Witch in the White City: A Dark Historical Fantasy/Mystery (Neva Freeman Book 1), Nick Wisseman [best novels for students .TXT] 📗

“Take my brother’s face off,” Neva said—apparently the Augie-guise hadn’t restricted her voice. “Take any other form. Just not his.”

He smiled again, but this time it was less self-indulgent, more tinged with ... regret? “My dear Neva, still believing until the end. Still determined to see only an idealized version of her brother, despite all evidence to the contrary.”

“Take another form,” she repeated, tears stealing over her top lip and onto her tongue. “Take another form.”

“Oh, I could. I could take this form ...” He shut his eyes, and his body folded in on itself, ingesting the tweed suit and replacing it with a blue dress—shaped from the same cloth? Or was it skin?—while altering his appearance to that of a rail-thin white woman.

The woman who’d screamed in shock when Augie disappeared on the Midway moments after Neva had been bitten.

“Or I could take this one,” the woman said in a feminine drawl before her aspect and clothing changed to that of a bearded colored man wearing a World’s Fair cap and uniform—the porter who’d pushed and then killed the Civil War veteran.

“Or this one,” the porter said in a masculine bass as he morphed into a white girl in a green frock. Neva didn’t recognize her but felt as if she should. There was something oddly familiar about the girl. Face, height, posture—all of it.

The skinchanger was already on to another guise, though: Augie’s again, but in a more-contemporary jacket and trousers. “But the truth is I’m tired of lying, tired of pretending. And this is the real me.” He tapped his forehead. “This is me, Neva.” He tapped his chest. “Augie. Always has been.”

“You’re lying,” she insisted, swimming upstream against the wrenching current of her emotions.

The tenderness in his eyes hurt more than all the rest. “I’m sorry,” he said, near-whispering. “I’ve always been sorry. Please believe that.”

She bit her lip, too close to drowning to speak.

He glanced neutrally at Brin, then disdainfully at Derek, whose lower limbs now swarmed with insects. But as if compelled by a sense of obligation, the Augie-guise turned back to Neva. “Did you know we had a sister?” he asked after a terrible moment filled only by the chittering of his little minions.

She refused to answer this either. It had to be another lie.

“When DeBell confessed our parentage to me—that you, Derek, and I were all his bastards ... But I see you know that already?”

Neva grit her teeth.

The Augie-guise nodded. “DeBell said there were four of us at birth: quadruplets. A colored boy, a colored girl, a white boy, and a white girl—matching sets. A pair of aristocrats and a pair of servants.” His rage was like an iceberg: barely visible above the surface, yet suggestive of how much more lay beneath. “But the white girl, the last to leave our mother’s womb, was stillborn. Sad enough on its own, of course. Yet there was something else, something beyond the oddity of our unmixed hues. The stillborn girl was riddled with puncture marks.”

Leaning back, a motion which caused Derek’s coat of insects to ripple, the Augie-guise gazed at the ceiling. “I see her in my dreams sometimes.” His form changed to that of the white girl in the green dress again. “I think this is what she might have looked like—had she lived.”

Now Neva saw it: the girl had Augie’s eyes, but her own nose, chin, and ears.

Augie’s aspect resurfaced and he lowered his head. “Those are the good dreams. In the bad ones, I’m shapeless, unformed—tiny. But I’m trying to be more, and I’m latching on to another little non-shape, and it’s not you, but it feels like you, and I’m not trying to hurt it, but I am ... And then it’s gone.” He squeezed his eyes shut again. “Then it’s gone.”

Even the insects seemed to grow quieter.

Until a gunshot sounded from somewhere outside—had the city’s chaos already spread to the Fair?—and the Augie-guise reopened his eyes, at which point the bugs grew rapidly more animated. “My first sin,” he said after another long pause. “Committed before I was conscious, before I was really alive. I knew it for true the moment DeBell mentioned her death. Understood what I’d always been, what I was destined to be ... That was when I stopped trying to fight it.”

A patch of the insects swarming Derek’s neck had gained a red sheen; they must be biting him. Could he not call out? Were he and Brin gagged as well as bound? Neva wet her lips. For their sake, it was probably best if she played along and seemed to buy into the skinchanger’s hideous falsehoods. “And that’s why you killed Mr. DeBell?”

The Augie-guise scowled. “No, I went back to the Yards because I was furious—doubly so when I found DeBell tipping a letter down the mail chute. He tried to hide it, but I saw the top of the address before the envelope disappeared: ‘To my beloved son.’ Not me, you understand: only his acknowledged bastard merited that type of regard.”

He shifted on Derek again, setting off another shimmer of legs, antennae, and carapaces. “All my life, I’ve wondered what our parents looked like. There were no pictures, of course, and Hatty was the only servant who remembered them. Her description of our mother was vivid: round cheeks, a warm smile, pretty as a sunflower. I could almost see her. But Hatty’s description of our father was ... vague. Unsatisfying.

“So I made my own.” The Augie-guise held up a finger and doodled in the air. “I tried to draw him—you remember? Sketches in the dirt? Faces on scraps of stolen paper?”

Neva’s breath betrayed her by catching. She did remember Augie attempting to draw their father. But the skinchanger couldn’t have known that on his own. He must have stolen the memory somehow, appropriated it from her brother along with his form.

“Yet I was always a better mimic