanted to live or die…or if I even had the power to give him that choice.