The Touch of Twilight Read online

  I waited to speak until I was steady enough to control my voice. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Well, I don’t know little Ashlyn’s adopted surname, or where she ended up all those years ago, but it shouldn’t take too long to find out. And even if it does, I don’t mind waiting for the onset of her second life cycle.” I opened my mouth, but she held up the hand with the detonator and shook her head. “Uh-uh-uh. Remember, I’m watching you too. And right now I’m going to watch you walk away with your tail tucked, while I enjoy a romantic two-step with your boyfriend.”

  I knew I was losing the battle for self-control when Regan’s delicate nostrils widened, a sign that my natural pheromones were flaring, but I couldn’t help it. My options were swiftly disappearing. Regan watched my face, drinking in the emotions she caught passing there, and as if thirsting for more, she leaned forward on the counter, gaze piercing mine through the mirror. “It’s a conundrum, isn’t it? Continue stalking us, and you risk pissing me off so much, I may snap and take it out on your childhood crush. Stop, and he might outlive his usefulness. Nothing to keep me from killing him…or making him wish he was dead.”

  I was clenching my jaw so tight my teeth ached.

  “But, no. I’m not entirely without needs of my own, so I think I’ll fuck him first.” She tilted her head, and her pretty smile widened. “I’ll make sure those listening devices are working properly so you can get off too.”

  I reached for her with a speed that still surprised me. Regan yelped, whirling and dodging as her glyph smoked hot on her chest, the realization she’d pushed too far stark on her face.

  My face, I corrected mentally, and plowed a fist into it.

  We were two opposing agents in our prime, and the fight was evenly matched, though it’d be a blur to mortal eyes, which is why the woman entering the restroom didn’t register our presence until a stool crashed through the wall behind her, imbedded there like an oversized thumbtack. She also had to be severely inebriated. She stood in place, staring at the stool as the whistling and howling of wind—our blows and battle cries in flight—accompanied a blur of motion so fast, it was like a dust devil had landed inside. I rushed Regan, continuing forward when I should’ve stopped, launching up her body like it was a climbing wall to send a knee flying into her skull. She face-planted into the mirror she’d been sneering into only moments before, which gave me time to reach the mortal’s side, gently pick her up, and deposit her back outside the restroom. Regan wouldn’t hesitate to use her life as leverage, and I couldn’t give the bitch an opportunity to harm anyone else.

  “Keep guard,” I told the woman, and waited for her dazed nod before the door swung shut. I turned around…

  And had my stomach caved in by a driving skull. My ribs wrapped around my spine and the door splintered behind me so the yelp from the other side seeped through the cracks, but I was too busy learning to breathe again to worry about spillover into the mortal world. I was also pretty concerned about the ice pick arching toward the large artery in my neck.

  “Fuck,” I breathed, my glyph lighting in response to her conduit. Regan smiled.

  Leaving my aching ribs exposed, I crisscrossed my arms against her weapon hand, and paid for it with a knee in my gut. My breath whooshed from me again, but I latched on to lift her wrists, reared back, and head-butted her. Twice.

  Her arms went slack, my fingers scrambled; her hands wobbled, mine tightened, and the ice pick popped into the air like a champagne cork. One final swipe on my part sent it skittering across the sitting room and under the line of stalls. We both growled snaking sounds of fury and frustration, and redirected our assault.

  An admittedly lucky left jab had Regan backpedaling, and I was back on her in two strides, a low kick connecting with her thigh, causing the muscles to contract in the mother of all charley horses. It was a tide-turning injury, and we both knew it. Regan’s retreat was so fast, she looked like a spider scuttling away on too few limbs. I was just as fast, and had her…until sound erupted like a flash flood, waves of it careening over us both. We doubled over where we stood, hands pressed to the sides of our heads in a humorless parody of Munch’s The Scream.

  I tried to focus on Regan, but the narrow canals of my ears were closing up on me, like the cabin of a plane suddenly losing pressure. I cried out in pain, in silence, knowing what this was. This was stark elemental chaos, atoms and molecules compressed beyond anything this reality could hold, and the explosion of sound was as magnificent as an asteroid collision in space.

