It was Jo’s voice, but it was coming from Lizzie’s lips. And I finally realized what had been bothering me earlier. A flash of that terrible lightning in the last shard had lit up a shining head of hair—blond hair. Jo was a brunette.
Only maybe not anymore.
And then a different voice came out of the same mouth, higher pitched, breathier, and angry. Lizzie’s voice. “Don’t call me that!”
“Why not?” Jo asked. “Everybody else did. Lizzie the Loser, Lizzie the Layabout, Lizzie the Lummox—”
“Shut up!”
“Do you remember how they laughed at you? All the other acolytes? Far worse than me. I think they were scared of me. But you—”
“Cut it out!”
“Or what? You’ll make me? You forget who is in charge here.”
I just stood there, my head spinning. Because a woman who shouldn’t be alive was standing in the road, arguing with herself. I didn’t get it.
Until she helped me out. “Chimera!” Lizzie’s voice snapped, and then there were two.
Just as in my vision, on the floor of Gertie’s cramped little waiting room, the single body split into what looked like identical twins. Right down to the waterlogged gray Edwardian outfit they were both wearing. It looked heavy as hell, which might explain why Lizzie #2 was taking off her jacket and throwing it aside.
Or maybe there was a different reason.
“Oh, you’re going to fight me now?” Jo asked mockingly, out of Lizzie #1’s mouth.
“You think I can’t?”
“Yeah. I think you can’t.” It was dry. “Don’t be a fool—”
“Don’t call me that!”
“Then stop acting like it! You have a reward waiting for you, just as soon as this is done—”
“Yeah,” Lizzie #2 said. “Sure thing. Like you promised last time, when you told me I’d be Pythia! That I’d make my family proud. God, I was a fool then!”
And a mass of power suddenly went boiling through the air at Jo.
She countered it, barely in time, and I hit the dirt. The time wave flew overhead and ate a hole in the surrounding wall of bodies big enough to drive a car through. Unfortunately, it was three stories up.
Not that it made a difference. Getting away wasn’t the plan. Killing Jo was the plan.
Only Lizzie was doing better at that than I was.
“You got me into this!” she yelled at her doppelganger. “You told me we had no choice!”
“We didn’t—”
“Liar! I ended up in jail and you—you ran off to Faerie and forgot all about me. Until you realized you needed a body the Pythian power couldn’t trace!”
Another blast, and this time, it almost connected. Instead, Jo dodged to the side, some instinct saving her at the last moment, and the blast aged a patch of road to rubble. She threw a bolt back, but Lizzie countered and the shot went wild. But it gave Jo time to jump back to her feet, and the two started circling each other.
Meanwhile, I began to get a clue.
Jo had needed a body for this fight. Otherwise, she would just be a huge column of energy—her own and all that she’d acquired from her Black Circle friends. Which is not a great idea when dealing with a bunch of hungry ghosts.
But she hadn’t wanted to conjure one through Chimera, because Lizzie was right—the Pythian power was looking for her. And while it wasn’t a human and might not understand the concept of “jail,” it certainly understood “rogue.” It would throw me at her wherever she was in history as soon as she showed her face.
So she showed it Lizzie’s instead.