“Why don’t you put the gun away before someone gets hurt?” the Berglund at the table said. “Just tell us everything you know about the vaults in the Lodge, and whether you saw a particular item while you were there. This doesn’t have to get messy.”

  “All right. That sounds reasonable. Let’s discuss my fee.” Cornelia was no longer blocking the doorway, and Ruby decided to sprint for the gap. She pivoted to run–

  –and fell forward when someone grabbed her right ankle and yanked. She sprawled down face-first, pistol flying across the tile, where Cornelia picked it up, clucking her tongue.

  Ruby looked back – into the face of another Cornelia, who was under the table, her head now poking out from beneath the tablecloth, her hands still grasping Ruby’s ankle. Ruby screamed, as her mind rebelled at the improbability of another twin. Could that be possible, some kind of twisted dual marriage?

  It didn’t matter who this woman was: enough to categorize her as the enemy. Ruby kicked back with her other foot, wishing she was wearing spiked heels, but there was a satisfying crunch when her heel hit the double’s face, and it’s grip loosened.

  Ruby scrambled upright… and then kept rising. The Berglund with the hammer had her crushed in a bear hug from behind. The first Berglund rose from the table, sighed, and reached into his pocket for a handkerchief. “This could have been so civilized,” he murmured.

  Ruby kicked and flailed, but it didn’t make any difference. Berglund pressed the cloth, reeking of some sweet substance, against her face. Her panic rose, and then receded in the waves of chemical stink. Everything began to swim and shimmer, and then everything went away.

  •••

  Ruby woke, her head aching, and shifted, only to hit some restraining force. Ropes? Was she tied to a chair?

  People were talking, male and female voices, and so she kept her eyes shut and her chin on her chest, listening. It sounded like Berglund and Cornelia… though who knew which versions? They were both twins? And named Cornelia and Cornelius, as if they were the twins. What twisted family dynamic had she stumbled into?

  “…need to bother Cain,” a Berglund said. “I’m sure I can get her to tell us what she knows without bothering him.”

  “But what if she can’t remember?” a Cornelia countered. She didn’t sound like she was talking through a broken nose, so it was probably the one who’d met Ruby at the door. “You know how terrible these people’s memories are. If Cain brings the amulet and initiates her into the mysteries, she’ll have perfect recall of every turn and passageway in the Lodge. If she saw the fragment, even from the corner of her eye without consciously noticing, she’d be able to tell us.”

  Ruby ground her teeth. They wanted something from the Silver Twilight Lodge, and thought she could help them get it? She wasn’t going back there. She was lucky to have escaped unscathed last time she stole from Carl Sanford. She couldn’t imagine what she knew that might be helpful to them, either; she’d tricked her way into the Lodge once, but the same approach wouldn’t work a second time.

  “Cain is busy – you know it’s a delicate time,” Berglund countered. “He trusted us to handle this part of the operation, and he called it a ‘longshot’ anyway, so think how impressed he’ll be if we manage to find out–”

  He was interrupted… seemingly by himself. “We should tell him the longshot paid off, shouldn’t we? Look, I’ll just ask Cain what he thinks. I know he’s making deals right now, but this is the most important thing – this is the mission.” This was the second Berglund, the one with the hammer; his voice was a little mushier than his twin’s, as if he’d suffered a broken jaw and was still healing.

  After a long moment of silence, Cornelia said, “Perhaps… I should go with you.”

  “You first generations think I’m not capable,” the mushy one said, voice quivering with fury. “I’m not lesser, all right? If anything I’m closer to god than you are. Might I remind you that Cain himself is a comet made from a comet–”

  “It’s just better if we go together,” Cornelia said in a soothing tone. “It’s not a criticism. We have total faith in you. Cain will know it’s more serious if we both come, that’s all.”

  “Fine. Do or don’t. I’m leaving.” Heavy boots tromped upstairs.

  “I can get what we need out of her,” the remaining Berglund said.

