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36

THE DOUBLE

R eally, I realized an instant later, Black didn’t let go so much as leap.

He threw himself with muscular legs at the nearest part of the cave wall.

I followed with my eyes as he caught hold just below the main outcropping of rock, slid a few feet on his boots and gloved hands, then caught himself.

Once he’d steadied his position on the rock face, he adjusted his footing and hand holds. Then he began to climb, fast, making his way down the bulging cave wall, moving with an agility and skill that both awed and deeply annoyed me.

My jaw hardened as Ace followed after him.

The tall Texan climbed over the railing like Black had, and leapt a little less gracefully for a similar part of the cave wall. Ace slid a little further than Black had down the rock face, but managed to catch himself, too, right around the point where he grew even with Black.

Mika followed Ace.

Jax leapt after them.

I looked to Kiko, and found she was already working on her own way down to the cave floor. She stepped into a simple harness she’d yanked out of her backpack, and spent a few seconds buckling it around her waist. When she finished, she threw the end of the thick rope she’d hooked to a buckle to Javier and Cowboy.

Without waiting, without saying a word, she walked to the side of the metal bridge and climbed up on the railing. Turning around agilely on her feet, she dropped carefully down over the other side, so that she was hanging from the metal bars.

She let go once Cowboy gave her a firm nod.

Feeling the annoyed grumble already building in my chest, I scowled at the two of them.

“Me, next,” I informed Cowboy. I dared him with my eyes to disagree, but he didn’t.

He only nodded a second time.

When the rope went slack, he and Javi pulled it up quickly, and then I was climbing into the same harness. I pulled myself over the railing with a lot less of the nimble grace I’d seen Kiko use, balanced briefly once I was all the way over, my booted toes on the edge, and looked to Cowboy. Like he had with Kiko, he gave me a nod, no expression on his face.

I let go, and instantly, I was falling.

I didn’t fall fast, or very far, but it shocked me enough to get my adrenaline pumping. After the rope caught, Javi and Cowboy lowered me the rest of the way down. I stared around as the cave floor grew closer, but it was hard to see much with all of the torches still lit on the catwalk above, blinding my eyes.

My toes touched the rock, and I gasped a little, letting my knees give under my own weight, then catching my balance right before I might have fallen. Once I was solidly on my feet, I quickly began unbuckling the harness and stepping out of it. The instant I was completely free of it, the harness ascended rapidly back up to the walkway.

We were further down than I’d realized.

From below, I guessed the height at closer to forty feet, not twenty.

I only looked up at the bridge for an instant before my eyes turned back to the scene we’d witnessed from above.

I could see a lot more now, with one of the yisso torches re-ignited on the cave floor. A running stream ran by the “island” we all stood on, which wasn’t an island at all, but a section of the rock floor that met up with the jagged wall, and what looked like part of an abandoned dig. The flat area of the dig still had chalk markings on the walls, and segments partitioned out in grids made of wood and string, labeled with different-colored small flags.

I glanced at the high ceiling above, and remembered there’d been a cave-in followed by a partial collapse that drove all the scientists out. This whole area had been declared unsafe by engineers in the time since, yet here we were.

Black stood in front of me and to my left.

Kiko stood behind him, her gun out, aimed at where Brick and Nick had been struggling by the wall a few seconds before. The outcome of that hand-to-hand fight suddenly became glaringly clear as my eyes followed theirs.

Brick now gripped Nick by the throat, with Nick’s back to his chest.

The vampire king held a long, splintered piece of wood, what looked like part of one of the two-by-fours used to partition parts of the archeological grid, gripped in his bone-white hand. He held the sharp end of the wooden stake tightly against Nick’s chest, right over where his heart lived.

When I looked up from Nick’s chest, I found Brick smiling at me.

Blood still covered his chin and his shockingly white neck, and when he smiled, his fangs were coated in blood, too.

He winked when we met gazes, but I didn’t see any humor in that stare.

“What is the human expression?” Brick drawled in his deceptively lazy voice. “I brought you into this world, young man, and I can take you out of it?”

Black, who also had a gun aimed at Brick, took a half-step closer, but stopped when Brick pressed the wooden stake harder to Nick’s chest.

“Seems poetic, doesn’t it?” Brick drawled next. “Wooden stake to kill a vampire? While it doesn’t have to be wood, despite the myths, hearts are a bit of a weak spot for our kind, I’m afraid, just like they are with yours.” He looked down at Nick, then at Jem, and the fury in his eyes struck me as real.

“…In more ways than one,” the vampire king hissed coldly.

“Let him go,” Black growled. “You harm him, and––”

“Yes, yes,” Brick interrupted, impatient. “Can we simply dispense with all of that, Quentin? You must have known I never would let it go, as we once discussed. That it was an unreasonable impossibility from the very start.”

