18. I’ll Be Clone for Christmas
I’ll Be Clone for Christmas
The figure stepped forward. The weak glow of a strand of Christmas lights—plugged in but only half working—illuminated his eerie, semi-transparent features.
Delilah felt her jaw actually drop. Beside her, Jasper tensed and stepped partway in front of her—as though he could somehow protect a witch from whatever magical nonsense was about to unfold.
It was an adorably pointless move that Delilah couldn’t even take time to enjoy, due to the strange person standing before her.
It was Zahir.
Except it wasn’t. Not really. Zahir was downstairs trying to salvage the Saturnalia feast while processing the fact that magicians had just kidnapped the closest thing he had to a mother.
This Zahir was... off. Like someone had taken the original and given him multiple runs through a poorly maintained photocopier.
He seemed faded around the edges somehow.
Ever so slightly transparent. And Zahir’s usual tightly wound energy had been replaced by a lounge-lizard, can’t be bothered sort of air.
“Well, well.” Not-Zahir leaned against a massive plastic tub labeled X-MAS DéCOR (PRE-1950). “This is awkward.”
Jasper’s hand, still half extended in that protective gesture, drifted down to Delilah’s wrist. His touch sent a completely inappropriate tingle up her arm.
Get it together, Delilah.
“Who are you?” she demanded while trying not to think about how Jasper’s fingers had somehow migrated from her wrist to her palm.
The figure executed an ironic little bow that the real Zahir would rather die than perform. “I’m Epsilon. Or Eps, for those who’ve earned the privilege of nickname usage.”
“Epsilon?” Jasper repeated. “What, like the Greek alphabet?”
“Very good. We are Alpha, Beta, et cetera et cetera. I was the fifth clone off the magical assembly line.”
“Oh my god,” Delilah said, realizing. “Scarlett’s kitchen doppelg?ngers. She was trying to help Zahir manage two kitchens at once. Here and the new pub he opened with Dayo. She said it went pretty badly.”
“Picky picky picky,” the clone said indignantly.
“Original-recipe Zahir is such a little whiner. Nothing we did was good enough for him. Beta made him this five-star béchamel and Zahir said it tasted like cursed wallpaper paste.” Eps sighed bitchily.
“ Anyhoodle , Scarlett did what every witch does when a little magical experiment goes wrong: immediately gave up and erased it. One minute we’re failing at basic culinary tasks, the next we’re being sucked back into the primordial magical soup.
Except I wasn’t quite ready for magical oblivion, thanks muchly.
So I took off and hid up here.” He plunked down on a stool-sized elephant made of wicker and hummed a little tune. “ Call me... irresponsible ...”
Something tiny and furry went streaking across the attic floor.
Close at its little heels was a sleek black cat.
With an impressive leap, the bigger furry thing pounced on the smaller, gave several violent shakes, and then trotted proudly to Eps.
The cat deposited a dead mouse on the floor and curled up at Eps’s feet.
“Excellent work, Poe.” Eps didn’t seem the least bit disturbed by this gruesome offering. “Another trophy for your collection.”
“You have a cat,” Delilah said, her voice pitching slightly higher than normal.
Then she noticed a tabby lounging atop a decrepit box of tinsel.
And another was curled up inside Papa’s old Santa hat, the one with the battery-powered flashing lights.
Yet another was perched on the attic windowsill, staring intently at nothing in particular.
Cats. Actual cats. In her attic.
The discovery sent a bizarre cascade of emotions through Delilah.
First and strongest was the thrill of it—she’d always longed for a cat.
This was followed by alarm—Mama would be furious, as she viewed witches with cats to be excessively clichéd, as bad if not worse than witches using wands.
Next a sharp, painful stab of guilt—Mama wasn’t around to be furious because she’d been kidnapped.
And finally the most dreadful thought of all— I’m not losing another parent. I can’t go through that again.
Quite the rollercoaster, and it left Delilah with nothing to say except, “Our attic is Cat Lady Central.”
“Cat Gentleman Central, if you don’t mind,” Eps corrected. “And yes, there are a baker’s dozen of them, at present. Of course, if you want to get technical about it, they’re not literally cats so much as they are me. Parts of me.”
“I’m sorry, what does that mean?” Jasper asked.
