It was me—other me.
Any semblance of confidence left my body, leaving my voice low and hoarse. “Hi there,” I said to my doppelgänger, unsure how I was supposed to address myself.
She—I—held an old angel figurine, the color faded, the ceramic cracked, a wing missing. She was turning it over and over in her hands, her fingers raw and bloody.
I lowered myself into a crouch, my teeth clattering against the cold, my nerves, and met her at her level. The humming stopped. Her body stilled. Slowly her head turned as if it were separate from her body, on a swivel.
Candlelight flickered over hollow black eyes and sunken cheeks; thin black veins popped against ghostly white skin. All the air left my lungs, and I slipped backwards, catching myself on my palms. She grinned, a mutilated smile full of crimson-stained teeth.
I reached for my dagger.
She lunged.
I rolled out of the way, her clawlike hands drilling into the ground—where my chest would have been seconds before.
“What’s wrong?” she said—I said—but it wasn’t my voice, it was throaty and all wrong, and yet the words were leaving both our lips. “Don’t like what you see?”
Her neck twisted, the tendons protruding, bones cracking at the harsh angle. I felt my own snapping, turning to meet her stare.
“What is happening?!” I said, and she echoed me in her creepy singsong of a voice.
I gasped, and she cackled.
I stumbled, and she charged.
In a streak of bluish black so fast it was like she flew, she tackled me, slamming me into a pile of skulls. I sank into the bones, the air thinning, fear crushing. Razor-sharp nails clawed at my clothes, at my face, at my hair.
The heel of my palm slammed into her shoulder, but she just brought her face closer, her rotten breath breezing my cheeks. Her pupils glinted with a savage hunger.
Fighting to inhale, to move, I snuck my hand into my boot, wrapping my fingers around the hilt of my blade.
She mimicked the movement, reaching into the skeletons. Cartilage snapped, and as I brought my weapon to my chest, she raised hers—a splintered bone—over my head.
Was this how it ended? Would I kill her—myself? My grip was slick on my dagger.
I shut my eyes and counted down from ten. On that last number, that last whisper, a calm flooded my veins.
This was it. It was over.
I pressed my elbow into the dirt, then pushed up.
“River, no!” An accented voice snapped my eyes open.
A shadow fell over us. The other me mirrored my look of surprise.
“You can’t kill her!” Insistence draped the intruder’s tone. Light and fluid. Female. “If she dies, so do you. She is you.”
Seeming to waver between impulses—kill or listen—my doppelgänger and I released the hold on our weapons. They clattered against the dirt. She darted into a shadowy alcove and sank to the ground. Arms wrapped around her knees, she rocked back and forth, quietly humming.
She wouldn’t look at me.
A hand, human, appeared in the empty space before me. After staring at it for longer than probably necessary—counting all five fingers, noting her fair skin popping against the dark cave—I took it.
Legs wobbling, I rose to my feet.
Divine presence swept over the room. Over me. An urge to bow. To sing. To worship. To pray. To kiss the ground.
Brilliant wings—so white they shone like beacons in the gloom, so tall the tips grazed the ceiling and the bottoms swept the floor—fluttered and folded, flush against her shoulder blades.
