After Oberon brought us the bottle of white wine and poured two glasses, I cast the sound barrier bubble so we wouldn’t have to worry about being overheard.
“We can speak freely now,” I told my mother. “I just cast my—”
“I know,” she said impatiently. “I might not do spellwork anymore, but I’m not deaf.”
“You can’t do any magic on your own?”
“Not witch magic.”
“There are other types of magic?”
She yawned, as though the conversation was pedestrian and obvious to the point of boring.
“That’s all in the past for me now,” she said. “I took a potion, committed an abominable act with a filthy shifter beast, and that was that.”
I took a sip of the wine. It was sweet and cloying.
“And by filthy shifter beast, you must mean my father,” I said. “I know you’re not his biggest fan, but really? Name calling?”
“That’s what he is.”
“Then your granddaughter is also a filthy shifter beast,” I said.
“She’s an exception,” my mother answered immediately. No hesitation. “Zoey’s going to be one of the good ones.”
I tossed back the remainder of my glass of wine. “What about me? I’m half shifter, even more shifter than Zoey.” The effects of the wine washed over me like a warm tide loosening hard-packed sand. I had so many questions. “Why do witches and shifters hate each other so much, anyway?”
She lifted one shoulder elegantly. “Jealousy,” she said. “Obviously.”
“Are you sure? Why would shifters be jealous of witches?”
“Who wouldn’t be? All they can do is change into a furry animal. Big deal.” She waved a hand dismissively. “Any witch with advanced powers can change herself into an animal, as well as countless other things. Things the beastly ones can only dream of.” She drew herself up tall in her chair, almost regal. “We are the superior creatures, and they know it.”
“You sound pretty proud of being a witch, even though you aren’t one anymore.”
Her lips parted, and she held very still, like a video on pause.
The sound bubble hummed with a vibration alert for me. Oberon was returning to refill our water and wine glasses. He broached the bubble without faltering. Sometimes waiters trip over the invisible boundary, but Oberon was nimble on his feet.
“Madams, how is the wine?”
Jo’s spirit was evidently enjoying it, because she chose that moment to speak through my mouth. “Bring me another bottle on your next way through, Obie.”
Oberon did a double take. “Hey! How do you know my nickname?”
I pointed to his name tag. “Lucky guess.”
“Be right back with another bottle,” he said before scampering away.
My mother rested her elbow on the table and gave me a studying look. “That wasn’t you. I heard the change in your voice.” She gave me the wise, all-knowing look that only a mother can give her child. “It was her, wasn’t it? The dead thing.”
I coughed. “The dead thing? Really, Mother. It takes one to know one.”
“The dead girl, I mean. Poor thing.” She rested her chin on her hand. “But it was her speaking through you, was it not?”
“Yes. Jo Pressman ordered a second bottle of wine. She’ll be drinking plenty tonight, and she won’t be picking up the tab.” I shook my head. “Such a Jo thing to do. Her family used to call her a magician on account of how she could make money disappear.”
I laughed. My mother did not.
She asked, “What do you know about their powers over you?”
“I’ve been learning as much as I can with each one.”
“How many?”
I counted on my fingers. “Winona Vander Zalm was first. Then Jo’s father, though he wasn’t quite dead at the time, so I’m not sure if that counts.”
“It counts.”
“Number three was the girl in the coma. She’s conscious and walking around now. That was a strange one. Probably because she’s a goddess.”
“There are no gods or goddesses,” my mother said. “Not unless you choose to believe in them.”
I carried on counting. “Number four was Tansy Wick, the gardener. And now, number five is Jo.”
“And do you always let them use your body for whatever they want?”
I snorted. “You make it sound so tawdry. All she did was order more wine.”
“Something she evidently did in real life. They can only replay things they said at least once when they were—”
The sound bubble buzzed. Oberon dropped off a basket of warm bread rolls. My mother and I tore into the bread with wild abandon.
We talked for a while about ghosts. It felt both strange and yet perfectly natural for us to have this new thing in common. Unfortunately for me, she didn’t know anything about spirits that I hadn’t found out on my own.
The conversation reached a lull. The bread was gone. We started drinking the second bottle of wine. I checked that the sound bubble was still in effect, and told her about my strange encounter with the man who looked exactly like Chet.
She reacted to the news with excitement. “I’ve never met a doppelganger,” she said. “We need to find out what kind of magic he’s using. Is he a golem? Or a fetch? Spirit double?” She slid forward to the edge of her chair. “Maybe a vardøger?”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I said. “He might just be a sibling, maybe a year older or younger. You don’t have to be identical twins to look alike.”
“True.” She wrinkled her nose and slid back on her chair. “Plus maybe you’re wrong about Chet not having a twin. You don’t know everything about the man.”
“No, but I’ve got Winona Vander Zalm’s memories, and she was the midwife. I think she might have noticed two babies coming out.” I had already explained to her about the residual memories, earlier in the conversation.
“But twins aren’t born simultaneously,” she said. “There’s barely room for one in the birth canal.”
