Tell the Wind and Fire Read online

  An icon didn’t do anything of its own volition. A symbol didn’t act of its own accord. Both cities projected what they wanted onto me, and wanted me to stay still as they did it.

  We walked on through SoHo in silence, past a closed-up antique shop, a club with a sign that said SIZZLING, and into an alleyway that had a wall covered in intricate graffiti—the shadowy face and scared eyes of a girl lost in a psychedelic forest. Her eyes shone with Light magic, like a surprised animal’s in the night.

  “I didn’t start it, and I can’t stop it,” I said at last. “I can’t even get us a lousy meal. You think that I’m responsible for a revolution? I managed to fool everyone long enough to get my dad out. That’s all. I’m not a hero. I saved one person. You saved one person last night. We’re even. We’re the same.”

  “Are you starving?” Carwyn asked. “Because I’m starving.”

  I walked into the alleyway with the lost-girl graffiti, then turned and stood opposite him. The hood obscured his face, so all I was looking at was featureless darkness.

  “Put your hood down.”

  He pulled it away from his face without a word.

  All day, ever since I had woken to find the one person who meant love and safety to me in sudden danger, I had felt like I was back in the Dark. Like a rawly orphaned child, lying cold and exhausted and scared in Aunt Leila’s house, sure that I did not have enough Light in me to go on.

  Carwyn looked like Ethan, but an Ethan shadowed and starved, bones standing out in high relief in his face and with the sweetness gone out of his eyes. He looked like an Ethan who had been through some of what I had. He looked as if he might, just possibly, be able to understand.

  I said very quietly, “Do you think you might need to go to the bathroom at any point in the near future?”

  “Uh,” said Carwyn, “what? No. What?” He paused. “I want you to know that was my first time,” he added. “Not knowing what to say to someone. I always have something to say.”

  “Well, your first time didn’t last long, but I guess that’s always how it goes,” I said.

  I concentrated on my left hand, the sinister hand, so the rings on it glowed: lapis lazuli, opal, vermarine, emerald, and diamond, the colors of green and blue and moonshine mingling pale and bright as light underwater. When my hand was glowing, I inscribed a circle onto the night sky and made a loop of brightness that turned solid, like water transforming into ice, and landed in my palm.

  I pushed the link I had made over my hand, so it hung around my wrist like a bracelet.

  Then I looked back at Carwyn.

  “I have conditions,” I said. “This is only for one night. You’re not going to argue with me. You’re not allowed to beg or plead or try to make a bargain. You won’t leave my side all night. You have to do what I say.”

  “You might be surprised at how often I’ve had conversations similar to this one,” Carwyn commented, but he spoke in as low and as quiet a voice as I did, as if speaking too loudly in this lonely alley might tip off the universe.

  Outside the alley, the city went rushing heedlessly along, like a river made of light.

  A doppelganger’s collar did not resemble any other collar in the world. It was a heavy strip of black leather, meant to last someone’s whole life, and it was inlaid with metallic fittings like studs turned inside out. Glittering spaces like the setting of a ring when the jewel had fallen out. The spaces waited for the jewels to return.

  “This is serious,” I said.

  I stepped toward him. Carwyn’s gaze was fixed on me with steady attention. He did not move, but I saw him take in all of my movements. He was so absorbed in looking at me that he did not even seem to breathe.

  I turned my rings so each large jewel was palm-side. I lifted my hands and laid them gently against his throat.

  He tipped his head back. Moonlight poured down his neck until it was halted by the dull weight of his collar, a band of black pressed against the pale skin. The gems on my rings fitted into the metal spaces in his collar as if they had been made to do it.

  Carwyn swallowed, and I felt the movement beneath my fingers, reminding me of the vulnerable skin beneath the metal and leather. He felt human, felt as if he could be hurt.

  “I know,” he responded. I felt the leather flex under my hand.

