“I know,” he responded. I felt the leather flex under my hand.
My rings locked into place. Light magic was tucked in these metal fastenings, calling to the magic in my rings, anchoring them. I pushed my will into the precious stones and saw them glow, even locked into the collar, like lamps behind a closed door. The dim, trapped light illuminated his face, slashes of shadow and eerie escaped radiance: the familiar and beloved turned strange and terrifying.
I wondered what I thought I was doing, even as I did it.
The heavy clasp of the collar clicked, the mechanical sound like the inner workings of a clock. The collar opened, the line of the doppelganger’s throat abruptly naked, and the leather and metal fell into my hands.
I stuffed leather, metal, and hood into my pocket with one hand, and with my free hand I grabbed Carwyn’s, looping the strip of light around his wrist as well as mine and pulling it tight. The Light magic bound him closely to me. He was my prisoner now, and my responsibility.
“We can go anywhere we want,” I said, feeling both the wild, desperate urge to laugh and as breathless as if I’d punched myself in the stomach.
I glanced at Carwyn, who nodded, looking lost. He followed me as I stepped forward: he could do nothing else, linked the way we were.
I said one more thing before we left the alley, a mumbled prayer. “Please don’t make me sorry I did this.”
“I can’t promise anything,” Carwyn answered. “You’re already sorry. Aren’t you?”
CHAPTER SIX
fter all that, we bought street food and ate it leaning against a fire extinguisher on the corner of Prince Street. I wanted to be outside, wind pressing cool on my heated face, as I tried to absorb what I had done and to convince myself that disaster would not come of it. Once I was finished eating, I crumpled up the tinfoil wrapper and the mainly lettucey remains of a taco and threw them in the trash.
Carwyn raised his eyebrows. “Uh, if you weren’t going to eat that, you should have said.”
“Doppelgangers: coming for your soul and your leftovers,” I said, running on sheer bravado and fumes. “Follow me if you’re still hungry.”
We walked down streets full of restaurants and clothes shops until we got to the Moonflower Bakery, and then bought cupcakes. Doppelgangers turned out to be surprisingly fussy about baked goods. Carwyn turned up his nose at the strong suggestion I made that he should have a red velvet cupcake, instead selecting a vanilla cupcake with pink icing and sprinkles.
We went across the street and sat in the playground there, on the set of fragile swings with the paint peeling off the metal, our wrists hanging linked in the space between us.
“I just don’t think cheese belongs on a dessert,” Carwyn said. “I think it’s weird and gross. Those are my principles. Okay, that’s my one principle. I like mayhem and bloodshed and deviant sex acts. I disapprove of cheese.”
“You’ll see,” I predicted darkly. “The cream cheese icing cuts the sweetness. This means that you can eat more of the sweet, sweet treat without feeling all sick and sugared out.”
“You can say whatever you want to make yourself feel better about the fact that you don’t have any sprinkles on your cupcake.”
Carwyn put about half his cupcake directly into his face. I breathed in the night air deeply. It was getting easier to relax. It was difficult to be scared of someone who might soon have pink frosting in his eyelashes.
“Do the buried really think that they’re going to start a revolution in my name?” I asked. “They think I want one?”
Carwyn nodded, licking frosting off his hands. “Some of them think you’re part of the revolution. Some of them think you still need saving. There are people who believe you seduced one of the Strykers to take them down, and there are people who think one of the Strykers seduced you as part of a plan to silence your campaign for justice. The sans-merci, those psychos who wear red and black and talk about taking over, say that the Strykers captured you and your father to keep you from telling their secrets.” He arched an eyebrow. “Imagine the Strykers having a terrible secret. Isn’t that silly?”
I’d thought that I had seen weird stories about my personal relationships already. I’d been used to having no privacy before I even met my famous Stryker boyfriend. There had been brief columns about Ethan and me, photographs of us attending parties, sometimes reports that we had broken up or one of us was cheating with somebody we’d never met. I’d winced at a truly embarrassing picture of me in a blue string bikini on a yacht with Ethan.
That was bad enough. I hadn’t dreamed people thought I was acting a part with Ethan. He was the last true thing I had, the only thing unsullied by all that had happened to me in the Dark.