  Except this sound wasn’t set to a frequency in a galaxy far, far away. It was in a Las Vegas bathroom, next to me, all around me. In me. Someone—someone strong—was fucking with the vibration of matter.

  I tensed in anticipation of the final concussion. Paranormal turmoil operated on a different wavelength than normal matter, its pulse detectable only by those equipped to hear it. So it was a good thing no one entered the bathroom just then, because Regan and I would have looked mighty strange writhing in the perceived silence. But instead of winnowing away like regular sound waves, the tremor swelled, similar to the bubbles blooming over the heads of comic book characters, and not by coincidence. Those who were supernatural could sense the forming of that bubble, the crest between the waves making up the vibration, the enormous size of its pressurized core.

  And this was a big motherfucker.

  A high-pitched whine wheeled through the air, refusing to be absorbed before oxygen dropped from the room, the city, and then the earth. Then the accompanying pop ruptured the void, ricocheting off my eardrums like a puncturing jab, and the collapsing vacuum ate my scream.

  There was nothing but a low-grade buzzing for a good thirty seconds. I used the blissful silence to regain my equilibrium, trusting Regan was doing the same. My hearing returned on a single note, like the pluck of an untuned guitar string, and marked the ebb of the invisible tsunami of sound. It receded degree by degree, and when it was finally gone, Regan and I both straightened. Breathing hard, staring at each other across a distance of no more than a jab, we inhaled deeply.

  The air was chalky and static, and sapped the moisture from my tongue as I tried to taste the highs and furrows created on the shocked air. Scent was equally obliterated, at least for a few seconds more, and then a sour putridity crept into the room. Regan’s tensed shoulders dropped, and she found her smile again.

  “What? Did you think we’d never fight back?”

  The statement, and the stench, made it clear one of Regan’s allies had done this. Somehow he, she, or they had punched a hole through the plane between realities, and it was my job—mine and my troop’s—to fix it before the human element noticed. However, that wasn’t what had my response catching in my throat.

  It was clear from her words that Regan thought the recent series of vibrational outbursts had been caused by the agents of Light. They hadn’t—and we hadn’t been able to detect a source on the damaged air—but I wasn’t about to tell her that. And I needed to go. This explosion was bigger than anything Regan threatened to make.

  “No more bombs,” I told her. “Or I’ll send you to a place where hellfire feels like a spa treatment.”

  “And I’ll bring Ben along as my cabana boy.”

  She surprised me then by retrieving her conduit and leaving first, without another word, but as I surveyed the shattered mirrors, the upended furniture, and the holes in the walls and door, my eyes fell on something tiny and girly and black. I picked up her compact, flipping it in my palm before pocketing it.

  Then I left to find out what exactly was ripping at the fabric of our world.

  2

  I was surprised, though I suppose I shouldn’t have been, to see the man as soon as I exited the bar. He was leaning against my black Porsche, dark eyes trained on me, and I sighed as I picked my way around the weeds and broken beer bottles scarring the dilapidated parking lot, gravel making little popping noises under my feet. Hunter Lorenzo, weapons mast
er and fellow member of Zodiac troop 175, waited unmoving.

  He normally wore tinted glasses when out about town, but had removed them in deference to the night. His hair was growing out—it was about the same length as Ben’s now—but he sported a five o’clock shadow, which meant, though it was Wednesday, it was his weekend free from his cover job in security at the Valhalla Casino. Though not overly groomed, he was impossibly good-looking, and if you didn’t know him, you might think he spent an hour in front of the mirror each morning.

  Not that I should talk.

  Not the same, I told myself as I flipped a curl over my shoulder. This silicone and self-tan and impossible blondeness hadn’t been my choice of urban camouflage. My sister’s appearance had been forced upon me.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked as I came to a stop in front of him.

  “Almost as long as you.”

  I crossed my arms, looking up at him. “I almost got my ass kicked back there. Why didn’t you come in?”

  He quirked one dark brow. “Because I don’t drink watered-down beer or date horses.”

  I tilted my head. “You mean you ceased to have my back against one Shadow warrior—”

  “And a bar full of twenty-first-century wannabe wranglers.”

