“No, that won’t help,” she said, rounding the sharp edge out of her voice. It wasn’t his fault this wasn’t working. She should’ve known it was too much to ask of him. And now it was too late to call in a backup. All the suitable ones would already be at the gala with other dates.
A sort of numbness took over Caterina then, forcing the nervousness away. Alaric would see her fall tonight, spectacularly, with all the cameras flashing. He’d get plastered all over the magazine pages with Lizel Falk, his supermodel, and Caterina would get photographed with Rahul, with a snide caption something along the lines of “Millionaire Heiress Caterina LaValle Seems to Lag in the Rebound.” Alaric would really enjoy that. He’d probably frame the page.
Rahul was staring at her desperately, as if he were upset. And maybe he was, Caterina realized. He wasn’t like any of the guys she’d dated. He probably really did care how this night went for her, without much thought about how it would affect him.
Caterina forced a small smile. “Let me just fix your hair a bit.” There was no need to suck him into her vortex of unhappiness and dissatisfaction. He’d done nothing wrong. In fact, he’d made a valiant effort to help her achieve her goals. She walked around behind him and tried to get a strand of hair to lay over his whorl, but it kept snapping back into place.
“Oh,” Rahul said suddenly, turning around to look at her. “We forgot. The hair gel, remember?”
She hadn’t forgotten. Yesterday, at Oliver’s shop, she’d been overcome by the possibilities of what Rahul could become. She’d been swept up in Oliver’s vision and optimism, sure that they could make something of Rahul together. But tonight, seeing him in all of the Oliver-sanctioned finery, Caterina had to admit she’d been a tad overzealous. And so she hadn’t bothered putting the gel into Rahul’s hair. What good would it do now, honestly?
But he was looking at her with a mix of hope and desperation, and she couldn’t dash that. “Oh yes.” She walked over to the bed and grabbed the pouch that contained Rahul’s makeup. Pulling the pot of gel out of the bag, she held it in her palm for a moment, noticing that the glass had an iridescent shimmer she hadn’t noticed before. It caught the light and winked at her. “Let’s try it.”
Caterina walked back over to Rahul and opened the jar, holding it out to him in the flat of her hand. He peeked in at the milky white substance. “Do I just… take some in my fingers and put it in my hair?”
“Yes,” she said. “And kind of style your hair as you go.”
“Style it…” Rahul looked as though she’d asked him to open a wormhole in the hotel room.
“Just run it through your hair,” she said, not able to edge out the touch of impatience this time. “It really doesn’t matter.” His face fell. God. It was like kicking a puppy. She added, “It’ll look good no matter how you do it.”
Looking happier, Rahul reached his fingertips into the jar and came away with far more than she would’ve advised. “Whoa,” he said, bringing it to his nose. “It smells weird. Like lilies and metal and almonds. And dirt.”
Dirt? Caterina tried not to let her irritation show. “Just put it into your hair. I’m sure it’ll fade once it’s in there.” She sighed and began to fiddle with her jewelry. This was hopeless. They were going to fool exactly no one at the gala, and worse, she was about to become a laughingstock. Dammit. Why had she ever thought this was a good idea?
“Um… Caterina?”
“Yes, what?” She blinked and refocused on him. He was turned away from her now, looking into the mirror in front of him. From this angle, she couldn’t see his face anymore. “What is it?”
Rahul turned around slowly, to face her once more.
And Caterina found herself staring.
Something was happening. Something very strange was happening.
RAHUL
Something was happening. Something highly unusual and that Rahul was fairly sure defied every law of physics he’d ever read up on in his free time.
The flabbergasted, suspicious, alarmed look on Caterina’s face mirrored his. Well, except that he wasn’t sure his face was… his anymore.
Rahul turned slowly back around to face the mirror. Caterina took a step to her left so she was beside him, also looking at him in the mirror. “Is that…,” Rahul began, not sure how to finish that sentence. Is that real? Is that a hallucination? Is that magic? Ridiculous. That last one was absolutely ridiculous. “Is that… me?”
“I think it is,” Caterina said faintly, her fingers reaching forward to the mirror, then settling back down again. “It’s you.”
Except it wasn’t. Not as he’d previously existed anyway. None of his atoms or molecules had ever arranged themselves to look like this. This was not his genetic code. This was someone else’s phenotypical expression of superior DNA. He didn’t look like himself at all, but maybe a distant cousin who modeled in his spare time. Not Pritam—he looked way better than Pritam had ever looked in his best pictures.
Somehow, Rahul’s face had taken on a chiseled quality it had never had before. His skin looked clearer, his hair thicker and lusher and shinier. Even his shoulders were broader, though he couldn’t tell if that was simply because he was naturally standing straighter because he felt more confident looking like this. Casually he stuck one hand in his pocket, the way he’d seen Grey and Leo do before. He looked like a freaking GQ model. How was this possible?
“How is this possible?” Caterina frowned. “Am I dreaming?” She tugged on a lock of her hair, her expression unchanging, and then slowly put it back with the others where it belonged. “No. That hurt. I’m awake.”
“It—it has to be a shared delusion. A folie à deux. It’s a well-documented phenomenon in the psychological literature. People begin to believe the same things, and—”
“But why? Why would we suddenly begin believing you look like Tom Holland?”
Unable to stop a grin—a confident, easy, graceful grin!—from spreading across his face at the comparison, Rahul turned to Caterina. “The smell. The smell that wafted off the gel. What did Oliver say was in here?”
“I don’t remember; some plant.”
“Wolfsbane. Maybe it causes hallucinations in its essential form. I’m not aware of that ever happening before, but… Or maybe there’s something else in here, that when inhaled or ingested in some fashion—say, through the roots of your hair—causes hallucinations.”
Caterina shook her head and stepped away from him, looking effortlessly like an A-list celebrity headed to an awards ceremony in her midnight-blue gown. “It sounds really far-fetched. I don’t know. And does that mean when they take your picture tonight for the pages, you’ll look like you? Since the people can’t smell the gel through the pages of a magazine? What about people who are too far away to smell the fumes?”
Rahul pinched the bridge of his nose. These were all excellent questions, ones he had no answers to yet. “I don’t know. I guess we’ll just have to go out and see how this goes.”
Caterina’s eyes ran over every part of his face and body in a way that wasn’t at all unpleasant. “Yes,” she said thoughtfully, folding her hands on the silky skirt of her dress. “I suppose we should.”