  “I don’t doubt you, dear. Do look in on my sister when you have time? She’s upstairs in a salt bath, but that broken nose will take time to heal.”

  “Of course, darling. Good luck with that brute. I should have never made the beast.”

  “It’s good you did. We needed the help. That Ruby Standish may be tiny, but she’s fierce.”

  Ruby felt a little thrill of pride, then was annoyed at herself for caring about what Cornelia thought. She heard the tromp of more footsteps going upstairs, and then silence.

  Ruby cracked an eye. She was in a basement, all stone and clutter, which she’d surmised from the musty, damp smell. The room was illuminated by a single weak, bare bulb. Berglund – the one with the shiner and the bandage – was sitting in front of her on a folding chair. “Oh good,” he said. “You’re awake.”

  Ruby lunged at him, prepared to bite his nose right off, but jerked up short. She wasn’t just tied to a chair, loops of rough rope were wrapped around her body, pinning her arms to her sides. The chair was, in turn, tied to some sort of support post, stealing her leverage. She might still be able to work her way loose, but it wouldn’t happen quickly, and Berglund sighed and took her derringer out of his pocket when she started wiggling.

  “You know, you should be grateful.”

  “You should be grateful you’re still breathing,” Ruby retorted. “If you didn’t have wives hidden under every piece of furniture in the house, I would have shot you.”

  “Don’t be too impressed with yourself,” he said. “This was all a trap, you know, even if it’s not quite the same trap anymore. Carl Sanford knew I had certain connections in the illicit antiquities trade, and thought I might be able to reach you. He’s still upset about your little escapade. I don’t know what you took from him – I get the impression it wasn’t even that important, on its own merits – but he can’t bear the fact that you violated one of his inner sanctums and got away without consequences.”

  “You’re a member of the Lodge?” Ruby said. She’d asked around, and her informants assured her he wasn’t, though it wasn’t as if the Order published an official membership list.

  He sighed. “I was, once. Just a lowly Initiate. But I hesitated, you see, at a crucial moment during one of Sanford’s little tests. The ones you don’t realize are tests, until it’s too late. I wasn’t expelled, but it became apparent there was no chance for me to advance, and the atmosphere became so unwelcome I withdrew. It’s a shame, because the members of the Order like to deal with each other. They give each other inside information, they send opportunities to one another. I missed out on a lot of opportunities. So when Sanford offered to promote me to Seeker if I’d help him catch a thief…” He shrugged. “It was a good deal.”

  “It’s generous of him to let you lick his boots again.” Ruby’s bravado was always the last bit of her armor to go, but she was getting worried. She’d made it out of the Lodge once before, but if Sanford was on his way here… if he took her down to those basements, with their impossible corridors, the ones that still appeared in her dreams… she didn’t rate her chances of ever seeing daylight again very highly. Last time, she’d had a special compass to show her the way. This time, she’d be on her own.

  “I was supposed to call him as soon as you arrived, and keep you here until he could collect you.” Berglund shrugged. “Since we made that agreement, however, my priorities have changed. As have my loyalties. If you tell me what I need to know, I won’t hand you over to Sanford. How’s that for a deal?”

  She’d had worse offers. “What do you want to know?”

  “When you were in the Lodge, did you see something that looked like a preserved anatomical specimen? A lump of pebbled flesh, no bigger than a human hand, probably in a glass jar, adrift in preserving fluid? It… there might have been eyes, on the specimen.”

