Page 26 of When Sorrows Come

“Okay, that’s enough of that,” I said, and stomped down, hard, on her foot. No matter how much her body shifted, she still had feet, and feet are filled with lots of convenient little bones that go “crunch” when you subject them to sufficient pressure. There was a satisfying cracking sound, and she cried out in pain, still in that higher-lower impossible voice.

I yanked myself away from her, drawing my own knife, all too aware that I was only feet from the High Table and was probably committing some degree of mild treason by daring to fight, evenfor the sake of protecting myself, but unwilling to stand back and just get stabbed.

Although when I spun to face her, she didn’t have a knife anymore, and I realized maybe that was because she had already used it to stab something. Dammit. I glanced down, and there was the knife, a simple copper thing with a basic cross hilt, sticking out of my side where a knife definitely wasn’t supposed to be.

Shock is a hell of a drug. If there was going to be pain—and there’s always going to be pain—it would come later, probably when I tried to pull the damn thingout.

“This is a new dress,” I snapped, my attention going back to not-Nessa.

She was getting taller. Taller, and thinner, almost insectile, losing all roundness from her face, arms, and torso, losing all the softness. Her skin was taking on a new shade, becoming a mottled mix of gray and green, patches that seemed to shift in the light, making it harder to focus on the shape of her. Her clothing tore as she grew, exceeding what Nessa’s own body had needed in an outfit, and the ragged pieces began to drop away, even as her teeth sharpened into fangs.

“Doppelganger,” I said, and started to circle. I only had the one knife, and the urge to pull hers out of my side and add it to my petty arsenal was strong. It was also a bad idea until I could be sure the edge wasn’t serrated. I’ll recover from a little stab wound faster than anyone else alive. Disembowelment takes longer, and I didn’t have the time for that.

She hissed at me—actually hissed, like some kind of giant lizard—and leapt into the air, a single pump of her legs propelling her high enough to reach the ceiling, where she grabbed onto an amethyst spire and kept on hissing, looking down at the room.

“Shit,” I said, taking a step backward. “Tybalt? Luidaeg? Anybody got any ideas?”

“Archers,” said Raj. He sounded almost bored.

“I was right about that?” Bowstrings twanged around the edges of the room as the royal archers I had only been guessing about released their arrows, firing at the Doppelganger, who sensibly wasn’t there anymore as soon as she saw the arrows flying in her direction. Unfortunately, the arrows were still there, and they were doing what arrows do when they encounter gravity: flying in a high arc toward the center of the room, where they should haveembedded themselves in their target, which they missed by a considerable margin, and then beginning to descend.

“Shit shitshit,” I chanted, dancing backward, out of the area where the arrows were likely to hit. “Chelsea! Nolan! I need portals!”

“What in the world—” Nolan began.

“Follow my lead,” said Chelsea. The smell of smoke and calla lilies swirled as she concentrated, and a portal easily ten feet across opened in the air above our heads. Nolan made a small sound of understanding, and a similar, if somewhat smaller, portal appeared above the guards who were still trying to move High Queen Maida out of the way.

There were other Tuatha in the room, and their mingled magics filled the air as they emulated Chelsea and Nolan. The air above us became a virtual firework show of glittering portals, each showing a little slice of somewhere else. A few of the portals opened onto what I assumed were other spaces inside the knowe. Some showed open forest or meadows, and one showed the parking lot behind a Tim Hortons.

And the arrows, falling, fell into them, and didn’t come out on our side of things. Instead, they embedded themselves in whatever the portal showed, and no one was hurt. The Tuatha began closing their portals, and I started looking around for the Doppelganger, no longer afraid of being impaled by falling arrows.

The room was big enough that she was almost impossible to spot, her shifting skin allowing her to blend into whatever part of the ceiling or wall she was now sticking to. “I hate Doppelgangers,” I muttered, and used my knife to open the ball of my left thumb, spilling hot blood into the air. It seemed a little wasteful to go cutting myself when there was already a knife sticking out of my side, but again, disembowelment is hugely inconvenient.