  My rings locked into place. Light magic was tucked in these metal fastenings, calling to the magic in my rings, anchoring them. I pushed my will into the precious stones and saw them glow, even locked into the collar, like lamps behind a closed door. The dim, trapped light illuminated his face, slashes of shadow and eerie escaped radiance: the familiar and beloved turned strange and terrifying.

  I wondered what I thought I was doing, even as I did it.

  The heavy clasp of the collar clicked, the mechanical sound like the inner workings of a clock. The collar opened, the line of the doppelganger’s throat abruptly naked, and the leather and metal fell into my hands.

  I stuffed leather, metal, and hood into my pocket with one hand, and with my free hand I grabbed Carwyn’s, looping the strip of light around his wrist as well as mine and pulling it tight. The Light magic bound him closely to me. He was my prisoner now, and my responsibility.

  “We can go anywhere we want,” I said, feeling both the wild, desperate urge to laugh and as breathless as if I’d punched myself in the stomach.

  I glanced at Carwyn, who nodded, looking lost. He followed me as I stepped forward: he could do nothing else, linked the way we were.

  I said one more thing before we left the alley, a mumbled prayer. “Please don’t make me sorry I did this.”

  “I can’t promise anything,” Carwyn answered. “You’re already sorry. Aren’t you?”

  Chapter Six

  AFTER ALL THAT, WE BOUGHT STREET FOOD AND ATE it leaning against a fire extinguisher on the corner of Prince Street. I wanted to be outside, wind pressing cool on my heated face, as I tried to absorb what I had done and to convince myself that disaster would not come of it. Once I was finished eating, I crumpled up the tinfoil wrapper and the mainly lettucey remains of a taco and threw them in the trash.

  Carwyn raised his eyebrows. “Uh, if you weren’t going to eat that, you should have said.”

  “Doppelgangers: coming for your soul and your leftovers,” I said, running on sheer bravado and fumes. “Follow me if you’re still hungry.”

  We walked down streets full of restaurants and clothes shops until we got to the Moonflower Bakery, and then bought cupcakes. Doppelgangers turned out to be surprisingly fussy about baked goods. Carwyn turned up his nose at the strong suggestion I made that he should have a red velvet cupcake, instead selecting a vanilla cupcake with pink icing and sprinkles.

  We went across the street and sat in the playground there, on the set of fragile swings with the paint peeling off the metal, our wrists hanging linked in the space between us.

  “I just don’t think cheese belongs on a dessert,” Carwyn said. “I think it’s weird and gross. Those are my principles. Okay, that’s my one principle. I like mayhem and bloodshed and deviant sex acts. I disapprove of cheese.”

  “You’ll see,” I predicted darkly. “The cream cheese icing cuts the sweetness. This means that you can eat more of the sweet, sweet treat without feeling all sick and sugared out.”

  “You can say whatever you want to make yourself feel better about the fact that you don’t have any sprinkles on your cupcake.”

  Carwyn put about half his cupcake directly into his face. I breathed in the night air deeply. It was getting easier to relax. It was difficult to be scared of someone who might soon have pink frosting in his eyelashes.

  “Do the buried really think that they’re going to start a revolution in my name?” I asked. “They think I want one?”

  Carwyn nodded, licking frosting off his hands. “Some of them think you’re part of the revolution. Some of them think you still need saving. There are people who believe you seduced one of the Strykers to take them
down, and there are people who think one of the Strykers seduced you as part of a plan to silence your campaign for justice. The sans-merci, those psychos who wear red and black and talk about taking over, say that the Strykers captured you and your father to keep you from telling their secrets.” He arched an eyebrow. “Imagine the Strykers having a terrible secret. Isn’t that silly?”

  I’d thought that I had seen weird stories about my personal relationships already. I’d been used to having no privacy before I even met my famous Stryker boyfriend. There had been brief columns about Ethan and me, photographs of us attending parties, sometimes reports that we had broken up or one of us was cheating with somebody we’d never met. I’d winced at a truly embarrassing picture of me in a blue string bikini on a yacht with Ethan.

  That was bad enough. I hadn’t dreamed people thought I was acting a part with Ethan. He was the last true thing I had, the only thing unsullied by all that had happened to me in the Dark.

