"So which part of me are you?" Ella asked, her curiosity piqued. She released the double from her grasp and stood up to scrutinise her. "My ego? My conscience? My guilty conscience, maybe?"

"I'm the little voice inside your head you never listen to," the double said, rising from the mud to face her.

"The voice of reason, I suppose."

"Precisely. You have no idea how frustrating living with you can be. I give you suggestions, but you ignore them. I provide you with certainty, but you prefer to live in doubt. I whisper the answers to all your questions, but you choose not to hear me."

"Ah," Ella said, not believing an over-elaborate word of it. "And now you want to make me listen."

"Believe me, if ever there was a time you needed to, it's now."

She laughed scornfully. "Why? So you can lie to me?"

"I'm not asking you any questions you haven't already asked yourself. I just happen to be asking them out loud."

"Spare me," Ella muttered.

"I have nothing to tell you that you don't already know, Ella."

"Oh, I think I'd know if my deepest darkest desire was to be human."

"Like you knew Leon was your perfect fit?"

The double smiled, seeing Ella stunned into silence. "Deep inside, you always knew it. You just didn't want to accept it. The last of the great anointed ones giving away her heart and soul to a mere mortal? What would your father say?"

"He'd want me to be happy," Ella insisted.

"He'd want you to fulfil your destiny."

She lifted her chin imperiously. "I fail to see why the two have to be mutually exclusive."

The double tutted in disapproval.

"I need him..."

"You managed perfectly well without him for five hundred years."

"Yes," Ella agreed. "But that's all I was doing. I wasn't living – I wasn't feeling—"

"And what are you feeling now?" The double smirked. "Apart from Leon, that is."

Ella rolled her eyes. "I'm not sure I believe any part of me enjoys making smutty jokes as much as you do."

"You do have a sense of humour, you know. But you've spent so long being so deadly serious about everything that you've forgotten how to use it."

"What I do is not a laughing matter," Ella snapped as the double began to laugh. She wasn't sure if it was to taunt her or because it was genuinely amused by something.

"You see," the double said between giggles, "that was an excellent pun, and you missed it entirely."

Ella frowned, baffled. "What pun?"

The double snapped out of the hilarity like a switch had been flicked inside it. "Never mind. Just answer the question."

"About how I'm feeling?" She considered it for a second. "Let's see...tired. Kind of sore..."

"Proper feelings."

She thought of Leon: and there was an awful lot to think about. The maturity he'd shown in getting to grips with her world, his eagerness to help her, his determination to break down her barriers. His forgiveness when she'd betrayed him with Malachi; all the times he'd saved her life. She wasn't exactly unappreciative of his body or the touch of his lips, either. There was so much to say, so much to feel – and yet it all boiled down into one single word.

One that, handily, Ella had just remembered the meaning of.

"Love," she said, enjoying the way it resonated with such certainty.

"What else?"

She thought of Thelma: and smiled, picturing her in her angel outfit. Thelma had been her ally – her friend – long before she'd given it a name. But it was far harder to describe how she felt about her than it was to describe how she felt about Leon. Saying that it was nice to have someone to talk to didn't really seem to cover it. She liked her; respected her tenacity. Felt affection for her, even. Perhaps that was also love, in its way.

"I suppose...I suppose friendship."

"Anything else?"

This was safer ground, and she retreated to it with ease. "Relief."

"That you're still alive."

Ella nodded. The double shook her head slowly. "Do you think the rest of the world is so relieved?"

"My death wouldn't have changed what's happened," Ella retorted, prepared for the question. She'd already decided that she wasn't about to let this demon wearing her own face to wrong-foot her again.

"You're just skimming the surface again, Ella. Your feelings are far more complex than you pretend."

"Since you so enjoy telling me how it is I feel," Ella said, sitting back down as the exertion of the confrontation finally got the better of her, "why don't you fill in the gaps?"

The double's eyes lit up, needing no further prompting.

"Contempt. Pity."

"For Malachi."

"For yourself. Along with a healthy dose of guilt, disillusionment and doubt. Oh, and resentment, too. An enormous amount of resentment."

The double sat down with a smile, a childish sense of glee palpable as she watched Ella's face fall.

"You already know I blame myself for the End of Days," Ella said eventually. "Do we have to keep going over it?"

"We'll keep going over it until you find some sort of resolution."