It was a small cut, already half-healed by the time I got my hand to my mouth. The taste of the blood coated my tongue in an instant, brighter than the lights, sharper than the blade of my knife, eager to do my bidding. Sometimes I think my magic is like an abused dog learning to trust its new owner. It doesn’t fight me the way it used to, but its eagerness to be put to use can be somewhat overwhelming when I’m not properly braced.

Blood filling my mouth, I closed my eyes and breathed sharplyin, looking for the scent of Doppelganger. It was a good thing Nessa, wherever she really was, apparently favored form-fitting clothing; if it had been wearing something more adaptable when it transformed, it would have been able to assume a new face without worrying about the sudden appearance of a naked person in our midst.

Doppelgangers can only weave illusions when they have access to the blood of the person they’re emulating, and every attempt uses up a little more of that blood up. Either Nessa’s beauty becoming blunted had been an illusion, or the result of an actual physical transformation. It was hard to say without more information. If the Doppelganger was smart, it would have been a transformation, to preserve the blood it had access to.

I breathed in again, looking for the slick swamp-slime smell of the Doppelganger itself. With the blood amping my magic up well beyond casual limits, it didn’t take me long to find. I opened my eyes, pointing to a seemingly unoccupied space about ten feet from the still-open door. “There!” I yelled. “Right there!”

Still holding onto the scent, I started running. The knife in my side made that more difficult, the shock wearing off to be replaced by waves of stunning pain. Fuck worrying about disembowelment; I yanked the knife free and flung it away from myself as I ran, hoping I wouldn’t hit anyone. The King’s Court was in a panic, with people running in all directions to get away from the onslaught of arrows, blood, and strange changeling women throwing knives around like it was no big deal. Only the group I’d brought with me was still reasonably calm.

Emphasis onreasonably. Someone pulled up alongside me as I ran, and I looked to my left to see Tybalt keeping pace with my steps. Some of his normal mien had melted away, leaving him with rather more feline features than he usually chose to display around the Divided Courts. “Scarce here an hour and you’re getting stabbed?” he hissed.

“Could have been worse,” I said. “Could have kept my mouth shut and let someone who heals more slowly than I do get stabbed.” The knife, which had not been serrated, had left a clean wound that felt like it was already healing.

Tybalt scoffed.

I smiled as winsomely as I could while sucking blood off mymolars and running across a formal dining room to intercept an invisible hired killer. I wasn’t ready to credit the Doppelganger with being an assassin yet, as it hadn’t tried to stab anyone who was actually politically important. Calling me a tyrant didn’t indicate a high level of intelligence on the creature’s part, and yes, it had probably come prepared to say that as it killed a king, but it could have switched gears if it realized it was stabbing someone much lower on the pecking order.

Creatures aren’t known for their mental flexibility, and that’s exactly what it was: a creature. Doppelgangers are monsters, born through some strange alchemy of blood and magic and momentary need by one of the Three. They claim no progenitor because they’re no one’s descendant race. They crave chaos, and most of who they are is stolen, at any given moment, from the people they emulate. Without a face to wear and a voice to speak with, the Doppelganger was little more than a dangerous, cornered animal.

Animals have claws and teeth and can do a hell of a lot of damage when they feel like they have to. We kept running, until we reached the open patch of air that held the swamp-slime scent of the Doppelganger’s bloodline, and I leapt, knife poised to descend, only to feel a clawed foot slam into my middle and knock me backward, away from the fray.

And itwasa fray. Seeing me fly back from a hit of nothing had told Tybalt exactly where the Doppelganger was standing, and the thing suddenly found itself dealing with an entire pissed-off King of Cats who really needed a target for his aggression. Tybalt snarled, claws slashing at the air, and between one hit and the next, the Doppelganger reappeared, bleeding from multiple wounds in its arms and torso and snarling.

I pushed myself back to my feet, already recovered from both my stab wound and the blow to my middle, and rushed to grab one of the creature’s arms, wrenching it around behind its back. “Hi,” I said amiably. “Care to tell us who hired you?”

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