  “You seem to know a lot about what the people involved in the revolution think,” I snapped.

  “I’m a very knowledgeable guy,” Carwyn agreed. “They say that doppelgangers can read human hearts and see all the fear and darkness in them. Pale companions of humanity, with their faces pressed up against the windows of the world. Seeing humans’ pain and laughing at it.”

  The swing gave a tiny metallic shriek as he swung.

  “Okay,” I said. “You could probably also hang around in dive bars and talk to people. Doppelgangers have a lot to gain from a revolution.”

  “It’s true a revolution might make the world a better place,” said Carwyn. “But I’m not really the world-saving type. Lots of risk, very uncertain reward—you know what I’m saying? And even if the reward came . . .” He swung and shrugged. “A reward wouldn’t stay a reward, not with me. You don’t know me very well yet, but you’ll see. Everything I touch turns to ash.”

  “What?”

  I’d been worried that he would look too much like Ethan without the collar, but his hair was still shorter and his mouth crueler. He bowed his head, and his nape looked bizarrely uncovered, with an indentation below his hairline where the collar had been.

  “This is how I think doppelgangers work,” said Carwyn. “The doppelganger is created so the other, the first image, can live and prosper. But there has to be a payment. I think that one of us has to suffer. Dark magicians make doppelgangers to be living versions of those dolls people used to stick pins into. We usually die young, instead of them, but we don’t simply die. We come to nothing, with none of our actions meaning anything, and none of our goals ever reached. We are those who might as well have died young: all our lives might have been. All our lives are lived elsewhere, by someone else.”

  Carwyn glanced over at me, and a smirk was born on his mouth, dark as ink spilled and spreading.

  “Of course, sometimes the doppelganger can get its own back. Sometimes the doppelganger can make his mirror image be the one who suffers.”

  Legends say that a doppelganger will cause their original’s death in the end, and try to take their place. There are records of doppelgangers who killed their doubles, their doubles’ families, the magicians who made them, and innocent people. Doppelgangers are lethal. Making a doppelganger is illegal because it is making a weapon that will kill of its own volition.

  I had listened to the stories but I had never considered, before this moment, how much a doppelganger might resent their original.

  Except Carwyn had not killed Ethan. He had saved him.

  “You know,” I said, “you’re right. You do talk an awful lot.”

  “Hmm.” Carwyn flicked an eyebrow sardonically. “You were right as well,” he said, and seemed to be chiefly addressing the remnants of his cupcake. “This is much too sweet for me.”

  “Someone should have warned you about that,” I said, and ate the last of my own delicious cupcake with deep satisfaction. “Oh, wait. I did.”

  Carwyn tossed his cupcake wrapper and fragment toward the nearest trash can. It fell short by several feet, but Carwyn looked indifferent. Apparently doppelgangers were litterbugs, too.

  “I talk, but I don’t really listen. Where to next?”

  I’d already given that some thought. I didn’t want to go to any of my usual hangouts, because I worried we might be seen and questions might be asked. Carwyn kept talking about having fun in the Light city, and he would not be content with going home and being collared while the night was still young.

  There was a place I had gone quite a lot when I was fresh out of the Dark city, and a few times since.

  “I might have somewhere in mind.”

  The problem was, the place wasn’t exactly legal.

  I guided Carwyn through the streets and into Greenwich Village. He wandered along in my wake, looking amiably around as people passed by. At this time of night, it was mostly couples headed to dinner, single people looking for money or fun, and giggling groups headed to clubs. I saw one girl wearing an obviously fake doppelganger’s collar, the material of her hood fraying and the collar plastic. Carwyn didn’t look offended: he smiled the dark, smug smile from the playground and she smiled back, face shadowed but not hidden. Her smile reminded me of the way the midwestern woman from the restaurant had spoken to Carwyn. She stopped smiling when she noticed our linked wrists.

  A lot of couples went around linked like this, which was why I’d done it. I couldn’t risk us looking suspicious, or him getting away from me.

