Doppleganger

“It’s Thomas,” she agreed. She exhaled. “You understand that you’ve asked for my help. You know what that means, right?”
“Obligation,” I said.
“Yes. You’ll owe me. And those scales will have to be balanced. It’s … like an itch I can’t scratch until they are.”
“You’re still you, grasshopper.”
She regarded me for a moment, her maybe-not-quite-as-human eyes huge, luminous, and unsettlingly, unnervingly beautiful in her gaunt face. Her voice came out in a whisper I had last heard in a greenly lit root-lined cavern on the island. “Not always.”
I felt a little chill slide around inside me.
She shook her head and was abruptly the grasshopper again. “I’m willing to do whatever I can to help you. Are you willing to balance whatever I offer up?”
“He’s my brother,” I said. “Duh.”
She nodded. “What is it you want?”
I told her.
She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “Tricky. Difficult.”
“If I could do it myself, I wouldn’t be asking you, grasshopper. Can you do it?”
She sipped more of the drink, her eyes sparkling as they narrowed. “Are you questioning my phenomenal cosmic powers?”
“Well, you’ve been so busy globet-rotting doing Winter Lady stuff,” I drawled. “Let’s just say I’m curious if you’ve kept your wizard muscles in shape.”
“Hah!” she said, grinning. Then her expression sobered. “I’ve done some work like it lately. The skills aren’t the issue.” She leaned toward me a little, her eyes intent. “Harry. I need you to be absolutely sure. Once a bargain is done, there’s no going back. And I will hold you to it.” Her expression flickered, for just a second suddenly looking much less sure. “I don’t get a choice about that.”
“He’s my brother,” I said. “I’m sure.”

Peace Talks Chapter 16, Page 155


I took that under advisement for a sober moment and then heard her feet pounding back up the stairs. She was carrying a large box, wrapped in white paper and tied with a length of silver cord. She grunted and hefted it onto the general vicinity of my hips, with the inherent accuracy that small children and most animals seemed to possess.
I flinched and caught the box, preventing any real damage, and sat blearily up. “What is this?”
“It was on the porch this morning,” Maggie said. “Mouse doesn’t think there’s a bomb or poison or anything.”
I eyed the box. There was a paper tag on it. I caught it and squinted until I could make out Molly’s handwriting:
I KNOW YOU MEANT TO GET ONE EVENTUALLY. M.
“Hmmm,” I said, and opened the box with Maggie looking on in eager interest.
“Awww,” she said in disappointment a moment later, as I drew a new suit out of the box. “It’s just clothes.”
“Nothing wrong with clothes, I said.
“Yeah, but it could have been a knife or a gun or a magic sword or something.” She sighed. “You know. Cool wizard stuff to help you fight monsters.” She picked up the silver-grey rough silk of the suit’s coat. “And this is weird fabric.”
I ran my hand over the cloth, musing. “Weird how?”
“It just … feels weird and looks weird. I mean, look at it. Does that look like something you’d see on TV?”
“It’s spider silk,” I mused. “I think it’s a spider-silk suit.”
“Ewg,” Maggie said, jerking her hand back. Then she put it on again, more firmly. “That’s so gross.”
“And it’s enchanted,” I mused. I could feel the subtle currents of energy moving through the cloth, beneath my palms. I closed my eyes for a moment and felt the familiar shapes of my own defensive wardings, the same ones I worked into my leather coat. I’d taught the grasshopper the basics of enchanting gear by using my own most familiar formulae. She was probably the only person alive who could have duplicated my own work so closely. “Yeah, see? Once I’m wearing this, it’s going to store the energy of my body heat, of my movements, and use it to help redirect incoming forces.”
Maggie looked skeptical. “Well. Enchanted armored bug suit is better than just a suit, I guess.”
“Yes, it is,” I said. I checked the box. It included all the extras, including buttons and cuff links and a pinky crest ring in the glittering deep blue opals favored by the Winter Court.
The ring pulsed with stored power, with densely packed magical energy. I could feel it against my skin like the light of a tiny sun. I carefully pocketed it, then changed my mind and put it on. If I needed the thing, I was going to really need it, tout de suite. “It’s also the same material the Warden capes are made of.” I set the suit down and frowned for a moment. “So Molly wants to make a statement with my outfit.”
“That you aren’t afraid of spiders?” Maggie asked. “I mean, what else would that say?”
I pursed my lips. “You know … I’m not really sure.”

