Very alluring. But this hideous charade had to be continued.
I tossed my long hair over my shoulder and sent the doppelganger a wink. “Maybe.”
He spread his hands, as if to say “What can you do?” He was still slouching, which was fairly impressive when there was nothing in sight to slouch against. “Maybe he is guilty and I’m totally innocent.” His mouth curved, as if he was amused by the very idea. “It only seemed fair to point out that you don’t have all the information.”
“Now you do,” I stuck in. “It could have been either one of them, and if you kill the wrong one, it will be murder.”
“Killing a beast isn’t really murder,” muttered the guard who had wielded the whip, spitting at the doppelganger’s feet.
“You might not think so,” I said, “but you’ll be punished just the same.”
I tested the grip of the guard still holding me. His fingers twitched, relaxed, and, under the steady pressure I was exerting, released. I walked forward, past the cluster of guards, to the doppelganger. He started when I approached him, oddly, as he had not flinched when the whip came down. I reached out, grabbed his hand, and towed him over to Ethan.
When the guards let me pass, I could almost believe we might get away with this.
“The only thing you can do is take us to the Light city,” I said, sounding as certain and casual as I knew how. “All of us.”
The guards parted and I could finally, finally see Ethan, my Ethan. They had knocked him onto his hands and knees, his broad shoulders were bare and his wavy, sleep-mussed head was still hanging, but he looked up as I stooped toward him. I gave him my free hand, and when his fingers closed around my shaking, sweat-slicked fingers, I felt steadier, my lost anchor regained, warmth and security a possibility once again.
Ethan got to his feet. A moment later, I had them both safe, keeping myself a step ahead, between them and the guards.
“Remember what I suggested earlier?” I asked. “Put us back in our compartment. Put a guard at the door if you like—I don’t care. And call Charles Stryker. Let the Light Council sort out this misunderstanding.”
They were off balance enough to do what I wanted, and uncertain enough now to listen to the name Stryker. When the guards ushered me, Ethan, and the doppelganger into the compartment that had been just mine and Ethan’s, the leader was already looking worried.
Another guard said, as he shut the door in our faces, “I didn’t know any of the Strykers had a doppelganger.”
The door closed, and I sagged against it. I watched Ethan and the doppelganger retreat to opposite sides of the compartment.
“Funny thing,” I remarked. “Neither did I.”
I was furious, but there was something I had to do before questioning either one of them.
“Come here,” I said, and advanced on the doppelganger. He took a step back and wound up sitting on the bunk, looking surprised and mildly irritated.
I held up my hands as if in surrender, though it was anything but. I held them so the doppelganger could see the Light magic rings glittering on all my fingers.
“I’m a trained Light medic,” I told him. “Now let me see your wrist.”
He gave me an unfriendly look, but he let me kneel down and snatch his hand again. I pushed back the worn fabric of his sleeve. The material tried to adhere to the burn, but I pulled it off despite the hiss of pain that slipped through the doppelganger’s teeth. I had to loop my fingers around his wrist, over the burn, thumb and middle finger touching. I concentrated, coaxing to life the light hidden in every sparkling stone, letting it form a bright bracelet over his skin and mine. When I let go, I knew the light would wash the burn marks away. I was able to help, because he was not too badly hurt. My mother had been able to save people on the brink of death, but I was not a tenth as brilliant a magician as my mother. I could only do this.
I blinked away the remnants of Light in my vision, like dissolving stars, until all that was left was his intent gaze.
“There,” I told him.
“Am I supposed to thank you?”
“No,” I said. “I’m supposed to thank you. You saved his life and I love him, so I owe you more than I know how to repay. Thank you . . . what’s your name?”
He hesitated. “Carwyn.”
“Carwyn,” I said, still kneeling, staring up into a familiar face with a strange name on my tongue. “Thank you. Buried how long, Carwyn?”
That was what citizens of the Dark city always asked each other when we met. That was what we called living in the Dark city: being buried.
