make a deal for you. Besides, I don’t think that’s all he wants with you.”
I thought of the letter from my mother and an ominous cloud settled over me. “And how do you make good on your deal?”
“Depends on the deal, I guess, but I think with twins there’s always a fight.”
“A fight?” I asked. Derek nodded in answer. “A fight for what?”
“A fight for your life.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, unable to disguise the tremor in my voice.
“Somehow he finds what people need most and he gives it to them. For a price. With twins, it’s like hitting the jackpot. He gets two for the price of one.”
“But I don’t understand,” I repeated, but in my gut I thought I probably did.
“It’s kill or be killed, but either way you lose. If you lose, you can never come back here, never move on. You die, but not really. You’re trapped in the darkness,” he said gravely.
“And if you win?”
Derek laughed bitterly. “No one really wins. You can’t kill a man without becoming the monster.”
I felt like I was about to hyperventilate. I couldn’t kill someone, especially not my identical twin. To look into her face, so like my own, and end her life, condemn her to an existence like those other people I’d seen. No way!
Suddenly, I was overcome with the urge to run, run far and fast. And then hide. Forever if need be. I was certain I couldn’t handle what he was suggesting. Heck, I wasn’t even sure I was strong enough to handle what had happened in the past month. Who could?
Then I remembered the girl in the garage asking me to save her. What if that really was my sister?
“So you’re saying that I’ll have to- have to kill my sister or be doomed for eternity?” I felt the weight of it, the hopelessness of it pour down on me like thick, black tar, drowning out light and air. “Is there no other option? No way to…to…”
“Not that I’ve been able to find,” he said, shaking his head. “Yet,” he said again. “But…”
“But what?” I felt my entire being latch onto the possibility in that one word, the hope of a “but”.
“There’s something that just…”
“Just what?”
“That I just don’t get.”
“What?”
“You’re already dead. If you’re already dead, how can he claim you?”
I felt deflated. I had hoped there would be something else, something more like a loophole that he’d just realized. “I still don’t believe that’s possible. I mean, look at me. Do I look dead to you?”
“No, but maybe that was part of the deal.”
I had no response to that, bits and pieces of Dad’s version of “the accident” flitting through my mind. “So you’re saying that it’s possible that I’m dead and that the only reason I’m here right now is because someone pretty much made a deal with the devil.”
“Pretty much,” he agreed. “At least that’s one theory.”
“There are more?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I need to think,” he said pointedly.
I was silent, mulling over what Derek had said as he resumed his pacing. Then a thought occurred to me. “Why couldn’t he find me?”
“That’s another question I don’t know the answer to.”
“And why did he think you could?”
Derek stopped and looked at me, hard, for several long, tense seconds before he responded. “I think he knows I can feel you,” he said carefully.
“How can you feel me? Why?”
Derek shrugged his shoulders in that way of his. I felt like I’d seen it a thousand times, like I’d known him all my life.
Despite the seriousness of the conversation, a ripple of warmth skittered through me at the thought of him knowing what was inside me, feeling what I felt. And feeling it with me.
I felt the blood stain my cheeks. A question, one that I had to know the answer to, came to mind and I was embarrassed about it even before I opened my mouth to speak.
“What does it feel like, to feel me?” It sounded like such an intimate thing, to feel me.
“I can feel it when you wield, partly because right now it’s tied to your emotions. I feel your fear, your anger, your power,” he said then paused. “And your danger. When you’re out of control, I can feel it raging inside me like it’s me. Only it’s not.”
It wasn’t quite the romantic explanation I’d hoped for, but I supposed it made sense. My cheeks burned. I was even more embarrassed for thinking that the explanation might be something