  Ruby opened her mouth to say no, of course not, but… hadn’t there been something of the sort? Not in the main vault, but in a chamber she passed along the way, a side room stuffed with dusty curiosities that made her think of a forgotten storage room in the back of a natural history museum. There were taxidermied animals that had never been recorded in any zoology textbook, and wired-together skeletons that were somehow both doglike and batlike, and, yes, there’d also been bottles and jars with specimens inside, including one that held a lump of greenish flesh dotted with half a dozen blankly staring eyes. What could they want with some creepy anatomical specimen? If it was valuable, it wasn’t any sort of value her keen eye for treasure had recognized.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Untie me and take me upstairs and out of this house, maybe to a nice café, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “I don’t think you understand the situation,” Berglund said. “You can tell me now, or my… associates… will do things their way instead. They can make you talk – they can make you want to talk. Well. Not you, exactly.” He sighed. “I’d rather not do it that way. I think there are too many comets running around now already, and we have a history of becoming a bit fractious and having schisms – Cain had to do a purge – so I’d just as soon find out what I need to know from this version of you, and–”

  A chime rang from upstairs, and Berglund frowned. It rang again. “I don’t know why I let Cornelia install that doorbell,” he muttered.

  “Better go see who it is,” Ruby said. “I’d hate for you to miss anyone important. Could be another young woman you want to betray and kidnap.”

  He grimaced and rose. “The things I do for a god… I’ll be back shortly. Take this opportunity to think about what’s best for you. If you value your life, and, if you believe in such things, your soul, you’ll tell me what I wish to know.”

  Berglund went up the stairs, leaving her alone again.

  Amateurs. She was bound, but they hadn’t tied her wrists together, just wrapped her body in rope. There was enough slack for her to work her hand down to her thigh, where she had a slim knife in a sheath on a strap. They’d done a slapdash job tying her up and hadn’t even searched her for weapons! She got the knife free and began to awkwardly saw through the bottom loop of rope, her wrist aching from the necessary angle. She worked as fast as she could – she only had until Berglund sent whoever’d come to the door packing.

  After slicing through two coils, the ropes were loose enough for her to shimmy and stand up, the remainder falling down around her ankles. She looked around for windows or a cellar door leading to the outside – she would have scrambled up a coal chute at this point – but this was just a stone-lined hole in the ground. She’d have to hope the door to the kitchen wasn’t locked, and if it was, she’d have to get the drop on Berglund when he came back down.

  Before she went up, she caught a glimpse of something stuffed under the stairs. Knowing she shouldn’t look, but unable to stop herself, she knelt and peered. It was an old tarp, stained with something wet and dark and fresh, wrapped around a form that… well, it looked like a body. Or bodies. There was no denying that. With a trembling hand, Ruby reached out, and peeled back the top of the tarp.

  She looked into the ruined faces of Cornelia and Cornelius Berglund, skulls cracked from hammer blows, but still recognizable. Ruby whimpered and scrambled backward, choking back a scream and turning it into a whimper.

  What was happening here? Fratricide, sororicide, triplets turning on their own? That was absurd, but what were the alternatives? She’d brushed up against the uncanny before, and now she felt buried by it. Were these shapeshifters? Monsters who stole human faces? Dark creatures with a thousand masks? Who were these doppelgangers, and what did they want with a bit of dead meat from the Lodge? What had she gotten herself into?

  Then the door at the top of the stairs creaked open.

  Chapter Eight

  Seth

  Abel paced around in Diana’s apartment, peered out her windows, and felt the psychic itch of his comets, moving around on the other side of the river. Diana wanted him to wait here until she returned, but he could bear waiting no longer. The hope newly kindled within him demanded action. He would track down Cain, spy on him, and find out what he was doing… and whether he was close to finding a way into the Lodge, and bringing Asterias back to life and glory.

  He felt less awkward about bathing now that he had the apartment to himself. Abel washed off the stink of his recent derelict days, then returned to the cache of old clothes Diana had provided. Pants that fit well enough when he rolled the cuffs up, a shirt that was baggy but serviceable, and best of all, a round-brimmed fisherman’s hat that would serve to obscure his features if he kept his chin down.

  He considered a nip from the bottle of sherry by the armchair, but, no. He needed to feel the connection to his comets strongly so he could track them down, even if it meant they could also sense him clearly. He didn’t even know for sure if alcohol made him “fuzzy” to the comets anyway – the theory was based on a single comment Seth made one night near the end, when Abel got drunk and Seth said, “I don’t like how that feels – you’re going all blurry on me.” The comment might have been metaphorical, for all Abel knew.

