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The first thought had been shock at how easy it was to pass as a substitute teacher. This shock had lasted until he'd snuck in the time, in the motel room, to do some cursory googling and discover how abysmal recruiting and hiring standards were for substitute teachers in nearly every state. Had he managed to piss into a cup without alerting every drug-sniffing dog in a forty mile radius, before, he would have been completely qualified. The man on paper now had a record appropriately squeaky-clean. In an era of relaxed standards his tattoo would not earn any second glances.

He had fake credentials, a fake name--Charles, because he was used to using it, and Bohannon, because he still missed her, still thought of her--and a sincere case of stage fright made more intense by the fact that he'd barely had time to recover from orientation. He also had a folder of lesson plans left for the last substitute who had found herself mysteriously too ill with a summer cold to fulfill her obligations, necessitating a last minute replacement. In this case "lesson plans" was a generous term for videos to be screened and a handful of worksheets that even to Taym's eye looked horrifically dull.

He had a few changes of business casual clothes, a bag of the usual supplies that he had already become deeply paranoid of leaving unattended, a scarf to tuck up high around his throat in what he hoped would pass for a hipster affectation, and a box of nicotine patches. He managed two and a half hours of sleep.

----

It took three periods to make himself speak loudly enough on the first try. The kids--high school freshmen, awkward and uneasy in their new building, the middle school hierarchies destroyed and all made level by the great equalizers of unfamiliar territory and universal ignorance--rolled their eyes and snorted and tittered until he realized, ten minutes in, that he knew the way to their hearts.

"Don't get so loud that the class next door gets suspicious," he told them, "and you can do whatever the--whatever you want. I'll pretend I didn't see any cellphones."

In the midst of the merry, controlled chaos, he attempted at first to bury himself in a book. But the students seemed inclined by curiosity (and, at first, a vicious predatory need for mockery that rapidly diminished under the weight of his sardonic, youthful tone) to engage with him, and I'll investigate after classes became I can investigate now.

This was uneasy at first--it felt like the work of his old division, not of his new--but became steadily less rocky as conversations took an idle, shoot-the-s**t tone. They asked him about his tattoo, about the book he was trying to read, about everything, and he, an expert bullshitter, stretched the legs of a lying habit he'd not had reason to fully exercise in nearly a year. Most of the kids ignored him, save for the few keen on pumping him for person details. There was no audience. It was somewhere between being a big brother again and the hazy, shrouded memories of a man-that-wasn't in a reality-that-hadn't, and of being, again, normal.

And they talked back: about classes, about the other teachers, about the summer reading list and their old schools. He deftly diverted the attention of a girl who reminded him of Grace despite looking nothing like her, who kept pointedly touching up her lipgloss. He sympathized with a kid who volunteered, to general derision, that he'd already read the entire first semester reading list. He earned a modicum of respect by catching, easily and gracefully and without trying, a paper football that a pair of boys had only pretended had gone wayward. It had been a missile, and there was a tacit understanding from all parties that it had been a missile, and that he had intercepted it and only flicked it back, his hands, thank god, steady.

"D'you smoke?" asked a kid after lunch, and he saw no reason to lie about why his clothes stunk.

"Don't start," he said drily, and he was gratified to see that most of them expressed an immediate lack of interest, one of them candidly informing him that only old people smoked.

"Look at him. Ought to ask him if he goes grim too," a girl mumbled sarcastically, and she'd thought she was out of hearing but he'd heard it, heard the titters. He knew well the embarrassed and nervous tone of the laughter, and attempted to steer her into an explanation, old curiosities alive and well. The conversation dead-ended. He felt it unwise to push it too far just yet.

---

Three students in his first period double take, staring uncomprehendingly at his face, and then at his hair, and then at his hand in obvious bewilderment. Some whisper.

He tells himself, sick and terrified, that they are only startled to see a man that looks like he does wearing the little plastic label that marks him out as a substitute. He tells himself that the looks are not ones of startled recognition.

----

He has an empty period towards the end of the day, and he is weighing the relative merits of staying put in case someone checks on him versus getting things done when there is a rap at the door and the principal shows herself in: short and square with a halo of greying hair that badly needs to be wrangled. She asks him to join her in her office, and he is already formulating excuses for the fact that he'd spent the entire day letting the students essentially enjoy indoor recess when she closes the door behind him, gestures at a chair, and clears her throat in a way that indicates that she has prepared a speech.

"Mr. Bohannon," she says. "Can I call you Charles?"

"Only if you don't call me Charlie," he says easily, and rather than relaxing she levels a sterner eye on him.

"Charles," she repeats. "We do appreciate your being able to show up on such short notice."

"Not a problem."

"I know the students do love to chatter, and unfortunately the faculty as well. I'm sure that you've already found yourself confronted with various rumors about the state of the school."

He hadn't, not really; he makes a noncommittal sound. "You get that everywhere," he observes, "even if they're a little... crazy here."

She stiffens. "Yes. They are certainly--quite wild. Unbelievable, really. This is because they are a fiction, Charles, and this is a situation in which the fiction is stranger than truth."

