“I did die,” Leanne said, digging her feet into the cold sand.
I turned my head to face her. She had kept quiet on the subject all the way over to Peel’s beach.
“That’s what you want to know, right?” she asked me.
I nodded, only partly seeing her. My mind replayed that awful scene from last night.
“Well, let me clarify—a part of me died.” She glanced at her hands before meeting my gaze again. “Four days ago I created a doppelganger.”
***
Doppelganger. I jogged my mind for the word. And then it clicked. One of my attackers a few months ago had been a doppelganger. “That’s why you smelled like smoke!” I furrowed my brows. “How do you even make one?”
Her lips quirked. “It involved a voodoo priestess, some rum, and a piece of me—pettiness more precisely.” Her expression sobered. “Cecilia put me in touch with the woman, who happened to be visiting the Isle of Man at the time.”
Happened to be visiting. Somehow I didn’t think anything was a coincidence when it came to Cecilia. She, however, had disappeared shortly after Leanne had activated the circle, so I wouldn’t be able to question her in person over this.
“What exactly is a doppelganger?” I asked. All I knew about them was that they were dark, dangerous creatures.
“It’s a shadow person, a portion of a real person that has been fractured off to take on a life of its own. I created it to prevent myself and others from being wholly and completely destroyed.”
Now she wasn’t making any sense. “What do you mean to prevent yourself and others from being completely destroyed?”
“I had foreseen that the devil would use me or someone else you loved to get to you. I realized that if they didn’t take me, they’d take someone else. And in my visions the captive always died. Out of desperation I got in touch with Cecilia and she gave me the idea.”
There her name was again. Cecilia. She’d somehow orchestrated this.
“But aren’t doppelganger’s . . . evil?” Leanne didn’t practice black magic as far as I knew.
She winced. “Sometimes—usually it has to do with the person creating them. Separating yourself into pieces is not good. Although, all I gave up was pettiness to make my doppelganger. Sorry about that by the way; I was probably a headache.”
I smiled, remembering Leanne—or her doppelganger—over the last couple days.
Something about what Leanne said nagged at me. “But why did you have to get kidnapped—why did anyone have to? Couldn’t you have hidden and told others to hide?”
“Gabrielle, I promise you it was the only way. I foresaw dozens upon dozens of possible futures. Every instance where something went differently ended up fatal. In most you outright agreed to the devil’s demands, usually before but sometimes after someone was killed. Agreeing to the devil’s terms didn’t matter, by the way. The captive was always going to die.
“In some of my premonitions Oliver died in my place. In some we both died. In others, the entire Politia died. And in one, Andre and the rest of your coven died. That one was the worst.
“I looked at every possibility—ones where I told you what was to happen, others where I told friends what was to happen, others where I did nothing, and still others where I hid you—there was always someone or something that brought you to the Braaid. That was unavoidable.”
I was blown away by Leanne’s thoroughness. Never had I imagined that all those times she’d ignored me and Oliver, or worked while we talked, she was actually trying to find ways to save us.
Her words also made me think over last night’s gruesome events. “You mean that what we all went through last night—that was the best possible outcome?”
She smiled sadly. “I told you already Gabrielle: you’ve pissed off the fates. Cecilia may be on your side, but there are three of them. The other two weren’t making it easy for you to survive this evening.
“And that’s not even including how cunning the devil already is. Had I told you about what was to happen, or had you done anything out of the ordinary, you would’ve been kidnapped the same way I was. You were being watched that entire time. Had you not shown up at the Braaid of your own accord, someone would’ve forced you there.”
“Who kidnapped your doppelganger?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. They wore masks just like everyone else on Samhain. But they were humans, not demons.”
I hugged the blanket closer to my body. Humans had taken her, people that probably lived on this very island—possibly even people we knew or passed along the hallway.
“Where were you while your doppelganger was with me?” I asked.