The Touch Of Twilight by Vicki Pettersson Page A

to follow his gaze, and discovered a surprisingly slight woman just behind me.
    She was short, barely five feet tall, and so pale her skin sparked off itself, causing her to glow with a soft radiance. If she was wearing clothing it was spandex-tight, merely rounding out her curves and muting her sex like a naked Barbie. Her hair swung down her back, snapping in effervescent waves, and I watched as a droplet fell to the floor, where it reflected the light blazing from the Tulpa’s eyes before it sizzled and was gone.
    Behind me the Tulpa roared. “Break it down!”
    The woman smiled…with sparkling spiked teeth. “I have a better idea.”
    And though she looked too fragile to resist a blown kiss, much less the Tulpa’s anger, she effortlessly scooped me up at the waist, her translucent, shiny fingers winnowing their way down to my ankles. I was so disoriented—and so relieved to no longer be cooking from the inside out—it took me a moment to realize I was floating. “Shit—wait!”
    The Tulpa protested too. “You can’t—!”
    “Just did.” Her voice, like her hair, was effervescent and snapping sharp, the syllables of her words running together in churning ripples to reverberate off one another.
    “It’s a law!”
    “Meant to be broken.” She waved the Tulpa away, and flashed those pointed teeth again, more pearl than white. She glanced up to find me watching. “Come. We must hurry.”
    “The mortal—” I began, flailing as she shifted her feet.
    “—is already dead.” She was studying the distance between the floor and the top of my head, and said it without emotion. “The Tulpa is animating him with residual energy.”
    “It’s an illusion?” I took my eyes off her long enough to gaze up at Vincent again. He was still rotating slowly, drifting closer to the center of the black hole, but too far removed now for me to make out the expression on his frozen face.
    “Yes, but the heat melting this building is not. Let’s go.” I’d floated higher, and she pulled me beneath the center of the black hole, straight-armed, like I was a kite. Wait a minute…
    The Tulpa objected as well. “You can’t shield her forever!”
    “Don’t need to,” she muttered, almost sounding bored. She grabbed my other ankle, steadying me, the coolness from her palms spreading through my body, though I knew it was unbearably hot. Even the steel beams looked to be sweating. “Creating and sustaining a black hole burns a massive amount of fuel. You’re running out of energy at an alarming rate, am I right? Besides, I could just take her back to Midheaven with me. You’ll never touch her there.”
    I didn’t think it was possible for the Tulpa to blanch, but he did, and wondering what, and where, Midheaven was, I looked up.
    That’s how I saw Vincent’s body suddenly stretch like spaghetti, his head whipping back in a sharp centrifugal swirl. For a moment I thought the rest of him would follow, but people weren’t meant to enter black holes, and in the next instant his body was rent by the tides of gravitational force, snapping, dissipating, destroyed so thoroughly, it was as if he’d never been. I swallowed down a scream. The woman and the Tulpa seemed not to notice.
    “Now scoot along, tulpa,” And she said his name like she would say
cat
or
dog
, like he was a thing and not a person. The black hole wobbled in the sky, and the Tulpa let out an infuriated but hollow yell.
    The woman turned her back on him and whispered to me, “Are you ready for this?”
    “No, no, no!” I said, suddenly panicked, knowing what she was thinking. “I was never good at science, but I know if you get too close to a black hole, there’s no escaping it. So maybe we can talk about fighting or shooting our way out of here instead. I-I’m really good at that.”
    “Okay, shooting. We’ll do that.” She turned her wicked grin on me. “I’ll be the propulsion. You’re the rocket.”
    And she bent her shimmering knees and