Read Online The Touch Of Twilight by Vicki Pettersson - Free Book Online Page B

let me borrow yours.”
    I was already backing away, so when she lunged I tripped over an abandoned crate, which was all that saved me from a vertical autopsy. The first swipe of those ice-hook claws took a chunk from my left breast, but I dodged the second. She shot forward and secured one bony hand around my throat, and I scrabbled at those tensile, opalescent fingers as her other palm fell again to my chest, firing my glyph, too close to its target. Her fingers dug in and I head-butted her, causing both her hands to loosen. I got one more in before her frigid hand clawed onto my shoulder again.
    “The spirit of the Kairos shouldn’t be shackled to a body with damaged
chi
,” she snarled, and returned my head butt, sending shards of icy white light firing through my skull. Then she dragged me toward the portal. I scrambled, digging in my heels, the nonslip soles catching until she leveled one of hers down on top of my left foot. She was as strong as I was, but suppler, bending and reshaping to form in front of me or beside me or behind me at will. I struggled harder against her fluid grip, now positive I really did not want to go through that supernatural doorway.
    Still, she was making slow and steady headway, and so focused was I on the bloodred portal that the cold sprawl of that homicidal hand crawling over my face was a complete surprise. “Time to remove the blinders, Kairos.”
    And she did what no one else had been able to before. She yanked my mask from my head so the straps tore at my earlobes, threw it to the ground, and drank in my Olivia identity, my most prized secret. I drove my left elbow straight up and connected with her chin, though it immediately shifted. Judging the number of steps and direction the blow would send her, I sent a flying kick to await her there. But she didn’t show up. The next thing I felt was her knee connecting with my already bruised kidney from behind.
    Well, she had me bested there, I thought as I crumpled to the ground. I couldn’t very well return the favor when she didn’t have any organs.
    When she could dissipate like smoke only to reappear behind you…
    No, I thought, balling up as she flipped me over. Nobody could do that. I just hadn’t been seeing clearly.
    But I was seeing clearly now, and her whole body was shining and ethereal and luminescent as she straddled me. “Divided energy, Joanna. Divided looks…and a divided heart, no?”
    I swung my legs up behind her to link them beneath her arms and propel her to her back.
    The scent reached me first, more of my blood being spilled, though pain came close on its heels, an eruption of nerve endings telling me something had just destroyed my spleen. I squeezed my eyes shut, arching backward as sound gurgled in my throat. I was on my back again, and this time she dropped her knees to my shoulders, pinning me, closing the distance between us.
    “You asked why I saved you from the Tulpa.” The froth bubbling up in her voice wasn’t as enticing now. She nudged my chin and waited until I could look at her. “It was for one reason only, Joanna. You’re the real target in both my worlds. You’re the Alpha and Omega of the spectral plane. You, my dear, are the golden ring.”
    “And let me guess,” leveled a voice from behind me. “A pretty lady like you likes your baubles.”
    A light flared through the rent in her chest and I had a moment to think,
Glyph
, though before I could identify it, her weight was gone, layer after layer of her morphing into flight, breaking laws with bubbles, delicately straddling worlds. Those in my troop who had projectile weapons fired them into the night sky. Hunter’s whip coiled up in a resounding snap, but caught nothing but disturbed air. My glyph died on my chest, but the pain was still coming in regular, if less intense, waves. When I looked up, Felix was looming over my head.
    “Dude,” he said, boyish face implacable. “I totally thought you were going to throw a