That evening it was just me and Ethan, curled together and snuggled into the sofa cushions.
“I would love you without the fabulous luxuries,” I informed him. “But they help.”
“So what you’re saying is that if I get fat, you’ll keep me around for the sofa.”
“You have a personal trainer because you’re so afraid of losing your svelte figure,” I pointed out. “But if you start balding prematurely, I’ll consider keeping you around for the sofa.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
I levered myself up on one elbow, looking down into Ethan’s face, soft with laughter and tenderness. The commercials buzzed along on television, little jingles and bursts of color, drawing into the news of the day, and everything seemed normal and safe.
“Besides,” I said, laying kisses from his jaw to his mouth, feeling him smile under my lips. “I bet all your money could buy a truly awesome toupee.”
I remembered an old poem that went, What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten . . . but I had not forgotten. There had only ever been Ethan.
The other one didn’t count.
I had almost lost Ethan, a handful of days ago. It reminded me that it was a privilege to be close like this, the skin of his stomach under the flat of my palm, the curl of his smile against my mouth.
“You’re such a romantic,” Ethan mumbled.
“You have no idea.” I kissed him again, my hair a curtain all around us, his mouth opening in a warm, easy slide under mine, and then a cough sounded like a door slamming, and I bit down on Ethan’s lip.
“Ow!” said Ethan, and I reared back and stared around wildly.
Jim Stryker, Ethan’s cousin, was standing in the doorway.
“Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said, with one of his stupid grins. “You were just getting your PDA all over the good sofa.”
“Oh, as opposed to the extremely private stuff you were doing on it with Suzy at your birthday party.”
“Come on, Lucie, be reasonable. I was drunk.” Jim grinned again. He had thick lips, a thick bridge to his nose, gel turning his hair into a solid mass. Other people thought he was handsome, but he’d always looked like an overblown version of Ethan to me. “I wouldn’t do anything like that sober. Unless you’re finally willing to drop Ethan and try a real man.”
“I’ll do it!” I declared. “Now, tell me more about this real man. Will you take me to him? Because I haven’t seen anyone like that lately.”
In some ways, Jim was restful to be around, since he took everything any girl said to him as flirting. Occasionally he looked confused by something I said, but the whale of his self-esteem always ended up making short work of the plankton of doubt.
It occurred to me that if Ethan’s doppelganger had acted like Jim, I wouldn’t have felt any urges to sympathy, and I certainly wouldn’t have taken off his collar. Carwyn might have been soulless, but at least he wasn’t an idiot.
I couldn’t think about that right at that moment, and I certainly couldn’t be such a nervous wreck that I was jumping at the least little noise. I rolled my eyes at Jim and reached for Ethan’s hand.
Ethan jerked away from me, and I stared at him. He was sitting bolt upright, suddenly tense, his jaw held tight. I felt my heart trip in my chest, felt the lurch and the chill, like a little kid stumbling over her own feet into a freezing-cold puddle.
“What,” I said, my voice trembling. “What—what is it?”
“Guys, look at this,” Ethan said, voice and body strained as if the television were going to attack him.
We both turned our attention to the television. I had been tuning out the drone of the reporter’s voice, but now I looked at the shimmering Light magic projected against the wall, resolving in my sight until the voice and the picture came clear.
“. . . violent disturbance within the walls of the Dark city, during which six Light guards lost their lives,” said the newscaster’s voice, flat and noncommittal, turning the words into boring nonsense. I wondered if that was why these people were hired, because they could make disaster sound dull and give people the distance they needed from it.
The feed from the camera was grainy, showing footage taken at night on someone’s phone. But I could see enough of the entrance gate: it was just outside Green-Wood Cemetery.
I could recognize it even though it looked different. The whole scene was painted gray by night, and in the street itself were streaks and dark stains, still shining fresh. The rough, irregular stones of the street had dammed flowing blood into small dark pools.
The camera followed the path through the gate and into a scene of chaos.
It looked as if lightning had struck every tree. They were ripped to splinters and shards of wood, cast over the grass like the remnants of a shipwreck, and amid the wood were the iron cages.
Some of the cages had bodies still huddled in them. Some of the bodies were skeletons, left in place as a warning to others not to cross the Light. Some of them might have died last night, died of terror at the idea of freedom.
Some of the cages lay twisted and empty, the black iron melted, the cage doors gaping open.
The cages were down. Nobody would ever be strung up like my father had been, ever again. They were the symbols of the Light’s power, the awful threat of the Light’s worst punishment.
Nobody had ever dared attack the cages before.
I remembered that guy at the club who had told me we might have something to celebrate soon. Was this what he had meant? Had somebody planned this?
Why had he thought I would know?
A shrill sound of laughter rang out, and the camera zoomed back up the hill, through the gates, to the bloodstained street.
There were people there, and one side of my brain just said, Yes, normal people. That’s what people look like, and the other side of my mind, the side accustomed to the Light, said that they were gaunt scarecrows. Food had to be brought in past the walls, and the Dark city was never given quite enough. I’d been overwhelmed by the lunatic abundance of food in the Light city when I’d first arrived, but I hadn’t realized how used I had become to the Light citizens, smug and sleek as housecats.