“We helped you,” I snapped. “That stupid house in New York. We played your little game, and nearly got ourselves killed in thanks––”

“And you got a rather posh honeymoon in exchange, if you’ll recall,” Brick drawled. “And my, did my eyebrows go up when I got that bill. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you took advantage of an old romantic like myself with some of those extravagances.”

My jaw hardened more. “But why would you do this? How does it possibly benefit you to start another war between our races? We’ve held to our end of the treaty for almost two years. We haven’t gone near your people since––”

“And then we found a new tear in the world,” Brick cut in, his red eyes warning me coldly. “Yet another door where your people were entering.”

I froze, staring at him. “What?”

“Don’t play coy with me, young lady.”

“But I honestly don’t know what––”

Brick snarled loudly at me, fangs shining in the torch’s light.

When I fell silent, the smile that wasn’t a smile returned to his pale face.

“A bit of a cheat, isn’t it?” he quipped, tilting his head. “To claim you won’t harm me and mine, all the while more and more and more of your people keep wandering, unwanted, into our sweet and pristine and pretty little world? How long before one of them decides to follow Charles’ example, Miriam? How long before Charles himself finds his way back here? After all, you tried banishing him once, didn’t you? How well did that work out for all of you?”

I stared at Brick, then looked at Black.

“Seriously,” I said to the vampire, voice flat. “What the fuck are you talking about? I thought the only door left was the one under your childhood home, in New York.”

Brick shook his head. As he did, he backed up slowly towards the rock wall behind him, dragging Nick with him.

It was only then that I saw it.

It had been invisible from above, as the rock wall slanted in at a steep angle, narrower up by the walkway, wide and broad and filled with crevices and shadows down below. I hadn’t seen the light it emanated because of the yisso torches, which washed it all out.

But I could see it all clearly now.

A misty swirl of glowing light shone from the dark rock face.

Water dripped down the rock around the dimensional tear, leaving orange, pink, green, and yellow streaks along the wall around it, probably from minerals accumulating in the falling water. The effect made it look almost like a mouth, like the rock itself was alive.

It was smaller than the one we’d found under Brick’s childhood home.

It looked more organic somehow, more natural.

But I had absolutely no doubt what it was.

My heart thudded in my chest as I looked at it. The hairs rose on my arms, and on the back of my neck. My mouth seemed to tense, as if I’d bitten down on a live wire.

Brick and Nick stood only about five feet from its lit edge.

“How did you even find this?” I whispered, bewildered.

Brick’s red eyes bored into mine.

“We hadn’t until now, Miriam, dear,” he said in that drawling voice. “Of course I knew something was going on. Seers began to be sold and traded on the black market… seers we’d never seen before, and we’ve been meticulously documenting your kind since we’ve known of your existence. These seers were new. They were unnamed. They were unidentified. They had to be coming from somewhere, didn’t they? Including your dear little poppet here, who’s quite a story in and of herself…”

He jerked his chin towards where Aura stood.

I followed his eyes, still fighting shock, a kind of sick unease.

Aura hadn’t changed positions.

She stared at Nick like she was terrified out of her mind, but teetering on the edge of desperation and rage. Jem stood next to her, a nearly identical expression on his handsome face. Both of them looked like they would leap on Brick the second they saw an opening. Both of them looked like they’d tear him apart with their bare hands.

They also stood closer to the two vampires than any of us, even Black.

In fact, they stood pretty much directly between Nick and Brick and the rest of us.

I glanced at Black’s face. I saw from his eyes that he’d seen the portal, and knew exactly what it was, what it meant. He seemed significantly more cognizant of how it factored into the little standoff here, given it stood directly behind where Brick gripped Nick by the throat.

I looked at Nick, wondering suddenly why he was so quiet.

I immediately realized his eyes were glazed, probably from venom. It’s possible Brick got him with another syringe filled with vampire-strength tranquilizer, too.

In any case, he’d been bitten badly, somewhere in the course of his fight with his sire. A violent tear, presumably from Brick’s fangs, had gouged out part of Nick’s neck. Blood flowed in clumped lines down from the seeping flesh, darkening the top of his shirt, which had been yanked open at the neck, again, likely by Brick.

Nick stared only at Jem.

“God, get out of here,” he managed in a croak.

Jem’s jaw hardened.

Brick broke out in a delighted laugh. “It’s all so wonderfully messy, isn’t it? You can see it, can’t you? When you look at them? You can see how they are the same?”

I blinked, confused.

I refocused on Brick, but he was no longer looking at me.

