“Helena doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
“Mm, she has a name,” said a Cedric to my left an instant before I turned to slice the mirage to nothing.
“Names make things personal, don’t they?” taunted another double from behind me, which had me swinging that way next, cutting upward with the blade this time, rending another Cedric to green mist.
“That’s why you hate names,” jeered another Cedric, “isn’t it?”
“What does he mean I could be set free?” Helena asked even as she kept swinging her purse at the Cedrics. Though this time, a gloved hand shot out to catch it.
“Let go, you platinum brat!” she yelled, tugging.
“Helena!” I shouted—but my warning for her to release her hold on the purse came too late.
Cedric—the corporeal one—yanked Helena toward him, straight into his grip. Again, she cried out as the wizard ripped her purse from her before flinging it aside. Whirling her around, he pulled her against him. After drawing a dagger, he held the blade to her throat.
I glared hard into her terrified stare, the guts I wasn’t used to having twisting with the familiar sensation of rage, and the less familiar but just as potent emotion… of fear.
For her.
“I know what you hate more than names, though,” Cedric goaded. “Mirrors.”
This last word he whispered into Helena’s ear as, one by one, his doubles shifted shape, each morphing into someone else entirely.
Into identical versions… of me.
18HELENA
Grim’s expression, so hard and impervious before now, faltered under the scrutiny of his own repeated glare.
Hadn’t I also experienced the trepidation that gaze instilled?
Even poor Bryce had almost imploded under that terrifying stare.
Apparently (and paradoxically), Grim himself wasn’t immune to its effects.
While I yanked at the arm that imprisoned me—an arm belonging to a bona fidewizard—Grim peered from left to right and back again as the crowd of imitators closed in, their glowers bearing down on him from all sides, something about their stares putting an unmistakable crack in his previously impenetrable demeanor.
That collage of unblinking gazes drove his to the floor, as if they radiated some truth—some condemnation—he couldn’t face.
I didn’t know how to help him. I didn’t know how to helpme.
“Do you haveanyidea how long it takes to extract oneself from a body bag andthena morgue drawer?” asked Cedric. “My powers tookjustlong enough to start recirculating with my blood that I almost asphyxiated first.”
“Tell me you saved the toe tag,” snarled Grim as he gripped hisscythe between both hands. “Suddenly, I have the urge to start a collection with your name on it.”
I blinked at this because, for someone who’d judged me for joking my way through a life-and-death situation, he certainly seemed to possess the talent himself.
“You think you’re funny,” said one of Grim’s doubles, mimicking his low and smoky voice.
“And you are,” grunted another, “but not the way you think.”
“What are you doing?” I asked, yanking again at Cedric’s unyielding arm.
“Torture, of course,” muttered that sly voice, a grin implied in his tone.
“You fucked up,” said another of Grim’s doubles. “Again.”
“But you keep fighting the consequences,” said another, their verbal onslaughts piling on faster now.
