“I am not having this conversation,” I said.

“Repression and denial,” my double said acerbically. “Get thee to a therapist.”

The figure next to him made a soft sound.

“Right,” the double said. “We don’t have much time. Murphy’s pulling the nail out.”

“Time for what?” I asked. “And who is that?”

“Seriously?” he asked. “You aren’t going to use your intuition even a little, huh?”

I scowled at him and at the other figure and then my eyes widened. “Wait . . . Is that . . . is that the parasite?”

The shrouded figure shuddered and let out a pained groan.

“No,” my double said. “It’s the being that Mab and that stupid Alfred have been calling a parasite.”

I blinked several times. “What?”

“Look, man,” my double said. “You’ve got to work this out. Think, okay. I can’t just talk to you. This near-dream stuff is my best, but you’ve got to meet me halfway.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Wait. You’re saying that the parasite isn’t actually a parasite. But that means . . .”

“The wheel is turning,” my double said, in the tone of a reporter covering a sports event. “The fat, lazy old hamster looks like he’s almost forgotten how to make it go, but he’s sort of moving it now. Bits of rust are falling off. The cobwebs are slowly parting.”

“Screw you,” I said, annoyed. “It’s not like you’ve showed up with a ton to say ever since . . .” I trailed off and fell entirely silent for a long moment.

“Ah,” he said, and pointed a finger at me, bouncing up onto his toes. “Ah hah! Ah hah, hah, hah, the light begins to dawn!”

“Ever since I touched Lasciel’s Coin,” I breathed quietly.

“Follow that,” my double urged me. “What happened next?”

“Touching the Coin put an imprint of Lasciel in my head,” I said. “Like a footprint in clay, the same shape as the original. She tried to tempt me into accepting the true Lasciel into my head along with her, but I turned her down.”

My double rolled his wrist in a “keep it moving” gesture. “And then?”

“And then the imprint started to change,” I said. “Lasciel was immutable, but the imprint was made of me. A shape in the clay. As the clay changed, so did the imprint.”

“And?”

“And I gave her a name,” I said. “I called her Lash. She became an independent psychic entity in her own right. And we kind of got along until . . .” I swallowed. “Until there was a psychic attack. A bad one. She threw herself in the way of it. It destroyed her.”

“Yeah,” my double said quietly. “But . . . look, what she did was an act of love. And you were about as intimate with her as it gets, sharing the same mental space. I mean, it’s funny, you get twitchy when you start considering living with a woman, but having one literally inside your head was not an issue.”

“What do you mean?”

“Christ, you’re supposed to be the intellect here,” my double said. “Think.” He stared at me for a long moment, visibly willing me to understand.

My stomach fell into some unimaginable abyss at the same time my jaw dropped open. “No,” I said. “That isn’t . . . that’s not possible.”

“When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much,” my double said, as if speaking to a small child, “and they live together and hug and kiss and get intimate with each other . . .”

“I’m . . .” I felt a little ill. “You’re saying . . . I’m pregnant?”

My double threw up his arms. “Finally, he gets it.”

In years and years and years of experience as a wizard, I’d dealt with concepts, formulae, and mental models that ranged from bizarre to downright insanity-inducing. None of them had, in any way whatsoever, ever prepared my head to wrap around this. At all. Ever. “How is that . . . That isn’t even . . . What the hell, man?” I demanded.

“A spiritual entity,” my double said calmly. “Born of you and Lash. When she sacrificed herself for you, it was an act of selfless love—and love is fundamentally a force of creation. It stands to reason, then, that an act of love is fundamentally an act of creation. You remember it, right? After she died? When you could still play the music she’d given to you, even though she was gone? You could hear the echoes of her voice?”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling dazed.

“That was because a part of her remained,” my double said. “Made of her—and made of you.”

And very gently, he drew back the black blanket.

She looked like a child maybe twelve years old, in the last few weeks of true childhood before the sudden surge of hormones brought on the chain of rapid changes that lead into adolescence. Her hair was dark, like mine, but her eyes were a crystalline blue-green, the way Lash’s had often appeared. Her features were faintly familiar, and I realized in a surge of instinct that her face had been constructed from those of people in my life. She had the square, balanced chin of Karrin Murphy, the rounded cheeks of Ivy the Archive, and Susan Rodriguez’s jawline. Her nose had come from my first love, Elaine Mallory, her hair from my first apprentice, Kim Delaney. I knew because they were my memories, right there in front of me.