He was staring at Jem and the girl––looking between them, really, as if comparing one to the other. I glanced at Black, and saw him doing the same. So was Jax, and Mika, and every seer who had made it down to the cave floor by then.

Bewildered, I followed all of those stares and also gazed at the two seers, one middle-aged, the other a child, one male, the other female.

That time, I went into the Barrier to look at them, using my seer’s sight.

At first, I couldn’t understand what I was seeing.

Their aleimi was completely wrong.

Jem’s aleimi, in particular, which I was far more familiar with than I was with Aura’s, looked totally different than how I’d ever seen it before. I’d examined Jem’s light from the Barrier multiple times. I’d done it during jumps, when he’d wanted me to verify this or that thing he’d found. I’d done it when he’d been injured, or in shock, or he’d been shielding me, or I him. I’d done it when we were fighting something in the field, side-by-side.

I’d never seen it look like this, no matter how agitated or angry or afraid he’d been.

It was like his light had been pulled halfway out of his body.

Stranger still, all of that off-kilter aleimi of Jem’s was somehow completely enmeshed with the girl’s. Their aleimi was visibly entangled to the point where it was difficult to pull them apart, to even tell which part was the girl and which part Dalejem.

As I continued to watch, the two of them seemed to be fighting over the different parts of their living light, too.

Sparks occasionally erupted, or detonated like small explosions within those clouds of purple, green, gold, and blue. Complex light structures shivered and hit into one another, rotating strangely or sliding erratically from Jem’s side of the light to the girl’s, only to rotate back around to the other one of them. Long, snaking strands of light wound between them, as well, almost like they were attempting to strangle or take over the other’s life force.

“What the fuck is she doing to him?” I asked in shock.

Gaos, Jem had been right.

He’d been right about her all along.

The girl wasn’t what we thought. She wasn’t this benign victim who’d simply become an avatar for Jem’s paranoia and fear. She was some kind of parasitic monster, and she was killing Jem. She was somehow stealing or siphoning off his light.

I hadn’t even known such a thing was possible.

Brick laughed at my question, however.

He grinned down at Nick in his arms, still with the wooden stake pressed firmly to Nick’s chest.

“How confusing this must all be for you, my dearest boy,” Brick crooned into Nick’s dazed eyes. “How very very confusing. Which of them do you save? Which of them do you want? Do you save neither of them? Both? Do you keep them apart and assign some sort of visitation rights for the two halves of the year? I don’t think they were ever meant to live in the same place at the same time, do you…?”

Brick raised his eyes. He smiled maliciously back at Jem.

“It seems to have made your darling Dalejem a bit batty, hasn’t it?” Brick observed. “Or is that purely the girl’s influence, do you think? Was she batty already and you’re only seeing it mirrored in him now, as well? Or were they both batty all along?”

I blinked and stared.

I tried to pull apart Brick’s words, failed.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked angrily.

I wondered why I was the only seer speaking suddenly.

Black and the others just stood there, staring at Jem and the girl, with blank, paralyzed looks on their faces.

What was I missing? What the hell was happening?

Ace and Kiko seemed to be wondering the same thing.

They looked between one another like they had no idea what any of us were talking about, or why everyone was staring at Jem and the girl.

It was Black who finally broke the silence.

“Then it was the girl who did it?” Black’s voice sounded oddly distant. “It wasn’t Jem who went after them… it was her.” He looked at Brick. “So you had nothing to do with Rucker dying. Or Frasier. Or even those deaths in Paris.”

Black didn’t voice it as a question. He did glance at me, though, like he was remembering our conversation in the dining car last night.

Brick laughed, as if Black’s words delighted him yet again.

“I had nothing to do with it in the slightest,” the vampire proclaimed, smiling wider. “I’ve been following these two little scamps, just like you. I didn’t realize the significance of their odd connection, but with the help of Zoe, we figured it out…”

I froze, following Brick’s eyes a second time.

He was looking into the darkness of the cavern on the other side of where he stood.

Brick hadn’t come here by himself, and he hadn’t only brought with him the vampire version of my baby sister, Zoe. Multiple pairs of red eyes shone out of that dark. Bone-white skin and even whiter fangs flashed in the glow of the yisso torches as the vampires stepped forward and lowered their hoods, making themselves visible.

I counted eight… no, ten vampires standing there.

My sister, Zoe, stood in front.

They wore all black, and most had donned cloaks with hoods to cover their hair, and likely much of their skin until they walked forward into the edges of our torchlight.

They’d stood so utterly still before that. With their ability to remain bloodless and unbreathing and statue-like, in that way only a vampire could do those things, I’d had no idea they were there until Brick instructed them to make themselves known.