  Now that he was sober enough to think clearly, he wondered if being on this side of the river, all alone, made his location more visible to his comets. If he was on the north side, where so many of his copies and their copies were operating, his own presence might disappear into the noise of theirs, and make his position harder to pinpoint.

  He wasn’t sure what would happen if his comets did find him. They didn’t seem to want him dead. Cain could have killed Abel during their last altercation, but instead he’d beaten him, and laughed, and told him to await the future with the rest of the humans. Cain, it seemed, had plans for him, and those plans didn’t bear thinking about. Abel had been tempted to flee Arkham forever, but he’d come back, desperate to do something to stop the chain of events he’d set in motion. He just didn’t know what. The comets probably didn’t even see him as a threat.

  They’d been right. He hadn’t been a threat. But meeting Diana had awakened him, inspired him, and even shamed him. If she could set herself against the power of the Silver Twilight Lodge, he could be courageous, too.

  Abel let himself out of the shop by the back door, making sure it locked behind him. He didn’t have keys, but he’d come back later and hope Diana was home. If nothing else, her shop would be open tomorrow, and he could catch her attention then. It wouldn’t be the first night he’d slept out on the street. Sleeping under a roof was the novelty these days.

  The morning was crisp and clear and beautiful and quiet. The pull of his comets drew him north, but if he tried to follow that interior compass and walk straight toward them, he’d end up walking into the murky flow of the Miskatonic River. Instead he set off east down Main, heading for the nearest bridge. He had a long walk ahead of him, which meant a lot of time with his thoughts. The alcohol had been helpful for avoiding those, too.

  Abel had initially come to Arkham in the company of his first comet, Seth. “I’m hardly going to name myself after Abel’s other brother,” Seth said over their first meal together, and that little biblical joke had jolted Abel. He’d been thinking of Seth as a sort of homunculus, or witch’s familiar, something created to do his bidding and help him restore the glory of Asterias… but Seth was a person, with his own thoughts and wishes and urges. He may have started out as a copy of Abel with perfect recall of all his memories, but he would soon develop in his own way, the two of them diverging like separate branches from a tree.

  “Do you feel like me, inside?” Abel asked, sharing bread and butter and salt (Seth went heavy on the salt) and tinned anchovies thick with grease. “In your head? I mean…”

  “I understand what you mean.” The comet considered the question. “It’s more that you… provide the shape for me. You’re a vessel that I’m poured into. I have your memories, of course, but also your habits of mind, and your ways of thinking about problems, and your basic personality. But there’s something of Asterias in me, too. You are animated by your soul, but the source of my life is a gift from our god.”

  “I must seem like a lesser being to you,” Abel said.

  Seth shook his head. “You have the amulet, blessed by Asterias. I am close to our god by nature, but the amulet makes you even closer, and stronger than me, too. I have visions that show me the will of our god, but the visions you experience with the amulet are so much more intense. When you wear the amulet, if you immerse yourself in sea water, you heal, and while I heal faster than a human does, I don’t heal anywhere near as quick as that. If I were to cut off a finger and cast it into the sea, it would grow into a copy of me, too, eventually… but it would take years for my comet to mature, while I was fully grown from your finger within a day. The amulet is concentrated power, blessed by Asterias, mixed with the god’s essence or blood when it was forged in the fires of a volcanic vent beneath the sea. You bear the sigil of the Ravening Deep. You are the one chosen to lead us, and restore our god.”

  “I just got lucky,” Abel said. “Anyone could have found that island. Or no one.”

  “Just because Asterias is dead does not mean he is powerless,” Seth said. “That temple is holy, and I believe the Ravening Deep guided the waves that brought you to the temple. Asterias sensed greatness in you. An opening in your soul that only our god could fill.”

  Did he guide the storm, too, then? Abel wondered, but didn’t say, because questioning his god must be blasphemy, and he didn’t think Seth would take kindly to that, even from the chosen one.