Peace Talks Chapter 18, Page 166-167


And from behind me came a deep, warbling, throbbing hum, like nothing I’d heard before.
My dad, the illusionist. I slipped the dark opal ring I’d gotten from Molly off my hand and palmed it.
Then I turned.
Hovering maybe twenty feet up, with his feet planted firmly on a stone the size of a Buick, was the Blackstaff, Ebenezar McCoy. One hand was spread out to one side for balance, fingers crooked in a mystic sign, sort of a kinetic shorthand for whatever spell was keeping that boulder in the air.
The other gripped his staff, carved with runes like mine, and they glowed with sullen red-orange energy. His face had twisted into a rictus of cold, hard fury. Flickers of static electricity played along the surface of the stone.
“You fool,” he said. “You damned fool.”
I put my feet back on the dock. Then I knelt down and tied my shoe.
“Boy,” he said. “They’re using you.”
I set the palmed ring down behind my heel, out of sight. Breathed a word in barely a whisper.
There was a moment of dizziness and then I stood up and faced my grandfather. I gathered in my will. The shield bracelet on my left wrist began drizzling a rain of green and gold sparks of light. The runes of my staff began to glow with the same energy.
“Sir,” I said. “What are your intentions?”

Peace Talks Chapter 31, Page 297-298


He looked up at me. His eyes widened, and then his face twisted into rage and disbelief. “Why, you sneaky—”
“Good talk,” I said, “Wizard McCoy.”
And I let go of the Winter glamour Lady Molly had crafted for me.
I felt my consciousness retreating back down that black tunnel, down to where I had laid Molly’s opal pinky ring on the dock, while I felt the ultimate construct of glamour, my doppelgänger, collapsing and deflating into ectoplasm behind me. My awareness rushed into the stone in the ring, found the thread of my consciousness I’d bound to it, and then went rushing swiftly back toward my body.
My eyes flew open and I was on the deck of the Water Beetle, on the far side of the cabin from where Ebenezar had been, where I’d taken cover after dropping the ring and beginning the illusion. Once I’d activated the ring, the veil around me had let me slip aboard the Water Beetle, take cover, and then project my consciousness back into the construct.
I’d blown up my relationship with my grandfather by remote control.
But at least I hadn’t taken a comet to the lung.
As I came all the way back into my body, I was gripped by a weariness so intense that it was its own entirely new form of pain. I could feel myself thrashing in spasms. Murphy had one of those face masks with a rubber pump over my mouth and was forcing air in. Freydis was trying to hold me down.
I fought for control of my body and eventually reasserted it, sagging down to the deck in utter weariness. Freydis lay half across me, panting. Murphy, all business, peeled back one of my eyelids and shone a light on my eye. “Harry? Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” I said, and brushed the mask off my face. “Ugh.”
“Od’s bodkin, seidermadr,” Freydis breathed. She rose off me wearily. “You cut that one close.”
“What the hell is she talking about?” Murphy asked.
“A construct,” I said. “For the illusion. Um. Molly made a really, really good ectoplasmic body for me, stored the pattern for it in the ring, and linked it to me. Everything you need to drop a fake double of yourself in place as a decoy and simultaneously make yourself unseen. Then I … kind of possessed the construct. Projected my awareness into it. Sent all that energy into it, all the way from here, which is exhausting as hell. Had a wonderful chat with McCoy.”

Peace Talks Chapter 32, Page 306-309