He points out, tone neutral, that it's hard to take any high school rumor seriously. That a lecture is hardly necessary.

"Tell that to the newspaper," she says sharply. Regret immediately cascades over her square-jawed, freckled face. It is more than she means to say, but she continues anyway: "This state has woefully lacking guidelines when it comes to the certification of substitute teachers. Non-existent guidelines, as you know well, Mr. Bohannon. We are finding ourselves more and more hiring outsiders and strangers as opposed to familiar faces. Some might dismiss us as paranoid, but it has become obvious that the newspaper has decided that its duties now extend to investigative journalism and undercover exposés of imaginary scandals. It has equally arrived at the conclusion, judging from the phone calls we have received, that hearsay qualifies as fact. Irresponsible reporting at its best, Mr. Bohannon."

"Positively tabloid," he agrees, in a tone calculated to infuriate while remaining just friendly and ignorant enough to prevent being called out.

She lets him go after some desultory attempts at normality. He tells the students the next day that they'd made enough of a ruckus that they ought to expect supervision, and that they should at least pretend to watch the video he's been told to show them.

He leaves the classroom door open, contrarian, and each time that she strolls past he sees her mouth thin into a disapproving, angry line. She does not trust him. She knows he is not what he says he is. But she is dead wrong about the truth, and so he feeds, quietly, the lie. He asks the students questions a little more directly.

"So what's the deal," one of them blurts, finally. "Is he your brother or something?"

"Shut up, Nathan," says his girlfriend sharply.

The world tips up, wobbling on a shifted fulcrum. Taym pushes his hands, suddenly shaking, into his pockets, and looks so clueless that they believe him, or at least pretend to.

She trots out to the parking lot to dismiss her ride and then, shouldering her backpack, starts walking. She's the one following him, but he manages without seeming to to keep an eye on her, afraid she might bolt. His fears are misplaced: she looks calm, collected, maybe even a little amused, and when he meets her at a Texaco three blocks down she grins at him again.

This is the second time today he's found himself in a position that, if discovered, might cause him significant problems. He waits until he's sure there's no one here but the clerk and an old man filling his car before offering her a cigarette, which she waves away.

"You gave William some bad s**t," he informs her.

"Nah," she says. "He knows you're always rolling the dice with scarecrow. He's the dumbass using it."

"So you don't?"

"I just sell it," she says exasperatedly. She is perhaps fifteen. Maybe if William skipped a grade, she had been held back. She has a precocious, affected mien that makes him long to smack her, or would if he weren't so ******** scared for her. "Wouldn't be good for business. But you know that," she adds slyly.

The words are hard to say, even for an experienced liar; it is the kind of lie that sticks in his throat. "I guess you know my brother."

"He's cuter than you are," she informs him. "You two partnering up?"

"I guess you could say that. That was the original plan, but he's been monopolizing s**t. He owes me money," he finishes, and finally the girl starts to look nervous.

"I don't want to get involved in any of that s**t," she says.

"You don't have to. Just tell me where I can find him. ******** dodging my calls."

She shifts her weight uneasily from one foot to the other. "I dunno, man."

"I'm not gonna tell him who told me. How will he know? I'm not interested in getting you in trouble. Exactly the opposite. I promise you I'm easier to work with than he is."

"He kinda gives me the creeps," she confesses.

"You and me both."

But still she hesitates, and Taym says: one second, and he puts his cigarette out and goes inside to use the ATM, returning with a handful of twenties, and this time he jerks his chin in a walk with me motion until they're both headed down the sidewalk and away from the cameras.

"How much are you gonna get for what you've got on you right now?"

"Eighty."

"I'll give you one-twenty for the rest of it, if you tell me where he is."

In the end this works. She hands over a bag of what he recognizes as a sort of FEAR candy, and he hands over the money while she tells him where to go. They don't break pace. He is alarmed and impressed to see that her sleight of hand is every bit as good as his, and maybe better. At times they drift fifteen feet apart, two separate pedestrians. She is more cautious than he is, and she does not say goodbye when she goes her way, walking towards a run-down apartment complex as he splits off, looping back around.

His hands are shaking by the time he is two blocks from the school, which looks menacing now, hunkering down over the empty sidewalks and parking lots just barely freckled with the last few students waiting for rides or shooting the s**t, with a couple of teachers leaving for the day. No one takes notice of him. No one ever does.

He waits for three hours with nothing to occupy his time but fear and Fionnghal's voice and the thought that he ought to check in before he acts, that he ought to have backup ready before he does this, all of which are thoughts he discards, his hands aching with longing. It is a long, long three hours, and at the end of it he heads out to the deserted track, out to the bleachers, and underneath them he finds what he is looking for. It wears his face better than he does: healthy, self-assured, dark hair worn long in the front and pushed to one side.

It freezes, startled, and although it grins nervously, licking its lips, it tenses as if to run. It never has the chance.

