I sent Alabaster a message to invite him to join us at the junkyard. As I suspected, magic hangover, although it clearly hadn't put him off at all and he now wanted to do everything with magic. It was somehow both annoying and encouraging, seeing him embrace his weirder self. He's still insisting his powers come from God, which certainly isn't the case for me, but I think he might be a good influence on me.
We caught him up on the two situations: Michael's vision, and the demonic summoning totem housing estate. There were some wild ideas about staging a fake stabbing for Michael so that the vision would be correct but it would be fake blood. But I didn't think there was anything else we could do about that other than keeping Michael away from kitchen knives, and we needed to focus on the much larger demon problem.
The library was clearly the best place to start hunting, but it was past closing time. After a prolonged explanation of why breaking into a church that was potentially housing a dangerous artefact in the hands of a derranged vicar was not the same as breaking into a perfectly normal library with a librarian we all liked, we finally agreed to go in the morning. That night we would pay a visit to the cemetary and see if we could find Agnes' grave.
We piled into Vanessa the Batvan, and Adam drove us to the cemetary. He had some wild ideas about each of us carrying a piece of rope and pretending that we'd lost a dog if anyone asked us why we were there, but as I pointed out (backed up by Alabaster) it would be a lot simpler for me to just give them a convincing explanation that didn't involve any fake dogs. I liked the aesthetics of the moonlit graveyard and was pretty sure I could make it work.
Adam had some suggestions for how to efficiently search the place, which Alabaster got halfway through before running off and tripping over a headstone. I stayed with Michael, uncomfortably aware how close we were getting to twelve hours after his vision. We didn't find Agnes's grave. What we did find was a headstone for someone called Mary, with an inscription about holding onto her heart forever or something, with the name Agnes. Oh, and a date some time in the late 18th century, back when Wicker Valley was nothing more than a few farmhouses and a church.
Then Michael found a body. Specifically, his body, with the same red hair and borrowed biker jacket, and with a stab wound in the chest. Which made me feel a lot better, now Michael's vision had an explanation that didn't involve him being stabbed, but obviously freaked Michael out a lot.
While I was checking that it really was a duplicate of Michael, and going through the pockets to see if I could find any ID, Adam and Robin took off running. When they got bad, Robin said that he'd seen a third Michael, but Adam, who had caught up with the fleeing figure, had seen a duplicate of himself.
Doppelgangers. We had doppelgangers.
I wanted to know more, specifically about the biology of these creatures since we had a dead one in front of us. I asked Adam if he had some nitrile gloves I could borrow, but while he was fetching them from the van, Alabaster started talking about harvesting organs as spell components, and Michael understandably freaked out even more. He ran off after Adam, and the body in front of us suddenly disappeared.
At least that told us something. The mimicry might not be entirely voluntary. They might just be mimicking the nearest person.
With one of them vanished and the other one having got away from Adam and Robin, there wasn't much else we could do though, and the mystery of Agnes was getting deeper. We decided on a visit to the church - or rather, Alabaster did and we all agreed we would go with him to help search the parish records. Or keep an eye on him. On the way I sent Rusty an email. I had a hunch our family tree would have something interesting in it.
Alabaster still had the key to the church but decided to magic the door open anyway, just because he could. He tried to hide the resulting nosebleed but I know a magical backlash when I see one. Still, we were in.
While the others searched record, I tried to ignore the horrible itching from being yet again in a church, and checked my replies. Rusty had some questions, and insisted that I didn't want to get involved with Agnes. I agreed, but told him there was a chance Agnes was trying to get involved with us.
They did find something in the records. Mary from the gravestone. Mary, with a surname starting with Ma and the rest scratched out. I was pretty sure I knew what that would turn out to be. And she was survived by Agnes. We were getting closer. But not close enough. At least the others were all on board with the idea that Agnes might be a shade more immortal than your average aunty.
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