He hesitated again, but when he spoke there was weight to his response, as if he had come to some decision. “Thirteen years, but I’m out now,” said Carwyn. “Buried how long, Lucie?”
So that answered that: he had recognized me.
“Fifteen years,” I said. “But that was two years ago. I’m out now.”
“They’re still talking about you in the Dark city,” Carwyn said.
I picked up the dress that was on the floor and pulled it over my head as quickly but with as little fuss as I could manage, lacing up the front. Ethan grabbed a fresh shirt out of his bag.
He came and sat with me on one end of the bed, taking my hand again, and I curled into him, chin tucked against his shoulder and my hand pressed in a fist against his chest. As if I could protect him, as if I could keep his heart beating.
“I didn’t know how to tell you, Lucie,” said Ethan. “About him.”
The train was in motion again. I leaned against Ethan, but I did not look at him or at the stranger who wore his face. I looked out the window. The train was speeding along the slender bridge that the Light Council had built fifty years ago, toward the Light city of New York. I saw the tall, bright columns standing in clusters, the Chrysler Building with its prismatic triangle of lights at the top, blazing like a beacon, and Stryker Tower, a steel line studded with huge stones shimmering with Light power and crowned with a spike.
We were almost home, my new home full of Light, the home where I had learned how to be happy. I did not jump in front of blades there. I did not see blood or horror: I was not that person, not anymore. All I needed to do was keep my head down and my life could continue the way it was now, the way I had made it. I could be safe.
I remembered how I had felt on the train platform, knowing for the first time that someone could hurt Ethan.
I said, “So tell me now.”
Chapter Two
BOTH BOYS WERE SILENT. CARWYN JUST SAT ON the other end of the bed. I knew his eyes were the exact same as Ethan’s, but they looked different to me, darker, almost black, with no depth in the color. I thought of the old saying that the eyes are the windows to the soul: no lights shone in Carwyn’s windows. He was looking at me, but his gaze was almost challenging, and I did not know why.
Ethan was much easier to read. He looked horrified and guilty.
“You knew he existed,” I said to Ethan. “When was he made? Why didn’t you ever tell me? I told you . . .”
Everything, I wanted to say, but I hadn’t told him everything. He still thought I was brave and good. I had told him more than I had told anyone else in the world though, and he had kept this huge secret from me.
I could have accepted it from anyone else, but I had been so sure that Ethan was open and honest, the one person in the world with no secrets and no shadows. I’d built my new life on that certainty.
“Lucie,” said Ethan, “I didn’t know how to tell you. I was ashamed. It’s a crime to create them—I couldn’t turn in my own father. And I was afraid you’d look at me differently, knowing I had one of . . . of them.”
When someone young was dying, a Dark magic ritual could save them, but the ritual created an exact double. I had heard the horror stories, heard people say that the ritual gave Death itself a young, sweet face and let it walk among us.
Someone with a doppelganger was not just complicit in a crime. They carried a reminder of mortality on th
eir shoulders, carried the shadows of doppelgangers on their souls. It was said that looking into a doppelganger’s face would doom the original soul, that the doppelganger would hunt the original down so it could take their life and their happiness as well as their face. It was kinder to let someone die, people said, than create a doppelganger to save them.
I looked over at Carwyn, who was fiddling with his collar and looking supremely uninterested.
“Oh, don’t mind me,” said Carwyn. “Continue with your relationship drama. It is fascinating.”
I rolled my eyes at him and turned to the boy I loved. “Ethan. Look at me.”
He looked at me. I had always thought his eyes were different from anyone else’s. I still believed it. Nobody else looked at me like that, light and warmth in their eyes because I was there. There was gold in his brown eyes. There was light here, in Ethan, for me.
“I’m looking at you,” I said. “And nothing’s changed. Nothing will ever change, not for me. But I want the truth.”
Ethan took a deep breath.
“My mother and I almost died when I was born,” he said, and his voice was soft; apologetic, I thought—but, then, his voice was always soft when he spoke of his mother. “They were able to stabilize my mom, but they kept having to restart my heart, and it wasn’t working. I was fading fast. My mother said they would have done anything to save me.”
