Tell the Wind and Fire (20 page)

He saw me looking and winked.

“Dull meeting, my petal. Don’t you think?”

I let go of the table. I stopped watching and began to prowl, moving in a slow, unstoppable circle back toward him. Carwyn stood and watched me come at him. He let me come, let me rest a hand on his collarbone, not far from his dark doppelganger’s heart.

I gave him a hard shove. He was the one who stumbled then, back connecting with the wall. I clenched the soft blue material of his shirt collar in my fist, wrenched it stranglingly tight, and spoke with my face close to his face—Ethan’s face, the doppelganger’s lying mask.

“Where is Ethan?” I demanded. “What did you do with him?”

Carwyn still had that smile on his lips, as if everything that was happening to him was impossibly amusing.

“My little love dessert, I think you’ve become upset and confused. I’m Ethan. Who else would I be?”

“Don’t play games with me, Carwyn!”

“These violent outbursts and this suspicious nature must be born of your childhood trauma, Golden Thread in the Dark,” Carwyn observed sweetly. “What a prince I am to understand your wounded psyche and put up with your erratic behavior, my damaged daffodil.” He reached up, patted my hand at his throat, and closed his eyes, apparently at his ease. “I know you only hurt me because you love me.”

“I know you. You’re not the one I love. And I will hurt you if you don’t answer me.”

He could have murdered Ethan, I thought. It was possible that it was already far too late to save him.

Carwyn’s eyes opened. They looked darker than Ethan’s even though they must have been the same color, as if the black of his pupils was spreading to swallow Ethan’s eyes up in darkness. “If you cause a disturbance, people will come in. What will you say when they start asking questions? If I’m not Ethan, who else could I be? Who is Carwyn?”

I stared at him mutely, my lips pressed together.

Carwyn smiled gently. “A long-lost twin?” he asked. “Maybe an
eeeeeevil
twin?”

My silence was the stony, absolute silence of a grave. My silence should have spelled out his own name to him, carved on a tombstone.

“Surely not a doppelganger,” said Carwyn, dropping his voice with solemn horror. “How could that be? Certainly the esteemed Strykers, the first family of the Light, would never create a filthy, unholy creature like a doppelganger! And even if they did, what hideous traitor would ever, ever remove the monster’s collar?”

I could not help myself. I started to shout. “How
dare
you—”

The door burst open, a stranger on the threshold who must have been Stryker security. He stopped short at the sight of me and someone he thought was Ethan, and I could read his uncertainty: nobody should have been threatening one of the Stryker heirs, but it was the heir’s girlfriend, and he might have been misinterpreting the situation.

Carwyn pulled himself out of my slackened grip and strolled toward the security agent.

“She’s a little rough with me sometimes,” he explained in a confidential tone, patting the man on his arm. “You know how it is. You want to tangle with a wildcat, you get clawed. Worth it, of course. We’re very much in love.”

He glanced over his shoulder at me, as I stood with my hands empty, robbed of my prey.

“Coming, my love panther?”

I walked over to take his arm.

“Absolutely. We still need to continue our conversation.”

“Certainly,” Carwyn returned promptly. “I have promised my dear Uncle Mark and my even dearer cousin Jim that we’ll have dinner together tonight, but of course we’re all so close, there’s nothing you can say to me that you can’t say in front of them. Family’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

He looked at me, and the security guard looked at me too.

“You must come for dinner as well,” said Carwyn hospitably to his security detail as we stepped out into the hall. “The more the merrier. Don’t you agree, my strawberry of delight?”

I spoke through my teeth. “I’m afraid I have to go home to Penelope. I have to be there for her and Marie right now.”

“Oh, because one of your adopted family has disappeared into the Dark city, possibly never to return? Of course. How insensitive of me. Please forgive me. I will think of you fondly during every course at dinner, and twice during the cheese course.”

We walked through the halls and went down in the gold-plated elevator of Stryker Tower, me, the mocking copy of my darling, and the man who was preventing me from killing him. Carwyn kept up a cheerful monologue, mainly about what he was going to have for dinner.

We went out into the street. It was still morning, the sky a fine bright blue over tower tops winking in the sunshine.

