Double Trouble | Kelley Armstrong
DOUBLE TROUBLE
By
KELLEY ARMSTRONG
My name is Marielle, and I hunt monsters.
I do not usually introduce myself that way – it leads to very awkward pauses in the conversation, followed by jokes about mothers-in-law and such.
Worse, those jokes are often a little too close to the truth, at least if your mother-in-law is an evil queen or callous landowner responsible for the deaths of hundreds.
I grew up reading every monster tale I could find, and I decided I would make it my life’s work to rid the world of these terrible beasts, only to discover that while monsters exist, they are usually the scapegoats for even more monstrous humans.
So that is my calling. I track down stories of monsters and stop the humans behind them.
Every now and then, though, an actual monster is responsible. They are not much different from humans in that regard – while most are just trying to live in peace, some are driven by darker desires.
And so that has led me here, to a tiny house that smells of fresh bread and lavender boughs and the bowel-evacuating stench of the newly dead.
The thatched cottage is barely two hundred square feet, a single room with a tick mattress and one chair by the fireplace.
A table laid with bread and vegetables and water suggests soup was being prepared.
But the fire is out, and the paring knife is embedded in the throat of the young woman who stares up with empty eyes.
Her hands are missing. Both of them, severed at the wrists, and I know if I were to ask around, her neighbors would tell me she had such lovely hands. She’s plain-featured and half-starved, but I know she had beautiful hands. That’s why her killer took them.
I bend and close the young woman’s eyes.
Then I crouch there and grieve for her. I never met her in life, and yet I see her all around me, in the care she took with this hovel of a home.
She’s about my age – twenty-one – and alone in the world, like me, and desperate for a place to call her own, which is not me, but I’ve felt the pull of that life some days, when the one I’ve chosen threatens to swallow me whole.
The creature who killed her is one of the rarest of humanoid monsters: a doppelg?nger.
I’ve been tracking it for weeks now, following the trail of dead women with missing body parts and the stories that go with them, of witnesses who spotted everything from an old man to a little girl to a giant wolf to a house cat.
A doppelg?nger has the ability to change forms. Not just an ability, but a necessity, as they do not truly have their own.
I have never seen one in its natural state, but I am told it looks human, except for skin and hair and features that change color constantly.
Unable to live among people like that, it must assume the form of someone – or something – else.
As for why this one is collecting body parts, my childhood reading on doppelg?ngers suggested they can permanently assume human form with the help of a witch and a reconstructed body.
Why not just use a whole body? Because magic never likes to make things easy.
It requires commitment, such as killing a dozen people for body parts.
And this particular doppelg?nger is making sure their new body is exactly right – lovely feet, shapely legs and now, pretty hands.
I touch the young woman’s neck. Her skin has cooled, but I can still detect warmth, and the hearth fire seems not to have been out for long. I’m catching up to my prey. Just not fast enough.
I search the cottage for clues, but after a few weeks of chasing this monster, I have to admit I’m unlikely to find any thing that will lead me to it. A hair or a boot print is useless when the creature changes form for every kill. Instead, I’ve used past kills to map its route.
It is careful not to strike the same town twice, but it is moving in a predictable pattern. I know where it will go next. I just need to figure out who it will choose there.
The young woman tells me I am on the right track so far – the doppelg?nger favors dark-haired and light-brown-skinned women between sixteen and twenty-five.
The witch will turn the body into a whole person, but the age and coloring must roughly match, and the doppelg?nger has chosen the most common attributes to make its job easier.
If I leave tonight, I can beat the doppelg?nger to the next town. I’m thinking through my plan as I slip out the window. I need to identify young women living alone who—
“Watch out!” a male voice says… just as my boot touches down on the tines of a pitchfork. The handle flies up, but a hand catches it before it smacks into me.
A young man stands there. He is perhaps my age, with a compact, wiry build, dark hair tumbling into his eyes and a smile that makes me momentarily forget what I am doing.
It is a very brief lapse, though, before I realize he just saw me climbing out a window.
“I was—” I begin, waving at the window.
He puts a finger to his lips and whispers, “You have almost escaped. Do not ruin it now.”
