Chapter 37
Thirty-Seven
Elodie
Pain jabs everywhere inside like a flurry of needles… A rhythmic beeping reverberates alongside them…
Voices warble in and out of earshot…
“Did you finish the—”
“—one more time, just in case.”
“—clear as we can—”
“—should be enough.”
“Bring over the—”
“—the way her heart rate—”
The words fade completely into a murky haze.
Lights blink through the fog as if far in the distance.
Why does everything hurt so fucking much?
Poison. In the soup, down my throat.
Who would have—?
I didn’t do it to myself this time. This time, it wasn’t me.
When is it going to stop?
Where are my matches? I need… I need a hand wrapped around mine… Fingers stroking over my hair…
No. If they saw me like this—
They’re so far away.
That last thought echoes away into the darkness.
The next thing I’m aware of is a now-familiar soft weight draped across my body to my shoulders, a similarly cozy pillow beneath my head.
I open my eyes cautiously. I’m lying on the bed in Other Elodie’s bedroom, tucked beneath the duvet. The gauzy canopy stretches across the frame above me, rippled with the faintest of creases.
“Elodie?”
Dad’s voice comes with a rasp, and then he’s jerking forward over the bed, clasping my shoulder and peering into my eyes.
His face has gone taut, worry lines digging into the corners of his mouth.
His tawny hair sticks up as if he hasn’t washed or even combed it in days.
A faint tremor passes from his hand into me.
“How are you feeling, sunshine?” he asks, still raw with an edge of suppressed panic. “We finally got you home.”
I open my mouth. It tastes like sawdust.
The words creak up my throat. “I—I feel better than before.”
A smile that looks more frantic than pleased flashes across Dad’s face. “Oh, good. We were… We were pretty concerned for a while there, but everyone took such good care of you. You just take it easy. The doctors said you’ll need plenty of time to recover.”
He rubs my arm, still studying me as if searching for a promise that I’ll never be sick again. A lump fills my throat.
I’m not even the daughter he’s so afraid to lose. She’s already gone.
“Anything you need, I’ll be right here,” he says. “You just let me know.”
One anxious thought pierces the muddle in my head. “Did they—did they catch the person who did it?”
The lucent medical staff must have figured out I wasn’t simply down with food poisoning, because Dad doesn’t show any surprise at the idea of someone causing my illness. His eyes turn stormy. “Not yet. I won’t let up until they figure it out. We’re going to keep you perfectly safe from now on.”
I tamp down a laugh at the absurdity of that statement. When I squirm under the covers, a renewed lance of pain shoots through my abdomen.
At my wince, Dad stiffens. “Are you all right? If you start to feel worse again, we can head right back to the hospital. It won’t—”
I reach up to squeeze his hand, cutting through his hurried babble. “It’s okay. I just shouldn’t move much yet, I guess.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.” And I’m just as sure that if he keeps looking at me like that, like his whole world is on the verge of ending if I’m in pain, it’s going to drive me mad. “Maybe I should try to get some more sleep.”
“Yes. Yes, of course. I won’t keep you from getting your rest.”
Dad grips my shoulder for a moment longer as if he’s afraid of letting me go and then stands up. He points at the phone sitting on the bedside table. “I’ll be home. Just a shout or a text away if you need me.”
“I know.”
When he slips out with a click of the door behind him, I do close my eyes, but it’s not exhaustion I’m feeling. The lump in my throat burns almost as horribly as the toxin did. Every other part of me is tangled up with guilt and a looming sense of hopelessness.
Whoever murdered my doppelganger made another attempt. I still have no idea who that is. I can’t even tell which of my various threads of investigation prompted them to act.
If they hadn’t used one of the few poisons I’m familiar with the flavor of… If I hadn’t recognized it quite so quickly… I’d be dead now too.
I have no glim to save me here, whether I’d want it to or not.
The burn spreads up to my eyes. I squeeze the lids tighter, willing the tears away, but they well up anyway.
I’ve made a mess of everything. No clear leads on the murderer, no closer to getting back to my matches, dragging chaos through the lives of the guys who would have belonged to my double, traumatizing my dad…
For what? To just keep doing this until the killer strikes again in some way I can’t fend off?
The duvet suddenly feels ten times as heavy. I push it down to my waist, but the suffocating pressure doesn’t lift from my chest. The effort leaves my arms quivering.
I prowled around this city like I’m some kind of badass, but look how weak I actually am.
The door whispers open. I glance over to see Aunt Daphne peeking inside.
When she confirms I’m awake, she eases in and shuts the door behind her. Her mouth is twisted, her usual frenetic energy more subdued than usual. She paws her wayward hair back from her face and then clasps her slim hands in front of her as if she doesn’t know what else to do with them.
“They came after you again,” she says quietly. “Have you determined who’s responsible?”
Of course that’s the first thing she’d say to me. Not “How are you feeling?” or “Do you need anything?” but “Have you solved that murder I dragged you here to investigate?”
I wish I didn’t feel so feeble with my answer. “No. I haven’t got a clue. I don’t think I’ve even gotten closer to figuring out why anyone would want to kill me—her—in the first place.”
Daphne’s grimace deepens. “You must be close. They left you alone for two weeks, and now… Something’s pushed them to lash out.”
“Or else they were just waiting until they were sure I wasn’t going to point the finger at them before they tried again.”
