by P. S. Newman
"A good one?"
"Like looking in the mirror."
The doppelgängers that looked like mirror images of their dreamer were as rare as a molecule of oxygen on the moon. I clambered backward out of the van until I stood on solid ground next to him. “Give me your hand.”
Sean reached out and we clasped hands. The touch didn't trigger my shade sense. He was the original. I pulled away. "Where did the doppelgänger manifest?"
"My Jacuzzi." His ears turned red. Maybe his dream-self had been up to something kinky in the hot tub.
“Trust me, whatever you dreamed, I’ve heard worse.” I climbed back into the van and continued to fiddle with the stuck lock, hoping to ease his embarrassment. Nobody was able to control their dreams. It was illegal to even try. “Tell me about it.”
He took a deep breath. "I was caught underwater in a riptide. It was hot. It felt like I was burning. At some point, the boiling water turned into whirlpool jets and I surfaced in my rooftop hot tub." He let out the breath he'd been holding.
"Then what?" I needed to know everything up until he'd awoken and manifested his dream.
"That’s it. I woke up."
I shook my head. "There's got to be more to it, Sean. What's the difference between you and your dream version of yourself?" There had to be a significant one or the doppelgänger wouldn't have manifested. That was just how shades worked.
Sean looked sheepish. For some reason, he didn't want to tell me the crucial difference.
I dropped the stupid lock and gave him a look. “I can't help you if you don't tell me."
He surrendered. “As soon as I surfaced I started shooting fire from my hands.”
A fire-wielder. That would be enough of a difference to create a doppelgänger. “Did it hurt?”
“No. It felt good, actually. Natural.”
Click. Finally. I opened the lid and reached inside, keeping a close eye on the kitten as I lifted it out. It hadn’t made any attempts to eat me, but one never knew. Round, golden eyes gazed at me. A soft paw batted at my nose, making me smile. I should phaze the beast and be done with it, but guilt and defiance stirred inside me. They were the same emotions that always got Bella in trouble. I wouldn’t give in to them, but I could at least give this kitty a reprieve until Sean left. It was just too darn cute.
I turned to him, the kitten in my arms. “And you're sure your doppelgänger manifested? And that he wields fire?"
Sean nodded. "Somehow… I knew. I went up to the terrace immediately after waking up. The shade was standing at the edge of the roof. He looked exactly like me. I thought he was going to jump, so my first instinct was to run up to him and pull him away from the edge. But he blasted fire at me and I had to find cover. Then he just… stepped off the roof. By the time I reached the edge, I saw him running down the road. Somehow, he survived that fall. So I called the Order.”
The kitten turned its luminous eyes towards his voice. The purr vibrating through its body stopped. It stared at him.
Uh-oh. I’d seen that look before.
The kitten’s bottom jaw dropped. Cartilage cracked as it unhinged from the top half and kept widening.
Oh no, you don’t. I reached for it with my shade sense. Frustration and annoyance punched me with the pure and single-minded focus of a young child. Of a girl who was angry at her big brother and his idiot friends who never stopped teasing her. Boys were so mean and stupid.
The kitten pushed off against my chest and leaped at Sean. Its head had grown to the size of a pumpkin, its mouth now large enough to fit an adult human head. The red maw loomed wide at my friend.
I grabbed for it. My fingers connected with soft fur. I shot my phazing power at it, severing the emotions from their physical incarnation. The kitten’s high-pitched mewl cut off and it popped out of existence like a bubble of soap.
Sean’s eyes stared at me, as wide as the kitten’s jaws seconds before. “What the hell was that?”
“Boy troubles, of a sort.”
“It almost swallowed my head!”
I frowned at him. He shouldn’t be this freaked. Sean knew that shades were capable of anything. This was an act to distract. “Back to the doppelgänger. Is there anything else I should be aware of?”
Sean let out a sigh of defeat. “Hell if I know. There wasn’t much to go on in the dream. I'm sorry I let it escape."
