Regan thought I was straightening up. “Oh, the Kairos gets angry. Could this be the ‘rise of your dormant side’-the third sign of the Zodiac come to life? Take notes, Douglas. We’re in the presence of greatness here. Are you shaking in your high tops?”
Douglas actually looked down. Regan rolled her eyes. “Breaking in new changelings is a bitch.”
I made a face, though I happened to sympathize.
“Guess that leaves me to sum up the situation without the wisdom of the adolescent set. So how’s this for a pithy little roundup?” She sauntered to the center of the room, and I angled to keep her in view as she dropped her weight on the arm of one of the chairs. Douglas shadowed her. “Your real boyfriend is about to hop in the sack with your mortal enemy, and your fake one is getting horizontal with everyone else.”
“That’s just nasty,” Jasmine told me, leaning against a bookshelf crammed with Shadow manuals.
“But the surprising thing is that a man like Lorenzo would need to pimp himself out at all.” Regan took a slow breath. “After all, I’d do him for free.”
“Even that would be charging too much.”
Regan’s left eye twitched and she rose to her feet before she could stop it. I closed the space between the fireplace and me and saw alarm flash in her eyes. Steady, I thought, staying myself where I was. I didn’t want to spook her too soon.
“Jasmine!” Li pulled her sister into view, straining with the effort. “Help her!”
Jasmine yanked away and Li toppled onto her butt. “Get bent, runt.”
Li looked up at me in bereft helplessness.
“Don’t worry, Archer. That lazy bitch can’t help you in any way that matters.”
“Hey!”
“Oh, now you protest?” I muttered to Jasmine, who was suddenly standing attentively beside me. “And do I look worried to you?”
Regan’s brows rose. “If you’re not you should be. Your cover identity is starting to unravel at the edges. It’s only a matter of time now.”
“Does that mean you’re ready to show your hand? Let the Tulpa know his daughter is posing as…” I mouthed, Olivia Archer, erring on the side of caution, not wishing to risk the information leaking into the manuals. Paranoia, one of the few superstitions we did entertain.
Thoughts, actions, and even conversations with an enemy remained private unless the acting agent willed their actions to be known. Otherwise we’d never be able to make love or have a meal, or even go to the bathroom without worrying it would end up on the glossy cover of a graphic novel. Our private moments and thoughts, the same ones mortals kept secret from others-and sometimes themselves-those things remained hidden. Right now these confrontations between Regan and me were parries and thrusts of a personal nature, but if she ever chose to truly strike, the world would know it.
“Not quite yet.” She edged herself back onto the armchair and shot me a sly look. “Though I could tell him about other family members.”
My teeth clenched, but I relaxed when I realized she would only hint at my daughter’s existence as well. She didn’t want to talk about Ashlyn in front of the changelings, and wouldn’t risk the girl’s name showing up in the Shadow manuals either. An empty threat then, I thought, relaxing marginally.
“Or,” she continued, “I could make this really interesting. Even the playing field a bit. Show you my true identity.”
Why? I wondered, instantly distrustful. “You’d better not. You’ll scare the children.”
She remained undaunted. “But don’t you want to know what exactly Ben is fucking, say, this time next week?”
That was why.
She gestured to Douglas before I could answer, and he completed the transformation from jellied shadow to roaring monster. His outline wavered as if a chill wind had swept over him, and the scrawny preteen frame thinned even further. He was the width of a dime as his mass expanded outward and upward to mirror Regan’s. He looked like the ugliest paper doll I’d ever seen. Then he pivoted in front of her, she took one step forward, and their bodies married. His husk-all the parts she didn’t need-fell away, hitting the ground like stoneware. He didn’t move again, and the new Regan, the real one, grinned.
In relative terms, she was pretty. Joaquin, our enemies’ Aquarian, was the last Shadow I’d glimpsed from behind the viscosity of his changeling’s aura, and he’d been all ebony bone and rot, skin hanging from him in blackened strips of aged decay. Regan, in turn, was merely skinless, like some barbaric beauty treatment had shaved it all away, and her blood had dried around her muscles, making her look like she’d been dipped in a thin layer of burgundy candle wax.
Her glittering, pale blue eyes stood out against this dull sleekness, though I spotted a section near her collarbone where the blood had scabbed over unevenly, like a human’s would. It was trailing fresh blood and pus, and when she saw I’d noticed, she began worrying it with her fingers, icy eyes daring me to react. I spotted the white bone of her elbow peeking at me through the ruins of her flesh, still smooth but with a hairline crack, and knew that fissure would widen. Every time she moved, some other muscular system popped open and began to bleed, and though she was meaty-unlike Joaquin-she was still rancid. The wriggling I saw pulsing inside her chest wasn’t from a beating heart.
I decided to wait and drag her from the shop when she wasn’t so gooey. “Let me guess? You guys start decaying as soon as you metamorphose into full-fledged agents, am I right?”
“Duh,” Jasmine said to me. “I could, like, totally smell her from here. And I have allergies.”
“I’m not decaying,” the living corpse said evenly. “I’m becoming more deific, like my ancestors before me.”
“No,” I said, playing along. “You’re simply not aging well.”
The insult was right up Jasmine’s alley. “I’d recommend a face lift…if she had a face.”
“Now, Jas,” I chided. “She’s better off sticking to the basics. Eight hours of sleep, plenty of water…multiple skin grafts.”
Under the “Rose” persona, Regan’s reaction would’ve been no more threatening than a hair toss. But now she snapped her head back and forth, like a snarling dog, her emotions as exposed and raw as her mucus and muscles. As she struggled to regain her composure, I wondered again why she would show me this. I found out as soon as she resumed looking like a mere zombie, instead of a psychotic zombie. “I have a message from your father.”
I sighed. Of course she did. And that’s why she’d sought me out…though it still didn’t explain the freak show. “Let me guess. He wants to make good on all the back payments on my child support?”
Muscles ruptured as she clenched her jaw. “It’s about the doppelgänger that saved your life last week.”
Which confirmed Warren’s suspicion as to who, or what, the woman was. And that the Tulpa knew it too. I quirked a brow at Regan. “And he sent you?”
That didn’t make sense. If the Tulpa thought Regan knew where to find me, he’d have pummeled it out of her and come after me himself. At that point my Olivia Archer cover would be moot.
“He sent a message-by-minion.”
Li put her hands to her cheeks and gasped. Jasmine groaned and pulled out her cell phone again, checking out. I stood blank-faced, pretending I knew what that was.
“I just happened to be the first one to find you.” Her shriveled lips quirked. “Imagine that.”
From her words I gathered a “message-by-minion” was something that applied to all Shadow agents, a mandate that couldn’t be disobeyed. Apparently it also meant Regan had to take her reluctant revelation a step further. Literally. She widened her stance, lifted her arms in the air so the muscles split and bled, and took a moment to steady herself before lowering into a backbend. Her decaying spine cracked in five places.