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Skamar looked up. “It could be coincidence.”
“No. The Tulpa is looking for her.”
She wouldn’t say Ashlyn’s name. It was still a secret in Vegas’s underworld, the only thing protecting the child from it and the warring factions of Shadow and Light battling for the city’s soul.
Yet soon, thought Skamar, everyone would know who Ashlyn was. “Her second life cycle? She’s begun?”
Zoe shook her head. “Not yet.” But her tone said, Not long.
Agents on both sides of the Zodiac could pass as mortals when young, but puberty kick-started the pheromones that acted as a siren’s call to their enemies. This marked the second phase, or life cycle, of their development and was the most vulnerable point in a young agent’s life. Once Ashlyn’s hit, she might as well paint a bull’s-eye on her chest. Everyone would know she was Zoe’s granddaughter . . . and the Tulpa’s.
And if he found Ashlyn, he would raise and train her as Shadow, using her against the troop Zoe had been raised in. The Light. “So you want me to protect her?”
Zoe immediately scoffed. “The way you two brawl? You’d only lead him directly to her.” Yet she backtracked immediately, knowing the way the words would strike Skamar. “It’s not criticism. You’re more powerful than he is, smarter, too—”
“Stop complimenting yourself.” Because Zoe had created her that way.
Zoe smiled, but only briefly. “With a little more time and experience, I have faith you’ll prevail, my dear Skamar.”
Skamar detested the pride that shot through her chest. She shouldn’t care what anyone thought, even the woman who’d spent a decade birthing her—thinking her—into existence.
“No, I let that bastard get his hands on her once . . .” Zoe trailed off, and Skamar knew exactly which memory she was fingering. She’d almost lost her daughter and granddaughter to their common enemy. “I’ll do the guarding this time. Actually, I’m already doing more than that.”
A wispy smile threaded Zoe’s lips, and an unexpected emotion struck Skamar—green and sharp. She shunted it aside before it could bloom into scent.
Zoe pointed a finger back at the photos. “But they need to be found.”
Skamar shrugged. “Let the Light take care of it.”
“They can’t know about her. Not yet.”
Because the Light would be just as anxious to use Ashlyn. Zoe was fed up with the women in her family being used . . . a sentiment Skamar understood and shared. Yet she clenched her jaw and tossed the folder with the girls’ photos on the end of Zoe’s lounge chair. This quest would interfere with her pursuit of the Tulpa. “They’re mortal.”
“I’m mortal,” Zoe snapped, leaning forward, eyes fired. “And so is my daughter, the one who named you, and almost lost her life so you might have limitless power.”
“She did it for a child, not me.” Which was still unfathomable to Skamar. Joanna Archer had given up all supernatural powers for one mortal soul. What a waste.
“But you benefited.”
Skamar looked away. Zoe thought their obsession with killing the Tulpa was joint, but Skamar’s was different. When she was first birthed from Zoe’s mind in physical form, it had been as a doppelgänger, with the ability to mutate into different shapes. The precariousness of her state had frustrated her then. The inability to hold one shape for long had made her feel insignificant, like a ghost. But in some ways it had been freeing, too. Skamar now looked back on that time as someone else might look back on a carefree childhood. Maybe she’d wanted too badly to believe Zoe when she said becoming a full-blown tulpa would make Skamar the most powerful being alive. Maybe she’d been too greedy.
Because while claiming this mortal flesh had indeed provided her with the benefits of permanence—energy and power an unnamed being like the Tulpa could never tap into—its shortcomings were equally potent. The Tulpa—another being who’d walked into existence as a doppelgänger and knew what it was to be untouchable—had bested Skamar briefly and used her new body against her. She swallowed hard as she remembered him driving iron ties into her wrists and ankles before hanging her from a lightning rod and setting her up beneath a roiling sky. For all her strength, she’d been utterly helpless to free herself.
And that pain now stalked her dreams. The first time she woke with a pounding heart and sweat-soaked sheets, she was clear out the apartment door before realizing she wasn’t being chased. Not by anything more than memories, at least.
Her paranoia, too, was off the charts. Thus her avoidance of neighbors, small talk with strangers, and even something as simple as a cup of coffee with Vaughn.
Especially a cup of coffee with Vaughn. Because she might be new to the whole flesh-and-bone thing, but she’d watched these mortals long enough to wonder openly at the messy emotions that routinely marred their lives. So what if the blue heat in a man’s eyes suddenly made her stomach plummet into her knees? Or if his mouth, when not quirked in humor, looked like a beautiful destructive force? Feelings for another person were an unnecessary chaos. Intimacy gone bad would only open her up to more pain, more fear.
Fuck that.
But Zoe was right about Joanna. She had saved her from crucifixion, so that’s why Skamar finally nodded.
But she would also continue to hunt the Tulpa. It was the only way she knew to combat the night sweats and remembered fears. And when she caught that sadistic, mutable fucker? She’d string him up as he’d done to her. She’d let him rot so slowly that he’d sit as close to death as anyone could and still remain alive. Then she’d patch him up, nurse him back to near health, and do it all over again. Then the leader of the Shadows, too, would know pain and fear and paranoia.
He would know intimately, she thought as she stood, what it was to be touched.