“I’ll leave you here, tulip,” said Carwyn.

He bent down, Ethan’s face gilded by sunlight with darkness behind it, and his lips brushed my cheek as his hair brushed my forehead. I held on to his shirt and hoped it looked as if I was clinging.

“Is he alive?” I whispered. “Just tell me that.”

Carwyn’s kiss was gone as soon as it had landed, the place on my skin he had left it cold even before he leaned back. “If you behave yourself . . .” he whispered against my cheek.

He studied me in silence, as if he was considering something, then turned and walked away.

I stood looking after him. If anyone saw me watching, they would assume my motive was love, and, after all, they would be right.

The doppelganger and his guard proceeded down Sixth Avenue, past a pizza shop and a tailor’s, cars whizzing by with their windows becoming squares of captured light and then turning back to darkness.

Carwyn was far enough away that someone else might not have been able to see him perfectly, not been quite sure what he was doing. But I was sure.

He looked back over his shoulder and nodded, just once, just slightly.

Ethan was alive. Ethan would stay alive, if I did what Carwyn wanted.

I got through dinner with Penelope and Marie and Dad with the forced cheer and frequent smiles of the desperate. I had someone else to think of now, besides Jarvis. Ethan was just as surely gone.

I was certain Carwyn must be in league with the
sans-merci,
who had killed Ethan’s father, if he had not killed Ethan’s father himself. His taking Ethan’s place proved that. And his taking Ethan’s place meant the
sans-merci
had taken Ethan. If Carwyn had been telling the truth, they must have kidnapped Ethan and kept him alive for a reason.

If Ethan was alive, what were they planning to do with him? What did they want from him?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I went to school the next day. The teacher said Ethan Stryker claimed that he could not attend due to being suddenly overwhelmed by excessive grief for his father.

I tried to get through the day. I did not sit at the table with Jim Stryker, though he waved me over and seemed to expect it. I sat with my biology partner and a few other girls she knew. A couple of people who knew my home situation looked at me sympathetically, but nobody spoke to me about Jarvis.

There were still people talking about Ethan’s father. I heard his name whispered in the corridors, by the teachers, heard his name in the silences that fell over groups when I walked by. But mainly everyone was talking about what the
sans-merci
might do next—whispering about atrocities they had already committed—and gossiping about the ball Mark Stryker was throwing to welcome the new guards. One girl at my lunch table, whom I did not know very well, asked shyly if I thought I could get her tickets for the party.

Nobody was very interested in Charles Stryker himself anymore. One of the most powerful men in the city, one of the Strykers whose name was inscribed in gold across our skies. And he was gone, gone as surely as my mother was gone. The dead drift away from us, like reflections in moving water, hardly seen before they are lost.

I sat and ate my sandwich, and I told myself I would not allow Ethan to drift away.

I noticed, as the days wore on, that Carwyn was avoiding being alone with me.

Nobody else had any answers for me. Nobody knew what had happened, and I could not tell them. Telling them meant my head would be cut off and Ethan would be in even more danger than before.

I had to get answers from Carwyn. He had to know
something:
where the
sans-merci
were keeping Ethan, why they had taken him. He was the only possible source of information that I had. But he was being very careful not to give me the opportunity to ask any questions.

I went to dinner at his house more than once, and we ate with Mark and Jim at the table, and Carwyn would invite Jim to play video games with him afterward. He would always encourage me to stay, always include me in a conversation, always make a point of subtly taunting me, but he would not talk to me in private.

The taunting was sometimes hard to bear.

“How is school going?” Mark asked at dinner one day when he had finished talking about the glories of the upcoming ball. He spoke as if Carwyn had been going to school.

“Wow, actually, I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Carwyn said. “I’m failing.”

Mark raised his eyebrows. “Which class?”

Carwyn waved his fork around in a big circle. “Oh, like,
all
of them.”

“Ethan!” Mark snapped.

“I know,” said Carwyn. “I am just not very bright. Well, you’ve seen the kind of clothes I choose to wear, with the entirety of New York men’s fashions at my disposal, right? This can’t come as that much of a surprise.”

“You always did more than adequately in your studies before,” Mark said.

