"I have some questions for you," I said. "And you're going to answer them or I'm going to use this."
His face broke at my words. "Why are you doing this? I don't understand."
"I need you to prove who you are," I said.
"Prove who I am? Is this a joke? Or some kind of witchcraft?" he asked, his face lined with the wounds of betrayal.
"We've been infiltrated by a creature that can pass as anyone. It's called a doppelganger. I have to be sure you're not that creature and until I am, I'm not letting you out," I said.
His face softened slightly, though the corners of his lips were still bent and his forehead had a bunched overhang. "I don't believe you."
His response stunned me into momentary silence. "You what?"
He rattled the manacles. "This is a trick. I don't know what you're trying to do, but it has to do with sorcery. The next thing I know you'll spill my blood upon your floor and summon a demon with it."
The response was so convincing I almost relented. "It's not that easy, Simon. I have to be sure. It almost wiped out the American government, and if you are the creature, it'll have control of it from the inside."
"Fine," he said, spitting the word out as if it tasted bad. "What do you want to know? That I've courted you before and it went badly? Or about the dead man with his blood sucked out? Or all the lies you've told me since I've known you? What about the Brave Eagle? That I was there while you saved George and Martha Washington? Or that you fought a bony knight? What else do I need to tell you to prove that I'm the real me? That I'm Simon Snyder. Kat, listen to me please. It's me. I've known you for almost four years now, and I'm in love with you."
I reacted as well as I could under the circumstances. A younger me might have stabbed him in the leg for such utterances. I wasn't interested in him like that, but I also had no intenting of being cruel.
I set the knife on the armoire and pulled the iron key from my pocket. "You understand that I had to check. We couldn't have you end up as the President, if it really wasn't you."
Simon gave me a heavy smile. "I understand. I suppose I would have done the same if I were in your shoes. Or boots, as it were."
I should have known it was the real Simon by his smell alone. It reminded me of a clearing in a sunlit pine forest. I leaned over, giving him a mischievous smile as I placed the key in the lock.
Kat. He called me Kat.
I pulled away from him, quickly grabbing the knife and wishing I had the axe instead.
"You're not Simon," I said.
He looked like he was ready to argue, but decided against it, probably seeing the resoluteness of my expression.
"Where did I make a mistake?" he asked.
"You called me Kat. There's only two people who've ever called me that. Ben Franklin and the Empress Catherine, and you're neither of them," I said.
It widened its eyes—or Simon's eyes, I should say—in surprise. "The Empress Catherine. I'd nearly forgotten about her. I was there at her end."
A stone formed in my gut. The story Catherine had told about a dream that she found herself on the throne.
"That was you?" I asked.
"You have to understand," it said. "I've been doing this for a long time. She wouldn't have been the first empress I'd killed and taken the place of."
Rage filled my veins like molten lava. I nearly stabbed it with the knife, but thought better. It might be trying to provoke me into a mistake.
"Why do you do this?" I asked.
"Wouldn't you if your world was going to end? Do anything possible to find a new home?" it asked.
"Then why not come peacefully? Why all the subterfuge and threats of war?" I asked.
It scowled, which was an unpleasant expression on the Warden. "How naive, Princess. Do you think we haven't tried? First, our friend Perun does not think we should. He believes that we should go to the end, quietly and with honor. And second, early incursions were met with prejudice and pitchforks. But now that we have the capacity to come through in numbers, we're not going to be beaten back easily."
The denials never left my lips because I knew the difficulty of being an immigrant. No matter how much I tried to assimilate, they always found reasons to distrust me. At least I'd overcome the Society's ills.
"Are you trying to make me believe that your side has no plans of conquest?" I said incredulously.
"Name one of your countries that hasn't tried to conquer another," he said with a mocking sneer. "Your history is filled with conquests. Why should this be any different? Spare me your indignation. I've had my fill."
Then with little warning, he flexed his arms, snapping the wooden spindles and bringing the chain over his head and around to the front. I was moving towards the axe in the other room by the time he was pulling his arms out of the iron clamps.
I realized how foolish it was to have thought those could hold him, when he could change shape at will. I backed through the kitchen and into the bathroom. The high ledge of the tiled bath provided a defensible position.
The doppelganger sauntered into the room with arrogance to spare. The manacles dangled from one hand, scraping across the floor.
"First I'm going to kill you," he said. "And then I'm going to kill your friend the Warden."
Clutching the axe, I asked, "How did you know those things you said? Those were private things he would have never revealed."
He showed me his tongue. "I secrete a saliva that convinces people to tell me their innermost secrets and forget that they're my captive. It's a shame I'm the last of my kind, or we could have conquered you trusting fools a long time ago. But such is the way of the multiverse."
"That time comes to an end," I said, readying the axe.
The doppelganger lifted one end of the manacle and squeezed it in his hand. The iron cuff was a quarter inch thick, but the creature bent it in half as if it were a piece of parchment.
"I'll be taking that axe from you, Princess," it said, hopping over the edge of the bath.
