Tell the Wind and Fire(22)

“What?”

I’d been worried that he would look too much like Ethan without the collar, but his hair was still shorter and his mouth crueler. He bowed his head, and his nape looked bizarrely uncovered, with an indentation below his hairline where the collar had been.

“This is how I think doppelgangers work,” said Carwyn. “The doppelganger is created so the other, the first image, can live and prosper. But there has to be a payment. I think that one of us has to suffer. Dark magicians make doppelgangers to be living versions of those dolls people used to stick pins into. We usually die young, instead of them, but we don’t simply die. We come to nothing, with none of our actions meaning anything, and none of our goals ever reached. We are those who might as well have died young: all our lives might have been. All our lives are lived elsewhere, by someone else.”

Carwyn glanced over at me, and a smirk was born on his mouth, dark as ink spilled and spreading.

“Of course, sometimes the doppelganger can get its own back. Sometimes the doppelganger can make his mirror image be the one who suffers.”

Legends say that a doppelganger will cause their original’s death in the end, and try to take their place. There are records of doppelgangers who killed their doubles, their doubles’ families, the magicians who made them, and innocent people. Doppelgangers are lethal. Making a doppelganger is illegal because it is making a weapon that will kill of its own volition.

I had listened to the stories but I had never considered, before this moment, how much a doppelganger might resent their original.

Except Carwyn had not killed Ethan. He had saved him.

“You know,” I said, “you’re right. You do talk an awful lot.”

“Hmm.” Carwyn flicked an eyebrow sardonically. “You were right as well,” he said, and seemed to be chiefly addressing the remnants of his cupcake. “This is much too sweet for me.”

“Someone should have warned you about that,” I said, and ate the last of my own delicious cupcake with deep satisfaction. “Oh, wait. I did.”

Carwyn tossed his cupcake wrapper and fragment toward the nearest trash can. It fell short by several feet, but Carwyn looked indifferent. Apparently doppelgangers were litterbugs, too.

“I talk, but I don’t really listen. Where to next?”

I’d already given that some thought. I didn’t want to go to any of my usual hangouts, because I worried we might be seen and questions might be asked. Carwyn kept talking about having fun in the Light city, and he would not be content with going home and being collared while the night was still young.

There was a place I had gone quite a lot when I was fresh out of the Dark city, and a few times since.

“I might have somewhere in mind.”

The problem was, the place wasn’t exactly legal.



I guided Carwyn through the streets and into Greenwich Village. He wandered along in my wake, looking amiably around as people passed by. At this time of night, it was mostly couples headed to dinner, single people looking for money or fun, and giggling groups headed to clubs. I saw one girl wearing an obviously fake doppelganger’s collar, the material of her hood fraying and the collar plastic. Carwyn didn’t look offended: he smiled the dark, smug smile from the playground and she smiled back, face shadowed but not hidden. Her smile reminded me of the way the midwestern woman from the restaurant had spoken to Carwyn. She stopped smiling when she noticed our linked wrists.

A lot of couples went around linked like this, which was why I’d done it. I couldn’t risk us looking suspicious, or him getting away from me.

“This way,” I said, going down another alley, this one between a bar and a closed shop that sold pottery and had shutters painted green. Behind the shutters, a tiny thread of Light shone, showing a security system was in place.

“Are we breaking in to steal urns?” Carwyn asked. “I could use a flowerpot.”

I ignored him and walked around a Dumpster. There was a hatch, wood with wire mesh over it, heavy enough so it was extremely difficult to pull up with one hand, but Carwyn didn’t offer to help and I didn’t ask. I heard a siren and froze for a moment, but it went wailing past like a banshee late for an appointment, and I heaved the trapdoor open so Carwyn could go in before me.

Once I closed the hatch, it was dark there, standing on rough concrete steps, but I felt more than heard the beat of the music already. We negotiated the stairs tied together in semidarkness, damp heat and smoke like mist rising to meet us as we went down.

It was a huge basement, a series of rooms like a network of caves. The walls were the same rough gray concrete as the steps.

It was filled with Dark and Light magic. Shadows that nobody had cast moved on the wall, shadows of things that did not exist: beautiful naked silhouettes and flying dragons and clouds with lightning bolts and rain. The lightning bolts were jagged shimmering lines of magic that dissipated into glitter in the dancers’ hair. One boy wore a neon-green bowler hat that spun continuously on his head, and always at a jaunty angle. A girl with bright wings tied to her back was blowing bubbles, fat globes of pure light that winked purple and blue and gold as they drifted through the room.

Everywhere you looked, there was Light and Dark magic dancing together, shadows and light lacing around people’s limbs.

I’d been taken to this place by other formerly buried ones, some fresh from the Dark city and some hardly remembering it, people who helped me when I was just getting used to my new home. None of them went to Nightingale-Evremonde, and too many of them wanted to talk about what had happened to me in the dark. I hadn’t been back to the club in more than a year.