The Pretender (The Soren Chase Series Book 2) (17 page)

“True,” Friday replied. “Now get up; that was just the first lesson. I trust you got the point.”

Soren got to his feet, his clothes sopping wet.

“I have to stop thinking like I’m human,
”
Soren asked. “And I need to learn how to swim in rapids.”

“Both, actually,” she said. “You did well at the first part. I saw you eventually accept that you no longer needed to breathe. Gotta say you were pretty damn slow about it. At the gym, I’d make you run a few laps.”

“Yeah, well, it didn’t exactly come easy.”

“You should have been able to escape the current,” she said. “It’s not that hard, you know.”

“Oh yeah?” Soren asked. “Why don’t I push you in next time and see how you do?”

“No need,” she said.

She walked past him, a thin smile on her face. She stepped into the water and shivered. She quickly waded farther into the water and dove into it. Soren wasn’t sure what she was going to prove; the water was relatively calm here. He could easily swim in it.

But Friday began to swim upstream. She did it effortlessly, cutting through the water like she was doing laps in a pool instead of challenging a vigorous current. She swam toward the waterfall where the forces against her must have been intense. Every bit of the current was yanking her downstream, yet she plowed on undeterred. She swam to a rock, grasped it, and pulled herself out of the water as if it were a ladder, and not slippery and dangerous on its own. She turned in his direction and bowed low.

“I don’t believe it!” he yelled at her.

“That is why you fail,” she yelled back, and began laughing as if she’d made a great joke.

Soren stared at the water. If she could do it, he could, too. But how? The current was amazingly strong. He hadn’t even been able to keep his head above water, much less swim back upstream.

“Come on!” Friday called, waving her arms. “Alex is dying while you stand there!”

Soren jumped into the water, determined to repeat her performance. Instead, he almost immediately began to drift downstream. He plunged underwater and started swimming forward, pushing himself with all his strength. But no matter how hard he swam, he couldn’t make headway. After a few minutes, he gave up and floated back to the riverbank. He looked up to see Friday standing with a mocking smile still on her face.

“How?” he screamed at her. “How are you doing this?”

“Stop thinking like an aussenseiter,” she called back. “Remember your glasses.”

He put his hand to his face, but he remembered that his sunglasses weren’t there anymore. They’d fallen off when he went into the river. Or maybe they hadn’t. Maybe they’d just melted back into his face.

He closed his eyes and summoned the memory of the glasses. A second later, he opened his eyes to find them back on his face.

There was a lesson here, one not about clothing, and Friday was leaving him to figure it out. The glasses were there because he’d made them part of who he was. Was it possible to apply that logic elsewhere?

He looked at his wet, bedraggled body and flexed a muscle. His upper arm strength was decent, but hardly exemplary. His primary talent was running. He’d been a track champion in high school.

That was the real Soren Chase, not you.

The inner voice had a point. Soren Chase, the real one, could run fast, and when he took his place, he’d believed he could run fast, too. So he did.

He looked at Friday on the rock, and she put her hands on her hips in an impatient gesture.

The glasses had appeared because they had become part of his identity. What if the muscles necessary to fight against the current could be summoned as well?

Soren pushed back from the shore, and dove into the water again. This time, as he swam forward, he conjured the image of Soren Chase as a champion swimmer rather than a runner. He mentally substituted the track-and-field medals with swimming ones, even planting false memories of John and Sara cheering him on from the stands by the pool. He was Soren Chase, and Soren Chase could swim as fast as lightning. In his memory, Soren was a world-record holder for swimming. He could almost feel his biceps grow in size and the strength in his legs increase.

He didn’t just swim through the water then—he sliced through it. He put all his considerable energy into moving forward, swimming as if his life depended on it. This time the current didn’t fight him. Rather, it was as if he could see the current and move through it. It swirled around him without holding him back. There was almost no resistance.

When he looked up, he hadn’t matched Friday—he’d gone beyond her. He was swimming near the base of the falls, the force of which should have dragged him under, but he barely felt the tug at all. He reached a hand up to grasp a rock and vaulted out of the water, landing on the rock. He turned toward Friday in triumph.