I threw a ball of sorcery at him—purple and black with threads of lightning. The density and control would have made Zentrii proud. Hell, I wanted to jump in the air and click my heels together. But the doppelganger caught the seething ball with its other hand and squeezed until it melted into black mist.
"Merde," I said under my breath.
It had me trapped, and my magic could do nothing against it. I'd given it my best shot. But it wasn't going to let me live now. I just wished it wasn't using my friend's form with which to kill me.
"Time to die, Princess," said the doppelganger with Simon's lips.
I extended my clawed hand and the doppelganger reacted as if it expected another ball of sorcery. I reached and turned the star-shaped handle, which squeaked brass against brass, an innocent sound with deadly implications.
Then I thought the whole house was coming down.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The doppelganger leapt away as the first tentacle extended out like a whip unfurling. The Warden's double moved with sinewy grace, dodging the seeking appendage, dancing around it like a master duelist.
My plan looked to come to a rapid end until the second tentacle emerged, quickly followed by a third and a fourth. Impossibly, four tentacles as thick as my thigh extended from the small pipe, writhing and thrashing, trying to get a hold of the doppelganger.
Using the distraction, I ran along the side of the bath, keeping my head below the edge of the tiled wall. When a tentacle slithered over to grab me, I dove forward, landing heavily on my stomach on the threshold of the kitchen.
I rolled on my back in time to chop off an end with my axe. Then scrambled in a crab walk until I slammed my head against a cabinet.
I was free, but unsure what to do next. If the doppelganger was going to win, then I was free to escape. If the tentacle creature won, then I had a premonition my problems with the doppelganger would feel small in comparison.
The doppelganger, to its credit, was holding its own
against the four tentacles. Well, three and a half since I'd lopped off the end of one. A pus-green fluid oozed out the end of the wounded appendage, throwing dots across the doppelganger's chest.
The sound of something gargantuan moving through the pipes put a shiver of fear through me. The house lurched. Plaster and tile fell from the ceiling. A crack split the kitchen wall.
"Merde," I said under my breath, for what I was about to do, and then louder, "Catch!"
I threw the axe to the doppelganger, who deftly caught it and swung at the nearest tentacle, splitting it in half, which would have made me happy except two more sprung from the opening. The doppelganger had barely been keeping its defenses up. The high walled bath was like an open topped cage hemming it in. The creature in the pipes connected on every fifth blow, which would have broken one of my limbs but only made the doppelganger grimace.
When the trunk of the creature in the pipes came out, I knew I had to unleash my sorcery. The massive appendage was as wide as a young oak tree, with five green-black limbs thrashing about the bath, threatening to tear the whole house apart.
The remaining pipes snapped and twisted on the wall. Whatever supernatural force allowed the massive creature to come through the water pipe was tearing the structure around it apart. Metal groaned and crinkled, while brown, putrid water sprayed out.
I'd always thought each pipe was a portal to another dimension, pulling in the special water for use in the bath. It seemed the creature was harnessing those nineteen portals to fit its enormous girth into our world.
"Back up!" I screamed and then unleashed my magic.
The magic in my head was a well. What I did felt like taking the upper waters and launching them from the tube like a cannon. Half the bath disintegrated in the blast, blowing concrete, ceramics, and metal across the room. The ceiling caved in partially, bringing my wooden bed halfway into the room.
Though my sorcery did nothing but stun the creature in the pipes, it was enough for the doppelganger to lunge forward and twist the handle closed. This happened while I tried to keep my head from imploding. The flood of magic had left me raw and exposed, as if I'd been skinned and dipped in salt.
I was in danger again, I stumbled out of the room while the sounds of grinding—possibly the tentacled creature being sucked back into the pipes—were soul-rendingly loud. Knowing I had no energy to flee, I scrambled up the stairs on hand and foot, banging my knees against every fifth step.
The doppelganger was rounding into the room as I slammed the door to the spare room shut. In what seemed like only a breath later, the axe head came through the door, splitting it in half.
I climbed into the cauldron as the doppelganger put its foot through the door. Splinters flew everywhere. I blinked out of the room and into the space above the street a moment before the creature would have put an axe through my skull.
I'd hoped my exit would be unnoticed, but that illusion was quickly dispelled by the crowd outside my house. The neighbors had flooded into the street because of the earthquake emanating from my bathroom. A young boy in a cap was first to spot me, crying out wordlessly as he pointed in my direction. Like flocking birds, thirty or forty faces turned up to see me hanging in midair in the cauldron. I suppose I should have been grateful that I wasn't wearing a tattered black dress and that my hair wasn't in a tangled halo around my head, every part of me screaming “witch!” to the assembled, but the looks on their faces told me the thoughts behind those shocked gazes weren't far away from that sentiment.
Then the doppelganger, that cunning opportunist, stumbled out of my front door as the Warden and collapsed on the cobblestones. A few people ran over to the "Warden" and helped him to his feet.
He extended a trembling arm in my direction. "It's that Russian sorceress who's bewitched Franklin and the other members of our dear government. She almost killed me by summoning some horrible creature from the great beyond. Kill her! Kill her now!"
Someone in the crowd fired a weapon. The bullet pinged off the cauldron. I flew away from the area, heading as far west as I could in a short time.
