by Kelly Meding
As the numbness wore off and I caught hold of my initial panic, I felt my tap to the Break return. It snapped into place like a rubber band. I tried to picture the living room, someplace where David would see me and wake the fuck up. I found a few tendrils of loneliness and grasped them. The second syringe broke skin. I closed my eyes, pulled on everything I had, and slipped into the Break.
A scratchy wool rug burned into my naked back. The mounted deer’s head loomed above me. I wrenched my head toward the sofa. David lay flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling. Probably drugged with whatever I’d been given. Shit.
The bedroom door squealed open.
I twisted onto my stomach, my limbs still not quite cooperating, like rolling through syrup. My legs were heavy, dead weights. I reached out with both hands, grabbed a handful of the faded area rug, and tried to pull. A foot pressed down on the small of my back. I screamed, although there was no one to hear me. We were in the middle of nowhere.
He kicked. Pain flared in my left side, and it knocked the wind out of me. I felt sick as I gasped. Struggled as he flipped me over on my back and straddled my thighs. I kicked and bucked to little effect, terror overtaking good sense, still lacking full control of my body.
Not him, not him, not him, not him—
The first blow filled my mouth with blood. The second bounced my skull off the floor, and I saw stars. He repeated this one just as I got a good inhale back, and I spun around inside my own brain. My eyesight blurred. Everything was muddled.
Agony in my other hip, just like before. That strange sucking sensation. Maybe he’d take whatever he wanted from my bones and just leave. Leave and never come back, or I’d kill him. Rip his head off his shoulders and use it for volleyball. The syringe came out, but he didn’t get up. I clung to consciousness, pulling desperately on my tap to the Break. Loneliness was hard to find, buried under so much rage and fear and pain.
Just one more transport, please!
My entire body screamed as I slipped in and out once more, landing some distance away in the kitchen, on cracked and stained linoleum. I flailed for a weapon, even as heavy footsteps thundered toward me. Got my right hand into a cabinet and around the handle of a pot. His weight was on me, pushing me to the floor. One hand circled my throat. I swung the pot with all my available strength and was rewarded with a dull crack. He howled, released my throat, and punched me in the stomach.
I curled forward, agony flaring in my guts. My lungs seized. I swung feebly with the pot. He caught my wrist. Snapped it. I shrieked, my brain starting to short-circuit. He caught my other wrist and pinned them both above my head. Agony lanced up and down my arm from my broken wrist. I don’t know when I’d started crying, but with my torso stretched and my lungs gasping, I began to choke.
He laughed, and in that horrifying, deep-chested, inhuman sound, I understood what my heart had kept trying to tell me—the thing holding me down was not my Wyatt. It was something else.
“Help!” I didn’t manage many decibels, but I repeated my plea as I sought my tap. Couldn’t find it. I couldn’t drum up the correct emotional cocktail of loneliness to make my Gift work. Rage rioted in my pain-addled brain.
His weight shifted. I wept, furious at my weakness, disgusted at my inability to protect myself. He leaned down. I could smell his sour breath puffing near my face.
Not again. My eyes snapped open. I saw his neck.
I reared up and sank my teeth into his throat. Fucking hard. I locked my jaw and skin broke. Blood filled my mouth, thick and oily. He bucked, hands beating my hips and chest, but I didn’t let go. I clamped down harder, digging into his neck like a stray dog who’d finally found a meal.
I didn’t see the pot until it smashed into my temple. Lights flashed in my eyes. Something buzzed in my ears. My jaws relaxed. He rolled away, gasping. His blood was on my face, my tongue, everywhere. I rolled and spit and retched. Then the most beautiful sound in the world made it through the buzz—voices. Not the scary, no-one-hears-them-but-me voices—real ones, on the other side of the cabin door.
Confused, cold, and in desperate agony, I did the only thing I could think of—I took a deep breath and screamed as loudly as I could.
Not-Wyatt backhanded me. The world blurred. Fists were beating on the door. Two male voices shouted. Familiar voices. My attacker had a dish towel pressed to his throat. He made a dive for his abandoned syringe.
