Tell the Wind and Fire (3 page)

“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.

I snapped the compact shut and saw Carwyn giving me one of his flat looks, mouth curled in what looked a whole lot like contempt.

“You look beautiful,” Ethan told me, which I didn’t care about, and, “We can do this,” which I did.

The train pulled into Penn Station with a creak and a rattle. I stood up from the bed without letting go of Ethan’s hand, and I reached for Carwyn’s and grabbed hold, pulling him to his feet as well.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get this done.”

We went up the elevator into a maelstrom of reporters. One of the guards had told somebody, I thought, or someone had seen what almost happened to Ethan and recognized him. The station was packed.

Carwyn’s hood was up—people did not take kindly to a doppelganger brazenly displaying a stolen face—but all it would take was a guard spilling the secret before he could be bribed into silence, or someone making a lucky guess about who the doppelganger next to us was.

Ethan’s father was on the Light Council. Ethan’s Uncle Mark led it. There had been a Stryker on the council ever since it was formed.

They were the most powerful family in New York. But there were other powerful families, waiting for their chance to take the Strykers down. People were voted onto the council —nominated from only a small pool of the wealthiest and most influential Light magician families, but voted on. If the Strykers were implicated in a crime like creating a doppelganger, their power would be lost. All the protection they could offer Ethan, and me, would be
lost.

We were in dangerous waters, the flashing light of every camera a threat. I was prepared to hold on to them both and push my way through, but I wasn’t looking forward to it.

And then Ethan’s uncle stepped out of the crowd.

It was the first time in my life I had ever been glad to see Mark Stryker. Not that he had ever been unpleasant to me. On the contrary, he had always been flawlessly, almost ceremoniously, polite. I knew how people acted when they were being recorded. Mark was like that all the time.

He was like that now, but we were in perfect accord. When he put a hand on Ethan’s shoulder, loving and concerned for the space of three camera flashes, I sent him a perfectly distressed and grateful smile.

“My dear girl,” he said in a loud voice, “I’m so relieved you’re both safe.”

His security detail swept unobtrusively after him, dark-clad and official-looking without being official enough to answer for anything they did. We were effectively cut off from the crowd of reporters.

“There’s been some kind of terrible mix-up,” I responded. “I’m so glad you’re here to sort it out.”

Mark Stryker raised his eyebrows, smile fixed in place like a picture on a wall. I’d never thought he looked like Ethan in more than the superficial way all the Strykers resembled each other: they practically had tall, dark, and photogenic trademarked.

Now that I had met Carwyn, I saw that Ethan looked more like his uncle than I would have dreamed. I saw now how different the same features could seem when they were illuminated by a different spirit. Same hawk-like nose, same high cheekbones, same thin mouth with the potential to be pitiless. Same dark eyes, which could look so flat.

Mark’s frightening eyes locked on the sight of my hand linked with Carwyn’s.

I knew that it would only call attention to the fact that he was with us, attention we did not need, creating questions we could not answer. But I was afraid of letting him go. I didn’t want to lose him.

“A doppelganger,” said Mark, with what seemed to be mild surprise and nothing more. The skin on the back of my neck crawled, as if stroked by a hand too cold to be human. “Here illegally?”

Oh God, I thought. He must be, and that meant he could legally be executed if he was caught. And thanks to us, he was well and truly caught.

“You shock me with that implication!” Carwyn said, and showed the inside of his wrist, where the date—September 12—burned with Light magic. A perfectly legal pass, inscribed by a Light magician official.

“But you said—” Ethan began.

“Be fair,” Carwyn told him. “I just expressed my enthusiasm for crime in general. I didn’t say I was committing a crime right that minute. I was given a pass to come and assist another legal Dark magician with the draining of the city’s best and brightest.”

“You must be very good,” I remarked, almost involuntarily. He was young, and a doppelganger. To be sent to the Light city indicated enormous talent.

“That’s what the ladies all tell me,” Carwyn said.

Mark looked disgusted. “Who else saw . . . the creature?”

I knew what Mark meant: Who had seen his face? Carwyn had had his back to the train. I was certain the passengers had not seen him.

“Just these guards,” I said honestly. I heard my voice shake, and Mark nodded as if confirming that it should. We both knew that I was signing the guards’ death warrant.