Lupi 08 - Death Magic

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.”
    “That’s it. It fits. Why didn’t