She didn’t applaud, but gave him a smile, nodding her head.

“It’s a good start,” she said. “Now get over here.”

Soren thought it was better than a good start. He dove into the water and swam to her, easily crossing the distance between them. He pulled himself up on the rock to stand beside her.

As soon as he did so, she turned and leaped over a series of rocks, jumping from one to the other until she reached the shore.

He took a step forward to follow her across the rocks, and there was a squishing sound from his sneaker. All at once he felt soggy and tired.

He tore off his clothes, pulling them off with some effort, as Friday watched impassively from the shoreline. When he was completely naked, he kicked his clothes into the water and closed his eyes. He conjured up his usual outfit of jeans and a long-sleeved shirt along with brand-new sneakers. When he opened his eyes, he was completely clothed again, wearing just what he imagined. He even had the sunglasses on, though he hadn’t remembered thinking of them.

“I could get used to this,” he said.

He leaped along the rocks back to shore, finding an unsmiling Friday watching him.

“You’re catching on,” she said. “Time for your next lesson.”

She turned to the sheer rock wall behind her and began climbing up it. She did so expertly, moving so quickly she was almost halfway up before he realized he had to follow her.

As he approached it, he rewrote Soren’s memories again, this time evoking an image of him being an expert mountain climber. It didn’t work quite as well as it had in the water, and he fell twice, hitting several rocks on the way down before picking himself up, watching his wounds heal, and trying again. It wasn’t until the third try that he made it.

Friday stood impatiently at the top of the cliff, watching him.

“Too slow,” she said, a frown on her face.

Soren ignored the commentary.

“What’s the next lesson?” he asked.

“I’m going to teach you how to fight.”

Ken dropped Sara off at the Wallace Institute building and went to park the car. She checked her watch. It was 3:47 p.m., exactly twenty-four hours since Alex had been taken from her. He could be dead already or in enormous pain. Even if he was neither of those things, he was certainly terrified and alone.

And all she had by way of a lead was an allegedly cursed knife. As she opened the door to the institute’s lobby, she was stopped short by the presence of a young, red-haired man with pale skin and freckles. He was sitting just inside the office as if waiting for someone.

“Hi, Sara,” Glen said.

Sara belatedly recognized Soren’s assistant as he reached a hand out. She shook it, noticing the sweat on his palms. As she did so, she eyed him up and down. Did he know what Soren really was? Could he even be a pretender too? Sara looked around warily, expecting to see Soren.

“He’s, uh, not here,” Glen said, apparently figuring out who she was looking for. “He’s . . . following up a lead.”

The way Glen said it was so unconvincing that Sara might have laughed out loud under different circumstances. But at the moment, she was simultaneously angry and relieved.

“Oh,” was all she said. “Then why are you here?”

“Soren sent me here to help,” he said. “I’m good at finding stuff. That’s why he hired me.”

“I thought your uncle forced him to hire you,” Sara said.

Glen shrugged.

“Well, yeah, okay, if you’re going to be technical about it,” he said. “But I’m still good at research. He thought I could help.”

Sara supposed she should be grateful for any extra assistance, but he probably was a spy for Soren.

“I appreciate it,” Sara said. “But we have a team of people here working on the case. So unless you’re an expert on cursed Russian daggers, I don’t think you can really—”

“What did you say?” he interrupted.

“We don’t really need your help,” Sara finished.

Ken walked in the door behind her. “Everything okay?” he asked.

“Did you say something about cursed Russian daggers?” Glen asked, his eyebrows raised.

“It’s nothing,” Sara said. “Just something Detective Sharpe and I were—”

She stopped when she saw his face.

“Are you talking about the
Cursed Dagger of the Tsars
?” he asked. “Because I know quite a bit about that.”

Sara didn’t recognize the name, but was suddenly less concerned about him being a spy. She gestured toward Wallace’s office.

“This way,” she said.

She paused only to invite Alice back with her. The four of them walked into the office, and Wallace looked up in surprise.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

Glen nodded nervously at Wallace, and Sara gestured for him to take a seat on a white, leather sofa on the far wall. Alice joined him while Ken stood in the doorframe.