Maybe that was all the doppelgänger wanted; to escape. I often got the feeling that Sean wished to escape his life in the shadow of his little brother. Maybe his subconscious had created a version of him that could. But that was something he'd have to figure out for himself. With professional help.
"It would be good if you told your shrink about this dream.”
"I have a session with her this afternoon." He shook his head and laughed his little laugh.
I smiled. "Enjoy. I’ll handle the rest.” I’d head to the Somni Order right now to find out what the report on the doppelgänger’s case revealed. I hoped I wouldn’t have to speak to the hunters who’d bungled the case, but they’d likely be ending their shift soon and it would be the best time to catch them if I needed to question them.
Relief washed the worry from his face. "Thank you."
I shook my head. “Don’t thank me yet. Wouldn’t want to jinx it.”
CHAPTER THREE
The LA division of the Somni Order sat on the corner of Sunset and La Brea, a gray, L-shaped building that squatted on the site of a former strip mall. Like most buildings these days, it tried to blend in and avoid any eye-catching design. Being nondescript made an office or public building three percent less likely for the people working there to dream of it and manifest something inside. Three percent didn’t sound like much on the grand scale, but three percent less chance of a rampaging monster popping into existence on the premises made it worth the gray walls, doors and window frames. The only splash of color was the dark green sign with the Somni Order’s logo of a stylized sword in front of a white shield above the main entrance door.
In general, I kept my distance from the Order. Everyone who worked there was trained to recognize and eliminate shades. Hunters like me tracked down and got rid of monster shades; dream therapists tried to help people overcome their recurring nightmares of teeth falling out or their neighborhood flooding; dream keepers helped people sleep through the night; biohazard teams cleaned up biological and chemical wastes, poisons and toxins; construction workers and structural engineers freed buildings, roads and other man-made structures from plants or other types of shades obstructing or threatening to destroy them; and cleanup crews came in after all was said and done to make sure all shade remains or residues were mopped up. The Order employed a lot of different types of specialists and I preferred to steer clear of all of them.
But sometimes cases came up where I needed every piece of information available on the shade I hunted. A fire-wielding doppelgänger who could survive a 400-foot drop and who’d escaped a team of Order hunters certainly qualified. The Order had that information. I had no choice but to enter the lion's den to acquire it. But I had a plan. All I had to do was check out the report about Sean's doppelgänger, written by the Order hunters who'd let him escape. The records room was in the basement, far enough from the captain's office that she might not sniff out my presence before I left.
It would have been a good plan, except for one little hitch. Getting my hands on the report hadn't been a problem. I’d sauntered into the building as if I belonged, all the way to the records room at the back. I drew my shoulders back so the fabric of my dura-tex suit strained nicely across my chest and flashed the college kid manning the desk a brilliant smile along with a crisp twenty-dollar bill.
Gleaning any information from the report, on the other hand...
"You call this a report?" I asked the college kid, who’d introduced himself as B-b-bobby while staring at my chest. He came to stand beside me at the computer terminal. I pointed at the screen. The blank squares within which a shade and it
s elimination were supposed to be described in detail were mostly empty, their white expanses mocking me. So much for coming into the division, filling out the necessary forms to print out a copy of the doppelgänger’s case report, and hightailing it before the Captain found out I was here.
Bobby adjusted the thick glasses on his nose and squinted at the screen.
"Type of shade: class C doppelgänger," he read aloud, "dreamer: confidential. Hunter: R8, R23. Location: Faced on rooftop of Andaz Hotel. Characteristics: cunning, pyrokinetic. Status: fugitive." He frowned at me. "It's all there, man."
"What do you mean, ‘all there’?" I said. "This could be any shade on the planet. It doesn't even say how it escaped the hunter team."
“My guess is it tried to fry them with fire. That’s why they wrote ‘pyrokinetic’.”
"I was hoping for more information on exactly that point."