  “This way,” I said, going down another alley, this one between a bar and a closed shop that sold pottery and had shutters painted green. Behind the shutters, a tiny thread of Light shone, showing a security system was in place.

  “Are we breaking in to steal urns?” Carwyn asked. “I could use a flowerpot.”

  I ignored him and walked around a Dumpster. There was a hatch, wood with wire mesh over it, heavy enough so it was extremely difficult to pull up with one hand, but Carwyn didn’t offer to help and I didn’t ask. I heard a siren and froze for a moment, but it went wailing past like a banshee late for an appointment, and I heaved the trapdoor open so Carwyn could go in before me.

  Once I closed the hatch, it was dark there, standing on rough concrete steps, but I felt more than heard the beat of the music already. We negotiated the stairs tied together in semidarkness, damp heat and smoke like mist rising to meet us as we went down.

  It was a huge basement, a series of rooms like a network of caves. The walls were the same rough gray concrete as the steps.

  It was filled with Dark and Light magic. Shadows that nobody had cast moved on the wall, shadows of things that did not exist: beautiful naked silhouettes and flying dragons and clouds with lightning bolts and rain. The lightning bolts were jagged shimmering lines of magic that dissipated into glitter in the dancers’ hair. One boy wore a neon-green bowler hat that spun continuously on his head, and always at a jaunty angle. A girl with bright wings tied to her back was blowing bubbles, fat globes of pure light that winked purple and blue and gold as they drifted through the room.

  Everywhere you looked, there was Light and Dark magic dancing together, shadows and light lacing around people’s limbs.

  I’d been taken to this place by other formerly buried ones, some fresh from the Dark city and some hardly remembering it, people who helped me when I was just getting used to my new home. None of them went to Nightingale-Evremonde, and too many of them wanted to talk about what had happened to me in the dark. I hadn’t been back to the club in more than a year.

  Tonight, though, when I had already done something monumentally stupid, when I had tied a doppelganger to my side and was already drowning in memories, it looked just right.

  “Welcome to Club Chiaroscuro,” I said. “Come on, let’s get a drink.”

  “I admit it’s better than flowerpots.”

  Carwyn did look mildly impressed as we went to the bar in the next room. One of the girl’s bubbles floated in between us, and I captured i
t in my free hand. It didn’t burst, but glowed at the proximity to my rings, and I found myself laughing. Blue and green patterns flashed on the glowing sphere, and it went spinning and trailing sparks.

  “Hey, Lucie! I haven’t seen you in forever.”

  I tossed the bubble up into the air and threw an arm around Nadiya, who had been one of my first friends in the city and was still one of my best friends. Nadiya was almost always laughing but knew when to be serious, and she was always talking, but never about anything that might hurt me.

  “You look amazing,” I said, and she did: long, tight black dress, her hijab purple, and her eyes outlined with liquid eyeliner that I could never get the hang of. Whenever I tried, it looked like I’d taken to face painting. I was still wearing the dull, high-necked blue dress from the train station. “Don’t say a word about how I look good or I’ll never trust you again. Coming here was a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

  “I wasn’t going to tell you that you look good,” Nadiya said. “I was going to ask you to tell me more about how good I look. Oh,” she added a little too casually, her eyes moving past me, and my heart sank. “And I see you brought Ethan.”

  I glanced at Carwyn.

  “Well,” I said slowly. “Yeah.”

  Carwyn’s smile was unlike any smile I had ever seen on Ethan’s face. “Hey. My Lucie is right as usual: you do look amazing.”

  Nadiya didn’t know Ethan well. They were always perfectly friendly with each other, but he was a Stryker, and that made every interaction strained. Of course, she didn’t notice anything wrong with this Ethan.

  “Thanks. You look good too,” she said. “Did you get a haircut?”

  “I did!” said Carwyn, to all appearances delighted. “I did get a haircut. It was time, you know? Because, let’s face it, my old haircut made me look stupid.”

  “No it didn’t,” I said.