Before long, I hovered beneath the clouds. At that great height, sunlight warmed my face, but it wouldn't last long. The evening wind blew hair into my eyes. I hooked it out of the way with curled fingers.
Things had gone from bad to worse, and my head still ached from the unleashing of sorcery. I thought back to the battle in the bath when I turned the handle. I'd felt no ill effects from that demonstration of power. Was it because I hadn't thought about it? Zentrii had told me that my experience was a hindrance.
But my magic wasn't the issue. Simon Snyder was being held by the doppelganger, and if I couldn't figure out where, then he would die.
My first instinct was the Warden's apartment, but I knew it wouldn't be that easy. The doppelganger had taken Simon after the party, but before the vote. I eliminated the possibility that it was after the vote, because of Simon's confidence outside the House of Representatives.
Which pretty much left the whole city to worry about. I slumped against the edge of the cauldron. If the location was near my home, then Simon was as good as dead.
In a fit of rage, I pinched the skin of my arm, hard, to dispel my despondency. That sort of thinking would do no good here. I had to concentrate. I knew the clues were there.
Maybe I was asking the wrong questions. Maybe the question should be how did the doppelganger get access to so many important government officials? A cold shiver went through me. I was on the right track.
The doppelganger had been able to take the place of so many people because it had access and was able to get them alone. Which meant that the missing people had to be a part of the city's elite, but not one of the inner circle, because someone would notice frequent absences.
I eliminated President Washington and the leaders of both parties. Access to them was limited, and if the doppelganger had taken their place, they would have never let Simon take the nomination for Vice President to replace the fallen Adams.
In fact, it probably wasn't any current member of the House or Senate. The doppelganger had been taking the place of the assistants closest to those people, but not the people themselves.
Why?
After a moment, the answer came to me. Because once the doppelganger had killed them, their absences would be noticed. The creature had played a dangerous game, taking the place of so many people. I suppose as creatures of logic, we fabricated reasons for these strange occurrences rather than make peace with the truth.
So was there anyone who had been acting odd who couldn't be accounted for? I briefly considered Thomas Jefferson, but he'd been visibly distraught when we met him a few weeks ago, and why would he summon us for help if he were the doppelganger?
I eliminated William Bingham as well, along with just about every other important official I could think of, due to the process of elimination that the doppelganger had been seen in their presence after the war vote. Which left no one else that I knew. Which meant that Simon would die.
"Who wasn't at the war vote?" I asked myself, because every important individual in the city was there that day. Everyone, except those the doppelganger had killed and taken the place of, since it'd been impersonating the Warden.
The answer became abundantly clear. And I realized I should have seen it sooner. Russians were notoriously superstitious. That Mather Amberger didn't know about his Domovoi should have been suspicious. The house faerie was telling me that he wasn't the real Mr. Amberger at all by throwing his boots into the tree.
So I knew exactly where Simon Snyder was being kept. I just hoped to get there in time to save him.
Chapter Thirty-Five
I left the cauldron behind a stone wall near the Amberger farm. For now, I held the advantage of surprise. The doppelganger would assume that I wouldn't know where the real Simon was being kept.
The sun had passed below the horizon, leaving a faint nimbus on the western sky. I crept across the field in a low
crouch, seeing no one outside the home. In fact, the whole farm was dark. The Ambergers had sons and daughters of various ages, and a farm to upkeep. It seemed unlikely that no one would be home, or if they were that there would be no lantern or candle lit.
Looking across the fields towards the other farms proved this point. From my vantage, I saw at least three other farmhouses. Cooking smoke trailed from their chimneys while firelight warmly illuminated their curtained windows.
The windows of the Amberger house were coal black. I had to assume that at some time, the doppelganger had murdered the rest of the family when the subterfuge had become too difficult to maintain.
Standing behind a wooden fence made of mill-cut wood, I surveyed the various buildings to determine which one would hold Simon. My gut told me that he wouldn't be in the house. Which left the chapel or the barn. Sally Hemings had been kept in the barn. Would the creature put Simon in the Amberger's barn? But if the Ambergers still had farmhands working the fields, they would need to utilize it.
Ducking low, I ran across the space between the buildings to the front of the chapel. The front door was locked, but that meant little to me as I had lock picks hidden in my boot.
The click of the door closing was abnormally loud in the hallowed space. Without light, my eyes took a moment to adjust. I could make out dim shapes in the dark: the wooden pews, a stone altar beneath the dome, and the double cross on a white banner at the back of the chapel.
There were many hiding spots in the dark space, so I moved carefully, peeking into each row to make sure Simon wasn't stashed between them. When I reached the altar, I thought I'd guessed wrong, until I heard a moan.
Simon was laying against the back of the altar, bound by ropes that went around the stone legs. I hadn't noticed them in the dark. His chin bumped against his chest as he struggled against his unconsciousness.
"Simon," I whispered, pulling his head up by his lush brown hair. "Can you hear me?"
He mumbled in a drunken slur. He might have said Katerina, or something similar.
The Franklin Deception (The Dashkova Memoirs Book 4) Page 21