There were people laughing, dancing, people openly wearing the black and scarlet of the sans-merci. Dark magicians were on their knees, doing spells with the spilled blood. Ethan and Jim would not be able to differentiate between Dark magicians—one would look the same as another to them—but I could see from the edges of their clothes under their dark robes that they were not among the Dark magicians who served the Light Council. They would not have been permitted to drain people often. They were holding more magic in their hands now than they had ever before touched in their lives.
My own hands were twisted together in my lap. They felt colder than my rings, shivering flesh under a weight of metal. My Aunt Leila, whom I loved and who was the one person I knew I could count on, was a Dark magician. I had only ever felt sorry for them, known that they suffered for something that was not their fault, and that they were starved of their power because people feared it.
I was afraid, I realized, of what they would do with power now that they had it.
Over the shoulder of a child, his cheeks fat with a grin and daubed with blood, I saw a message glistening on bricks.
Scrawled upon a wall with a finger dipped in blood were the words FREE THE GOLDEN ONE.
It was as if I was seeing the words of Carwyn and the man from the club written on a wall, a message spelled out all too clearly now that it was too late.
“Oh God, they mean me,” I whispered. Ethan took my hand and held on: Ethan was all I had to hold on to. “They did this for me.”
Chapter Eight
WHEN I GOT HOME FROM ETHAN’S HOUSE, I waited until Dad was asleep. Then I crept into the long skinny hall that we didn’t call a corridor, the wood floor forgivingly quiet under my bare feet, and listened outside the door of the other bedroom. I could hear Jarvis’s deep br
eathing and Penelope’s faint snore, and I was almost sure I could make out the soft sound of Marie sighing in her sleep. I was the only thing moving in that dark narrow apartment, shadows on exposed-brick walls, with a beam of moonlight and the orange slant of a streetlight filtering through a tall, black-trimmed window.
I stole back into my room and opened my wardrobe, snaking my hand under the mountain of clothes and shoes at the bottom to the very back, where I had hidden the doppelganger’s hood. For a moment, I could not find it, my fingers making a blind, futile journey over the fuzz of a sweater and the rubber sole of a shoe. Then my skin caught on one of the metal slots, fingertips brushing the cracked leather. My rings almost hummed in recognition.
I pulled the collar out and heard the tumble and slam of a dislodged shoe against one of the wardrobe walls. I stayed frozen in a crouch as my father murmured, disturbed and discontent, and then settled back into sleep. My pajama top stuck to my collarbones with sweat.
At the train station, the guards had said somebody who looked like Ethan had been distributing security information to a member of the sans-merci. And a few days later, the cages were shattered and the prisoners had gone free.
Anyone under suspicion of consorting with the sans-merci would be suspected of involvement with the attack on the cages. Ethan was going to be under investigation, and his connection to me would make it worse. The sans-merci were acting in my name: the Light Council might decide we were both in league with rebels.
I knew that I had done nothing, and I was certain Ethan had done nothing. I had another suspect. Carwyn had been talking about revolution and blood in the streets. Carwyn must be involved.
And I had made it easy for him to move about the city, unmarked by his hood, people all around him never dreaming what he was or what he was planning.
I should take this hood and collar to the Light guards, should explain the threat I had unleashed on the city. But what would they do to me then? What would happen to my father without me?
I knew better than to expect mercy.
I wrapped the collar in the hood to muffle any betraying clink of metal, then crawled across the floor with it clutched in my fist, to my school bag. Inside my bag was a small brown leather pouch containing a handful of ashes I had taken from the fireplace in Ethan’s living room. I tucked the doppelganger’s collar into the little bag, blindly fumbling, and then crawled around the side of the wardrobe, to the brick wall.
If I crawled, nobody could see me through the windows. Just in case someone was watching the apartment.
When we had come to Penelope and Jarvis’s, I had been constantly on edge, relentlessly terrified that someone would show up to take back the pardon and take Dad in to be tortured, so terrified that I had burned Dad’s books on Dark magic and the very few letters Aunt Leila had sent. I had never written back to her, and she had soon stopped writing. I spent my time back then, whenever Dad was drugged into calm, scraping away at mortar until I could pull out a couple of the bricks.
If someone looked at this wall, they would have noticed two bricks that were obviously displaced. I had taken a fork to the crevices between those two bricks, and the mortar around them had a slightly gnawed appearance.
The real loose brick was seventeen across and five up from the bottom, in the shadow of the wardrobe. I slid the brick out, feeling its rough edges nip into my palm, to reveal a tiny hollow space. I shoved the pouch almost to the very back, then crammed in ashes, hoping the dull brown of the bag would be entirely obscured even if someone took the brick out.
Although I had burned Aunt Leila’s letters and Dad’s books, I had kept one thing: the pendant necklace with the single jewel my mother had worn and worked magic with in the confines of our home. I didn’t deserve to have a keepsake of her, but I had not been able to leave it or get rid of it.
I had never hidden anything else in there, until then.
I slid the brick back into place, stood up, stepped away, and surveyed the innocent expanse of the wall. Then I came out of the bedroom, pulling the door open and closed as softly as I could, and went to sit on the sofa. I put my guilty head in my ash-stained hands and sat there for what seemed like a long time.
