Siege of Shadows (Effigies #2)(14)

“Usually, an Effigy’s signal will show up on the monitor, pulsing at a particular rate. However, while we were monitoring his signal, it was erratic, arrhythmic, even as he jumped from area to area.”

“Sibyl said Saul’s spectrographic signature had been unstable for several days after we faced him in France,” I told him. “Then nothing until now.”

I thought back to that day I’d watched Sibyl interrogate him in lockup when we had him captured at the London facility. I could still picture him clearly: caged in that cold, metallic chamber, drugged and rambling. But the tired fear in his eyes as he sputtered out incoherent phrases eventually dissolved into an expression wholly different—and sinister. The fear and desperation had flickered out, leaving only that glimmer of malice I was too familiar with . . . and that vile smile. The same he’d worn as he and the phantoms under his control had torn through bodies in New York.

“Well, I mean, Saul’s nothing if not unstable. The last time Saul was in Sect custody, they measured his spectrographic signature and his brain waves,” I said. “That’s how we learned that Saul actually has two personalities: Alice and—”

“Nick Hudson.” Chafik tapped away the satellite map and, in a few seconds, there he was. Saul—no, Nick.

He was handsome, almost beautiful. It was a fact I couldn’t escape even after all the evil he’d done. Then again, Nick wasn’t Saul. The black-and-white image Chafik showed us was of a young man in a nineteenth-century frock coat and trousers smiling boyishly without a care in the world outside a stone building. He was just one of a group of boys packed into the stairwell leading up to the grand entrance, but he stood out through his beauty alone: the same full lips, petite nose, and sculpted face, which was maybe a little chubbier in this picture. He was still slender, though with the slight muscular build of a casual athlete. If the photo were in color, I might have seen the ghostly sea blue of his eyes.

The hair alone was enough to make the difference. His was dark, not the silver I’d come to associate with Saul.

“After the interrogation you spoke of, Ms. Finley, we were able to research his history. Nick Hudson, born in 1847 to a wealthy British family that owned a small but lucrative railway company in Argentina before it was bought out and absorbed into a larger British firm.”

“So Nick was a little rich boy.” Chae Rin scoffed.

“But then he became an Effigy,” Belle said.

“Alice is the more vicious personality,” I said, thinking back to that terrible night in New York, the bodies strewn across the lobby of La Charte hotel. Saul had stood atop his serpent-like phantom as if it were his personal steed, lapping up the sight of the corpses like it were the only oasis that could quench his thirst. But it was Nick I’d faced in France, a boy who’d maintained an almost gentlemanly etiquette even as he held me against my will while threatening a train full of innocents with the phantoms at his beck and call. It made no difference. “Even still, they’re both murderers.” My lips pursed as I stared at Nick’s gorgeous face beaming in monochrome.

“But then who’s Alice?” Lake asked. “Did you find any information on her?”

Director Chafik shook his head. “We have not found anything so far. With only her first name to work with, we’ve cross-checked the name against all known Hudson associates and acquaintances, but nothing has come up.”

“But if he’s an Effigy, then she was the last one before him,” said Chae Rin. “The little voice in his head. Only she is the one driving.” And after a short pause, she laughed as the joke dawned on her. “Grand theft body,” she said with a little chuckle. “Whoever Alice is, she sure took the poor guy out for a joyride and . . .”

The words died on her lips once she turned and looked at me. She must have seen the way my body was hunched over, my head lowered, my eyes downcast as I recalled the feeling of being ripped away from my own flesh and trapped inside my own mind. Another perk of having someone else’s consciousness bubbling just under the surface. One wrong move—

I held my arms tightly, squeezing the flesh for reassurance before lowering them again. “If Alice is really the last Effigy in his line, then she would have lived and died in the same time period,” I said. “But people aren’t immortal. Even as an Effigy, Nick should have died by now.”

“What is Saul?” Lake said. “What else can he do beyond teleporting? Oh, wait, he can control phantoms!”

“Nah, he used the ring to do that,” said Chae Rin, and she would know because her old circus boss had used the one she’d stolen from Natalya’s apartment for a phantom-Effigy performance act. I always wondered whether Chae Rin missed the feeling of riding phantoms for fun and profit. Having recently done it myself, I could safely say it wasn’t an experience I wanted to relive.

“Accursed,” I whispered, thinking back to that night in France. “He’d called himself accursed. Like us. He said his life span was just one part of his burden. Maybe he can live forever.” A terrible thought. What if we couldn’t kill him? “We have the power of the elements, but for him . . . teleporting and immortality . . . it’s almost as if he can bend space-time.”

“One of the researchers at your London facility, Dot Nguyen, has a theory,” said Chafik. “For hundreds of years, philosophers have been theorizing the existence of a fifth element: ether. Experiments were conducted in the nineteenth century to examine its properties as a medium for gravitational and electromagnetic forces. Nguyen believes it’s possible that there were originally five Effigies created, not four, and that Saul has the elemental power of ether. But all we have are our theories. What we need is a way to test them.”