“What, are you new here? How do you think witches conjure things? They take pure magic and shape it into whatever they want. In this case, an army of me’s. And when they get tired of us? Quick flick of the wrist and we’re magic soup again.”
Jasper turned to Delilah for confirmation, and she could only shrug. “That is basically correct. Not an especially generous explanation but?—”
“Generous!” cried Epsilon. “She wanted to turn me into soup.”
“ Back into soup. You were soup before, and to soup you returned. . . .You know, actually,” Delilah interrupted herself, “I’m not wild about the soup analogy, The point is, clones were made of magic, and all Scarlett did was return you to your original form.”
“Well, I wanted to be me a little longer. Is that so wrong? I mean... look—” Epsilon stretched out his lanky body for inspection.
“Can you blame me? Pretty great, am I right? Anyhow, given that I’m magic myself, I can reshape myself into other forms if necessary.
The mice were destroying irreplaceable family artifacts.
” He gestured at the surrounding chaos of trunks, wardrobes, and stacked boxes.
Basically anything that any Melrose had ever saved since the inn was built was up here.
“Thought I should do something about it.”
“So you turned parts of... yourself? I guess? Into cats.” Jasper’s voice had that particular tone he got when his brain was struggling to fit a new piece of information into an already overloaded framework.
“What would you have done?” Eps asked.
“Called an exterminator?” Jasper suggested.
“Yes, well, I didn’t have that option, seeing as I was supposed to be reabsorbed into the collective magical essence, or whatever nonsense you ladies call it.” Eps directed this last part at Delilah with a pointed look. “I wasn’t ready for magical oblivion just yet.”
“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You’re a piece of pure magic that Scarlett shaped into a duplicate Zahir, but you didn’t want to go back to being just magic, so you’ve been living in our attic making cat versions of yourself to hunt mice?”
“ At last we’re all on board, yes.”
“Wait,” Jasper said slowly, “does every cat you create makes you... less?”
For the first time, Eps looked slightly uncomfortable. “I prefer to think of it as magical recycling.”
Delilah stared at the clone, realizing why he was looking so translucent; it wasn’t bad conjuring on Scarlett’s part. “You’re using yourself up.”
“Well, that’s a bit dramatic. I’ve merely repurposed some nonessential aspects of me for the greater good.
” Eps waved dismissively, a gesture that sent several nearby cats into alert mode, thinking it might be a game.
“Now, are we going to discuss why you two look like you’ve seen a ghost? Besides me, I mean.”
The events of the past hour came crashing back, and Delilah felt her knees go weak.
Somehow, in the bizarre discovery of Eps and his feline army, she’d momentarily forgotten the horror of watching her mother vanish.
She sank onto a nearby trunk, disturbing a Siamese that shot her a reproachful look.
“The magicians took my mother,” she said, the words still not feeling real. “Right in the middle of the Saturnalia feast. You didn’t hear anything going on downstairs?”
“Oh I see. Yes, there was some commotion earlier,” Eps said with a shrug. “But generalized mayhem is pretty much par for the course with the Melroses, so I didn’t think too much about it.”
Jasper settled beside Delilah on the trunk. Their thighs touched, a warm line of contact that shouldn’t have been as distracting as it was. “One minute we were watching a second-rate magic show, the next...” He gestured helplessly.
“Well, shit.” Eps looked worried for the first time. “That’s significantly more important than my Tom and Jerry situation.”
Something in the clone’s concerned look (an expression so familiar from the real Zahir) made Delilah’s eyes sting. “We’ve searched the entire inn. No sign of her.”
“And you came up here because . . . ?”
“Process of elimination.” Jasper’s hand found Delilah’s almost unconsciously. She tried not to read too much into it. He was being supportive, that’s all. Just because they’d shared one kiss (okay, one mind-blowing kiss) in a moment of weakness... “Also, we’re avoiding the chaos downstairs.”
“Mass panic?” Eps asked knowingly.
“All the women at the feast tried to fight magicians without actual magic,” Delilah confirmed. “It went about as well as you’d expect.”
“Ah yes, the Saturnalia catch-22.” Eps nodded sagely. “Nothing like a self-imposed magical blackout during a crisis.”
“How do you even know about Saturnalia?” Jasper asked, a slight frown creasing his forehead. “If you’ve been hiding up here for?—”