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The other platform held Vaughn Rhett. He was suspended over a sparkling blue pool, though he faced exactly the opposite problem in his potential death. Lifted to his toes by a makeshift series of pulleys and levers, he would suffer crucifixion if his platform suddenly gave way. And though Skamar didn’t move, didn’t even blink, something inside of her screamed. Her palms also began to sweat as she recalled the acute ache ratcheting up her arms from the giant nails the Tulpa had driven into her wrists. Her calves cramped up reflexively, and she closed her eyes, swaying as she remembered her ribs pressing against her lungs in a slow suffocation. Her normally sharp mental admonition to pull it together might as well have been a kitten’s plea.
“Decisions, decisions.”
Her eyelids flipped open, and her gaze landed on the ringmaster to this wet, twisted circus. The Tulpa stepped onto the walkway separating the two pools, surrounded by three doppelgänger hounds, their bodies shimmering and frothing, refractive and nauseating. When Skamar said nothing, the Tulpa grinned and took a bow.
“Choose platform A and you’ll save four innocent, albeit relatively useless, lives. My pets, then, will have to feast on something else.” He placed a hand on the flat head of the nearest warden. It growled liquid menace. “Choose the second, and you’ll save only one life—though one that’s been trained to save many.”
Skamar said nothing. She was trying to still her shaking hands, hidden behind her back.
“No choice!” Vaughn’s voice was strained as the rope around his neck drew tighter. “Save the girls!”
He didn’t realize his words made her decision more difficult, not less.
The Tulpa smiled. He knew it. “Well, it’s a conundrum either way. I’ll leave you to it.”
He began to turn, and Skamar acted out of instinct. Letting out a battle cry, she dove not for Vaughn or the girls, but for the Tulpa. Yet even as she flew forward, he rocketed straight into the air, yanking at ropes he’d had concealed behind his back. The platforms, one attached to each of his wrists, twisted from the pools. The girls fell. Vaughn screamed.
Unable to cease her forward motion, Skamar could only drop to the walkway where the doppelgänger hounds lunged, all three striking at once. Skamar’s screams spiraled throughout the theater as the drumbeats increased, syncopated with the girls’ terrified cries and, just as they hit the water, the Tulpa’s booming laugh. “Permanence must be a bitch.”
Skamar was too busy working a jaw full of luminous razors from her left calf while shielding her throat with her other hand. Yet the wardens were almost impossible to see in the reflected light of the tanks, eerie undulations appearing through their not-flesh. A strange sensation began to overtake her, one she’d only smelled on others before but recognized immediately—pure, sharp panic.
When the third hound took a chunk from her back, she arched forward and knew the next would claim her heart. Ironically, it was that sharp pain of teeth piercing skin that brought Skamar back to her senses. She hammered one snarling beast on its head, less to fend it off than to anoint it, naming it even as it regained its balance. “Dasher!”
He shuddered, the forced moniker giving him form as Skamar whipped around, kicking the second. “Dancer!”
The third animal again found her back. “Prancer!”
The power of permanence rippled through them, just as it had done when she’d turned from doppelgänger into a full-blown tulpa. It gave them the same momentary pause she’d had, too, and in that moment she launched herself backward. When they continued their midair attack, the wild snaps of the first two dogs found each other instead. Too far gone with battle lust, and too newly born in their permanent state, they writhed madly, tearing at each other’s bodies.
Meanwhile, Skamar propelled the third dog, so recently existing in a liquid form, into the giant tank of water where the girls had already sunk. Release and relief came immediately, and as the third hound lost its breath and life to the black liquid, she dove past the pooling of her own blood to search out the drowning girls.
Blindly, she flailed around until grabbing rope, or hair, or something that wound easily about her hands, then used her legs to thrust herself and the girls straight out of the tank. She dropped the gasping girls on the center platform and braced for the
Tulpa’s counterattack, only to find the cooling bodies of the hounds destroyed by their own magic.
And then she looked up.
The sensation of flying was an afterthought. She was back on the ground so fast, a tortured man cradled in her arms, that the girls were still sputtering on hands and knees. But Skamar forgot them for now. How odd, she thought, removing the rope from Vaughn’s neck, that the Tulpa hadn’t missed a trick. After all, she wouldn’t have expected a patently unreligious being to remember the spear in the side.
Though Vaughn’s larynx was crushed, his neck hadn’t snapped, leaving him to bleed out slowly, as the Tulpa had no doubt intended. Holding the man, Skamar thought of the boy who’d once borne kissable freckles. Tearing up, she could almost smell blueberries. “You did it, Vaughn. You saved those girls. Just like one of those medieval knights.”
She didn’t know if it was the small white lie or her tears dropping to his face that did the trick, but his eyes fluttered open long enough to reveal recognition touching his gaze. “Your . . . name . . .”
It wasn’t even a whisper, only his lips moving, but she read them and whispered back, “Skamar. It means star.”
And he somehow managed to reward her with a full smile, though the shockingly brave look twisted quickly into an anguished wince. Then as she held him, as she cried for the first time ever, her fragile knight died.
Skamar hadn’t opened the door to the apartment in days, never mind left it, so when she allowed Zoe in—and even that had taken a few moments of dull, uninterested consideration—her creator winced at the smell, and then in sympathy. It was the latter emotion that made Skamar want to slam the door shut.
Zoe, in yet another pretty if nondescript disguise, perched on the rented sofa’s side. “So, the Tulpa thinks he’s won. That you’ve gone into hiding . . . injured, licking wounds, beaten.”
“I don’t care what he thinks.” Though she did, of course. Thought created reality, and the Tulpa’s mind was a dangerously fertile place. But even the idea of facing him was too much effort right now.
“He’s still after my granddaughter.”
Skamar clenched her jaw, not looking at Zoe. “Well, I don’t know how to kill him. Obviously.”
Zoe repositioned herself in front of Skamar, who—deeming it too difficult and pointless to move—had simply sunk to her knees just inside the door. Grasping those knees, Zoe squeezed. “Just because you’re born for a particular task doesn’t mean you don’t have to work at it, or that it doesn’t come with a price. In fact, if you’re really born to do something, chances are you’ll die doing it, too.”
