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—me.

“So,” I said, slowly. “What you’re telling me is—this guy I’ve been after, for the last couple of days—”

“He’s your shadow.”

And: Ohhhh.

Well, that explained a lot.

Rubbing a hand across my lips, then stroking it absently back over my hair. And thinking, all the while: Could be true; why not? I mean—who did that guy remind me of, anyway, if not myself? Certainly explained the attraction.

Running after myself, yearning after myself. Working magic on myself.

Man, I always knew I was a narcissist.

All the lesser parts of me: Weak where I was potent, slippery where I was direct, silent where I was vocal, acquiescent where I was anything but. Myself, reflected backwards and upside-down in a weirdly flattering Yin mirror, just like Grandmother Yau said.

Caught in a mesh of darkness.

“My ‘evil twin’,” I suggested, facetiously.

She shrugged. “Kind of depends on your definition.” Then: “Christ! What is that smell?”

In other words: If he’s the evil one—

—then what’s that supposed to make you?

I shook my head yet again, flicking the idea away—such a smooth-ass move, and one that really does get easier and easier, the more diligently you practice it. Then propelled myself upwards and outwards, briskly brushing the room’s dust from my clothes, like I was simultaneously scrubbing myself free of her aura’s leaking, purple-brown, depression-and-defeat-inflected stain. Saying:

“Well, anyway—gotta go. Things to do, rituals to research, shopping lists to compile. Exorcisms don’t come cheap, you know.”

“ . . . don’t.”

“Why the hell not?”

Hesitant: “I mean, it’s just. Not. Not, uh . . . ”

( . . . safe.)

Riiiiight.

‘Cause that was the big concern, these days: Staying safe, at all costs. Even when the best way to make sure I stayed safe, if it really concerned her so much, would be to sign herself out of this shithole—the way we all knew she could, at a moment’s fucking notice—and come help out. Instead of just sitting there all smug with dead people’s handwriting crawling up and down her arms like some legible rash and the air around her starting to thicken like a rind, to crackle like a badly-grounded electric fence . . .

Bitch, I thought, before I could stop myself. And saw her flinch again, as the impact of my projected insult bruised her cortex from the inside-out; saw blood drip from one nostril, as she blinked away a film of tears.

I shut my eyes to block it all out, feeling that ache squirm inside me, twisting in on itself. Knotting tight. Feeling it ripple with fine, poison-packed spines, all of them spewing a froth of negativity that threatened to send my few lingering deposits of tenderness, sorrow and affection flowing away at a touch, leaving nothing behind but emptiness, and rot, and rage.

If I let it, that is. Which I wasn’t about to.

Not when I still had even the faintest lingering chance of getting what I wanted.

“Listen,” I began, carefully. “We both know the main reason you put the Posse together in the first place was because it was the only way you could blow off steam, stop devoting all your energy to just protecting yourself . . . ”

Leave it open as sin and let the ghosts rush in at will: Babble and float, vomit ectoplasm and sprout word-bruises like hickey chains, laugh like a loon and know no one was actually going to treat you like one for doing it.

Good times, baby. Good, good times.

“But now the lid’s back on all the time, because you’re afraid to let it come off, under any circumstances. And the steam’s still building. And pretty soon it’s going to blow either way, and when it does it’ll hurt somebody, which’d be okay if it was just you. Except that it probably won’t be.”