“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.