I snorted. “Tell me about it. Zoey’s head was like a bowling ball.”
She pursed her lips. “Perhaps if you’d waited until you were a little older and fully grown.”
I clasped my hands together on my lap. There were too many sharp utensils on the table. Through gritted teeth, I said, “You were saying? About twins?”
“I’m not a doctor, of course, but I believe the time can vary. My friend Gabrielle had her two boys five hours apart.”
“Five hours?” I relaxed my hands. “Now that I think of it, my memory of that night gets blurry after the birth. There were a lot of cocktails. Winona Vander Zalm knew how to pass time during a power outage.” I reached for my phone. “Let me just send a message to Chet to clear things up.”
I read the text he’d sent me while I’d been talking to his look-alike. It had been a simple, three-word message: On my way.
“He’s on his way here,” I reported.
“Him and the rest of the animals.”
I shot her a look. “Please try to be nice to my friends.”
“I’m always nice to your friends.”
Let it go, I told myself. I hadn’t stabbed her over her comment about my teen pregnancy, so I could let anything go.
I tapped out a message to Chet: There’s a guy here at the castle named Archer Caine, and he looks exactly like you. I’m not exaggerating. Is he your twin?
The notifications showed that my message was received and read. Five minutes passed with no reply.
He still hadn’t responded thirty minutes later when our food finally arrived—along with our third bottle of wine.
My pasta was undercooked, cold, and a bit bland. When the waiter came by to check on us, I told him it was perfect. Bland pasta is better than waiting an eternity for more pasta.
I asked the waiter, “Can I just get a little salt? And pepper? And some lemon wedges?”
He ran off, returned with the requested items, a
nd left again.
“If your pasta’s not right, you should send it back,” my mother said. “Now, why do you suppose they don’t have salt and pepper shakers on the table?”
Suddenly, I remembered sneezing, and my coworkers laughing at me. It was one of Jo’s memories. One of her job duties was to refill the salt and pepper shakers, which was why they hadn’t been set out that day. I would have gladly answered my mother’s question, but she had already moved on to her next observation, which was about the number of people in the dining room versus the quantity of cheesecake on the dessert trolley.
I murmured in agreement that we should order dessert immediately to be safe, but I didn’t look up from the salt shaker in my hand. An idea was coming to me. The salt shaker was almost exactly the same size, shape, and weight as the one I had at home. I might have thought they were exactly the same, but this one didn’t have the same logo on the bottom. Mine was from Ikea, and this one was made by a company I didn’t recognize. Either one of the companies had copied the design from the other, or two separate housewares designers at two different companies had independently produced the same salt shaker. Such things happened sometimes, in business, art, and science. I’d even heard the theory that creative ideas exist and float around, sometimes finding two humans at the same time.
That gave me an idea.
The same design from two sources.
“He’s a twin stranger,” I said.
“I beg your pardon?” My mother licked the steak juices from her lower lip.
“Archer and Chet are twin strangers.”
“Yes. That is the working theory.”
“No, I mean they don’t come from the same parents. They just happen to look the same.”
“By magic?”
“By statistical probability. If each of us is, say, one in a billion, that means there are seven more lookalikes on the planet.”
She chewed a large chunk of steak slowly and thoroughly. “But even if that were true, the odds of two meeting are extremely unlikely.”
“Until now,” I said. “You know how facial recognition software keeps getting better and better? It’s not just the police and governments who are using the technology. There are these websites nowadays, for finding your twin.” I beamed, proud of myself. “Your stranger twin.”
She seemed to be on the verge of believing my theory. “Show me.”
I pulled out my phone and showed her a couple of websites. The people shown in their sample matches were incredibly similar. The website companies must have paid for professional photo shoots. The stranger twins were always wearing identical clothes and positioned in such a way to accentuate their similarities without showing differences in height or weight, but even knowing that, my mother and I were both impressed. We kept scrolling back and forth through the featured profiles.
“It would probably match me to Aunt Zinnia,” I said.
“Not me?” She looked offended.
“Your hair is black and your freckles are gone, so probably not.”
“Right.” She nodded.
“I am seeing you correctly, am I not? This isn’t a glamour, is it?”
She smiled. “You see me as I truly am,” she said. “You always have. They say newborns can’t see, but I swear that the day you were born, you looked at me, and you saw me.”
I got chills across my back and down my arms. I’d felt the same thing when I’d looked into my daughter’s face.
We spent a few quiet minutes looking through the stranger twin websites. I scooted my chair around to her side of the table so we could both keep eating as we shared the one screen.
When we were finished eating, my mother set her utensils aside and patted her mouth with her napkin. “Let me get this straight. You think a stranger has matched himself to your neighbor, and that man is staying here at the castle in order to… what? Build up the courage to go all the way to Wisteria to meet his stranger twin?”
“Maybe Chet already knows and he’s planning to meet him here, away from his family.” I heard myself say the words and realized how ridiculous it sounded. “Or maybe Corvin signed him up without him knowing. It doesn’t sound like the sort of thing Chet would do.”