"They do write up to ten of these per night, you know,” the kid said. “After their twelve-hour shifts."
And paperwork was boring. I could relate. "The hunters on the case, R8 and R23?” I asked. “I'd like to speak to them."
“Sorry,” Bobby said, shaking his head. "I'm not allowed to give people the names of our hunters on the cases without permission from the Captain. You can get an appointment today, though."
Fudge. This was exactly what I'd been hoping to avoid. But if I wanted more information on Sean's doppelgänger, I had to talk to the hunter who'd failed to take him down. It was rare that a shade escaped an Order hunter and I needed to know how exactly the doppelgänger had managed it.
"Fine," I said. Meeting with Ganner didn't mean I had to sign anything. “Can you get me an appointment with her? Today, if possible."
"You'd best talk to Sherry at the reception about that," he said. "She knows Ganner's schedule.”
I headed towards the exit and had almost reached the door when it flew open with a bang. Two steps closer, and I would have been flattened against the wall. I came nose to chest with a tall man who leaned into the room like a supercharged ski jumper. A buzz-cut framed his face, accentuating sharp cheekbones. Bunched brows and tight-pressed lips completed the picture of severity - which was ruined by the rest of his appearance. No matter how menacing, no man was intimidating with cotton candy stuck to his body. It covered the dark green dura-tex hunter suit from neck to boot tips like fluffy pink dust bunnies.
To his credit, this man came close to pulling off the cotton candy menace. His scowl could have thrown a shadow over a rainbow. His eyes were the deep blue of arctic waters. They sliced into me.
"Are you the filer on duty?" he barked. His hostility took me by surprise. Who the hell did this guy think he was?
I glared right back. "Are you the candy man?"
"You think this is funny?" he said, indicating the fluffs of pink clinging to him. "This stuff could morph into acid or catch on fire at any moment.”
"So take a shower," I shot back. He was being dramatic. This looked like one of the rare occasions when a shade could simply be washed down the drain.
"Right after you start prepping the reports for tonight,” he demanded. “We had case numbers three through thirteen, and fifteen through twenty."
I did the math. Fifteen cases. That had to be some sort of record, even for a team of hunters. My all-time high was twelve in one night.
I crossed my arms. "What's the magic word?"
Color rose in his face. I was glad I’d left Aunt Vy in the van. At least I wouldn’t be tempted to draw my weapon first.
"I'll get them ready for you, Sergeant Taylor," Bobby called out from his desk. The hunter's eyes flickered to the kid, then back to me with a withering look. He grunted an acknowledgment, turned on his heel and left. The door slammed in my face.
I looked at Bobby. “Now there’s a real Prince Charming."
He shrugged. “Don’t take it personally; he’s always like that. General George wasn't happy about hiring him, but he used to be a sergeant in the military during the Shade Wars and it makes him a good shade hunter. He’s one of our best."
I stifled a laugh. No wonder Ganner wanted to recruit me. But I wasn’t going to discuss this with the kid, so I swallowed my mirth and focused on something else he'd said. "'General George'?"
He looked sheepish. "It's what we call Captain Ganner."
This time I did laugh. It was an appropriate moniker.
That sentiment was reinforced fifteen minutes later when Captain Georgina Ganner received me in her office. It wasn't just the fact that she liked to wear pantsuits, or her graying hair in a tight bun to tame its nappy nature; it was also the bark in her voice and the perpetual frown line between her slate-gray eyes that pinned you to the spot.
"Miss Maybrey," she said when I entered her office. "What an unexpected pleasure. Have you finally decided to join our ranks?"
I stepped up to her desk, now regretting leaving Aunt Vy in the van. My sword’s presence by my side would have literally steeled me for this confrontation. But the farther I kept her away from the indomitable captain, the less likely that Ganner would suspect our explosive secret.