I do not know why I looked up to the silver square of the window, its pale reflection cast on the floor at my feet. Perhaps it was a strange noise, or perhaps it was something the Light Council says all Light magicians have: an innate sense of when the darkness approaches and encroaches on the illumination we give out.
A dead streetlight stood in my line of vision, its magic failed, staring like a socket in which the eye had been put out. As I drew closer to the window, I saw the windows of the buildings across the street, all glossy black save for the sharp lights of cars reflected as they went by. The city was indifferent and distant, as close to sleeping as it ever was.
Underneath my window, my devil was waiting, wearing my true love’s face. The moon bleached that face and the street beneath, so Carwyn looked as if he were standing on a ray of moonlight, a shining silver expanse that stretched from the sky to his feet.
His face was so pale, the color of alabaster or pearl, the poetic peaceful color that people turned in stories when they died. But I had seen the dead in their cages, had seen them livid and ashen, and I had learned long ago not to believe in stories.
The dead are defeated, the dead are lost. But this, I thought, with all the whispers about doppelgangers I had ever heard suddenly crowding my mind, was something that had been sent back from the land of the dead. This was a shadow of a person. This was death triumphant, walking among the living.
And I had set him free.
He had not changed position or expression as he looked at the window. All he did was stand beneath the window and stare, but I knew he saw me. His eyes looked dark and empty, in contrast with his salt-white face, like holes burned in a sheet.
I do not know how long I stood at the window.
I do not know how long my pallid companion stood looking up at me before he seemed to dissolve away, slipping from the moonshine to mingle with his fellow shadows.
I did not know if it was a warning or not. I didn’t know if he was telling me that he’d had something to do with the spectacle at the Green-Wood Cemetery, or that I was guilty by association, if he wanted only to frighten me or to ensure my silence with fear.
It was a wasted trip for him. I had seen the blood in the streets and on the wall, and I had told nobody what I had done. I had made my decision. I had hidden the collar. I could not betray him without betraying myself.
All the streets could run with blood, and I would not go to the authorities. They had taken my mother forever, taken my father, and I had only gotten him back through being able to lie and pretend we were somehow different from the other victims. Only a few days ago, they had tried to take my Ethan.
I needed no apparitions in the night to urge me to evil.
I had made the decision long ago: better to be safe than good.
The next morning, I got up early and made everyone breakfast. I tried to cook and clean as regularly as I could. Jarvis, Penelope, and Marie might care about us, might feel sorry for us, but it was smart to make them like me. The last time I ever saw her, my aunt had advised me to make myself useful.
Be clever. Be careful. Remember they are not like family, she’d said. Wait for me to come and get you, she had added, but I’d known she was dreaming, and I was on my own.
I forgot sometimes, with Penelope especially, but I tried to remember. I didn’t want to be stupid or careless.
Now I had been stupid and careless, and I had to make up for it by trying even harder.
“You’re a treasure, Ladybird,” Penelope declared, coming into the kitchen to snatch a piece of bacon and patting Marie’s cornrowed hair. “What we’ll do when you go to college I can’t imagine.”
Nothing would change when I went to college. I was going to college in New York, of course. My father couldn’t manage without me.
My father emerged into the kitchen last of all, glasses askew and hair ruffled, looking like a baby owl confused by the world. He sat down at the kitchen island, and I set his plate in front of him and poured his juice.
“You effortlessly make the morning shine, my dear,” he said, sounding like a gentleman from days long gone by, and I could see he felt better. He started talking with Penelope and Jarvis about the deleterious effect of dust on the minds of the young. He was doing research on the subject, writing a paper: there were days he went to the library and talked to strangers, and they thought he was such a charming, intelligent man. He was going today, and I was sure every stranger he spoke to would be fooled again. They would never have imagined there was a thing wrong with him.
I’d burned the side of my thumb cooking the bacon and eggs, and I took this opportunity to press the burned skin to the metal of the refrigerator sneakily, so nobody would see me do it. Nobody ever guessed how much effort looking effortless took.
“I’ll walk to school,” I said. I always got up in time to do that, because only four people fit in the car without being cramped, and dropping me off meant making an extra stop.
“You don’t have to,” said Jarvis. He always offered me a lift, as if it was his job to look after me, as if I was Marie. He was always so kind, and it made me nervous: I always wondered when his kindness might run out.
“I want to,” I told him.
I wasn’t lying. I usually walked, and Ethan usually met me on the way.
Ethan could not come by my place much, because my father got upset when he saw him. He got upset at the very name of Stryker. I couldn’t blame him, not really: I knew as well as he did what anybody on the Light Council could do to us, let alone what Mark or Charles Stryker could do.
I gave everyone a round of kisses and goodbyes and walked out into the sunshine. It was a bright morning, but sharp around the edges. The sun was a golden disc so high up in the sky that it made sense that its warmth had not reached the city yet. I pulled my coat tighter around myself and walked on, watching the glitter of sunlight on the tin roofs of warehouses and faraway spires alike.
Tell the Wind and Fire Page 10