I am escaping – from the scene of a murder – and so I open my mouth to protest that it is not as it seems. Then I see his grin. He thinks I’m a young woman escaping the watchful eye of a parent or husband.
I dip in a shallow curtsy. “Thank you, sir.”
As he sets the pitchfork upright, I glance along the narrow passage. When I entered the house this way, I mistakenly believed it a safe entrance, but the alley seems to be used as a shortcut. I really do need to be more careful.
I bid the young man farewell, but when I set out, he heads in the same direction.
“I do not believe I have seen you about town,” he says. “Though I am fairly new myself. Apprenticed to Aran, the blacksmith. Do you know him?”
“Not personally, but I have heard the name. It is a good job to have.”
“Good enough.” A jingle as he shakes coins in his pocket. “Even better on payday. I don’t suppose I could interest you in a pint?”
When I glance over, he raises a hand. “Just a drink and conversation. As I said, I am new to town.”
I must look suspicious, but that’s how I always look, and this young man gives off no sense that I would be in danger if I said yes…
or if I said no. Both can be treacherous ground for a young woman.
I peer at him in the moonlight, with his easy smile and cloudless blue eyes, and I wish I could say yes.
Just as I some times wish for a place to lay my head for more than a night or two, I sometimes wish to live the life of a normal young woman, free to say yes to a drink with a handsome young man.
All right, on another night, I would have said yes. While I play the role of virgin when monster scenarios require it, I have not been one for years. No one ever checks; they’re just happy to have a sacrificial victim.
Tonight, though, I have no time to dally, and I regret it because that smile says this is a young man I would not mind dallying with.
“I am so sorry,” I say. “But I slipped out on urgent business.”
“Ah.” A moment of silence. Then, “May I escort you wherever you are going? It is late for a young woman to be about. I heard whispers from other towns. They say…” He clears his throat. “Well, I will not repeat what they say, but it is cause for concern.”
That has my steps slowing. The murders I have been tracking are horrific, and news does travel fast between towns, but the killer has been careful with their pattern, never striking settlements close enough together that they are likely to have heard of the body it left in the last one.
Still, this young man said he is new to town. It is possible he comes from someplace where news of several of the deaths has coalesced. And yet…
“That is very kind of you,” I say, and I take his hand and squeeze it.
The sudden touch of my hand on his surprises him, and his eyes shimmer from blue to brown to yellow before snapping back to blue, which is exactly what I was watching for. I have my dagger at his throat before he can react.
“Doppelg?nger,” I whisper.
He blinks those innocent blue eyes. “What?”
I back him against the wall at knifepoint. “You know what I said.”
“I heard a word, miss, but I do not know the language.” He tries for a laugh. “I suppose I should not have been jingling a pocketful of coins and bragging about payday. You were not slipping out of that house. You were robbing it. No matter. Take my coins and—”
“I am going to take more than your coins, monster.”
“I do not know—”
I kick him in the shin. Again, he doesn’t expect that, and his eyes shift.
“Doppelg?nger,” I repeat through clenched teeth. “Your eyes cannot hold their color when you are startled. You killed the young woman in that house. Killed her and took her hands.”
His shoulders slump, and disappointment settles in my stomach. I chide myself for it. What had I hoped? That there just happened to be another of this very rare species in town?
“I was hoping she had not struck yet,” he says.
“She?”
A deep sigh. “You are looking for my cousin. As am I. Your name is Marielle, yes?”
Now I’m the one who startles.
His chuckle is low and strained. “I know who you are, and I know you are hunting my cousin.”
“And so you seek to stop me?” I dig the blade tip in.
“I seek to stop her. We chase the same killer.” A wry smile.
“You’re better at it, so I have been following you.
You came out of that house quicker than I expected, which made me think my cousin had not taken a victim there.
Given your speed, I also did not have time to transform.
Then I thought, perhaps, we might go for a drink and I could see whether you are someone I could work with. ”
“Work with?”
“To stop my cousin.”
I shift my weight. “Because you are here to stop your cousin.”
“That is what I said.”
I lean closer, blade tip drawing blood. “I know how rare your type is. If you had a cousin, which I doubt, you are not going to kill her.”