We’d met two years ago, shortly after I’d manifested. I was hunting down one of Bella’s shade monsters that was terrorizing both her and the city. Captain Ganner had been trying to recruit me as a shade hunter for the Order ever since I’d eliminated the monster. “That's not why I'm here.”
Pencil straight brows rose halfway up the high forehead. "You haven't thought about my last offer?"
"No." It had been difficult not to. She'd dangled a high salary in front of my nose. With benefits. "I'm here for information about a case. I'm told only you are authorized to give it to me."
"You want the name of one of my hunters."
“Two hunters: R8 and R23.”
She smiled and pointed at the chair in front of me. "Please, sit."
If I sat, I would receive the broadside of Ganner's manipulation. But hunting down Sean's doppelgänger would be so much easier if I had more information on him. So I sat. And tried to ignore Ganner's cat-in-the-cream smile.
"What if I don't want to give you the name of my hunters?” she asked, steepling her fingers. "It's a detail we don't give out to the public. You, as you do your damnedest to remind me every time we talk, are the public."
"Then I would tell you that a powerful, respected man of this city hired me to clean up the mess these hunters of yours made of his case."
"If you were a hunter of the Order, I could have put you on Baptiste's doppelgänger from the beginning." Of course she knew which case I was talking about. "You could have cleaned it up without making a mess. Assuming you're really that good."
"You know I am.” Or she wouldn't still be trying to recruit me.
"True," she said, "although I was talking about this particular case. I'm not sure even you wouldn't have let the shade in question escape."
“Then it's in all our best interests that it be apprehended before it creates too much damage. So please, let me talk to your hunters."
“Okay,” she said, surprising me. She usually put up more of a fight than this. "If you'll answer one question."
I knew it. "For the last time: I will not join the Order." If I worked for Ganner, sooner or later someone would catch on that I wasn’t entirely human, and the very institution I worked for would put a bullet in my head. No thanks.
Her smile came slow and sly. "That's not my question."
"Fine. The name of your hunters for an answer to your question." If I didn't like it, I could always lie. Though lying to General George was difficult.
"Thank you. As I said, it's only one, and a simple one at that: Why don't you want to join the Order?"
Another conversation we'd had before. Maybe she hoped that I would slip up and show my true colors if she asked the question often enough and in enough variations; like a recruiter trying to find out why a job applicant had really quit his last job. So I said what I always did when she asked me some variation
of this question. "I prefer to work alone. I like being independent and keeping to my own schedule. Being my own boss."
"If you're so independent, how come you lived with your cousins for over a year? And when you finally got a place of your own, it was right next door. If you like keeping to your own schedule, then why do you adapt it to your cousins' lives? If you're your own boss, how come you're taking this case from a man you were hoping to get some distance from?"
For the second time that day I was stunned. I knew General George was savvy, but her questions could lead right to the truth and then my life would be over. I decided offense was my best defense, hoping she didn’t see the sweat springing up on my brow. "Have you been spying on me?"
"That wasn’t necessary. I know of your living situation because of the change of address on your business website. I know about your routine because Bella Perez is a prime dreamer and I make it a habit of checking up on her shades regularly. And you couldn’t possibly think you could go on a few dates with a Baptiste brother without the whole world knowing, especially when it broke off so suddenly.”
Okay, Sherlock. “If you check up on Bella so regularly, you know she has anxiety issues when left alone. The Perez sisters are family, so I’ve picked up some of the responsibilities, including being there for Bella when I can. End of story.”
“That’s noble of you,” Ganner said. “But I doubt it’s the end of your story.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what you’re hoping to accomplish here, but you’re wasting both our time. I’ve given you the answers you wanted. Time for you to give me yours.”
“Fine,” she said, surprising me. That had been too easy. She’d been fishing for some kind of information, and I must have given it to her, even if I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it might be. I tried to breathe through the panic roiling in my stomach as she continued. “The hunters on Baptiste's doppelgänger case were Joshua Dobrev and Sergeant Vaughn Taylor.”