She died when Ethan was ten. She had been sick a long time, and being with her as she died had taught Ethan, I think, how to be gentle.
Ethan took my hand in his, fingers running lightly over not my rings but my knuckles, for the strength and comfort of skin on skin.
“So my father called in a Dark magician,” he said.
It actually made me think better of Charles Stryker, that he had broken the law to save Ethan, done something that would ruin him if anyone learned of it. It made me think he might have loved his wife.
I thought better of Ethan’s father for taking the risk, but it was such a terrible risk. I could not even let myself consider what would happen if this secret got out. I was so scared, I could barely breathe.
“They did the ritual, and I lived. But it created . . . Carwyn,” said Ethan. He chanced a look at Carwyn, and I squeezed his hand. Ethan looked at me, appealing to me. “It was when I was a baby. It was years before I met you.”
“If it was when you were a baby,” I said, “Carwyn would’ve been a baby too. Nobody would raise a doppelganger baby. How could you collar or control one? And a baby couldn’t escape or survive on his own. Your uncle would have twisted his neck and thrown him into the East River. How could he possibly have lived?”
“Quite a picture, isn’t it?” Carwyn asked, looking out of the window. “Baby’s First Collar. ‘Who’s an itty-bitty manifestation of ultimate darkness? Is it you? Is it you?’” He glanced over at us. We stared at him. He shrugged. “That was a rhetorical question.”
I returned my gaze to Ethan, and he looked back at me.
“You said nobody would raise a doppelganger baby,” he said slowly. “But someone did. My mother did. She insisted. She was so sick, and my dad thought that crossing her would kill her. Dad didn’t tell my uncle. He sent my mother and . . . and the other child to live in the country. My mother would come up to be with me and my father—but she spent most of the first few years I was alive raising someone else. She didn’t trust anyone else with him. She wanted to keep the child alive as long as she could.”
Ethan’s parents must have known it was only a matter of time until Carwyn was discovered. All doppelgangers were Dark magicians, and nobody would believe Ethan had an identical twin who, coincidentally, could do Dark magic.
“When we were four, the Dark magician who made Carwyn told my uncle about the doppelganger and tried to blackmail him. Uncle Mark had the Dark magician killed, and he would have killed Carwyn if my mother hadn’t told my father she would kill herself, too. My dad and my uncle sent the doppelganger off to the Dark city the same day, and my dad brought my mother back to me. I didn’t even know about the doppelganger until my mother told me. She wanted me to know what my father had done. What he was capable of. And she wanted someone else to remember Carwyn.” Ethan looked toward Carwyn. He had been carefully avoiding doing so, but now he met his eyes. “You should know that she loved you.”
“You should know,” Carwyn informed him, “that I don’t care.”
A doppelganger wouldn’t. They didn’t feel like other people did. I couldn’t blame Carwyn for that, but from the expression on his face, Ethan could.
“She wanted to keep you.”
“So what?” said Carwyn. “She didn’t keep me. It doesn’t matter to me what some dead woman wanted. She wasn’t my mother.”
“She was mine,” Ethan said tightly. “Don’t talk about her like that.”
“Or what?” Carwyn asked. “Or the Golden Thread in the Dark, that sweet angel of mercy who now has her clothes back on, burns a little Light discipline into me? Oh, go on, sweetheart. It’s nothing I haven’t had before, and maybe with someone as pretty as you I’d enjoy it.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you. I told you, I owe you. I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”
“That goes for both of us,” Ethan said, after a pause.
Carwyn raised an eyebrow. “I’m touched.”
“Why did you do it?” Ethan asked suddenly. “Why save my life?”
Carwyn looked at me. I had to admit, I was curious to know the answer as well. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing a doppelganger would do.
“It was a whim. It was that or buy the weird cheese-and-crackers package off the food cart.”
I had honestly not expected a doppelganger to be sassy. I had never had a conversation with one before, and in stories they were mostly silent harbingers of death.
