“Blood,” Neva finished.
Another gunshot sounded from outside, the timing perfectly terrible.
“I didn’t do that at first,” he said. “Not until I’d already imagined our father several times.” The skinchanger’s form flitted between that of various colored men. Athletic and handsome. Tall and jolly. Skinny and scholarly. Small and weak. “But when I thought on a man who would abandon his children, and how dark his nature would have to be ...” A malevolent aspect surfaced, crooked and cruel. “I went too deep into character, and I took blood for the first time.” The Augie-guise returned, shoulders slumped. “From there, it became something of a bad habit.”
Had she been able to, Neva would have shuddered. “Nat died in the Great Fire, though, trying to reach my—our—mother. He didn’t abandon us. You had no reason to think him anything but heroic once Mr. DeBell told us the truth.”
“Perhaps, but what was Nat to us? A fiction perpetrated by others, one he had no part in. No, DeBell was the true culprit. His was the dark nature that made me what I am.”
Neva watched another patch of Derek’s awful, crawling coat turn bloody. He had to be hurting. Would the Augie-guise call them off if she asked? “What about the insects? What do they have to do with ... mimicry?”
“More than you’d think.” As if he’d heard her unspoken question, the bugs on Derek fell off in a shower, skittering in all directions, only to climb the walls or fly alongside them to the ceiling, where the miniature horde reformed and pulsed, hanging over the storage room like a living fog speckled with a thousand double-sickle shapes.
She couldn’t see Derek’s left hand, but his right already showed signs of bruising. Sickles of his own would be rising soon.
“Talents are surprisingly common,” the Augie-guise said, tapping Derek and then pointing at Brin. “Some are little better than parlor tricks; others make their owners the next thing to God. I could always tell when someone had one—that was my other ability from birth; perhaps it was our sister’s. If I touched someone, I’d know. Not what they could do, but that they could do something. And if I collected that someone’s form, via hair, or saliva, or—yes—blood, I’d have that something too.”
With a jolt that felt like being stabbed, Neva remembered the swirl of stolen—injected?—memories she’d seen the night of the shootout in Administration: A grizzled, one-legged man set his crutches on the side of a picturesque creek, pulled his sketchbook out, and drew the scene in perfect detail ...
The Augie-guise snapped his fingers. “Then it was just a matter of determining how it worked. Directing insects was one of the first talents I acquired.”
A grubby toddler clapped her hands in delight, and the swirl of ants at her feet rippled like a wave ...
More gunshots—whatever brewed in the Court of Honor was growing worse.
“And the way you heal?” asked Neva. She’d succeeded in buying some time, but would it be enough to find a way out? Was there one? “Coming back to life ... Did you ‘acquire’ that as well?”
The Augie-guise cocked his head. “That, I’m actually not sure of ... There was a Jewish girl in the Levee. I tracked her down after dealing with DeBell. She could heal herself.”
A dark-haired woman grimaced at the mirror, touched the cold sore above her lip, and smoothed the blemish away ...
“She’d almost finished recovering from a stab wound before I collected her. She didn’t recover from that.”
Neva could almost hear Brin screaming in her mind.
“Perhaps her talent is combining with another, one that sustains an action without conscious thought ... Eventually, I know their capabilities better than their original owners did. But I don’t always figure them out right away. Sometimes you have to die first, I suppose.”
He chuckled darkly—so darkly. “I’m not sure which was worse, actually: being buried by the rubble of the Cold Storage Building and cooked by the fire’s heat, or emerging days later in our father’s form, even more witless than he’d been in life. I remember it now—dimly. But back then I knew almost nothing; just a jumble of what I remembered of him.”
“With none of his memories?”
“Glimmers maybe, but that was all ... I remember this, though.” The Augie-guise gestured at the knife on Neva’s belt, raised his hand to his throat, and drew a line across it. “And this.” He drew a line the other way. “And this.” Another line. “And all the rest. We’re not so different, sister of mine.”
She was about to hiss, “I’m not your sister,” but a thought struck her. Not just struck her—leveled her. A flaming meteor of a thought that shattered her denials and slammed everything into place. “Why did you run from me?”
He snorted as if the answer was obvious.
“On the Pier?” she pressed anyway. “After you ripped the veteran’s leg off? Why did you run from me? What threat was I to you?”
“None. I just didn’t want to be one to you. Ever.”
And there it was.
Grisly and convoluted, but plain and inescapable all the same. The skinchanger had lost control after killing Mr. DeBell, sending forth insect scouts to brand potential prey and embarking on a “collecting” spree with little of his previous circumspection, to the point that he’d left a severed hand in the Algerian Theatre’s rafters. (Had that been a cry for help?) Causing her to be marked had snapped him back, however, given him pause. Yet he hadn’t been able to help himself when the Civil War veteran acted like a boor. And after the chase to Cold Storage, the skinchanger had seen a
