The Pretender (The Soren Chase Series Book 2) (18 page)

“But the swimming—”

“You knew how to swim, you just improved your speed and strength,” Friday said. “If you hadn’t known how to swim, it wouldn’t work. You don’t know karate, so trying to infuse the aether in your body with that power doesn’t take. You can’t just, say, reimagine yourself as a pilot and suddenly know how to fly. We are our disguises, and our disguises are us. The trick is enhancing their abilities.”

“That’s what I did in the water,” Soren said. “I made myself a better swimmer.”

Friday gave him a wry smile.

“Well, even a champion Olympic swimmer couldn’t have done what you did,” Friday said. “You made yourself stronger, but the aether isn’t limited to the physical. It can be given a supernatural boost.”

Soren nodded. He thought he’d figured out how now.

“Memories,” he said. “Memories are the key. I didn’t just will myself to be a faster swimmer; I made a new memory.”

“Ah, but that’s not really it,” she said, wagging her finger back and forth. “The memories are the means to an end. What did you feel when you made the memory, when you relived the moment you created?”

“Pride. Satisfaction.” Soren paused for a moment. “Joy.”

“That’s it,” Friday said, pointing the finger at him.

“You’re saying the key is emotion.”

“It’s the most powerful thing in the universe,” Friday said. “And it reshapes the aether accordingly. The right emotion can enable our kind to lift a bus with one hand, or move faster than the blink of an eye. In theory, anyway. Emotions make aussenseiter
what they are, and the same is true for us. Only they’re just mortals, and we’re made of pure magic. Emotions transform aether, and the more powerfully they’re felt, the more powerful the transformation.”

“Are some emotions more powerful than others?”

Her face visibly darkened at the question.

“That’s a dangerous question,” she said. “There are some doppelgängers who believe the more negative emotions make us more powerful: fear, lust, greed, anger. But it has always been a matter of opinion. I don’t think that’s true. Those are easier to draw from, but in the river, it was joy that transformed you. I think what matters is how keenly the emotion is felt.”

Soren ran his hands through his hair.

“What do you mean when you say they are easier to ‘draw from’?” Soren asked.

“Once we physically touch a target, we can take their form,” Friday said. “In doing so, we gain access to most of their memories. It helps us imitate them, but it also can give us the ability to enhance ourselves. We sift through their memories to find powerful moments in their lives, and the emotions those invoke give us added strength, speed—you name it. You used Soren’s emotions to make yourself even stronger.

“For the record,” Friday continued. “We can’t use emotions to give ourselves knowledge. But that can be acquired in a different fashion.”

“Through becoming different humans,” Soren guessed.

Friday nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “If you wanted to be a karate master, you would have to target a karate master. If you assume his memories, you will absorb his knowledge. If you want to know how to fly a plane—”

“You find a pilot and take his form,” Soren finished. “And then you get his knowledge. Beats going to flight school, I guess.”

Friday nodded. “But there is a price for this,” she said. “Emotions are powerful, but also unstable. And doppelgängers have just as much trouble as aussenseiter in controlling them, maybe even more. The darker memories are simpler to find because aussenseiter
easily remember the worst moments of their lives. Tapping into those memories and unlocking the emotions they carry can have . . . unpleasant side effects.”

Soren nodded. How many times had he investigated a case where a pretender murdered a family? He’d assumed it was because pretenders were evil, but what if instead they’d been drawing from the worst memories of their target—and snapped?

“People die,” Soren said.

“Not always, and not as often as you think,” Friday said. “But it does happen. Some of our kind live for the thrill of emotion—the more intense, the better. And often that leads to tragic outcomes.”

“But not for the pretender. Never for them.”

Friday sighed.

“Would you
please
stop calling us that?” she said. “It really is offensive.”

Soren opened his mouth to say he didn’t care, and then stopped. She was giving him a lot of information, so he should cut her some slack.

“Sorry,” he said.

