Read Online Spitting Image by Patrick LeClerc - Free Book Online

sighed. “More political schemers from the Old Country. “
    “What do they want you to do?”
    “It’s not me per se,” I said. “They want my abilities.”
    “Can they do that? Isn’t that all hereditary?”
    “Yep.”
    “So–oh.”
    “Yeah. They tried to pull a Morgan Le Fay on me.”
    “Who Le What?” asked Bob.
    “Morgan Le Fay was King Arthur’s half sister,” said Sarah, her voice flat. “In the legend, she was a sorceress. She changed her form to look like Guenevere to sleep with Arthur and conceive Mordred.”
    “I thought that was a fairy tale.”
    “Until a minute ago, so did I,” she said. “So did I.”
    She gave me a long, unblinking look
    “I had no idea this was possible either,” I said. “I don’t remember any of these other clans. I got mind wiped. I thought it was a legend, too.” I had thought Morgan and Arthur just had a family scandal and used superstition to cover it up. It wasn’t beyond belief. Mordred was hardly the most inbred noble in the world. Legends come from somewhere, though. Maybe that one came from the ancestors of my latest foes.
    We drove back to Bob’s cabin in silence. When we arrived, he went off to the kitchen to give us some privacy. We sat on the couch and just leaned together, my arm around her shoulders.
    After a while she spoke. “So what happened?” she asked. “With this imposter?”
    “I thought it was you, but you didn’t seem like yourself. Because it wasn’t yourself. But that was a crazy thought, so I figured you were upset, distant, hiding something. Working something out. I thought I might be in trouble. That you were thinking about leaving me.”
    “So did you sleep with her?” she asked, her voice barely audible. “The other me.”
    I swallowed. Lying was pointless. I’m not above it, in good cause, but there was no way to spin this one.
    “I thought it was you,” I said. “But it felt wrong. There was no intimacy. It didn’t occur to me that anybody could impersonate somebody that well, so I thought that I’d done something wrong and you were upset. I thought I was losing you.”
    She nodded, still looking straight ahead.
    “I was a train wreck. Couldn’t figure what I’d done to make you so distant. That wasn’t like you at all. It tore me up inside. I thought you were thinking about moving on.”
    “You’re used to moving on, aren’t you?” she said. “I figured you’d be good at that by now.”
    I kept my mouth shut. There was nothing I could say at that moment that would help. She felt betrayed and scared and hurt and wanted to lash out. Defending myself wasn’t going to do much good. Doing it well would just make her feel guilty about lashing out. Doing it badly didn’t seem like much of a plan either.
    “So when did you figure out it wasn’t really me?”
    “I got an inside tip. One of the family told me you’d been kidnapped. Showed me how they can change to imitate people. Before that, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
    She nodded slowly. Staring ahead.
    “It was your new office mate from the school. The poet.”
    She started, turned toward me.
    “I went to the school to see you. You weren’t there, but he was,” I continued. “He introduced himself and said he needed to talk to me about you, about how my relationship with you had been lately. If I’d noticed you acting oddly.”
    She leaned forward, looking directly into my eyes as I spoke. Searching. Looking through her glasses instead of over them.
    “I thought he was going to tell me the two of you were having an affair. I know, I know, but from the way he was acting, and the way he was beating around the bush, sneaking up on the revelation, I thought he was trying to soften the blow before he told me, – man to man, old boy – how things were.”
    I took a deep breath.
    “I was crazy with jealousy.”
    She blinked. “Really?”
    “Of course really. I was devastated at the thought of losing you. And it fit with the lack of warmth, the