“You can’t think about it that way. There’ll be an answer. You just have to keep—”
“No.” Bracing myself against the lingering pain, I roll onto my side and prop myself up with one arm so I can properly face her. “I don’t have to do anything. I never asked to come here in the first place. I’ve tried and tried—you know I have. I’ve done enough.”
Daphne’s eyes twitch away from me and back again. “You can’t mean—you were doing so well until now.”
“No, I wasn’t. The match bonds keep getting harder to ignore, and I almost got killed, and it’s practically destroyed Dad…”
I pause to suck in a breath that sends splinters prickling through my lungs.
“You don’t have to care about me, but you care about him, don’t you?
This is the perfect time to let the other shoe drop.
Say the poison had a secondary effect and wiped me out.
Then he won’t have to see me totally recover only to find out I’m dead weeks later. ”
Daphne shakes her head with a rustle of her hair. “There’s too much we still don’t know. Haven’t we been good to you here? Isn’t this a good life?”
My jaw drops before I can gather my words.
“What the hell does that matter? It isn’t my life.
I have the matches I love waiting for me to come back.
I have…” Okay, I don’t have much else, but that’s not the point.
“You’ve got an obvious crime now. Professional detectives can follow the clues.
You don’t even need me. I’m sure whoever’s on the case will do a way better job. ”
“It won’t be the same. It won’t—” Daphne lets out a ragged sigh and perches on the edge of the bed, resting her hand near mine.
Her gaze feels as penetrating as Dad’s but with a sharper edge.
“What would make you feel comfortable continuing? We can work out some accommodations, especially after this incident.”
My frustration bubbles up inside me. “I don’t want accommodations. I want to go home. If you won’t, then I’ll… Then I’ll tell Dad myself. I’ll tell everyone what you did, what really happened to your Elodie.”
I have no idea whether I could get anyone to believe me, but it must be a valid threat. The color drains from Daphne’s face.
“Please,” she murmurs. “I’ll help you every way I can. We will make sure you’re safe here.”
“That’s not the point. This is my limit. We’re done.”
“I thought…” She presses her fingertips to her temples. “I picked so carefully. Someone with the right sort of temperament and attitudes, but who’d struggled more, who’d lost a lot. Who could be so much happier here. If you’d just let yourself…”
A sudden chill congeals in my chest. Am I understanding her right?
“You chose me out of all the Elodies in all the realities out there because you thought I was unhappy where I was?” I demand. The fact that she might not be totally wrong only makes the assumption sting harder. “Why the fuck should that even matter? Why—”
Why is she fighting so hard when I haven’t actually been making progress? When she does have the perfect opening for professionals to handle the case?
I stare at her. She keeps her eyes averted, trained on her entwined hands.
A horrible understanding smacks me right in the heart. “You wanted someone who’d be happy to stay here forever.”
In the first second after the words leave my mouth, a small hope remains that Daphne will sputter indignantly and tell me off. Instead, her head only dips lower.
She speaks in a low rush. “You didn’t see him—when your mother died, Julien fell apart. He loved her so much. But he loved you too. It was only having you that held him back from the edge, kept him sane. If he lost you, I don’t know… He needs you. You see that now, don’t you?”
I go so numb in my horror that I lose control over my tongue. “You brought me here to be my dad’s emotional support daughter?”
“It’s not— It’s good for you too, isn’t it? You have him here, and so many things you didn’t have in your world—you can spark with your matches again—everything will be even better—”
“They aren’t my matches,” I break in. “I already have my mates, and I need to get back to them, and—”
The worst thought of all strikes me dumb. I have to swallow twice before I can force out the question. “Can you even send me back? Is it even possible?”
Daphne stays silent for a long moment. Her answer is little more than a whisper. “No. I found you with my Ellie to guide me, and I brought you here, to a place I’m very familiar with. To try to toss you across the dimensions to a reality I barely know… It was hard enough coming this way.”
“You could at least try—”
“I have. I’ve searched for the same reality I brought you from.
Strained my glim as far as it’ll go. But it’s much easier to search for a thing—or a specific variation of a person—than the absence of that thing.
I just don’t have enough of an anchor. I can’t find it.
” She finally lifts her gaze to meet my eyes.
“There’s nowhere for you to go, Butterfly. ”
The certainty in her words crushes me. The muscles in my arm go slack; I sag into my pillow. An acidic flavor creeps up my throat.
“I’m sorry,” Daphne says, and Fenrir flay me, she sounds like she means that too. “I truly thought you’d be happier here. I didn’t know you’d be leaving anything behind.”
She waits a short while, and when I don’t respond, she drifts out of the room again. I stare up at the canopy as if I can transform it to the cracked ceiling of my apartment if I wish hard enough.
It doesn’t change. I’m still just as far from home.
The horror of that fact swells inside until I can’t breathe. I curl up with my legs to my chest and press my face against my knees, but the tears stream out anyway.
I gulp and shake and bawl my eyes out, squeezing myself tight as if I’m the only thing I have to hold on to.
I have all I— I have all—
I can’t even think my mantra all the way through. It fractures apart with each sob that racks my body.
I have nothing. I have no one.
All the leads I’ve dug up, all the people I’ve talked to, all the threads I’ve tried to weave together—they’re meaningless. No matter what I do, I’m stuck waiting for a killer to take another stab at me, universes away from the men I love.