Chapter 15

The girl had a dreamy quality to her; what light touched the silvered glass made her image ripple with iridescence. She was small, but not a young girl, her hair as dark as a raven's feather and her skin bone white. It was her eyes that held me there. Large and round, they were of a pale blue that seemed as endless as the sky itself.

She dropped her palms from where she'd pressed them against the glass and wrapped her arms around her waist. The style of her pale green gown was more at home in Avalon than our world—a glimpse of the past you would only see now in costume, or portraits.

Caitriona was the first to recover her senses. "Who are you?"

"My name is Elaine," she said. The words were hoarse, as if she'd spent a lifetime screaming for help that never came. "Please, you must assist me. You must let me out. They have kept me here so long."

"Great Mother," Olwen said, horrified. "No one has helped you in all this time? How can that be?"

Yes, I thought. How could that be?

Now that the shock was wearing off, there was room for suspicion to slip in. Judging by Caitriona's uneasy stance, she was following a similar, more coldhearted line of questioning in her mind.

"Elaine of … Shalott?" I ventured.

"Yes!" the girl said, her breath fogging the glass as she drew close again. "You know of me? "

Olwen turned to me, her eyes pleading. "There must be a way to get her out?"

"Sure," I said, trying to keep my tone neutral. "But how were you trapped in the mirror in the first place?"

I'd read the faces of enough tarot customers at the Mystic Maven to know what the quick pursing of Elaine's lips and the angle of her head meant. Annoyance. Impatience.

"A sorceress by the name of Lavina ensnared me when I did not bow to her wishes," Elaine said. "I beg of you, release me. My family must miss me terribly and I so long to return home."

I leaned closer to the mirror's frame, searching the design of animals. "I'm not seeing any sigils …"

"They wouldn't be on the frame," Olwen said. "Metal is an inorganic material."

Oh. Right.

"So is glass," I said, thinking. Covering my hand with my jacket, I gripped one side of the mirror. As expected, the backing was wood. As I leaned closer to it, I saw that the glass wasn't glass at all, but a layer of magic meant to mimic it.

"Cait, can you help me pull this away from the wall for a second?"

"Wait—what do you mean by this?" Elaine asked.

Caitriona obliged and had a far easier time of straightening the heavy mirror than I did. But even that small bit of space was enough to see the sigils written in crimson on the back of it. Blood, it seemed, to further intensify the power of the spell.

"Are they back there?" Olwen asked, trying to lean over my shoulder to see.

"Yes," I said faintly. There were five words written beneath the curse marks. Caitriona met my gaze from the other side of the mirror. Carefully, so carefully, we leaned the mirror back against the wall.

"Did you not remove them?" Elaine said. "Surely taking a blade to them and scratching them out would be enough? "

I took several steps back from the glass. Caitriona followed.

"What—what are you doing?" Elaine asked, looking between us. That twitch of her lips was back, and in her agitation, her eyes had darkened to black.

"Here's the thing, Elaine, " I said. "Your first strike was the name. The real Lady of Shalott was freed centuries ago. There were several sorceresses present for it, and they recorded their memories."

Now Olwen was the one to back away.

"No—" the girl began.

"The second was the name of the sorceress," I said. "The sorceress Honora was the one who trapped the Lady of Shalott."

"You're wrong," the girl protested. "It was Lavina, I swear it."

"The third strike," I said, "and my favorite of all, is the fact that there's a warning written on the back of the mirror. Do you want to take a guess at what it says?"

"This woman is a creature of dangerous beauty?" the girl whispered hopefully.

"No. The beast within devours all, " I said. "So, again, who are you?"

The girl shrank back into the misty shadows of the world behind the glass, until she became darkness itself. Her face lengthened into more of a snout, her eyes glowing as she watched us, unblinking.

"It wasn't all, " she said, her voice taking on a hissing, if not prim, tone. "I have discerning taste in man flesh, you know."

"I'm sure you do," I said.

"Creatures born of magic are always more enticing than mortals," she said. "It was not my fault there were fewer and fewer of the former, and more and more of the latter. Mortals breed like fleas."

Her features shifted again, her dark hair lightening to silver, her face rounding, softening, and her eyes assuming a distinct shape and color.

For a moment, it looked as if all our reflections had merged into one.

"Stop that," Caitriona barked .

"Stop what?" the creature asked innocently. She glanced at Olwen, then placed her hands on her hips in a mirror of her pose.

I sifted through the archives of my memory, through the hundreds of thousands of book pages I'd consumed, searching for a creature who ate flesh and mimicked the forms of others. A pooka, maybe—they were omnivorous, but the few that remained in our world tended to shy away from humans. Those who weren't sorceress companions kept to forests and cliffside dwellings.

Feeling the creature's gaze shift onto me, I looked up at her again. Before I could ask about my theory, she had a question for me.

"What is it that your heart desires?" the creature began, the question ending in a hiss. Her gaze flicked over to Olwen before returning to me, pity burning in her eyes. My eyes.

"It must be difficult to travel with one so beautiful as she," the creature said softly, nodding to Olwen. "To know you will never be desired by another so long as she is near."

