The shadow in the hallway moved even closer to my doppelganger.
“Friends,” I said, and charged him. With one of my fellow agents behind him, I’d be on the dark version of myself in no time, clashing bat to bat.
Evil Simon spun around to run for the door back to the Department, but stopped in his tracks when he saw his way blocked. Two hands flashed out of the darkness, grabbed the sides of his head, and twisted. . . hard. The audible pop of bone and cartilage drove into my ears like daggers. A second later, the other me dropped to the floor, lifeless.
Out of the darkness stepped Thaddeus Wesker. He looked down at the body, and then up at me. He seemed disappointed. “I wouldn’t exactly say we were friends,” he said.
I couldn’t stop staring at myself lying there, unmoving. “Holy Hell!” I shouted over the dying sounds of combat all around us. Jane and the Inspectre held Elyse at bay at cane point and Connor had Darryl by the scruff of his hoodie. Most of the birds and rats had been dealt with or were already dissolving on their own. I walked over to Wesker, mindful not to step on prone, dead me. Wesker looked at me with an evil grin.
“That,” he said, taking the time to relish each word, “felt good.”
“That’s disturbing,” I said, freaking out at the dead look in my double’s eyes. “You did know that was a doppelganger of me, didn’t you?”
Wesker shrugged.
“What if that had been the real me?” I asked.
He walked past me. “I guess we’ll never know,” he said, heading up the aisle. “I was going to the café to see what they had for fresh pastry. Getting to kill you was just the bonus cherry in my Danish.”
Elyse, Darryl, and Heavy Mike—still pinned through his hand to the wall—all started yelling at one another while various members of the Department fought to contain them.
“Everybody, shut up!” a voice called out. The room went silent. Trent had come out of hiding from behind his seat. When Elyse saw him, her eyes bugged out.
“Hey, pal,” she said, turning on her charm. “How are you? Glad to see you made it out of that fracas at the university alive.”
Trent came out of his row, walked down the aisle toward Elyse, and shoved her. “No thanks to you.”
“Hey!” Darryl called out from between the two Shadowers who were holding him. “Keep your hands off her.”
“Or what?” Trent exploded. “She’ll tie me up again? She’ll bleed me out to power your messed-up little project? You might want to listen to these people. They’ve got some news, and as far as I can tell, it’s true. The professor’s not dead. He’s alive and wandering this city.”
Elyse’s eyes widened, but there was too long a hesitation before it. “It worked?” Elyse said. “The professor’s alive?”
Despite the look on her face, I wasn’t buying it. “You’re going to need more acting training if you want your surprise to sound more convincing. Knock it off.”
“What is that?” Darryl said, puffing up. “A threat?”
“My boy,” the Inspectre said, walking up to him. Darryl backed away from him as best he could, but the agents holding him didn’t give him much room to move. The Inspectre looked winded from the fight, but there was anger in his voice. “There is a threat, but it is the one that Mason Redfield himself proposes. His pact for his youth, yes, but I fear it is a debt that will need constant repayment.”
Elyse’s face finally went serious. “More blood,” she said.
“Ours,” Trent said.
“Precisely,” the Inspectre said. He pulled his sword from its cane once again and started toward her. “I’m sorry, but I believe we are past the point of all civility. Now, why don’t you tell me all about this woman in green?”
Elyse stared at him. Her cocky toughness was gone. The girl was scared. Not only was she scared; her eyes were blank.
“What woman?” she asked.
The Inspectre searched her face for a moment before lowering his sword. “Bloody hell,” he said. “She doesn’t know.”
27
Given our need to avoid questions from Thaddeus Wesker, Connor and I dragged our four captives out of the theater on the basis that interrogation always went better when there was less slime to slip around in. Cramped for space and coverage, the two of us were forced to bring the professor’s students up to Allorah Daniels’s office, with Jane and the Inspectre bringing up the rear, barring any chance of their escaping. When Elyse saw our offices behind the theater, she walked through it all, looking around like a tourist in Times Square.
“What is this place?” she asked. “Are you police?”
I pointed over to a bunch of chairs along one wall. “Consider this your home until we get some answers,” I said. “Sit!”
“What are you holding us on?” she said, taking her time sitting down, prim and proper. Darryl sat down next to her, but Heavy Mike sat two chairs away holding his injured hand. Trent remained standing.
“Okay, forget about tonight,” I said. “Forget about making me watch one of my least favorite people around here—Director Wesker—take a perverse joy in killing that evil goateed version of me. Let’s put that aside for now. Answer me this: Where’s your blond friend George?”
The blank look disappeared from Elyse’s face. Concern spread across it. “I have no idea,” she said. “I think he said he was heading out of town for a few days. I think he said it was his sister’s quinceañera.”
I knelt down in front of her, staring her straight in the face. “You’re lying,” I said.
“Am I?” she said with a grim smile.
I nodded.
“He used to be a thief,” Jane said. “He knows what lying is.”
“You’re a good actress, Elyse,” I said, “but you’re not that good.”
I walked away from her, went to the workbench, and grabbed George’s messenger bag off of it.
“I don’t think George is going to turn up anytime soon,” I said, walking back over to her. I flipped open the bag’s flap and pulled out the crushed remains of his laptop. “See this? See the bend in the middle, the shattered pieces flaking off of it? I have a feeling that your friend’s body probably ended up in worse shape than that. And I think you probably knew that George was dead, didn’t you?”
Elyse went green at the gills. Darryl did, too, a grayness overtaking his dark skin.
“Yes,” she said, letting out a long breath. “And it’s my fault.” She looked scared for a change, and for once, I was pretty sure she wasn’t acting. “I didn’t think the professor’s plan had worked until a few days ago. When we first took up with him, we knew he had spent years trying to get his magical process to work, but we thought it was only to further his cinematic frustrations with a lack of real fear that he felt was missing from the horror genre. I suspected there might be something more to it, but wasn’t sure what. When he ‘died’ suddenly, I started poring through his notes and at the same time I also discovered instructions he had left me on what he wanted done after his death. I was supposed to go to this lighthouse he mentioned out on Wards Island and play his final film there. He said it was already loaded into the projector and everything, but when I got to the lighthouse, it wasn’t there.”
“Guess who got there first?” I asked.
“So how does this end up with you trying to kill me?” Trent asked, incredulous. “Why?”
Elyse sighed, dropping her eyes to the floor. “I woke up the other night to discover the professor in my dorm room. . . young again and looking crazed. His notes had hinted at cheating death, but how could he be alive and so young? Darryl was with me. He saw the professor, too.”
Darryl nodded.
“Did he say what he wanted?” the Inspectre asked.
“The professor confirmed that the magic could work,” he said. “He was living proof, but he said that it came with a price none of us had counted on. He came looking for blood.”