“Like that spell that elf lady gave Cynna to turn her permanently blond. That’s body magic?”
“That’s right. Some elves go on to develop their body magic enough to affect the bodies of others. But body magic and illusion are two very different types of magic. The more you develop one, the harder it is to work the other. It may be different with the High Sidhe,” Cullen admitted. “Probably is, but we aren’t talking about High Sidhe. We’re talking about Rethna. He was aces at body magic, so it’s unlikely he could do much with illusion. It would be like a Water Gifted trying to work Fire spells. With a lot of work he might learn a few of the simple ones, but he’d never be that good at them. He’d sure as hell never call Fire.” Cullen waved his hand. For a few seconds tiny flames danced there, then puffed out.
Lily nodded. “Then if Rethna was really good at body magic, could he have changed someone to look like Ruben?”
“Probably. I very much doubt he could’ve made someone smell like Ruben, though.”
“The maid didn’t say anything about Bixton’s visitor smelling like Ruben,” she said dryly.
Rule answered instead of Cullen. “Matt did.”
She swung to face him, frowning. “I don’t know Matt. Who—no, wait, I remember. You were going to send someone to check out the trail I followed into that park across from Bixton’s house. That was Matt?”
“He’s Cynyr, one of those who’ve been guarding Ruben. He knows Ruben’s scent and he has an unusually good nose, even when two-footed. I heard from him this morning. He found Ruben’s scent on that bench in the park.”
“But that’s crazy.”
“Actually,” Cullen said, “it’s not. Though I just finished putting together ... can’t call it proof, but supportive evidence for my theory. Which I’m warning you is pretty wild, but the trigger on that dagger wasn’t just meant to be used by a null. It was made to be used by a magical construct.”
She blinked. “And that helps you how?”
“I think Friar used a doppelgänger of Ruben.”
A dopplegänger? “Uh . . . isn’t that some kind of ghostly double, a harbinger of death? You see your doppelgänger and you die. Something like that.”
Cullen rolled his eyes. “I’m talking about real doppelgängers, not fairy tales. Not that real ones are supposed to be real.”
“Is there a point you can back up to where you start making sense?”
“Son of a bitch,” Karonski breathed. “Son of a bitch. You’re talking about a double? An actual, physical double?”
Cullen’s eyebrows lifted. “Basically, yes.”
Karonski leaned forward. “I need to tell you about one of my open investigations. The one into the attack on Ruben.” He patted a closed folder. “It’s all in here, but I can sum it up. We know how the potion was administered. According to what Sherry’s group found, it was added to a pot of coffee. The problem is, Ruben says Ida brewed that pot. Ida says she didn’t. She washed out the pot like usual, then went back to her desk and didn’t go back in Ruben’s office until he had the heart attack. Whoever made the pot, it was brewed between five and five fifteen. Ruben had the heart attack at five forty. Three people had access to the pot between five and five forty—Ruben, Ida, and the director.”
Lily jerked back. “Ida? No. That’s not . . .” Ida Rheinhart had been Ruben’s secretary forever. Sure, she was kind of scary, but scary like Lily’s third-grade teacher. Lily, like the rest of her class, had been convinced Mrs. Brown was an alien. She had to be, since she was either telepathic or really did have eyes in the back of her head. Unlike some of the kids, however, Lily hadn’t thought Mrs. Brown was a kid-eating alien. No one had gone missing, after all.
Ida didn’t eat children, either. Or FBI agents who failed to file a report properly, however much it might seem that way at times. And if you pulled out her fingernails one at a time, she’d give you the Gorgon gaze, but she would not betray Ruben or the Bureau. “But it can’t be the director, either. Can it?”
“None of the above, if Seabourne here’s right.” Karonski’s eyes gleamed. “We’ve been looking for some kind of compulsion charm, which is several shades of unlikely, especially since Ida claims she doesn’t have any blank places in her memory. But compulsion is all we could make fit—until now.”
“Oh, yeah.” Cullen was almost purring. “I don’t feel quite so crazy now. I don’t suppose you found any puddles or wet places near Ruben’s office?”
Karonski frowned. “Nothing like that in the reports. I didn’t arrive on-scene until long after puddles would have dried up.”
“A wet spot.” Lily frowned. “Water, or something else? The carpet was damp near Bixton’s body.”
“Hot damn.” Cullen’s eyes glowed almost as brightly as his wiggly lines had—and a lot more blue. “Hot damn, it fits. It all fits.”
“Explain,” Rule said.
“Okay.” He brooded a moment, probably translating his jargon into something resembling English. “A doppelgänger is supposed to be a temporary magical construct that exactly duplicates a living person. Or a cat or a canary, for that matter, but most people are not interested in going to that much trouble to get a spare Tweety Bird. Problem is, doppelgängers are like the lead-into-gold bit early alchemists wore themselves out on. Or like cold fusion is for physicists these days. It seems like it ought to work, but no one can get it to. Every century or two there’ll be a flurry of rumors that someone’s cracked the problem, but those stories are like Elvis sightings—the true believers get excited, and everyone else rolls their eyes.
“So ‘doppelgänger’ crossed my mind when I heard about Ruben’s apparent double, but only in the way ‘alien abduction’ might pop into your head if you hear about mysterious lights in the sky on the same night someone disappeared on a lonely road. It fits the plot, but the plot’s screwy. Then I saw the runes on that dagger, and it didn’t seem quite so ridiculous.”
Lily drummed her fingers. “Are doppelgängers an elf thing?”
“Maybe. I should probably tell you about the guy who wrote the grimoire. Eberhardus Czypsser chased doppelgängers back in his day—it’s one reason he was discredited for a century or two and most copies of his book disappeared. But never mind that for now. He claimed to have successfully made a doppelgänger of a bumblebee.”
Rule’s eyebrows lifted. “A bumblebee?”
“You start small, especially if a spell takes an ungodly amount of power and you aren’t willing to use death magic.”
“Death magic.”
“Yeah, which is another way doppelgänger fits. If you could make one at all, it would take mega-oomphs of power. Magic had thinned out by Czypsser’s time, so he made something small. A bumblebee. Or so he claimed, but he refused to demonstrate or prove his claim in any way, saying he didn’t give a damn if anyone believed him. And sure enough, people mostly didn’t.
“But there’re two reasons he might not have been just passing gas. Number one is that in his youth he was apprenticed to an honest-to-God adept. His master was said to have spent time in one of the sidhe realms and returned knowing a lot about sidhe spellcasting—including their runes. Czypsser’s grimoire has a list of runes passed to him by his master. It may or may not have details about his purported creation of a bumblebee doppelgänger, but there will be something about it, even if he didn’t put it all down.”
“What’s reason number two?” Lily asked.
“Ah.” Cullen leaned back in his chair, smiling like the proverbial cat with feathers stuck to his mouth. “Reason number two, children, is the type of magic I think it would take to create a doppelgänger. You’d need someone who was naturally Gifted in some form of body magic and had spent a few centuries getting better. An elf lord, in fact. Someone like our dear departed friend, Rethna.”