“Perhaps Chet signed up because he was lonely,” she said, playing devil’s advocate. “People do strange things out of loneliness all the time. Even moreso these days, thanks to the internet.”
I looked down at the smiling stranger twins on my phone. “What if you met someone who looked exactly like yourself and they tried to take over your life?”
“Sounds like a great movie. I would love to see that. Why don’t they make more movies like that?” She leaned back and craned her neck. “Where is that young man with the dessert trolley?”
Chapter 12
“Well, it’s been great catching up with you,” I said to my mother as we stumbled our way back into her suite.
Once inside the room, she leaned forward with her hands on her knees, breathing heavily from the effort of getting up three flights of stairs after an equal number of bottles of wine consumed. On the walk up, she’d insisted that she wasn’t inebriated at all, since I’d consumed most of the wine, and that the only reason she was stumbling on the stairs was because I kept grabbing onto her to steady myself.
“Yes,” she said between breaths. “It has been lovely to catch up.”
“But I really must be on my way.” I walked over to the suite’s window. I knew I was staying there that night, but I was in a playful mood from the wine.
“You can’t leave. They have the parking lot closed off.”
“I can’t leave by car, no. But it’s a nice night for flying.” I looked out the window, down at the parking lot, which was lit by only a few security lamps. “Now, where did I park my broomstick?”
“Broomstick?” She looked up at me as her breathing returned to normal.
“It’s a joke, Mom. Plus I like saying the word broomstick. How do you like my new catchphrase? You mess with the witch, you get the broomstick!”
“I don’t get it.” She stood up straighter and checked the closure of all her shirt buttons, one at a time, top to bottom, in a familiar gesture.
“It’s a play on the phrase you mess with the bull you get the horns. Please, don’t bust your guts laughing. I know there’s nothing funnier than a joke being explained.”
“I still don’t get it, but I’m sure it’s very funny to other witches.” She came over and joined me at the window. “At first, when you said you were looking for your broomstick, I thought maybe you’d learned how to fly. I was almost jealous of you for a minute.”
“Nope. No need to be jealous of me. My life isn’t glamorous at all.” I backed away from the darkened window and waved at the finely appointed room. “My life is nothing like yours, with all the fancy resorts, and the world tours, and the hobnobbing with the rich and famous.” Between our first and third dessert, she’d told me all about where she’d spent the last five years. No wonder she hadn’t been able to drop me a postcard. Who has time to think of their family back home when they’re partying with the world’s most elite and famous dead people?
She frowned. “I shouldn’t have told you anything. Promise you won’t tell anyone, especially about you-know-who.” She was referring to a recently deceased American actor who was now enjoying the good life in Venice, Italy.
“Who would believe me? The tabloids are always running stories about sightings of dead celebrities. Who knew those trashy papers were right?” I started pacing the room. The suite didn’t seem as large and airy now that night had fallen.
She stayed by the dark window, leaning on the thick stone ledge. While I paced the room like a trapped cougar, she followed me with her eyes. “Zarabella, are you angry at me for enjoying my second life?”
“No. That would be ridiculous. Who gets mad at someone for… life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?”
She watched me pace for another minute. “We should make up the couch fo
r you,” she said. “It’s getting late.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Getting to bed early is healthy. The hours of sleep you get before midnight count double.”
“There’s no scientific evidence to support that. It’s just something parents say to get their kids into bed. Trust me. I tried it on Zoey, and she turned it into a research project.”
“Clever kid,” she mused. She crossed over to an armoire and began unloading extra pillows and blankets. With her back to me, she said, “Either way, let’s get your bed ready so that when you do finally wear yourself out, you’ll have somewhere to sleep.”
“Fine.” I changed course in my pacing, but I misjudged my trajectory, thanks to the wine, and bumped my shin on the coffee table.
My mother whipped around to see me rubbing my shin. “You shouldn’t have had so much wine at dinner,” she said. “You’ll have a difficult time sleeping tonight.”
“If I have any trouble sleeping tonight, it won’t be from the wine. Who can relax when there’s a brain-eating zombie in the room?”
She tossed a pillow at my head. “Enough with the creature-of-the-grave jabs. I still have feelings.” She tossed another pillow and a blanket. I caught both easily, but the edge of the blanket did whip me in the eyeball. The worst part of pillow fights are the eyeball injuries. The sting went away quickly, though. Rapid healing was one of the side benefits of being a witch.
My mother closed the armoire doors and stood still for a moment, touching her pendant lightly. The amber stone in the center seemed to glow in the dim light of the room.
I started making a bed on the couch without taking my eyes off her. “What’s the deal with your pendant, anyway?” I already knew that it exerted mind-control powers over people. She must have been using it for weeks to wipe Detective Bentley’s memories. I’d seen her use it a couple hours earlier in the ballroom, to convince the woman she’d choked that she’d swallowed a bug.
She kept stroking the pendant. “It keeps my head attached to my body,” she said dryly. “You can’t borrow my necklace, because if I remove it, my head will fall off.”
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