Fionnghal's runes light up the barred shadows beneath the empty seats, and Taym, aching, craving, needing, throws himself at the thing that looks like him but isn't. He barely notices the knife sliding through his shield and between his ribs. What he does notice is that the thing fights like all it wants is to escape, and that it is fast, so ******** fast, as nimble as a cat, and that its movements are more calculated and precise than 7's had been.

It wants to get away, a panicked noise rising in its throat in his own voice, a whimper of agony as Fionnghal drives deep, again and again, into its stomach. The blood crawls backwards along Taym's hands, desperately attempting to return to splintered veins, and the thing wails until Taym fights it down to the ground, clamping a hand over its mouth and ignoring the sudden pain of teeth closing again and again in his the flesh of his palm until the creature's blood and his are indistinguishable, one crawling, seething, living mass of dark red, dripping onto the pavement and reaching back towards its host.


HP: 55
DMG: 4
CHG: 1/3

"This'll go easier on you if you stop fighting," he spits, and it answers with a hysterical sort of laugh.

"Bullshit," it says. "Bullshit. You don't plan on making this easy. You're going to try and kill me even though," it added, half-wailing, half-triumphant, "you can't."

"Who says I can't?"

"Taym does," it says, frantic, and the shock of this loosens Taym's grip. It reacts with predictable, terrifying swiftness, with a knee in his gut, and then it scrambles away, crawling not towards the knife but towards its hand until Taym tackles it down again, a knee in the small of his back.

"What else does Taym say?"

"Not going to tell you," it pants, writhing. "Not going to tell you."

"What else," he repeats, twisting its arm up behind its back and pressing the edge of the knife to its wrist, "does Taym say?"

"Says we'll win. Says he'll get it. Says--no, no," it wails. "Not telling. Not telling."

It rises into a chant, terrified and agonized, and after another heavy, hacking blow Taym is able to stifle it with the thing's own hand.

HP: 45
DMG: 9
CHG: 3/3

"Don't move," Taym barked.

She swayed, pale and terrified at the blood on the ground, at the sight of them together, he with his face streaked with blood, the clone's with the same and with tears.

People don't stop to ask questions of a man who looks like he knows what he's doing and has been told to do it. The clone was still and tense, Taym's blood-streaked scarf wound around its face, its bloody stumps hidden behind its back. He was reluctant to remove the knife from its back but he did, one hand pinning its severed wrists, the other fumbling in his pocket.

He held up his wallet like he was flashing an ID at a skeptical liquor store clerk. All that was in it was an out-of-state driver's license, but the principal's face was bloodless, her hands pressed to her mouth, tears already starting, and she would not look too hard, because he looked like he knew what he was doing and had been told to do it. "FBI, Domestic Terrorism Unit." Somehow, miraculously, whether because of her terror or because of the general climate of public school security these days or because he had simply had twenty-five years of experience in telling a convincing lie, this worked. She made a strangled sound that was half horror and half relief.

In one swift motion he shoved the wallet back into his pocket, the knife again pressed to the clone's back.

"What--" she started weakly.

"Sit down, ma'am," he barked. "Last thing I need is you passing out. You know this man's been a threat to your students?"

"I'd--there were rumors--"

"And some of them were true and some of them weren't." The clone was starting to make a racket now, thrashing, and Taym gave it a shake, drove the knife harder into the small of its back. "Go back to the school. There's going to be two investigators around ASAP to get your report on this and to tell you what to do next but it is imperative--do you hear me? The safety of your entire student body is riding on this--it is imperative that you say nothing. If this a*****e's partners find out he's been apprehended they're going to get away and endanger some other high school. You understand? Tell me what you're going to do."

"I'm going to go back to the school," she whispered, backing away, "and wait to talk to the agents, and not--not say anything to anyone."

"Go. Go," he repeated. She turned, and then bolted away, and the clone made a last-ditch effort to wrestle loose. As soon as he was sure she wasn't looking back, Taym reached into his pocket and yanked out his pendant and seconds later the infirmary received not one visitor but two: a shaken Hunter who immediately barked that he needed someone to back for a memory wipe and to pick up a couple of severed hands (this met a couple of bewildered looks), and a thrashing captive, free of his gag at last, filling the room with gurgling, wordless shrieks.

"You'll be getting its hands back, at least," he said tersely, half-dragging it, half-wrestling it to the elevator. "That was me."

The immediate danger was over and now Taym was aware of the pounding of his heart, of the burning of his lungs, of the terror and adrenaline catching up to him. This crash nearly always accompanied a knee-knocking physical weakness, a buckling, but he couldn't let it now. He just followed H, his fingers white-knuckled.

He tensed, fury rising at what to him amounted to an accusation, a slur, but the task of keeping the clone in check kept him, mercifully, from acting on it.

"Tell me explicitly what helping you would entail," he said. It was not delivered in a tone of meek subordination. "And don't give me some generalized 'whatever I say it does' bullshit."

His hands full, Taym gritted his teeth and he ignored the reminder of the fact that it was he who was powerless, and stubbornly he pushed the point: "What kind of testing? Specifics."