Tell the Wind and Fire(6)

“I’m looking at you,” I said. “And nothing’s changed. Nothing will ever change, not for me. But I want the truth.”

Ethan took a deep breath.

“My mother and I almost died when I was born,” he said, and his voice was soft; apologetic, I thought—but, then, his voice was always soft when he spoke of his mother. “They were able to stabilize my mom, but they kept having to restart my heart, and it wasn’t working. I was fading fast. My mother said they would have done anything to save me.”

She died when Ethan was ten. She had been sick a long time, and being with her as she died had taught Ethan, I think, how to be gentle.

Ethan took my hand in his, fingers running lightly over not my rings but my knuckles, for the strength and comfort of skin on skin.

“So my father called in a Dark magician,” he said.

It actually made me think better of Charles Stryker, that he had broken the law to save Ethan, done something that would ruin him if anyone learned of it. It made me think he might have loved his wife.

I thought better of Ethan’s father for taking the risk, but it was such a terrible risk. I could not even let myself consider what would happen if this secret got out. I was so scared, I could barely breathe.

“They did the ritual, and I lived. But it created . . . Carwyn,” said Ethan. He chanced a look at Carwyn, and I squeezed his hand. Ethan looked at me, appealing to me. “It was when I was a baby. It was years before I met you.”

“If it was when you were a baby,” I said, “Carwyn would’ve been a baby too. Nobody would raise a doppelganger baby. How could you collar or control one? And a baby couldn’t escape or survive on his own. Your uncle would have twisted his neck and thrown him into the East River. How could he possibly have lived?”

“Quite a picture, isn’t it?” Carwyn asked, looking out of the window. “Baby’s First Collar. ‘Who’s an itty-bitty manifestation of ultimate darkness? Is it you? Is it you?’” He glanced over at us. We stared at him. He shrugged. “That was a rhetorical question.”

I returned my gaze to Ethan, and he looked back at me.

“You said nobody would raise a doppelganger baby,” he said slowly. “But someone did. My mother did. She insisted. She was so sick, and my dad thought that crossing her would kill her. Dad didn’t tell my uncle. He sent my mother and . . . and the other child to live in the country. My mother would come up to be with me and my father—but she spent most of the first few years I was alive raising someone else. She didn’t trust anyone else with him. She wanted to keep the child alive as long as she could.”

Ethan’s parents must have known it was only a matter of time until Carwyn was discovered. All doppelgangers were Dark magicians, and nobody would believe Ethan had an identical twin who, coincidentally, could do Dark magic.

“When we were four, the Dark magician who made Carwyn told my uncle about the doppelganger and tried to blackmail him. Uncle Mark had the Dark magician killed, and he would have killed Carwyn if my mother hadn’t told my father she would kill herself, too. My dad and my uncle sent the doppelganger off to the Dark city the same day, and my dad brought my mother back to me. I didn’t even know about the doppelganger until my mother told me. She wanted me to know what my father had done. What he was capable of. And she wanted someone else to remember Carwyn.” Ethan looked toward Carwyn. He had been carefully avoiding doing so, but now he met his eyes. “You should know that she loved you.”

“You should know,” Carwyn informed him, “that I don’t care.”

A doppelganger wouldn’t. They didn’t feel like other people did. I couldn’t blame Carwyn for that, but from the expression on his face, Ethan could.

“She wanted to keep you.”

“So what?” said Carwyn. “She didn’t keep me. It doesn’t matter to me what some dead woman wanted. She wasn’t my mother.”

“She was mine,” Ethan said tightly. “Don’t talk about her like that.”

“Or what?” Carwyn asked. “Or the Golden Thread in the Dark, that sweet angel of mercy who now has her clothes back on, burns a little Light discipline into me? Oh, go on, sweetheart. It’s nothing I haven’t had before, and maybe with someone as pretty as you I’d enjoy it.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you. I told you, I owe you. I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”

“That goes for both of us,” Ethan said, after a pause.

Carwyn raised an eyebrow. “I’m touched.”