Tell the Wind and Fire(5)

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 their 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.”