"How can I?" She rested her head against the tree, wanting to cry but determined not to give her inquisitor the satisfaction. Looking up towards the sky, she willed the unshed tears to drain back down to wherever it was they were springing from.

"It was my responsibility to stop him, and I failed. So many people are going to die – and it's all because of me."

"People have already died because of you," the double observed.

"It's not the same."

"You feel guilty about it, though."

"They shouldn't have become involved with Azazeal in the first place," Ella shot back.

"You can't help who you fall in love with."

She smiled ruefully. "No, you can't. But that doesn't mean I'm going to sit here and debate the morality of my actions with you. I believe in everything I did – everything. It may not have been right, and I may have some regrets about having to do it, but guilty? No."

"Cassie," the double said suddenly.

"What about her?"

"That's where the guilt comes."

"That was different."

"Why? Because you happened to know her name?"

Ella sighed, her thoughts straying to that fateful night in the church. "Because she wasn't the one I was trying to kill."

"An accidental death. Shouldn't that have made it easier?"

"Harder," Ella insisted. "It was Malachi who was supposed to die, not her."

"But surely you would have had to kill her eventually. Azazeal could easily have come back for more."

"I could have protected her from him."

"It seems to me," the double said, raising an eyebrow, "that it wasn't really him she needed protecting from."

Ella shook her head, trying to shake off the image of Cassie throwing herself in the path of the knife. "She wasn't supposed to die. But when she did, I saw the effect it had on the people – person – who cared about her the most. That was the first time I'd ever seen the consequences of my intervention. Thelma was so upset – she was just so bereft—"

"It's more than that, though."

"I don't blame myself for it, if that's what you mean. Cassie chose to sacrifice herself. There was nothing I could have done to prevent that."

"You were confused by it," the double persisted.

Ella frowned, suspicious of where the conversation might be leading. "Of course I was – no one else I've killed has ever offered themselves up quite so willingly."

The other Ella leaned forward. "That's because you've never tried to kill a child in front of his mother's eyes before."

"Oh, now I see where you're going with this," Ella said, after a careful pause. "This is connected to the me-secretly-wanting-to-be-human idea, isn't it?"

The double didn't answer. Instead, she carefully wound a strand of her red hair around one pale finger. She held it up to the light and watched it glint in the sunlight. She ignored Ella completely, a tactic that always enraged her, and, of course, one that worked perfectly.

"Cassie sacrificed herself for her son, I was confused by it, and that automatically ties into your ridiculous fancies about my desire to be human. For heaven's sake: of course I was confused! How could I even begin to understand something my destiny seeks to deny me? It's not—"

She stopped abruptly, cheeks flushing hot. The double looked up, impassive.

"What an interesting school of thought part of me subscribes to," Ella said, reflecting on it for a moment. She thought back to the night of her birthday, the accusation she'd flung so tearfully at a bewildered Leon. You're acting like we're going to settle down and have kids.

It only occurred to her now that he'd never come close to doing anything of the kind. He'd been drunk enough to declare his love for her, brave enough to admit in front of his friends that he wanted to be with her and only her forever, and she'd taken it and twisted it into something else entirely.

The double slid the ringlet of hair off her finger and watched it uncurl. "Very interesting."

"Very Elizabethan. My mother would be so happy to know my biological destiny is as important to me as my magical one."

"You misunderstand," the other Ella said. "I'm not suggesting you're secretly yearning to be a mother. But that doesn't mean you haven't wondered what it would be like. That's only natural. It's a part of the normal life you've begun to crave, after all."

"Perhaps. But that's not the same thing as wanting to be human."

"So you admit it's true if I say you want to be normal, but not if I say you want to be human?"

"I suppose so," she said, suspecting another trap was being laid for her.

The double shook her head condescendingly. "You're playing with semantics. What you want isn't what's normal for a slug, or a bird of prey. It's what's normal for a human. A normal life, a human life: they're one and the same. And yet you object so strongly to me using the word human."

"Yes," Ella spat. "I object."

"Normal...human..." the double said with a shrug, turning over her palms as if she was weighing the words up with scales. "I don't suppose it really matters. Just as long as you accept it was your desire to be one, or both, or either, that led you to this."

Ella listened with a heavy heart. "The reason I failed."

"Yes."