“We don’t wear our scars on the outside as humans do, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there,” Friday said. “And every time we take a new aussenseiter, we take on new scars. With Audrey, it was all this insecurity, her fear of being different. That was relatively uncomplicated. With Jeanine, she . . . doesn’t trust men. She views them as predators, and has good reason to. When I was punching you in the face, I enjoyed it immensely. It’s not the doppelgängers’ fault that we feel things quite so passionately. We were made this way.”

“That’s the second time you’ve said we were made,” Soren said. “By whom?”

Friday frowned.

“It’s a long story—too long for our purposes right now,” she said. “All you need to know is we were bred for war, slaves to powerful beings who thought they could use us and cast us aside.”

“I thought, er, doppelgängers once ruled the world?” Soren asked.

Friday smiled.

“That came later,” she said. “The greatest of all of us, we called him Magnus, united us and showed us our true potential. He had an unparalleled mastery of the aether that none of us could match. He was amazing to watch in action. He led us against those who were using us. They killed many doppelgängers, but the ones who survived became free.”

Soren thought for a moment, and asked, “How many are left?”

“Less than a quarter of our original number,” she said. “A few dozen at most. It’s hard to know for sure. The splintered ones don’t exactly show up at our annual conference.”

For a moment, Soren was confused.

“You have an annual conference?” he asked.

Friday gave him a wearied look. “No, that was a joke,” she said. “We don’t have secret meetings or a private handshake. We can barely stand each other anymore.”

“Why?” Soren asked. “What happened?”

Friday laughed, the same bitter one from earlier.

“We ruled the aussenseiter in secret,” she said. “Some suspected our presence, but we were crafty. We stole the identities of their leaders, their advisers, their power brokers. To rule a place, you only had to identify the proper targets and step into the right role.”

She looked up sharply at Soren, her expression wistful for a moment.

“Oh, the people we were,” she said. “Aussenseiter history is riddled with us; they just don’t know it. I never said ‘Let them eat cake,’ but they know one of my names.”

Soren looked at her, stunned.

“Are you telling me you were Marie Antoinette?” he asked.

“That was after we’d fallen apart,” she said. “But old habits die hard, and I occasionally liked to step in where I saw an opportunity.”

“I was told humans overthrew you,” Soren said.

Friday laughed, and this time it came out as more genuine.

“No,” she said. “We overthrew ourselves.”

“What happened?”

“What always happens when addicts get an unlimited supply,” she said. “We overdosed. Oh, it took a long time, but it was inevitable. These emotions we fed on and the memories we collected became too much for us. Sometimes I’m surprised the aussenseiter can bear it.”

“What happened to Magnus?” Soren asked.

Friday didn’t answer. She was staring into the dirt, lost in memory.

“Friday? What happened to Magnus?”

“He lost control. He grew restless, convinced our enemies would return, stronger than before,” she said. “He said that to reach our full potential, we had to embrace the aussenseiter’s baser emotions. He thought it would make us more powerful. Instead, it drove us apart.”

Friday looked up at him and for the first time, the look in her eyes didn’t seem like it came from Jeanine. The expression was too haunted and full of pain.

“I tried to save him,” she said. “I thought we could turn him away from the path that he’d embraced, and I almost won him back. But then one of his men saw what was happening and acted to stop it. He murdered Magnus. He ended our only hope to unite the doppelgängers again.”

“Who did it?” Soren asked.

Friday looked up at him.

“Someone who still invokes fear and fury among us, though I haven’t heard from him in almost a century,” Friday said. “He called himself Falk.”

Ken banged his fist on the table.

“This is fucking nonsense,” he said, and then glanced at Sara. “Excuse my language.”

Sara gave a mirthless laugh.

“I think strong language is the least of our problems,” she said. “Rakev has a knife that can steal souls? Is that what he’s doing to Alex?”

She heard the hysterical edge to her voice, but no longer cared. It was awful enough that Alex had been kidnapped, but the idea of a soul-sucking knife at his throat was too much.

“It might not be souls,” Glen said. “Look, Rasputin was a lot of things, but he wasn’t terribly educated. He’s probably right that the knife has unique properties. But you can’t steal a soul.”

“You seem awful definitive about that,” Alice said. “I saw what Father Coakley did to people. If that’s not stealing souls, I don’t know what is.”

