doppel ring

And from behind me came a deep, warbling, throbbing hum, like nothing I’d heard before.
My dad, the illusionist. I slipped the dark opal ring I’d gotten from Molly off my hand and palmed it.
Then I turned.
Hovering maybe twenty feet up, with his feet planted firmly on a stone the size of a Buick, was the Blackstaff, Ebenezar McCoy. One hand was spread out to one side for balance, fingers crooked in a mystic sign, sort of a kinetic shorthand for whatever spell was keeping that boulder in the air.
The other gripped his staff, carved with runes like mine, and they glowed with sullen red-orange energy. His face had twisted into a rictus of cold, hard fury. Flickers of static electricity played along the surface of the stone.
“You fool,” he said. “You damned fool.”
I put my feet back on the dock. Then I knelt down and tied my shoe.
“Boy,” he said. “They’re using you.”
I set the palmed ring down behind my heel, out of sight. Breathed a word in barely a whisper.
There was a moment of dizziness and then I stood up and faced my grandfather. I gathered in my will. The shield bracelet on my left wrist began drizzling a rain of green and gold sparks of light. The runes of my staff began to glow with the same energy.
“Sir,” I said. “What are your intentions?”

Peace Talks Chapter 31, Page 297-298


“Family,” came the old man’s voice, a primordial growl lurking in it. “One. Of those things.”
He whirled toward the retreating boat, barely visible from the shore by now, and his staff burst into incandescent blue flame as he lifted it in his right hand, the hand that projects energy, drawing it back.
“No!” I shouted, and lurched toward him.
He spun, eyes surrounded by white, his face scarlet, his teeth bared in a snarl, snapping his staff out …
And what looked like a comet about the size of a quarter, blazing like a star, leapt from the staff, like some kind of bizarre random static spark, and plunged into my ribs and out my spine.
I tumbled down to the dock on my back, the stars suddenly unusually bright above me.
I tried to breathe.
Nothing much happened.
“Ach, God,” the old man whispered, his breath creaking.
His staff clattered to the dock. It sounded like it came from very far away.
“Harry?” he said. “Harry?”
His face appeared at the end of a little black tunnel.
“Oh, lad,” he said, tears in his eyes. “Oh, lad. Didn’t think you were going to come at me again. Didn’t think it would trigger.”
I could feel his hands on my face, distantly.
“That’s why you were so big on teaching me control,” I slurred dully. “You’re barely holding it together yourself.”
“I’m a hotheaded fool,” he said. “I’m trying to help you.”
“You knew you were losing it,” I said weakly. “And you kept going anyway. You could have backed me up.” Blood came out of the hole in my chest in rhythmic little spurts. “And instead it ends like this.”
Shame touched his eyes.
And he looked away from mine.
The pain we feel in life always grows. When we’re little, little pains hurt us. When we get bigger, we learn to handle more and more pain and carry on regardless.
Old people are the hands-down champions of enduring pain.
And my grandfather was centuries old.
This pain, though.
This hurt him.
This broke him.
He bowed his head. His tears fell to the dock.
Then he paused.
Then his expression changed.
He looked up at me. His eyes widened, and then his face twisted into rage and disbelief. “Why, you sneaky—”
“Good talk,” I said, “Wizard McCoy.”
And I let go of the Winter glamour Lady Molly had crafted for me.
I felt my consciousness retreating back down that black tunnel, down to where I had laid Molly’s opal pinky ring on the dock, while I felt the ultimate construct of glamour, my doppelgänger, collapsing and deflating into ectoplasm behind me. My awareness rushed into the stone in the ring, found the thread of my consciousness I’d bound to it, and then went rushing swiftly back toward my body.
My eyes flew open and I was on the deck of the Water Beetle, on the far side of the cabin from where Ebenezar had been, where I’d taken cover after dropping the ring and beginning the illusion. Once I’d activated the ring, the veil around me had let me slip aboard the Water Beetle, take cover, and then project my consciousness back into the construct.
I’d blown up my relationship with my grandfather by remote control.
But at least I hadn’t taken a comet to the lung.
As I came all the way back into my body, I was gripped by a weariness so intense that it was its own entirely new form of pain. I could feel myself thrashing in spasms. Murphy had one of those face masks with a rubber pump over my mouth and was forcing air in. Freydis was trying to hold me down.
I fought for control of my body and eventually reasserted it, sagging down to the deck in utter weariness. Freydis lay half across me, panting. Murphy, all business, peeled back one of my eyelids and shone a light on my eye. “Harry? Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” I said, and brushed the mask off my face. “Ugh.”
“Od’s bodkin, seidermadr,” Freydis breathed. She rose off me wearily. “You cut that one close.”
“What the hell is she talking about?” Murphy asked.
“A construct,” I said. “For the illusion. Um. Molly made a really, really good ectoplasmic body for me, stored the pattern for it in the ring, and linked it to me. Everything you need to drop a fake double of yourself in place as a decoy and simultaneously make yourself unseen. Then I … kind of possessed the construct. Projected my awareness into it. Sent all that energy into it, all the way from here, which is exhausting as hell. Had a wonderful chat with McCoy.”

Peace Talks Chapter 32, Page 306-309