When Jane flips on a light switch outside the bathroom door on the other side of the room, I realize I’m looking all doppelganger—thick black cloud hovering over the floor by the end of the bed—and should probably duck and disperse. But then she pauses to check her makeup in the mirror over the sink. Jane’s eyes share a flicker of sadness with her reflection, and it seals my decision.
Before Jane even gets the bathroom door shut behind her, I’ve risen, thickened, and shocked Dick backward. The bottle of Maker’s is airborne. Wide-eyed, he falls onto the bed, and I’m straddling him. Bourbon pours, and topples its way onto the floor. The smell adds spice to an already heavily scented bedspread. I cover his mouth with mine and latch on, sharp teeth retracting. He tries to fight me, but that ends as soon as I begin to draw the air from his lungs and the spirit from his soul.
I pull deeply and close my beady red eyes, feel the transformation begin, and wait for his heartbeat to stop. When it does, his meaty human skin hangs from me. I jump off, before I draw his last breath, just barely aware that I am filling the murderer’s skin like a helium canister, its nozzle plugged into a balloon.
Instinctively, I watch for the real Dick’s chest to rise and fall. The adrenaline rush is the strongest now, and my new body vibrates as I see he’s still alive. It doesn’t register that I failed to kill a murderer, just that I’ve kept my vow to not to kill my victims.
I stretch, blink, open and close my new hands, and treat myself to one glance in a clouded mirror propped against the wall atop a maltreated dresser. The body I now wear feels wrong, odd, like I’m not really in charge of it. I feel an intoxicating degree of rage, the kind of wrath I’ve seen Down Under, unworldly. Yet his mind starts to grow in mine like any other human I’ve doubled up on.
An involuntary shudder races up my spine. There are things trapped inside this person’s head, things shoved deeply below the anger that covers them. My body quivers with unknown feelings. The toilet flushes, a human gesture that makes me think of Jane, then Gaire. I immediately shed Dick’s body. It sparkles and pools around my doppelganger form before winking out like a trillion shooting stars swallowed by waxing clouds.
As I slither into the filth under the dresser and entertain one second of familiarity with my surroundings, Jane walks out of the bathroom in nothing but a triangle of red lace and her black boots.
When Jane sees Dick spread across the bed, legs hanging over the edge, and the bottle of bourbon emptying onto the floor below him, she tosses up her arms.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, ya betta not be dead, damn it! Think you’re gonna bring me to this friggin’ pigpen, then just up an’ die on me? Shit. Shit. Shit!” She takes long strides toward the bed, eyes jerking from him to a prescription bottle on the floor next to the bourbon. “I ain’t spendin’ the whole damn night explainin’ this shit in no police station.”
While Jane’s going all Lower East Side Ghetto, I’m focused on the pill bottle and why it’s on the floor. Something stirs behind my red eyes—a familiarity.
I watch Jane tentatively place two fingers at Dick’s throat. “Well, at least you’re alive.”
As she turns toward the dresser, I snuggle farther under it. The look on her face clearly registers there’s no money on top.
“Son of friggin’ Sam! An hour wasted, an’ a fifteen-minute walk back to my corner with nothin’ to show for it.” Her shoulders slump with a snort of frustration.
She pulls a cell phone out of her left boot, looks from it to Dick, and then back to the phone. She fills her chest with the acrid air and chews on the corner of her lip.
I figure now is as good a time as any, before she makes that call, and ooze out from under the dresser and up Jane’s body. Totally into her situation, she doesn’t realize what’s happening, and I’m in before she can squeak an objection.
I look at her sleeping body stretched out on the filthy carpet and momentarily think about dragging her onto the bed beside Dick before I use her cell phone to call the police. But I decide it’s a stupid idea. The police need to find them just like this. I hope Jane on the floor and the brand of the open bottle of bourbon is enough to make them question him.
“At least I didn’t kill either of you,” I say through Jane’s lips, tits heaving, as I carefully dig under Dick and pull a wallet from his back pocket.