Sara briefly told them what they’d found at the Hillwood Museum, mentioning the tornado, the traveling show and the cursed dagger. As she did so, she saw Glen’s eyes widen and he started nodding his head.

“That’s it,” he said. “You’re definitely talking about the
Cursed Dagger of the Tsars.
During the Reapoke case, Terry had me researching famous cursed objects. The dagger made the shortlist.”

“What do you know about it?” Ken asked.

“It has a nasty history,” Glen said. “It was discovered deep in a silver mine near the Czech city of Kutna Hora, in 1904. It had a cat’s eye in the middle, serrated edges—”

“That’s the knife,” Ken said.

“Right,” Glen said. “It was found on the ruins of a raised altar, near a site with thousands of human bones. The best guess was that it was used for human sacrifice.

“But it was also valuable. The Czechs who found it sold it to Russian nobility. That’s when the rumors of a curse started. I don’t remember the name of the first owner, but shortly after he obtained the knife, his estate burned down, killing him and his family. The knife was found in the wreckage, unscathed. It passed to the man’s cousin, who later killed himself with the dagger.”

Wallace was nodding. “We get the idea,” he said. “So how are the tsars involved?”

“It’s a bit of a misnomer,” Glen said. “Only one tsar ever owned it. I’m not sure exactly how, but the dagger ended up in the hands of a monk name Iliodor. He was an influential figure at the time, but he thought a member of a different order, a top aide to Tsar Nicholas II, was too influential. He gave the knife to one of his adherents and asked her to murder the aide. The woman very nearly succeeded.”

Sara had minored in history. She didn’t know the names of many advisers to Tsar Nicholas II, but she knew one.

“Rasputin,” Sara said. “That’s who Iliodor was trying to kill.”

Both Alice and Ken looked at her in surprise, while Wallace nodded. Apparently he, too, had guessed who it was.

“The assailant used the cursed knife to stab Rasputin in the stomach,” Glen said. “His injuries were severe. They say he was never the same after that.”

Sara knew very little about Rasputin, though she remembered a photo of him, his eyes gleaming and watchful even from the picture. He’d creeped her out, and his involvement didn’t bode well. Why was Alex drawing a photo of a knife that was used to stab Rasputin, a man best known for dabbling in mysticism and the occult?

Glen took a deep breath.

“You need to know something else,” Glen said. “After Rasputin recovered, he gave the knife to Alexandra, the tsarina. He asked her to keep it protected because it had ‘unholy’ powers. He claimed . . .” Glen shifted. “Um, he said it could take a man’s essence.”

“What do you mean, essence?” Ken demanded.

Glen winced. “Rasputin claimed the knife had stolen his soul.”

Soren dodged a punch thrown by Friday and blocked a kick, using his arms to absorb the blow. But he didn’t see the right hook coming, and it smacked into his jaw. He staggered backward, tasting blood in his mouth, as Friday laughed scornfully. The blow was harder than he expected. He kept forgetting that while pretenders looked human, they were considerably stronger.

He came back at her quickly, concentrating on enhancing his own blows. She gracefully parried his initial attack, but he swept her legs out and shoved her. She fell into the dirt, but hopped up immediately.

As she approached him, he tried to reimagine Soren as a karate master. He summoned the image of Soren winning a karate championship and receiving a black belt. But the image in his mind felt fuzzy and indistinct, more like daydreaming than an actual memory.

While he was distracted, his guard slipped and Friday hit him with a sharp blow to the kidney that dropped him to his knees. She tried to follow it up by punching him in the face, but he stopped her hand, holding it with his fist.

“Time out,” he said.

She nodded curtly and stepped away. He watched her idly rub her back where she’d fallen.

“Sure,” Friday replied. “We need to change it up anyway. You’re good at basic fighting.”

“I just tried to make myself better,” Soren said. “I did the same trick I did in the water. I imagined myself as a martial arts expert. But it didn’t take. I don’t suddenly know karate.”

Friday shook her head.

“It’s not like the
Matrix
,” she said. “You can’t think about something and will it to happen.”