Free The Touch Of Twilight by Vicki Pettersson Page A

sheen that continually ran over its surface, like blood dripping, though it never fell. Yet the outline was less starlike the closer one drew, its edges jagged as though ripped. I reached up…
    “Olivia! No!”
    And gently rubbed a fingertip over the star.
    Tekla was there, slapping my hand away…too late. A crack sounded as the star clamped down over my hand like a Venus flytrap, and my fingertips immediately went numb, dozens of stinging barbs puncturing the printless pads. An acute and tortured scream echoed across the parking lot. Then, just as abruptly, the tiny star released me, and all five points curled in on themselves, a fundamentally protective gesture.
    We all stared questioningly at Warren, clueless superheroes, down to the last.
    Warren looked like he wanted to scream as well, but instead blew out a breath and leveled a maddened look at me. “Okay, so this is the point where I tell you all not to peel off the scabs of the wounded reality.”
    “No,” Tekla corrected sharply. “We passed that point about a minute ago.”
    Warren shot her an equally livid glare…and another at me.
    Ew, I thought, glancing back. Was that what I’d done? “Sorry,” I muttered, to him and the Universe.
    “Why can’t we touch it?”
    “You said there are others?”
    “What’s a double-walker?”
    “Well, that perked them right up,” Tekla said, walking away.
    Warren sighed again, then looked off into the sky as if the answers to all our questions were written there. “Come on, then.”
    “Where to?”
    “Someplace safe.” And as he began limping away, I thought I heard him add, “With lots of alcohol.”

5
    We reconvened at the Downtown Cocktail Lounge on Fremont Street, a touchstone in Vegas’s emerging entertainment district that was helping turn the promised downtown revitalization into less of a longstanding joke. The surprising thing about DCL was its refusal to cater to tourists. With a dim interior, low-key vibe, and not one overpaid celebutante or slot machine in sight, everything about it screamed “locals’ bar”...including the hidden front door.
    However, watching tourists scratch their heads as they tried to find their way in was only part of the location’s appeal. It was also a newly designated safe zone, which explained why we were meeting there. We couldn’t be ambushed by Shadow agents in a safe zone—or tulpas or hopefully bubble beings—so they were good places to while away the hours between dawn and dusk. It was only in the fractional seconds of the sun and moon’s momentary truce that we could cross over into the safety of a true alternate reality, and not merely the flip side of this one.
    There was also no better place to gather than one that served stiff cocktails and funky world beats via the DJ’s laptop 24/7. That too kept the children away. Warren put his hand in the air to call over the waitress as we settled ourselves around the large communal table. We spoke of nothing in particular until drinks were served, at which point I sucked down half the tonic-laced vodka before telling the others about the mask connecting me with the Tulpa, how it’d enabled us both to breathe beneath the massive weight of the black hole, and how his anger had been tinged with fright for the woman who bent gravity to her will.
    Micah tilted his head, his analytical and scientific mind clearly whirring. As our troop’s Seer, Tekla was as sharp as they came, but even she looked perplexed. However, Warren, who’d taken time to change and shower so the DCL employees didn’t move the hidden door entirely upon his approach, perked up at this. “Olivia, I need you to think. Can you tell me what this being smelled like?”
    “Sure,” I said, and closed my eyes to strengthen the memory. My sense of smell had dramatically improved with my metamorphosis at the age of twenty-five into something superhuman…but it hadn’t stopped after that. Experience and applied practice had increased my ability