We Will All Go Down Together by Gemma Files

law, plus one of her professors. Also, Guy liked coke. Lo spent a lot of time looking for somewhere quiet, and her primary hiding-place was—” She nodded box-wards. “—that.”
    “I wouldn’t think it’d be too—”
    “Oh, it’s uncomfortable as all hell, but it does lock from the inside. And it’s dark. And there’s other benefits too, if you’re in serious need of a friend.”
    “. . . Kate-Mary’s guide?”
    “I think that’s what it
thinks
it is, yes.”
    Ghost stories told without any visible proof in a series of almost-empty rooms; that was all his career boiled down to, really. The vocabulary alone was ridiculous. But . . . looking at her, then back at the cabinet’s dark expanse, both their reflections crawling deformed and luminous-numinous across it, like orbs. . . .
    “Okay,” he said, carefully. “So—what is it really?”
    The hint of a smile became something more, almost gleeful. “So glad you asked.”
    Glenda Fisk had told her it was something all mediums did, and she had no reason to doubt that.
A mnemonic device, Miss Devize, that’s all—just far more palpable. You take a splinter of your own core, your innate substance, and split it off, the same way you use your own detritus to render the spirit flesh; deeper, of course, though. And thus, far more lasting.
    “You use it to get over that conceptual hump,” Devize said, flatly. “To convince yourself you actually can do what you’re already afraid you can. Glenda helped me with mine, that first night in the Folly—budded it off me like an amoeba, whole and entire. It didn’t even hurt, and it was. . . .”
    Amazing. A miracle, pitch-black and shiny as La Brea pit-tar.
    “So it’s a doppelgänger?” Sy asked.
    She shook her head. “More like a fetch, I guess. What the witch sends out to do her will? A tool, perfect for companionship, for utility; something that loves you and wants what
you
want, because that’s all it’s ever known. People see it here and there, think it’s you, and in a way—it sort of is. Thinks it is, like I said.”
    “But . . . it’s not.”
    “Not even close.”
    She looked back down, that same weird smile playing around her lips, stretching them even wider, ’til a narrow rim of teeth began to show. And slowly, so slowly he barely knew when it had happened, Sy realized that crawly feeling at the back of his neck was less the standard
oh-crap-she’s-listening-in
than a genuine coolish dew, the sweat-sting of inescapable understanding:
Something has changed, and not for the better. But—
    —is she . . . unlikely as it seems, could she really be. . . .
    (happy
about all this?
)
    (whatever
all this
was)
    “So yeah,” Devize went on, as though neither of them had noticed, “Glenda and I had a whole lot of fun with our respective shadow-selves for a day or two, doing the things skinny little ghost-whisperer girls do. But then . . . the house kicked in, and it ate them alive, like everything else. Everybody. And afterwards, I just never bothered doing it again.”
    Never had to, really. No shortage of real ghosts vying for the position.
    “We only have one trick, when you boil it all down,” she said, as if to herself. “It’s a doozy, though: just open up and invite things in, and half the time, we don’t even ask for names, beforehand. Which does tend to make it pretty hard to get them out again, afterwards. . . .”
    An image growing at the corner of his eye—tumoresque, neoplastic—before wiping itself away, an unset photo-image: Carra Devize done inside-out and backwards, a reflection in black marble, grey-skinned with long black hair and cold white eyes. Blank eyes, their sclerae static-touched, whose flickery pupils shone whiter than teeth.
    Sy made a painful noise at this fresh intrusion, an aural wince, and was surprised—yet again—when Devize grimaced back, as though in sympathy. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m projecting, aren’t