Ethan’s expression suggested he would have preferred a silent harbinger of death.
I leaned forward a little, elbows on my knees, and asked, “What are you doing here?”
“I thought we covered that,” Carwyn said. “Mommy and Daddy loved each other very much, so they did a dark ritual . . . ? Any of that ringing a bell?”
“I meant,” I said, “where are you going on this train?”
“Same place you are,” Carwyn said. “The Light city.”
“What are you going to do when you get there?”
“Are you asking me out on a date?” asked Carwyn. “Because your boyfriend’s right here. Awkward.”
My plan was to help and support him in any way possible. If that meant ignoring ninety percent of everything he said, that was fine with me.
“Do you have a pass to get to the Light city?” I asked. “Do you have a permit to work? How long were you planning to stay?”
“I hadn’t decided.”
I noticed that the doppelganger did not answer either of my other questions. Ethan and I exchanged a look.
“You were going into the Light city without a pass?” Ethan said. “That’s a crime.”
“I guess we don’t know each other that well yet,” Carwyn observed. “It’s possibly time to talk about some of my hobbies and interests. One of my hobbies is crime.”
“So you’re a criminal,” said Ethan.
“My hobby is my job,” said Carwyn. “My job is my hobby. It’s a thing. Also, when we were introduced, you were about to be executed for a, you know, whatsit—oh yeah, a crime. Are you upset because my thing is being somewhat successful at crime?”
Ethan leaned a little against the compartment wall, trying to ease me back with him. I didn’t go, but I glanced at him and saw his eyes were thoughtfully narrowed. Ethan usually thinks the best of people; that doesn’t mean he’s dumb.
“You are pretty successful at crime,” Ethan observed. “That’s why you saved me, isn’t it? You decided you wanted to go to the Light city, for whatever reason—”
Carwyn shrugged. “Just wanted to have a little fun. Sorry, do you need
me to explain the concept of fun?”
Ethan shook his head. “You figured you’d come to the city and blackmail my dad. Then you saw me on the train platform. You saw a golden opportunity.”
Carwyn grinned.
The city was getting closer and closer as we got to the end of the line, about to plunge into our last tunnel. I put my hand against the glass and looked out at the city, the buildings that made the gems in my rings briefly catch fire, the line of light that was Stryker Tower, so bright that it seemed like a colossal sword. The sun was coming up, and the dawn was embracing the buildings in swaths of rose and gold.
“I don’t care why he did it,” I said.
Both of the boys looked at me, Ethan’s grip on my hand going a little loose.
“I mean it,” I said. “I don’t care. What I care about is the result: what I care about is that we are all safe.” I pressed Ethan’s hand. “You’re alive, and he made it so. I say we give him whatever he wants. Your father created him, so Carwyn is his responsibility. And Carwyn saved your life: your father owes him twice over. You have to take him home with you and make sure that Carwyn has everything he needs.”
“I have many needs,” Carwyn put in.
“You want me to reward him?” Ethan asked incredulously.
I lost my patience. Maybe it wasn’t fair of me. Ethan wasn’t used to life-and-death situations. I don’t think he believed he would have died out there on that stone platform in the cold night. Not really.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I want you to reward him for saving your life. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.”
Carwyn, at this point, was smirking. “I like you. Can I put you on my list of demands?”
“And as for you, my little bonbon of darkness,” I said, “I want you to shut up.”
Ethan was stonily quiet. Carwyn, for a wonder, became almost quiet as well, aside from a murmured “Does anyone have a piece of paper? For, you know, my list?”
I spent the rest of the train ride putting on makeup and brushing my hair. I wasn’t dressed for the media, not in a simple blue dress. It had been so long since I’d had to prepare for a performance, and I was not ready. But I could look better than I did now. I found a compact in my bag and stared into the mirror: pink, sticky eye shadow smudged on, hair shimmering gold. I looked tired from the night. I passed my fingertips under my eyes, letting my rings glow gently, and made the shadows disappear.
Tell the Wind and Fire Page 2