Over the din, I recognized one voice screaming my name. Relief only made my tears surge, and I returned the call with everything I had left. “Phineas!”
Syringe in hand, not-Wyatt hauled ass to his feet. The door rattled. He was caught. With primal rage in his eyes, he turned on me. Fire exploded in my ribs, compounding the throbbing in my head. The front door broke open with a dull crash.
“Fucking hell—”
“What the—?”
The activity around me was a blur. I cradled my wrist to my chest, pulled my legs up, and curled in as tight as I could manage, shivering, aching. Heard grunts and slaps of flesh on flesh. Someone hollered. A thud. Footsteps. A hand on my shoulder.
“Evy?”
I cracked one eye open, saw his face so full of rage and concern, and the irrational side of my brain took over. I yelped and scrambled away, backing up until I hit the kitchen cabinets and rattled the things above. New bruises throbbed, and my wrist felt numb, ready to fall off.
Wyatt was frozen so perfectly where he’d knelt that he could have been a statue. Same size as the other one, same face, same every-damn-thing.
No, not the same. This one had talked. He’d said my name.
“Evy, it’s me,” he said again, desperate.
Nothing. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. Only my throbbing body kept me from pitching into the haze that had crept around the edges of my vision.
Phineas el Chimal appeared behind him. His narrow face was stony, predatory blue eyes full of cold fury and bloodlust. Our eyes met, and those emotions shifted immediately into something softer. Protective. He stepped out of sight, then was back with a folded blanket. He approached cautiously. I hated that I didn’t pull from him as I’d pulled from Wyatt. Hated that I let Phin wrap me in the scratchy blanket and wipe my face with a damp rag. He was my friend, a were-osprey and one of the last of his Clan, but he wasn’t the man I loved.
No, the man I loved was left on the kitchen floor, while Phin cradled me in his arms and carried me back to my room. Phin tucked me into bed and piled on the covers. I couldn’t stop shaking. I was starting to shut down, and I fought to keep it together.
“You’re safe now,” Phin said. He picked up the first syringe, his mouth puckering. “He took this from you?”
From beneath my cocoon of blankets, all I could manage was a nod. His eyes flickered to me, so many mixed emotions in them.
“David?” I croaked, teeth chattering.
“Alive, but unable to move.”
“Him?”
Phin inclined his head toward the door, listening.
“Being tied up as we speak, and none too gently. The resemblance is remarkable.”
I grunted, wanting to cry again for no good reason.
He crouched until we were eye level. I wanted to hide from the ferocity in his gaze and was glad that his anger wasn’t directed at me. “Evangeline, I must ask—”
“He didn’t.” I swallowed, a fresh round of tears clogging my throat. “The drugs wore off.”
“He tried to steal from you, and for that he deserves death.”
“We need to find out what his game is first,” Wyatt said from the doorway. “Then we’ll fucking kill him.”
Phin shifted so I could see past him. Only my intense shivering prevented me from flinching at the sight of Wyatt. At the misery he exuded in his slumped shoulders and in the downturn of his mouth. He understood what had happened, the perverse way I’d been manipulated, and he was at a loss as to how to fix it. At as much of a loss as I was.
I closed my eyes. Saw Wyatt�
�s face above me, leering down. Felt hands on my skin, pressing roughly. Hitting. I tried to alter that image, change it to a new face. Anyone else’s face. It didn’t work. A tear trickled down the side of my nose when I opened my eyes again.
“He took blood from my hips,” I said. “Deep down, from the bone, I think. He drugged me so I couldn’t move, but it wore off.”
“Bone marrow?” Wyatt said. “Why would someone come here and steal your bone marrow?”
“We shall have to ask the thief,” Phin said. “And then we shall ask the person who hired him.”
“Has to be Thackery,” I said, surprising myself with the lucid connection. “He hits me with the parasite, hoping I’ll heal. He’s checking my blood so he can make his antidote.”
Wyatt’s eyebrows arched. “Natural antibodies. Holy shit.”
“I’m his own goddamned petri dish.” Fury blossomed in my chest.
“Then why the charade?” Phin asked. “Thackery could have sent his people here to overpower your friends and kidnap you, or simply kill you and take your blood. Why this way?”