“It was Zoe’s idea to use a seer to look at the girl,” Brick commented, his eyes fond as he looked at my sister. “We found one of the new ones for that… one you wouldn’t miss… and put him to work solving this puzzle for us. Sadly, our new pet expired after we got a little too enthusiastic and a little too careless with him.” Brick’s red eyes flashed coldly. “But, luckily, not before he told us something very interesting…”

Brick’s red eyes met mine.

They seemed to dare me to react to his murder of another innocent seer.

When my expression didn’t move, he smiled.

“You see, my dearest Miriam, Jem and the girl aren’t simply oddly, freakishly similar, as you have no doubt now seen… they are the same person. They are mirror images of one another, separated only by dimension, by body, and by life experience. Our tasty little friend who helped us unravel that puzzle concluded they share the exact same aleimi, only altered by training, age, and experience. They share a kind of ‘soul,’ you see. A soul that could exist happily in multiple forms across different dimensions… so long as it didn’t try to reside in multiple forms within the same dimension.”

Brick paused, likely for effect. He raised one shoulder in a languid shrug, the one that attached to the arm and hand that gripped Nick by the throat.

“In short, our pet theorized they were two different versions of Dalejem… birthed in two different dimensions. When the girl wandered blithely into our world, there were two of them in the same dimension, when there really should’ve only ever been one in each.”

Brick looked away from me and towards the girl, Aura.

“It seems that wasn’t much of a problem until the girl got sold to that human with the fetish for children.” Brick sniffed dismissively. “Even then, it was relatively fine while he kept her imprisoned in his little castle in Monaco. But then he brought her to San Francisco, to the same place where Nick and his lovely Dalejem lived. Their little seer brains started to fry from the proximity… and then, we think, to vie for control. Obviously, she had more reasons to want to live in dear Dalejem’s body than the reverse. Because your girl here was the more damaged and righteously angry of the two, she managed to colonize Jem a number of times, I’m afraid… and then she grew a taste for it.”

Brick’s smile swiveled back to me.

“She grew to like her freedom, I expect,” Brick drawled in my direction. “Then she began to realize what she could do with it. To better her situation, of course… and, dare I say it, perhaps to extract a little revenge.” Brick smirked down at Nick’s face. “I admit, my darling Naoko, I might have been a little kinder to you about your very pretty pet, if I’d realized just how bloodthirsty and vindictive he could be…”

My face and hands felt cold, like all the blood had drained out of them.

I looked at Jem, then at the girl.

The same.

That was what I’d been seeing while I looked at the girl.

That was the puzzle my brain couldn’t unravel.

Their bodies, their ages, their faces, and genders had confused what my light had known, probably from the first time I laid eyes on her. But there had always been something there, hadn’t there? Something I’d never been able to pinpoint, never been able to explain. I’d not tied it to either one of them specifically, but on some level I’d known.

I’d known that I knew her already.

I’d recognized my friend because they were the same.

They existed as dimensional mirrors.

Jem from Old Earth, who got here first.

Aura, from somewhere else, who arrived after Jem.

I’d known it was possible to run across two different versions of the same person across different dimensions. I’d known it in theory, at least, while I’d been hopping dimensions myself. I’d discussed that very possibility with Allie and Revik and the seer elders on Urtre, back when I’d been trying to learn everything I could about my dubious and very dangerous “gift.”

The spiritual leader of Urtre warned me specifically that I would need to leave any dimension where I encountered what seemed to be another version of myself. She said I should never return to such a dimension, either, as the consequences could be fatal for one or both of us. The idea struck me as bizarre, bordering on fanciful at the time, but I’d promised her I would do as she instructed. Of course, the assumption had been that my twin would look like me, that I’d recognize her. That’s not what had happened here.

Aura was Jem, but not.

Jem was Aura, but not.

I had no explanation for that, no way to understand it, but the end result was the same.

Gaos, I thought suddenly. Poor Nick.

Had he known on some level? Had he suspected something, at least? Or was this all new information for him, too? The girl had obviously known enough to get possessive with him.

Did that mean another Nick existed on a different dimension, as well?

The thought was disturbing, even unbalancing.

“Why did you bring them here?” Black growled, finally breaking the silence. He motioned towards the portal, still glaring at Brick. “What is the point of this? Did you plan to throw the girl through? Jem? Both of them?”

Brick laughed, louder that time.

He shook his head, a bemused look on his face as he smiled at Black.

“My dear fellow,” Brick said. “I didn’t bring them here.” Brick nodded towards Jem. “He did. He dragged her here… and I’m sure you can probably guess why.”

All of us turned to look at Jem.

He didn’t return our stares. His green and violet eyes never left Nick.

It was then that Nick must have decided to make his move.