around his hands, and Dmitri drops into a battle stance. My gaze is still locked on the bird, and for one brief second, the image behind its face solidifies. For just a moment, I’m not looking at a bird at all, but…
A man.
He’s there and gone in a second, just long enough for me to register that it is a man, not a woman or some kind of magical creature. I get a glimpse of a male face wearing an expression of hatred so pure that it makes the air in my lungs go ice-cold.
What is he doing? He must be controlling the bird somehow, inside its head—the bird’s and the man’s minds acting as one, his will directing its movements.
Fuck. I remember Raul had some kind of mentor, someone he was magically prevented from talking to us about after we subdued him and turned him in to the Circuit. Could this be the same guy? He attacked the school once before, through Raul…
But now isn’t the time to ponder any of that. We have six demon-people and an evil bird coming at us, ready to tear us limb from limb.
It’s time to see what my mirror powers are really made of.
I don’t know if the doppelgängers have any of the memories or personalities of their originals. I’m not sure whether it’s some kind of perverted affection, or if some of the horror I felt earlier showed on my face and that’s why he’s after me—but the Cam doppelgänger is gunning right for me.
I take a deep breath. There’s no time for panic, and I’m not going to leave Dmitri and Roman in the lurch because I couldn’t handle this.
“They’re demons!” Roman shouts. “Be careful!”
Uh, okay. I’m going to be as careful as I can, but playing it safe isn’t really an option when it’s fight or die. I launch myself at the Cam doppelgänger and try to force down my instinct to hold back.
This isn’t Cam, I chant in my head. This isn’t Cam, this isn’t Cam, this isn’t Cam.
But it’s so hard not to freak out when this thing looks like him, moves a lot like him, is so close to being him—except for the fact that it doesn’t talk, is covered in weird slime, and has that creepy orange glow to its eyes.
I don’t understand how these doppelgängers are made. Are they created with the magic that was stolen? Is that the bird’s power?
I dodge as the Cam-demon flings magic at me. It’s raw magic, not a properly cast spell like the actual man would use, and I can feel it singeing the air around me. I throw my sonic boom, sending him flying backward into the nest.
My sonic boom is so powerful it once broke through the concrete wall of a nightclub. If I unleash my full force on someone—which I rarely do—then it could very likely kill the person.
Not this demon creature.
The Cam doppelgänger hits the wall of the nest hard. His head snaps back—
But then it snaps forward again with an audible crack, and his eyes glow. He clambers to his feet and lurches toward me, ready to resume the fight.
I swallow hard, my stomach roiling.
Holy shit.
We are so very screwed.
Chapter 25
Here’s the thing: Dmitri is the toughest guy I know, and Roman is an expert in demonology and necromancy.
If you’d told me a day ago that one stupid bird-demon with its ridiculous fetus doppelgänger children was going to defeat the two of them, I would’ve said yeah, sure, if you chloroformed both men first and blindfolded them.
But now we’ve got six of these motherfuckers on us, plus the bird, and whoever’s controlling this creature is doing a damn good job of it. I can’t help but wonder if the man I saw through the veil planned for this, if he suspected that someone would find the bird and prepared accordingly.
All the doppelgängers appear to have the same magic their originals did, although it seems to have taken them a few moments to figure out how to use the powers. Cam’s no longer throwing raw magic—instead, he’s teleporting around the roof, popping out of the ether to land a cheap shot before blipping away again. Tandy’s levitating, the demon copy of a student named Preston is hurling fireballs, and I’m trying to mirror them all as best I can. But it’s hard when there are six of them, and they’re coming at us all at once.
Images of when my classmates attacked me in Combat