“To fuck with my head. If his bloodsucker out there hadn’t stopped to cop a feel or two, he would have been in and out before I could move again.” I couldn’t look Wyatt in the eye. Shame heated my cheeks. “My brain would’ve had a hell of a harder time separating the real Wyatt from the fake one, had that been the case.”
The former made a strangled noise. I shut my eyes. The shivering had lessened to an occasional tremble, but my broken wrist shrieked. All I wanted was another shower, so I could scrub the feeling of those unfamiliar hands off my body. Wash every molecule of his thick, inhuman blood from my skin.
“Evangeline, do any of your injuries require medical attention?”
There didn’t seem to be an inch of skin that did not ache or smart. My ribs were sore, my head throbbed, my mouth hurt—but all were things that would heal on their own. “Bastard broke my wrist. Need to set it.”
“Let me see it.”
With Phin’s help, I got my arm free of the blankets. He cradled my hand as gently as he could, and I tried not to cry out. Failed. Wyatt appeared next to him long enough to hand over a sports bandage, then retreated to the doorway. My heart wept for the distance he was keeping. Phin wrapped his fingers around my wrist. I held my breath.
“This will hurt a great deal,” he said.
“No shit. Do it.”
He did. It did. I was crying again by the time he’d firmly wrapped my wrist in the bandage and secured the ends, tight enough to allow the bones to mend. I collapsed back under the covers, exhausted, and closed my eyes, willing the tears to stop. I had to get hold of myself, calm down, and think rationally about this.
Clothing shifted, and I felt Phin move away. “The bastard will be unconscious for a bit longer,” he said, not to me. “I’ll sit with your other friend until he’s properly revived.”
I almost shouted for Phin to stay. Leaving meant I’d be alone with Wyatt, and I didn’t want that. Didn’t want to talk about what had happened, because it would hurt him. Didn’t want to flinch if he tried to touch me, because it would hurt him even more. He hadn’t attacked me. He didn’t deserve that hurt.
The door hinges creaked. No snap to indicate it had closed completely. Silence. Maybe he’d left after all. I hazarded a peek with one eye. No, Wyatt still stood near the door, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his jeans, shoulders hunched. A stance of uncertainty. Attention firmly fixed on the floor by his feet.
“May I stay, Evy?” he asked the floor, and I wanted to cry all over again.
“You’ve never had to ask before,” I replied, opening the other eye.
“You’ve never been nearly raped by me before.”
The bleakness of his tone frightened me. That wasn’t what had happened. Was it? I shoved at the fog invading my brain, telling me to give up and just sleep the pain away. “It wasn’t you, Wyatt.”
He finally looked at me. Hurt and confusion warred with rage, all three compounded by whatever he saw in my face. “That’s not what your eyes say when they look at me. You know I’d never do that to you, right? You believe me?”
“Of course.” I untangled from the pile of blankets atop me so I could sit up, keeping one around my shoulders. My ribs protested the movement. I ignored the ache and tucked my legs so I was kneeling on the bed, a thin blue blanket folded around me like a cape. All I wanted was time alone to process this, but I couldn’t send him away. Not now. “Wyatt, please come here.”
He didn’t move, coiled so tight I thought he’d shatter. Even from a distance, I saw the faint vibrations in his arms and chest. He was shaking. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here again, that I didn’t protect you.”
He’d walked into a situation so similar to the way I’d died, and all my fear and anger were reflecting back from him tenfold. In his mind, he’d failed to save me once from misery and death. Now he’d decided he had almost failed me a second time. If the drug had worn off just a few seconds later, if I hadn’t moved as fast as I had—
No. No what-ifs about this one. I was fine. Shaken up and hell-bent on carving answers out of the thing in the other room, but fine. My broken wrist and bruised ribs and aching head would heal. The real Wyatt was standing nearby, proving to my trauma-addled brain that he hadn’t been the one to hurt me. We had survived our deaths; we could survive this, too.
