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.”
He cast me a mocking look. I could read the warning in his mockery: I knew I could not tell anyone what he had done.
“But they would be wrong, of course, those people who say she is nothing but a golden-haired doll.” Carwyn lifted a glass and toasted me. “How deep is our love, am I right?”
After dinner, he suggested to Jim that they play video games. He told me to stick around and give him a kiss for luck, but I left.
He was avoiding me, and that meant he might be useful.
The military ball was going to happen very soon, before all the flashing cameras and all the Light magicians. I was expected to be on his arm and at his side, in front of cameras and company, and that meant he could not get away. At some point in the dizzy whirl of that night, I was going to get answers from him.
I walked home, though Mark had offered me one of the Stryker cars. It was only when I was outside that I realized how quiet the night was.
People said our city never slept, but if it was still awake, it must have been hiding, holding its breath and praying not to be discovered.
I found myself badly wanting to get home, and wanting something too much made me stupid. I took a shortcut that led down a few too many alleyways. Even the alleyways were not dark, though: nothing was dark in this city. I was walking carefully through one of them, my boots clicking on the stone as I picked through the debris of the city, when I made my discovery.
Words on one of the walls glimmered in the moonlight, and I turned to see blood slick and still wet against the bricks.
Someone must have dipped their finger in still-wet blood, and scrawled these words:
GIVE US BACK
THE GOLDEN ONE
Without thinking, I did what I had done every time I felt unsafe or unsteady in the Light city—because I could not turn to Dad and knew I should not bother Penelope. I grabbed the phone in my pocket, my rings clicking and my palm sliding against the plastic, and I called Ethan.
The phone rang only once, not long enough to give me time to rethink the decision, not giving me time to think at all.
“There’s blood on the wall,” I said.
“What?” demanded Ethan, and I was shocked by the recognition that flooded through me at the real concern in his voice. This was Ethan, I thought, it had to be. It could be nobody else. “Where are you?” he said. “Are you all right?”
I closed my eyes and caught my breath and forgot about blood in the sweet, painful wonder of it: that he was safe, that there was still someone who loved me best of all.
“Lucie!” His voice rang out, an edge of annoyance to it now. “Don’t be an idiot. Where are you?”
It wasn’t that Ethan had never gotten annoyed with me. Of course he had, but he would never have shown it when I was scared.
Of all the things the doppelganger had done to me, this cruel trick was the worst. I took a deep breath, opened my eyes, and I saw the blood again clearly.
“I hate you,” I told him, and said his name, his real name, as if by naming him I could rob him of his power. “Carwyn. I hate you more than I can say.”
I cut off the call.
He immediately called back, but I did not pick up. I would have turned off my phone, except that there might have been murderers in the vicinity. I might literally have caught them red-handed.
Walls of the Light city had been painted with blood in my name. Who had done it, and whose blood had they spilled? Had they used the blood for Dark magic or had it been simply slaughter? Or had they used their own blood? What did they want with me? I did not know what it could mean, for the sans-merci to be in the heart of the Light city and so bold that they wished to advertise their presence.
I did not call for the guards. I kept walking, past the letters of blood and back to Penelope’s apartment.
At home, I found everyone asleep; they always went to bed early. I was glad that I did not have to listen to Marie crying herself to sleep again.
I stood at the window of the sitting room and stared toward the Dark city beyond the river.
I did not think of how it had been my home, the last time that I had a
real home. I did not think of my mother, who had taught me what it was to love and then what it was to lose, or of my Aunt Leila, who had taught me to be strong enough to bear the loss of what you loved.
I thought of Carwyn and his murderous allies. I thought of my former home as a city of nightmares, darkness waiting and seething at the gates, ready to flood out and drown every one of us.
Mark thought the military ball would reassure the city, boost confidence in its leaders, quiet the unrest. I thought I could get answers at the ball.
The Light Council and I, Mark Stryker and I, were in league. My best chance lay in being their ally, as it always had. They were so powerful. I hated them, but I had to hope they would succeed and save us all.
Chapter Fifteen
ON THE NIGHT OF THE BALL, I DRESSED FOR BATTLE. Ethan had sent me many formal gowns to wear at events when I had to be on his arm. I chose my favorite, the one that looked most like armor, the one he had sent me when I told him I hated gold.
That day, Carwyn had surprised me by sending over a box with a dress for me. I did not even open it and look inside.
I climbed into the car Mark Stryker had sent, and it carried me to Grand Army Plaza, where there was already a crowd assembled. I climbed slowly out of the car and looked around at the rich display.
I had been to functions in the Plaza Hotel before, with the real Ethan. I had walked under the stained-glass ceiling of the Palm Court, which seemed to make the whole room glow as if the rich had some private sun nearby reserved exclusively for their use. I had eaten caviar and drunk champagne in the Champagne Bar, its red drapes as rich and full as the skirts of women from times past, and its chandeliers like glittering spotlights for each one of us.
This was different. The hotel was built like the biggest chateau in the world, a massive block of a building with fairy-tale towers and sunburst windows and a roof of gray and gilt and green, standing among spires and spikes and straight lines. The whole building looked gold where it had once been white, because there were lines of leaping flame from the windows, short controlled bursts of light from the roof, and longer trails of fire, sparks flying upward and becoming banners in the sky. Streamers of magical light were being tossed around and around the building, as if rays of sunlight had been turned into twining ribbons.