"Fine. I accept it."

"No, you don't."

"Can we talk about something else now?"

The double shrugged easily. "If you'd prefer."

"Why exactly are you here?"

"Because you're in pain."

Ella prodded her stab wound experimentally, the crusted bloodstain on her blouse crinkling under the onslaught. "Not especially."

"Not that kind of pain." The double tapped at her forehead. "In here. You're conflicted – in two minds—"

She laughed. "Tell me about it."

"How can you consider where you go from here when you haven't yet come to terms with what's gone before?"

"I don't have time to navel-gaze," Ella growled.

"But fate has given you the time, for a reason: a very good reason. A war approaches, Ella, and if you hope to survive it you need to be more sure of yourself than you've ever been before. It's time to dispel all these doubts, all this indecision..."

"Most of which has been caused by you!"

"By you," the other Ella corrected. "I am simply a projection of it."

"But..." She frowned, trying to work it all out. "I dared to want something more than being alone, with nothing ahead of me apart from the next kill, and you said it was what made me a failure. The reason I couldn't stop Malachi from bringing about the End of Days. Does that mean...that's what I think, too?"

"Part of you," the double confirmed.

"And what else is that part of me thinking?"

"That the world will have to pay a great price for your refusal to remain what you were born to be. That you need to make amends for what you've done. That you need to make a sacrifice...to suffer as those who will reap the consequences of your inaction will do."

Ella wiped absently at her arms, still smeared with soil from the tussle with her twin. She glanced down at them, and gasped. As she lifted her hands, shaking, blood dripped from them. So much blood that she could no longer see her own skin. The blood of all her victims: past, present and future.

She screwed her eyes shut, knowing it wasn't real, just another projection of her mixed-up mind. But at the same time she knew there was only one thing she could do to make it better.

"I have to give him up," she whispered, hearing the siren call inside her. It was the oddest thing, but now she'd finally stopped suppressing it, she realised it was not her own voice, but her father's.

Unexpectedly, the double leapt over to her. "No."

She opened her eyes again, resigned to it. "Yes."

"It's what part of you thinks you should do, Ella. That doesn't mean it's what you want."

"It's not what I want," she said, a tear trickling down her cheek as she tried to ignore the insistent demand for atonement.

"Then what is?"

She wiped a hand across her eyes, forcing the pieces together with the iron will that had got her through five hundred years of solitary slaying.

"I want to stop Malachi. But I don't want to do it on my own. I don't care whether that's selfish, or whether my father would have approved. I want Leon, and dammit, I deserve him."

"Feisty Ella," the doppelganger said approvingly. "I wondered when you were going to find your way back to us."

"I bear some responsibility for the End of Days," she added. "I can't deny that. But it wasn't me who brought it about. It's Malachi who needs to pay the price for what he's done – not me."

The other Ella smiled triumphantly.

"I don't want to be human, though," Ella said quickly.

"But what else will you be?"

"Excuse me?"

"You remain at this age for a specific purpose. Once that purpose is fulfilled, there will no longer be any need for you to remain this way. Are you trying to tell me you'll drop dead the instant your destiny no longer exists?"

"I've never thought about it," she lied, but quickly realised it was pointless to deny it. "I suppose I'll be...mortal."

"Human."

Ella let her thoughts trail off for a moment, to the place she'd visited fleetingly throughout her long life, more often still since Leon had entered it. Imagining what it would be like: growing old with someone, feeling safe in their arms, feeling loved. It was a thrilling whisper, a hopeful promise that someday she might achieve it. That she might actually be...

"Mortal," she said firmly, then smiled, channelling Thelma. "With kick ass powers."

"You're not ready," the double said, sounding disappointed. "No matter. After all, there is every chance you will never fulfil your destiny."

"Not now," Ella agreed, resigned to it, thinking of the titanic battle that was about to begin, and how hopelessly outnumbered she, Thelma and Leon were, "no."

"But your destiny will be fulfilled if you kill Malachi?"

"In part," she said warily.

"Then how can you hope to achieve it if you don't participate in this war?"

"But how can I?"

The double regarded her thoughtfully. "You're afraid."

"Afraid to fail again?" Ella offered, anticipating the rest.

"No. Afraid of the unknown."