  “—just because you didn’t think you fit in?”

  “I don’t fit in,” he said, wincing now. “Not unless I black out some teeth.”

  “Snob.” He was joking, but I knew Hunter well enough to know his tastes ran to classical rather than country. In fact, in some ways I knew this man even better than the one I’d left inside that bar. Ben and I shared history, but Hunter and I had shared magic. We’d never sat down for a so-where-are-you-from? sort of discussion, but by once trading a soft-stream essence of breath tinged with a power known as the aureole, I’d seen into his soul.

  We’d agreed to forget about this unearned intimacy, but that hadn’t prevented Hunter from popping up on my mental radar in bright, jarring blips. I knew he felt the same. I could sense when his thoughts snagged on me as well…and it was a knowledge that wanted to burrow through my body, take up warm residence somewhere between my belly and pelvic bone, and part my thighs. It wasn’t helping matters that Hunter seemed to be reconsidering our platonic pact, as evidenced by his appearance now. He’d been watching out for me as plainly as I’d been watching out for Ben.

  “How’d you know they were going to be there?” he said, pushing from the car to stroll to the passenger’s side.

  How’d you know I was going to be there? I wanted to say as I disengaged the alarm and climbed in. “I put a trace on Ben’s phone, surveillance software on his computer, and satellite on his house 24/7.” Olivia had been a self-taught computer genius, a skill set that’d been lost when I took over her identity. Fortunately, I had the resources of a casino heiress’s fortune at my disposal, and could buy as much information from her illicit contacts as I needed. The word in the underground was the hacker known as the Archer had gotten lazy, but the rumor was somewhat muted by great, flowing—and seemingly endless—stacks of green bills.

  Hunter shot me an arched look as he shut the car door.

  “What?” I asked defensively in the sudden, vacuumlike silence.

  He tilted his head back, ostensibly to study the wide sky outside his window. “Have you ever stopped to think—”

  “Not if I can help it,” I interrupted smartly, revving the engine. I already knew I wasn’t going to like the end of this rhetorical question.

  “—that the fantasy of something, or someone, is often more vivid than the reality?”

  “No,” I replied immediately, shifting into gear as I lifted my brows. “Have you?”

  His mouth quirked, but he shrugged one shoulder so his black T-shirt stretched across his torso. “You could just let him go,” he said, his voice unexpectedly soft.

  I looked at him like he’d grown a second skull. “Let the man I’ve loved since I was a teen be corrupted and tainted by one of the most evil beings in the Las Vegas valley?”

  “Let the man you love,” he said, emphasizing the present tense, “make his own decisions.”

  I turned back to face the road. That was the stupidest idea I’d ever heard.

  Hunter was too close, watching me too carefully, and he smelled too damned good to be trapped in a car with a woman who had extrasensory perception. This wouldn’t normally be so unnerving—men looked closely at Olivia Archer all the time—but Hunter knew what tight emotions lived coiled beneath the Botox and boobs. He’d seen and, more importantly, felt the sharp nosedive my nature took whenever I truly lost my temper. Not only did he seem not to care, it appeared to interest him further. Twisted bastard.

  “Look, you didn’t know me then,” I said, before he could offer me any more sage testosterone-driven advice. “And despite what you think, you don’t know me now. Ben does.”

  And while attraction was one thing, true knowledge of a person was rare enough that it was still celebrated with elaborate ceremonies—a church, a woman in white, a walk down the aisle…and, in those instances, only one man waiting at the other end of it to receive her. One man was all I needed, wanted, or could handle.

  Hunter sighed audibly beside me, and the accompanying scent was a lacy pattern of spice and smoke. “You really know nothing of a man’s reaction to spurned love, do you?”

  “And you do?” I shot back.

  “I’m an expert.”

  The quiet rejoinder made me wish I’d said nothing, and I shifted uncomfortably. When your senses were so keen you could sharpen knives on them, when you could feel life pulsing from the plant life around you, and the heat retained in the concrete even after a winter’s day, the desire radiating from a person you were forever yoked to with magical power was like licking sunshine.

