The Children of Hypnos

Chapter 31: Morrigan

The doppelgänger looked at Emery when Emery looked at it.

Her doppelgänger.

Her.

The doppelgänger's eyes widened, bright smoky blue, and the journal fell from her hands. Emery had her gun raised but not pointed, her finger over the trigger but shaking too hard to squeeze. The strangeness of the doppelgänger's existence—the feeling that it was not of this dream—coalesced in Emery's senses into the obvious. It was not of this dream because it was of her dream. It was a piece of her. It was her.

"Emery!" Wes barked, at the same time the doppelgänger raised her hands and said, "No! Please, wait!"

She—it—she—backed up toward the wall that had once held the huge stitched body parts on chains. The chains hung empty now, the wall bare. The animal cages on the opposite side of the room were empty as well, their doors standing open. The whole lab looked ransacked. The doppelgänger kept her hands up, arms tight to her sides, and let her hair swim around her face like a veil.

"Please," she said again, "please wait. I need to talk to you."

"I've seen doppelgängers come for dreamhunters before," Jacqueline said, looking between Emery and her double, "but this is still weird."

"She's got to be trying to trick you," Wes said. "Shoot her now. We've got her cornered; this is the only way out of the lab."

Emery couldn't string two thoughts together; all she could think of was her own face, her eyes, her hair, her clothes. The doppelgänger was wearing her clothes. She brought both hands to her Peacemaker and took aim.

The doppelgänger dove behind the work table. Her legs were visible below the table's top, her hair floating above.

"No! No, please, please listen to me! Just for a second! I'm not going to hurt you!"

Her voice rose and cracked. Like listening to a recording of herself in pain. In fear. It dug into a tight spot in Emery's chest and lodged there. Emery lowered the gun.

"We wanted to know what happened with the dreamseekers and the doppelgängers, right?" Emery said, never taking her eyes off the table. Jacqueline and Wes were quiet for a second.

Jacqueline said, "Yes."

"Maybe she knows something."

"Emery—" Wes started, warning.

Emery held the Peacemaker at her side, breathing through that small relief, and said, "I'm not going to shoot you. Yet. What do you want?"

Another long pause, then a blue eye peeked up over the edge of the table. The doppelgänger's hair shifted, the curls coiling and uncoiling around each other. She brushed them out of the way with one hand as she tentatively got to her feet.

"I want to help you stop this war," she said.

Emery glanced at Wes, who frowned and shook his head.

"What war?" Emery asked.

"The—the war," the doppelgänger repeated, "between us. You and me. And—and all of us. Dreamhunters and doppelgängers."

She said it as if it was obvious. Hands spread, motioning to everything around them, like bodies were falling right before their eyes. An invisible war on a micro scale.

Emery raised the gun again. "I'm gonna need a better reason."

"No no no! Please, just—give me a few minutes to explain. Ugh." Emery had made that noise plenty of times herself, but had never heard it from herself; she knew it meant a frustration with the situation, but it sounded like disgust at the conversation, at her. Harsh and dismissive.