CeCe is halfway through the backyard two homes down from the white house with purple trim. She acknowledges me briefly, before her eyes glance down at the bright pink bra on her otherwise bare chest. She slowly takes in the rest of her clothes: a pair of jeans and rainbow colored Sketchers.
I carefully approach.
CeCe stares right through me, as she mumbles, “He tried to … he took off my...” She wails an emotional sob and knuckles tear-drowned snot off her upper lip. “He choked me with my own shirt.” Rubbing her hands vigorously on her jeans, she says, “Then all these guys showed up. One jumped on the man’s back and one broke my door in … and … and...” CeCe sinks to the ground in tears and wraps her hands around her knees. “And I ran away.”
“All right,” Jane says, arms swinging in an arch. “I get it. You’re freaked. Now can you put that shit behind you for a few seconds? I’m tryin’ ta orchestrate a damn rescue here!”
I close the remainder of the distance.
Dappled sprinkles of light fall on us through a huge black walnut tree as the wind dances with its branches. I reach out to help CeCe up. The girl curls into a fetal position and covers her head.
“C’mon, kid. The guy tried to attack me, too. Not like he killed either of us,” Jane says, and a rush of fear pumps adrenalin through our body. “Shake it off chickie, and let’s get the hell outta here before the bastard finds us.”
As Jane’s arm circles CeCe’s waist and we move toward Vuur’s jeep, pounding feet rush toward us. I’m thinking Gaire as I turn. But the momentary thrill of excitement that runs Jane’s spine goes cold. Dick is running toward us, a knife clutched in his hand.
“You won’t get away from me this time!” Dick screams as he approaches the hedge between us and leaps. “You got too close, too personal.” Midair, a savage grin on his face, he shouts, “I was always going to kill you!”
Jane drops, tucks, rolls, and pulls the 9mm out like she does this at least once a day. Shoulder to the grass, arms outstretched, she aims and fires before Dick lands on both feet, a red spot spreading across his chest.
I’m staring in awe as Dick’s knees buckle. He flips the knife so the blade rests in his fingertips, and with a flick of his wrist, the knife is headed our way before his shoulder hits the ground and his hip bounces on the grass.
The weight of cold metal is heavy in Jane’s hand as we both watch Dick’s knife head for Jane’s chest.
Gaire yells, “No!” as the knife slides effortlessly through Jane’s ribcage.
“I’ll be back for you,” Dick says through a bloody smile.
As the body Dick’s wearing crumbles and flakes around a cloud of pitch smoke, and carbon-copy Jane begins to slough off me in sparkly colored sprinkles, Dick and I both register who we are, what we mean to each other—brethren—we are both doppelgangers. My mind goes back to the hotel in Orlando. I had snagged his host, yet had no clue the doppelganger was part of the killer. I felt something dark, horrid, but chalked it up to the man’s psychopathic nature.
Flames flicker and push wafting smoke our way from the white house with purple trim. I wonder if the dragon is trapped inside.
Dick’s red eyes and garish smile are not the last things I see through my host’s eyes. With an echo of laughter, the other doppelganger’s smoky image turns to ash, and rides a gust of wind through me and up into colorful branches hanging over us, laden with maple leaves.
Gaire
CeCe is weeping ten feet from me—merely human—the shell of a creature I can’t live without.
I’m still panting after I watch a Smith & Wesson float onto the ground below a cloud of smoke forming where a woman who saved my life once lay. The blade of a knife, not a drop of blood on it, catches intense light as a sun of gold, pink, and magenta dips on the horizon behind the roof of the house we are gathered in front of.
My eyes find another puff of smoke. I watch it flake to ashes, before I turn back to where CeCe cowers.
The remaining doppelganger locks eyes with me and I know; I know this is the creature that wore CeCe, wore the busty chick that came to find me, and I know … that I love her.
The doppelganger is sooty, with pulsing red eyes and a mouth straight out of a nightmare. It slowly floats backward off the grass and onto a cement driveway still warming in the early evening sunlight. And as I watch the creature turn to dust, like the other did, and as it floats to the cement in a pile of ashes, I know it loves me too.
I am the doppelganger again
It is still day time. I can feel it. But I recognize the smell of the sewers Down Under. When I open my eyes, Gaire is staring down at me, still blond and tan.
“Don’t speak,” he says. “Don’t move. Just listen.”