"Isn't everyone?" She drew her knees to her and rested her head on them for a moment. "Malachi is most likely indestructible by now, and without the book of Orokiah, I don't know what it is I'm supposed to do to get around that. It's not as if I have anyone to issue me with step by step instructions anymore."

"But you never did have. You've always worked alone."

"And when I do need someone to tell me what to do," Ella said, "there's no one there."

"Ah. Hence the resentment."

She lifted her head and glanced at the book, lying discarded in the soil. "Leon and Thelma are relying on me to tell them what to do, and for the first time in my life, I don't have the faintest idea what that should be. I've spent five hundred years obeying them and their stupid rules—" She pointed up at the heavens for emphasis. "—and now they've abandoned me."

"Some would say it was the other way around."

"Wiping the book was a pointless, petty act," Ella insisted. "The information in it is of no use to them, but it's all I've got."

"Is it?" The double stared at her. "All you've got?"

"Well, there's Leon, and Thelma..."

"Maybe you should try listening to them," the double suggested.

Ella laughed. "They don't know anything about the End of Days."

"Neither do you."

She frowned, taking this in, as the double stood up and went over to the book. She picked it up with as little effort as if she was lifting a feather and tossed it on the ground next to Ella. Seating herself again, she opened the front cover. Ella recoiled, the sight of the empty pages hitting her like a speeding bullet.

"I know it hurts," the double said, sounding sympathetic. Her attitude seemed to have changed since Ella had stopped prevaricating quite so much. She was less brittle, kinder; more at ease, somehow. Ella wondered if it was a reflection of how she had changed, too. She was far from the hard ass demon hunter she'd been when she'd arrived at Medenham. Leon, Thelma, Malachi, Cassie: they'd changed her, all of them.

"It's more than that," she said. She caressed the side of the book with her hand, her mind drifting back across the centuries. "I've learned so much from this book. But it's not just a repository of knowledge. It's also a link to my past, a source of strength – it reminds me of who I am."

"Who you were," the double corrected. "You're more than that now. And you're in a whole new world, one where the old rules don't apply. What makes you think there was anything in this book that could have helped you?"

"There's always something in the book."

"You're right," the double declared. "There is."

Ella leaned forward, her heart filling with hope. "But it's blank," she said, feeling a crushing disappointment.

"You're not looking properly."

She stared at the book intently, leaving it a full minute. But still there was nothing. "I don't understand. What is it I'm supposed to see?"

The double remained stubbornly silent. Ella turned to it, angered. "Tell me."

"As I said – there is nothing I can tell you that you don't already know." She paused, and then spoke solemnly, as if she was pronouncing some great revelation. "Everything you need is already inside you."

Ella slammed the book shut, irritated. "What pretentious nonsense."

"It's got to be a habit over the centuries, hasn't it? All your talk about demons, for instance, when really you meant love but you were too scared to say it..."

"You may be me," Ella said, "but if you continue to mock me I may find it necessary to kill you."

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," the double said. She chuckled at her own joke. "Suicide would be a terrible waste of such a long life, especially when you have so much more to do."

Ella's smile faded. "Such as?"

"You have to take part in this war."

She nodded. "I know."

"Humanity needs you, Ella. Even if you profess not to need it."

"But I've failed so many times..." But even as she spoke the words, she realised she'd begun to accept what had happened, and her role in it. She was coming to terms with it, finding an inner peace that had eluded her for so long.

"...and that was just with Malachi. How do I go from that – to saving the entire world?"

"You'll work it out," the other Ella promised. She leaned forward and kissed Ella softly on the forehead. "I believe in you."

"Which means..."

"You've remembered how to believe in yourself."

Ella relaxed in the comforting assertion for a moment, but in a flash the spell was broken. Something began to scratch insistently at the back of her mind, as if there was something she was worried about but couldn't quite put her finger on what it was. The other Ella pulled back, as if she was feeling it too.

Ella felt her face twist itself into a replica of the one in front of her, her eyes widening, a frown corrugating her brow—

"Where are they?" they said in unison.

Suddenly, Ella's eyes snapped open. Darkness was beginning to fall around her, and as she looked around, she realised she was alone. No double, no Thelma, and no Leon.

She stretched over and grabbed the volta, wondering why they'd been gone so long, feeling a sickly sense of unease. Back at one with herself and her purpose in the world, she struck out into the gloom of the woods to search for them.