molly duplicate

As I vanished into that veil, I also called up an image, another combination of illusion and suggestion. This one was simple: me, as I’d appeared in the mirror a moment before, clean and seemingly perky and toting a fresh cup of creamy goodness. The sensation that went with it was just a kind of heavy dose of me: the sound of my steps and movement, the scent of Butters’s shampoo, the aroma of my cup of coffee. I tied the image to one of the rings on my fingers and left it there, drawing from the energy I’d stored in a moonstone. Then I turned around, with my image layered over my actual body like a suit made of light, and walked out of the coffee shop.
Once outside, the evasion was a simple maneuver, the way all the good ones are. My image turned left and I turned right.
To anyone watching, a young woman had just come out of the store and gone sauntering down the street with her coffee. She was obviously enjoying her day. I’d put a little extra bounce and sway into the image’s movements, to make her that much more noticeable (and therefore a better distraction). She’d go on walking down that street for a mile or more before she simply vanished.
Meanwhile, the real me moved silently into an alleyway and watched.
My image hadn’t gone a hundred yards before a man in a black turtleneck sweater—a servitor of the Fomor—stepped out of an alley and began following it. Those jerks were everywhere these days, like roaches, only more disgusting and harder to kill.


Brief Cases, Bombshells, Page 231