Free Dead Ringers by Christopher Golden Page B

entire city.
    Cold and damp, she lowered her umbrella and ducked beneath Lili’s for a moment, embracing her friend, warmed by the connection.
    â€œI’m so glad you’re here,” Tess said, rain trickling down the back of her neck, underneath her coat and her shirt. “Are we really doing this? It’s supposed to be sunny on Monday.”
    Lili kissed her cheek and took her hand. Both of them had frozen fingers. “Do you really want to wait till Monday?”
    Tess remembered the encounter at First Light Gallery last night and shook her head. “No. It’s too weird. I won’t be able to focus on anything else if we just go home, but what if he doesn’t show?”
    â€œThen we get coffee and warm up somewhere dry.”
    â€œHalf an hour. That’s it,” Tess said. “Longer than that and we’re going to feel pretty stupid instead of just freezing.”
    Lili agreed. They found a spot out of the way, near a granite circle that surrounded a small patch of grass and a single tree. The rain lightened a bit as they stood there, umbrella to umbrella, watching the sidewalk where Tess had seen Not-Nick the previous afternoon, but after ten minutes the wait became numbing.
    â€œThis is ridiculous,” Lili said with a shiver. “It’s not even October.”
    â€œClose enough, obviously.”
    They fell silent for a few seconds, listening to the rain around them. In the distance, thunder rumbled across the sky.
    â€œAlonso called me today,” Tess confessed.
    Lili’s eyes lit up with mischief and she grinned, about to speak before something caught her attention. She glanced at the river of umbrellas rushing past them and her expression flattened. Tess watched her mouth open into an astonished “O,” and Lili’s head turned to watch one of the black umbrellas float by.
    Tess understood. “Is that him?”
    Lili nodded. Her head slumped a bit and she stared at nothing, as if trying to make sense of what she’d seen. They had come back to the spot where she had first seen her ex-husband’s doppelgänger, thinking they might encounter him again in the after-work pedestrian rush. And now here he was.
    â€œLet’s go,” Tess said, taking her by the arm.
    A sixtyish woman cussed them out as they cut her off. Tess’s foot splashed into a puddle, but they bulled their way into the sidewalk foot traffic and she tried to keep an eye on that particular umbrella. She saw the man beneath it, the set of his shoulders, the fingers wrapped around the umbrella handle, and she knew them. Even from behind, she knew her ex-husband.
    â€œThat’s Nick,” Lili rasped in her ear, leaning in and keeping her voice down, though in the rain and with cars roaring by, the man who was a half-dozen people ahead of them would not have heard.
    â€œIt’s not,” Tess said. Windswept rain had soaked through the right arm of her jacket and slicked her cold legs, but she felt flushed with the heat of the moment, with stealth and pursuit and the impossible mystery of it all. “It’s not him, Lili. I know it looks like him—”
    â€œ Just like.”
    â€œDid you think the gallery owner last night was reacting to you just bearing a passing resemblance to this Devani Kanda woman?”
    â€œI guess not. But still…”
    â€œI know,” Tess said.
    They followed him south at first, heading along High Street and trying to keep track of him in the flow of people. Tess lost track of where they were until they turned west onto Boylston for a block or so, and then they were headed south again, into the theater district. Lili walked alongside her in a silence Tess found unsettling. With every step, Lili’s reaction reinforced the uneasiness that Tess had been trying so hard to ignore. The resemblance this Theo guy had to Nick Devlin wasn’t just startling, it was uncanny.
    Coupled with their experience at