"Oh dear," I said dryly. "How will I ever survive?"

"It is a wonder," the creature agreed with a pitying look. "In my time, they would have been quick to shove you into some convent so they wouldn't have to tolerate looking at you."

"Hurting someone's feelings only works when they have feelings," I told her. "You would have been better off trying to start your negotiation with endless riches or eternal life."

"If you release me, I can make you into what you wish to be," the creature said, eyes glinting. "Your hair will no longer look like withered wheat. Your toady face will blossom with beauty."

"We like our Tamsin the way she is," Olwen interjected, more annoyed than I'd ever heard her. Something in me warmed at the word our. "And besides, if we're picking the most objectively beautiful member of our group, it's Neve."

Caitriona and I nodded in agreement.

"But you're very lovely too, Olwen," I said, "by any standards. And extremely clever and brave. "

The creature sputtered as she looked between us.

"Oh, Cait is by far braver," Olwen said, her cheeks warming with color.

"You are all—" the creature tried to interject.

"That's not true," Caitriona insisted. "You are brave, and better yet, openhearted."

"Listen to me—" the creature growled.

"And extremely talented with magic, too," I added.

"Your cunning nature has saved us more than once—" Caitriona said to me.

"Enough!"

The word echoed through the storage facility, drowning out even the distant sounds of the party above.

"There's no need to be rude," Olwen told the seething creature.

"You will release me!" she roared. "Right this very moment! Or—or I shall drink your blood and whittle your bones into picks for my teeth!"

"How do you intend to do that from behind the glass?" Caitriona asked.

The scream that followed was pitiful enough that I almost felt sorry for her.

Almost.

"Olwen, do you think you could figure out a way to reduce the size of this so we can carry it out?" I gestured toward the mirror. "I don't want to leave Neve up there alone for any longer than we need to."

"I'm with you on that," Olwen said. She pressed a hand against her cheek as she considered the mirror, thinking. The creature slid over to her, resting her face against her hand in the same way.

"What is it you intend to do?" the creature asked. "You came to find my mirror, did you not?" Her lips stretched wider, contorting into a serpent's smile. "Do you intend to trap another with it?"

"Don't you want a playmate?" I asked. "Or, I don't know, a hearty snack? "

The creature floated behind the glass, drifting my way. "It is impossible. The mirror's magic is only powerful enough for one."

"You lie," Caitriona said.

"Do I?" the creature replied. "The master of the house tried, oh, how he did. Pressing an enemy up to the glass, wanting to give me that plump little morsel …" She salivated at the thought. "But if one goes in, one must come out."

The others looked to me, but I had no answers for them.

"Who is your enemy?" the being asked. "Perhaps if you let me go, I can eat them for you?"

"The King of Annwn," I said. "Lord Death. Still hungry?"

The creature's face swirled, magnifying her disgust. "The usurper?"

"Yes," I said, though I had no idea what the being was referring to. I wasn't about to give her something to dangle over us. "The very same."

"Has he come, then? The new Holly King and his ravenous host of hunters?" the being asked. "Has he escaped Avalon?"

The Holly King. The personification of winter in the old tales. If those stories were true, his power would be at its greatest at the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. After, it would wane with each day, until summer rose again.

But … that didn't make sense, did it? Not knowing what I did about Annwn's death magic.

I studied the creature again. She was just haughty enough that my fishing expedition might work …

"Yes, he'll remain in this world until the winter solstice," I said, putting on an air of confidence. "Until his power is at its greatest and he can slay his enemies."

"Poor fly-brained mortal, devouring every lie fed to you," the being said, the words dripping with arrogance, correcting my guess as I'd hoped. "That is merely the day the boundary between the mortal world and Annwn is at its thinnest and a pathway can be opened. The day the Wild Hunt carries its bounty of dark souls to their prison. "

The realization braided itself together so quickly, it took my breath away. It was a leap, I knew that, but nothing else made sense. The threat wasn't that he would open the door and pass through … it was that he would leave that gateway open, allowing the malevolent dead to escape into this world. And when they began to kill the living as they craved to do, it would only add to Lord Death's power.

Caitriona made a questioning noise, but I couldn't bring myself to speak.

"They aren't just hunting dark souls," Olwen told the creature. Then, catching on to the game, she added, "Oh, I forgot that you've been trapped in there for so terribly long, you'd have no idea what his true aims are, or what he's desperately searching for."

"I was there at the dawn of the world, and I shall be there at the end, when the last light of the Goddess fades and you mortals return to the stardust and clay that bore you," the being sneered at us. "I carry the knowledge of the ages, and I will bear it still when time extinguishes you from memory."

"You know nothing," I said, fighting to hide the way my hands had begun to tremble. A sickly fear was making its way through me, a dread that had no name.

"I know what Lord Death seeks, as do all those who saw the blood spilled that day, who heard the last lamentations of the Goddess," the creature said.

The world grew hushed around us again. The creature's strange eyes glowed, a lure that drew me in, made me step closer to the rippling surface between us.

"He seeks that which was denied to him centuries ago," she said at last. "He seeks the soul of his lost beloved."