“True,” said Carwyn. “But I was mostly coasting on my family name and my debatable good looks, you know? I mean, that’s me. Spoiled little rich boy. Vaguely good intentions, you know, but not much follow-through. Very little strength of character. Have you guys ever noticed that when you look at me from a certain angle, I have kind of a weak chin?”

“Looking at you right now,” I said, “I do see it. I’ve never noticed it before, though. Never.”

Carwyn reached for my hand, which was lying on the table, in plain view and beside my knife. I had to let him take it, because Mark and Jim were there watching. His dark eyes followed the line of my sight to the gleam of the knife. He gave me a smile that gleamed in about the same way, and his fingers curled warm around mine. He had calluses that Ethan didn’t have: touching him felt completely different.

I would so much rather have been touching the knife.

“Sorry to let you down there, my adorable little meerkat,” Carwyn told me. “I do think I’ve been getting more good-looking, though. The pain of my recent tragedy has given a deep, haunted look to my eyes.”

I put my hand up to touch my forehead, able to block the sight of his terribly familiar face for a moment, and looked out at the ocean of lights that was the city at night.

“Let’s not talk about your father,” Mark Stryker said.

“All right. Let’s talk about my basic weakness instead. I’ve been sitting in on the Light Council meetings for a while,” Carwyn said. “And my father was on the council before that, my father who supposedly loved me so very, very much.”

“Ethan, don’t doubt that,” Mark said, and I heard a note of real pain in his voice. He had loved his brother. It was a shock to recognize that, to realize something that I already knew but lost sometimes in how much I hated him: that he was a terrible person but he was human.

And he was letting Carwyn get away with outrageous behavior because he thought Carwyn was Ethan, that he was grieving, that he was human too.

Carwyn, who was not any of those things, grinned. “Okay, Uncle Mark. So I have fairly liberal views, right? Me and my girlfriend from the Dark town, me and my whining about fair treatment and justice and free tiny pink unicorns for all. This military ball is going forward, even though we have blood, broken cages, and whispers in the streets. I talk and talk, but I don’t really do a damn thing, do I? You’re the one in the family who gets things done.”

The dinner table at the Stryker household was glass, with jewels beneath it glowing with soft light. It cast odd shadows on people’s faces, made Mark’s face one of hollows and threats. His rings clinked sharply against the tabletop as he put his glass down.

“What are you saying?”

Carwyn gazed at Mark with limpid eyes. “Just trying to express how much I admire you, Uncle.”

“I do not know what’s got into you recently!” Mark announced. “You say crazy things on television, and now that your father is gone you are behaving like a wild thing. Are you on drugs? Ethan . . . do you need to speak to someone? I can arrange that, privately. Nobody has to know. I can make arrangements to help you.”

It was horrible to see Mark’s patience with him, to hold that nightmarish dichotomy in my mind. Mark had hit Ethan and threatened me, had ordered so many deaths, but he did love Ethan. I did not want to share a single feeling with Mark Stryker. I wanted to hate and fear him. It would have been so much simpler.

Carwyn snorted. “Nobody can help me.”

Given how reckless and thoughtless Carwyn was being, I had expected, at first, that Mark—who knew about Carwyn—would suspect that a switch had been made. But people hated doppelgangers so much, were so used to seeing them in dark hoods, that they never thought the hoods might be taken off. And Mark and Jim were blinded by their love and concern, as well as by their arrogance. Mark and Jim believed they could never be fooled for a minute, that they could not speak to or touch a doppelganger without knowing, that they could never sleep with a doppelganger’s cold presence in the house, and so they could be fooled for as long as Carwyn liked.

He could act however he wanted, and nobody but me would know.

“Sorry, my little mint and chocolate parfait,” Carwyn put in, baiting. “Am I bothering you?”

I raised my eyebrows. “Nothing you say could bother me.”

“I wonder,” said Carwyn, but then he checked himself and looked to Mark and Jim. “It’s because she really gets me, you know? Some people think that she’s nothing but a decoration for my arm, the girl who smiles on command, a blank screen that the Light and Dark citizens project all they want to see onto: the martyr, the heroine of the revolution, the eternal victim, the Golden Thread in the Dark. Some people would say that she never dares even to speak.”