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“I see him.” Vaughn spoke too loudly. The Tulpa’s gaze rolled as though his head were riveted to his shoulders. He noted and dismissed Vaughn, and fastened his attention on Skamar. With a twitch of his lips, he angled the girl away, and they headed in tandem toward the main stage.
“Break up,” she ordered Vaughn, but he was already pushing through the tight pods of pubescent girls, all seemingly on a mission to slow him down. The warm-up band had just taken stage, and the singer yelled for everyone to raise their hands. Amid the excited screaming, the Tulpa lifted his own hand as he turned to grin at Skamar. Then he slipped around a vendor’s stall sparkling with lights and ornaments and disappeared.
Skamar knew the Tulpa was expending more energy than usual on this new physical form and was further limited by having to drag along a mortal. This knowledge—along with the phantom smell of blueberries and the memory of Debi’s shell-shocked parents—had Skamar zigzagging like a speed skater through the tightly packed crowd. If she got to him before he found a solitary spot, she could separate him from the girl . . . and take a shot at doing the same with his life.
A small clearing on the asphalt lot and a large burst of speed put her within arm’s reach. Being forced to drag Debi along unobserved had slowed him significantly. Perhaps he should have held on to his strength, she thought wryly. Yet he dodged when Skamar leapt, elongating creepily to slide behind a wall of portable toilets. Laughter greeted Skamar even before she whipped around the corner . . . as did a harsh, unmistakably canine growl. Yet halting abruptly, she saw no one but the Tulpa, now pulling Debi into an unyielding headlock. The girl didn’t protest or even blink, though her face was quickly turning red.
“Let her go.”
“Since when do you care about anyone or anything but my demise?” His dark eyes, fastened on her face, had gone as black as his aura.
“I care about many things,” Skamar lied, inching forward. “Not that I’d turn down the opportunity for a little payback.
”
“Still sore about that little crucifixion prank?” The features on his face shifted, shimmered, then resolidified. Despite his pleasant tone, he was expending a lot of energy. “It was a lark, I was just having a bit of fun. It would be so much more convenient if you just got over it.”
Skamar took a step forward, testing him. “I’m not here to make life easier on you.”
“Another way that we’re shockingly alike.” He whistled, and the ground next to Skamar’s feet moved.
She jumped at the sight of a greyhound, slight and wiry . . . and completely translucent. It glistened now that it was moving, undulating in pearly waves like all doppelgängers. Greys weren’t known for their aggressive natures, but canine wardens loathed anyone connected with the Light. And as Skamar had been created in the mind of a former agent of Light, she was certainly that. The dog snarled, baring teeth as long as crystalline spikes, its mouth bubbling with opalescent saliva.
She had time only to think how clever it was to create a warden doppelgänger before the Tulpa spoke. “Bandit . . . kill.”
And he named his creature right in front of Skamar, the same way she’d been named and afforded additional power . . . and with the same effect. The beast’s body was instantly inked, and it lunged at Skamar with a speed only she possessed.
“Motherfucker!” A bullet followed Vaughn’s cry, fired so close that Skamar’s ears rang with the aftershocks. It entered the newly created hound, and the creature yelped . . . then grew a good three inches all around. However, the interruption gave Skamar the opening she needed, and she leapt at Bandit while yelling at Vaughn to hold his fire.
The dog’s gaping mouth was level with her face, and Skamar shoved her hands inside of it to yank the impossibly sharp incisors in opposite directions. Bandit yelped as she ripped apart its hard palate. Then she bit into the hound’s neck, jerked her head, and tore out its larynx. She kept ripping with her teeth, literally consuming half of the animal—and its magic—because the only way to kill a tulpa, even a canine one, was to turn its own magic against it. Thus only another tulpa could do that.
Skamar’s vision swam, her mind clouded, and time leapt forward in the strange stop-motion jerks of battle-born fugue. Using the animal’s magic, she dismembered its energy and form, and when she’d finished, the body lay in pieces around her, the thought that had created his spirit was only memory . . . and the Tulpa and Debi were gone. Cursing, she began to rise before remembering Vaughn.
The cop was no longer standing. Shock had leached the color from his skin, and he was slumped against the last blue portable. Witnessing the object of his lustful fantasies feasting on the blood of a mutant hound was apparently more than he’d expected to see. And, she noted coolly, at some point between firing that bullet and when she’d cracked the last bone in Bandit’s body, Vaughn had repositioned his gun, setting its sights on her.
Their eyes met, and Skamar rocketed forward. After knocking aside the weapon, she lifted Vaughn clean from his feet, to propel him into a pickup at the lot’s edge. She crowbarred his neck until his feet began to kick like an upturned beetle’s—still lots of life in the limbs, though no amount of scrambling would allow escape.
“Get it all out,” Skamar rasped, pushing on his stomach so that the last of his breath wheezed from his lungs. She then wiped Bandit’s blood from her chin, put her mouth to Vaughn’s—beneath eyes widening in horror—and began to suck.
Mortals were so ignorant, thinking the soul lived in the eyes. The soul lived in the breath, threaded to the heart and mind in invisible strings, which pulsed with ethereal life. Skamar tugged on the brightest of these and was surprised at how little time it took to lift the memory of the last few minutes. Vaughn gradually relaxed, and she slowly lessened her hold, finally allowing life-giving inhalations to alternate with the small cocktail straw sips she still used to pull that memory clean.
Vaughn shifted, which she allowed because it was expected. His body and mind would create a new story for how and why they got there. The human mind was so weak that it was easily altered. Or maybe, she thought, frowning as she pulled away, it was that strong. All shifting, adaptable beings had to be, right?
Yet what Skamar didn’t expect, and somehow still allowed, was to be pulled close again. The new story developing in Vaughn’s strong/weak mind was clearly a romance. His mouth fastened on hers this time with a dizzying warmth, an enveloping she’d never before felt yet somehow still welcomed. She returned the kiss, her first, with a shocking urgency. In spite of that, or maybe because of it, she pulled away. Licking now tingling lips, she warily eyed Vaughn . . . who eyed her mouth dreamily.
“How did we—” But he broke off abruptly, putting a hand to his mouth and coming away with blood.
“He punched you,” she lied, flushing. Hey, she wasn’t the one who’d turned the memory cleanse into a kiss!
But it was already forgotten. Vaughn startled again, then fumbled his phone from his pocket. Face already expectantly grim, it fell further as he read the text, and Skamar didn’t have to be told why.
She sighed. “Where?”
“A park in Centennial Hills. The girl’s father tried to intervene this time. It looks like he was attacked by a dog, of all things.” Vaughn squinted into the sky, searching for a memory as he canvassed the stars, before shaking his head. “Isn’t that strange?”
Skamar just nodded, stood, and turned away to hide her bloodied clothing. Touching her hand to still-tingling lips, she thought, Yes. It was all very strange indeed.
The latest victim’s name was Theresa, she’d been born within two months of Ashlyn, and her father was mad with grief. He screamed and ranted about mutant hounds until the nurses held him down and sedated him by force.