“I thought I recognized you,” Glen said, nodding at her. “I didn’t realize you were working for Wallace. Soren will be glad to know you’re all right. As for Coakley, he corrupted people. That’s different than stealing.”

“So if it’s not stealing souls, what is the knife doing?” Wallace asked.

Glen looked exasperated.

“Soren told me that Alex was special, but he didn’t know how,” Glen said.

“He’s psychic,” Sara said. Ken started to object, but she held up her hand. “I’m sure of it now. This drawing proves it. But looking back—I think he could see the future, maybe other things.”

Glen was nodding. “Terry believes psychic energy is actually measurable. He has this goofy meter that lets him read electromagnetic activity. The more electromagnetic energy around a person, the greater the likelihood of some kind of psychic ability. Sometimes they see ghosts, or read minds, or see the future.”

“Get to the point,” Wallace said. “You’re saying Alex had a high EM range. I’ve heard of that. But why does Rakev care? Is he using Alex to see the future?”

“Maybe the knife steals power,” Glen said. “Think about it. Rasputin was renowned for his psychic abilities. What if the assassin wasn’t trying to kill him, but take some of that from him? It might have worked. Rasputin was increasingly unstable after that.”

“You’re saying Rakev is going to stab my son with this knife?” Sara asked.

“No,” Alice said softly, almost to herself.

Before she could explain further, Alice stood up and left the room without saying a word. She came back a moment later with a map in her hand, and spread it out on the table. It was a standard one of the United States, but Alice had drawn nine distinct circles on it.

“I’ve been looking at other kidnapping cases,” she said. “I wasn’t getting anywhere identifying Rakev by name, but I thought maybe I could find other cases that might help us get a beat on where he is. Most missing kids can be attributed to runaways or custody battles gone wrong. But I found nine murder cases that shared a similar pattern. Each child was eventually found dead without physical wounds. There was no obvious cause of death. I’m sorry to say this, Sara, but their brains were wasted husks.”

“Jesus,” Sara said.

Sara sat down. She wanted to scream. She kept waiting to wake up, or at the very least to reach some kind of equilibrium. Instead, just when she thought things couldn’t get worse, they did.

“Shouldn’t the FBI have noticed something like that?” Glen asked.

“They probably have,” Alice replied. “But they haven’t made it public. They may think they have more chance of catching the killer if they don’t publicize what’s going on.”

“So Rakev is taking psychic energy,” Glen said. “That’s my best theory as to what’s going on. But Lochlan told Soren that Alex was the last kid.”

“And Alex is going to die,” Sara said, looking at him. “Or is dead already.”

“He might still be okay,” Alice said. “In those cases I looked up, the children appeared to have lived for some time after they were kidnapped.”

“So maybe it takes time for the knife to harvest the energy,” Wallace said. “Or there’s some ritual involved. That’s what you’re suggesting.”

As thin as that hope was, Sara clung to it.

“It’s not just Alex at stake, either,” Glen pointed out. “We still don’t know why Rakev wants that power. Whatever he’s doing with it can’t be good.”

“So what do we do next?” Sara asked.

“We need to know more about him,” Alice said. “I’ve searched for his name and come up empty. But that was before the reference to him being smoke came up. I might be able to find something on that.”

“Okay,” Wallace said. “Everybody concentrate on that. In the meantime, I’ll—”

Before Wallace could finish, the lights in the office suddenly cut out. Sara looked up in alarm.

“What was that?” Glen asked.

There was a sudden crash from outside Wallace’s office, and then screaming.

“We’re under attack,” Wallace declared.

Friday had gone silent for the rest of the training, despite Soren’s repeated questions about Magnus and the history of pretenders. He wanted to know more about Falk, but his tentative questions in that direction had also been rebuffed. Finally, she’d insisted they were finished and needed to move on.

A little after six o’clock, Soren and Friday stood on a corner in Leesburg, watching people mill past. It was already dark outside, but the night was unseasonably warm.

“So what is this lesson?” Soren asked.

“The most important one,” Friday answered. “We’re going to teach you how to become someone else.”