Equal Parts by Emma Winters Page B

knowing where you’ve been, just in case. Best just to go with it,” replied someone.
    I was stuffed into a car of some sort – a van, I had to guess, by the sound of sliding doors – and felt the engine roar to life before we took off.
    So we were going to meet Finn. Great. No doubt there’d be a dozen or so snipers around the building as well, waiting for Achilles to show his face. Plus, Finn would connect the dots between my identity and the girl from the gazebo, most likely.
    What in the world was ‘our wedding chapel’, though? Clearly the history of Finn and Achilles was more complicated then I’d first assumed.
    A long time later, we came to a halt. I was handed out of the car, made to walk a short distance, up some steps, and into a building of some kind. The chiming of bells in the distance filled my ears, and then the blindfold was taken from me.
    I screamed at the sight that greeted me.
    At least ten versions of Achilles surrounded me, all with the same pattern of skeleton on their faces, all wearing the same outfit, all around the same height and weight. They even had the same fathomless black eyes. They must have done their make-up in the car, because I recognized none of them.
    “What the hell?” I gasped, taking in the setting – a dilapidated church of some kind, with broken stain-glass windows, battered pews, and an altar scribbled with graffiti.
    “Is the real one here?” I asked a random Achilles clone, noting his hair was a little too long to be the actual Achilles.
    “You tell me,” he said with the trademark Achilles smirk. Dear God, this was beyond freaky. What was even freakier was the way I was beginning to tell them apart.
    I studied each of them closely, noting the way some of their eyes avoided me – definitely not the real one – and how some of them were standing with a slight hunch, or in an aggressive stance. Some were bigger, some were scrawnier, some had obviously just sprayed their hair black. Scattered around the church were more versions, one at the end of the aisle, hip jutted against the altar, examining his finger-nails far too casually.
    With a last look at the group closest to me – nope, none of them fit the few descriptions I had of Achilles besides the face-paint – I approached the one in my sights. I couldn’t exactly call out his name and see which one turned around, because chances were, Achilles wasn’t his real name.
    So, I did the only thing I knew would inspire a reaction in one of them, and ‘accidentally’ tripped on the carpet, hitting my head on a pew on the way down. It did hurt, but maybe my skull had become immune to pain over the last week, because it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.
    Letting out a keening groan of agony, I clutched at my head, tried to get up, and sank back down dramatically.
    “Boss?” asked one of the thugs – the one I’d first guessed was just a clone.
    Footsteps approached me, then a shadow fell over my ‘unconscious’ face. “Christ, girl, what am I going to do with you?”
    A hand slid under my head, feeling for a lump or blood, and my eyes flew open. The Achilles leaning over me was definitely the real one – the one I had been approaching anyway. Same floppy hair, same square jaw, same intricate detail in the face-paint, same tanned skin peeking out from under his collar.
    “You can start with not underestimating my powers of deduction,” I told him with an unrestrained grin. I shouldn’t have found that to be so much fun, and I really shouldn’t have received a trickle of happiness from Achilles’s end when I opened my eyes.
    Was he just happy that I wasn’t dead? Or something else?
    “I’ll remember that,” he growled, but I saw the twitch in his painted lips. Ha! He bent closer to me, mouth hovering just above my ear. “I’m slightly impressed, darling.” The whisper made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
    He straightened, pulling me up with him, and I heard one of the