“Wyatt, it wasn’t your f—”
He took two sudden steps toward me. I flinched away, heart racing. He froze, and I wanted to weep when I realized what I’d done. Grim acceptance pulled his mouth into a straight line, and, with curt precision, he pivoted and left the room.
I collapsed against the mound of blankets, too stunned to do anything but stare at the hewn door for a while, silent tears leaving hot trails down my cheeks.
Chapter Ten
The longer I lay in bed, the more rage overtook my anxiety. Rage at the stolen blood, at the assault, at the seeds of doubt the attacker had planted in me simply by wearing Wyatt’s face. I had to fix this, so I forewent a second shower in favor of acquiring information.
Two pairs of jeans, three of my solid-colored T-shirts, underwear, and a bra were neatly folded in one of the dresser’s top drawers—Wyatt must have gone back to the apartment. Curled on one of the shirts was my cross necklace, safe and sound. After struggling one-handed with the bra, jeans, and a T-shirt, and earning a few painful jostles to my wrist, I tried to smooth my damp hair into submission. The shorter locks around my face were stiff in places, darkened with blobs of dried blood.
Gross.
I couldn’t manage the necklace with one hand, so I tucked it into my front pocket, just grateful to have it near.
Three familiar faces and one agonizing copy greeted me when I entered the living room. David was sitting up on the sofa, flexing his hands and arms as the numbing agent wore off. He blushed and ducked his head. I wouldn’t patronize him; we’d both been fooled. End of story.
Wyatt was barely visible through the kitchen doorway, fiddling with something on the counter. His doppelgänger was tied to a wooden chair with bungee cords, a length of nylon rope, and a twisted bedsheet. The man (or whatever) was bleeding through the bandage on his neck. He had a knot on one cheek, likely from my whack with the pot, a bloody nose, and more blood splattered on his clothes. Most of the blood was a dark shade of red, and I recalled the bitter, oily taste of it. Our prisoner was definitely not human.
Phin had a second chair placed an arm’s reach away, and he sat there like a sentinel, shoulders stiff and back straight, full attention on his quarry.
“What is he?” I asked, stopping behind Phin.
“I believe he is a pùca, although he will not speak.”
“What the hell’s a pùca?” I cast a searching look at Wyatt, who shook his head. This one was new to both of us.
“A rare and distant cousin of Therians. Few are known or recorded in our history, as they are an antisocial sort. They prefer pla
ying tricks and starting trouble to productively living in man’s world. I’ve never met one before, but it does explain his shape-changing ability.”
“He’s a trickster,” Wyatt said, joining us with a paring knife, a serrated bread knife, and a barbecue lighter. “That’s what you’re saying?”
Phin tilted his head, considering the word. “Yes, from your mythological texts, ‘trickster’ describes him well.”
“Not to me,” I said. “They didn’t teach this one at Boot Camp, and I didn’t pay a lot of attention in school.” After three full minutes of explanation from Phin that included names I didn’t know—Coyote of the Southwest, Loki in the Norse, Kokopelli and Zuñi, and a lot of others that blended together—I waved my good hand in surrender. “Information overload.”
“Apologies.”
“So why now?” My question was half directed at the silent doppelgänger, who hadn’t looked up from his lap since I’d entered the room. “Why would something that’s been unseen and unrecorded for decades suddenly show up, track me down, and suck marrow out of me?”
“Let’s ask the fucker.” The coldness in Wyatt’s voice was almost a physical presence. He switched places with Phin and was now directly across from the man wearing his face. The reflection was eerie in its sameness and in the differences. Wyatt exuded hate in a way I’d never seen and prayed to never, ever be on the receiving end of. The doppelgänger—pùca, trickster, whatever—still stared at his own lap, face bruised and bleeding, resigned.
“You should know up front that you’re going to die,” Wyatt said to his reflection. “The only thing you get to decide is if you die fast, or piece by piece until you’re begging me to end it.”
I shuddered.
“Who are you working for?”
The doppelgänger looked up. A crystal shard hung around his neck, swirling a lazy purple, tied with some sort of thin brown leather. “You know who,” he replied, and I understood why he had never spoken. His voice was like nails on a chalkboard, high and screechy and teeth-chattering.