  I’d be lying if I said a part of me didn’t want to incinerate myself in that fire, to see how far and deep the connection could go, and if a physical joining could compete with, or complete, the breath-stealing intimacy of shared souls. Another, stubborn part of me said that wasn’t fair. If I’d been allowed to share Ben’s thoughts, if pieces of his soul and psyche could’ve been caught and interwoven with mine, I knew I’d feel the same intensity—probably more—for him. Hunter and I had simply crossed a frontier that Ben could never reach.

  We remained silent as I gunned it down Boulder Highway, swiveling onto the 95 without slowing to head downtown. The stench of Shadow activity was as easy to follow as if it was transmitted through my GPS, and though it’d been less than a year since my extrasensory abilities had fired to life, using them was as natural to me as moving from sleep into full consciousness.

  “It’s not him, you know,” Hunter said, after a bit.

  I thought about Ben, probably two-stepping with Regan right now, holding her in a light, practiced hold. I remembered the way his palms had molded to my own back, and could almost feel them there now. Mine first. Mine always. Always mine. “Yes it is,” I said sadly.

  “That she wants, I mean,” Hunter said, and I glanced over to find him watching me with stark compassion. “It’s you. She wants to get inside your head and injure your heart, and you’re allowing it. She knows she’s getting to you.”

  He was right. My weapon hand twitched even as I nodded. I fought regret for the opportunities I hadn’t taken. I should’ve killed her five months ago when she’d first approached me as a Shadow initiate, and said she wanted to “help” me. I should’ve killed her once I discovered she knew who I was beneath the identity that was my safety and refuge and only remaining link to my dead sister. I should’ve slain her before she targeted my lover, using him to get to me. What I’d done instead was barter her life in exchange for information about the one person who, at the time, I’d have done anything to kill.

  But he was dead now, and with nothing left to haggle with, Regan soon would be too. I swore it.

  “Something else is causing the vibrational outbursts,” I said, changing the su
bject as we took the off-ramp down Casino Center Drive.

  “Something else?” he asked, and I told him what Regan had said in the bathroom. Yet there wasn’t anything else in the paranormal realm—there were Shadows, there were Light, and that was it—and Hunter said as much as we veered north. I shrugged, unable to answer, knowing only that Regan’s surprise, and ultimate relief, had been real. Maybe Warren would know more when we found him.

  I pulled to a stop in front of a street-side meter and switched from my impractical heels into a pair of black canvas boots with silent rubber soles, Velcro securing them tightly about my ankles. I’d have liked to change out of my black skirt and silk top, but there wasn’t time, so I locked everything but my conduit in the car, then took the lead on foot. I’d been a freelance photographer before my metamorphosis into a superhero, and had logged more hours on Vegas’s back streets than any other agent.

  We slipped past the four-block stretch still remembered by locals as Glitter Gulch. Though having undergone an extensive facelift—including a canopy of light, a name change, and an exodus of most elements of urban decay—the Gulch would always be grittier and more infamous than its temptress sister, the Strip, and for that I was pleased. Long live the ninety-nine-cent shrimp cocktail.

  For now, we strained to see beyond the canopy of neon and into the scarred landscape of an in-fill site, the still developing Union Park. The city had bought the railroad land that’d been Las Vegas’s original link to the rest of the world, and while the ambitious multi-use development promised to revitalize this historic urban center, right now it was a sixty-one-acre cross-hatching of cranes and gigantic mounds of earth. And a stark black void had opened up directly above the skeleton of one promising high-rise hotel and casino. I didn’t say anything about our new beard being located at what seemed to be the center of all that opaque darkness because Hunter’s stiffening posture told me he was thinking the same.

  A beard was a mortal who acted as a front for troop activities. Beards—or goats, as the Shadows referred to them—were given gifts, usually monetary, in exchange for allowing us to own their lives. Most thought we were a new crime organization, while others were sure we were government special ops. Interesting that there didn’t seem to be any perceptible difference. Naturally, some beards figured out the truth and ran to the press with fantastic stories about superheroes and monsters battling for the soul of the city, but the stories never ran. When you had your thumb on the pulse of the entire valley, it was easy to intercept one frantic, babbling mortal.