by Schulte, Liz
There are moments in life where the choice you make determines the path you’re going to travel. I’d had at least two of those moments already: when I started dating Baker and when I decided to become a vampire. Both decisions changed the rest of my life immediately and irrevocably. This conversation had that same defining quality, only this time I recognized it for what it was: a fork in the road forcing me to make a decision and see a truth I didn’t want to acknowledge.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t killed people. I had—just never out of revenge. Never did I hunt a particular person down and punish them, which was what he was talking about. I had to feed on evil the way a regular vampire fed on life. I didn’t have a choice, and sometimes I lost control, but I couldn’t help but feel it was different. Usually I tried to wait until someone attacked me so it was more self-defense than anything. It was a fine line, but one I consciously followed. Once I crossed to the other side, could I ever go back?
I tried to imagine what my friends would do.
Olivia had followed Holden into the darkness, but only to save him from himself. I wasn’t Olivia though, and darkness tempted me perhaps more than I could resist. Plus, I didn’t have the pull over Phoenix that she did over Holden. Our relationship seemed to work the other way around. If I followed him in, we’d both fall.
And then there was the bounty hunter, Femi. She wouldn’t follow anyone unless they were going exactly where she wanted to be. I wanted to be more like her, but I wasn’t that strong yet. The temptation to turn myself into a vigilante was already too alluring. There’s a saying about the road to hell and it applied here.
What about Baker? What would he have done?
Phoenix interrupted my train of thought when he carefully put the lamp back on the shelf then sat down next to me. “I have no interest in corrupting you, Maggie. We’ll talk later.”
It wasn’t true, of course. He definitely wanted to corrupt me—just on his own terms. He was the one who wanted me to be an assassin for him.
“It’s enough that you want to help.” He kissed my forehead. “That’s more than most people. And for the record, I do care that you’re seeing other people. Contrary to what you think, I’m not. There’s only you.”
I sucked in a breath. When he wasn’t seriously making me question my moral fiber, it was way too easy to picture whatever this was between us being a lot less temporary than I had imagined. Only one other person had ever done that and every word he spoke was a lie. I wasn’t ready to do this again. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t look at Phoenix and say what needed to be said. “I think we should take a break.” My voice was soft, but I knew he heard me from the way all ease evaporated from the room.
Phoenix didn’t say anything. With a flash of sadness, I knew he was gone.
Chapter 5
My head dropped to the table. I already missed him, but hoped it would pass. The music was back. Every time Phoenix was around, it disappeared. What about him disrupted the ghost?
I stood up and peered into the mirror.
The glass fogged and the black-haired woman from the party appeared. Her hair fell in a perfect wave to her chin, held in place by an ornate headband that went across her forehead. Her heart-shaped mouth was unsmiling as her big eyes met mine.
“Who are you?” I flattened my hand against the mirror.
She broke into a grin and waved, looking very excited.
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
Her mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear anything.
I shook my head. “I can’t hear you.” I cupped my ear in what I hoped was a universal sign.
She lifted a gloved hand and reached toward me slowly. First her fingertips protruded from the mirror then her whole hand. Holy crap, was she coming through? I stepped back, but no more than her hand showed on my side. She beckoned me closer.
I licked my lips and swallowed my fear. She was here for a reason. All of Boone’s visions had a reason. This was no time to be chicken shit. Besides what could a ghost actually do to me? Releasing my breath slowly, I reached out and touched her hand. Her fingers wrapped around mine, sending chills through my body. The icy trails spread deep and fast through my limbs, and pain hit me like I was being split apart. She yanked me forward with more force than even I could resist.
Then, with a thrrpt, it all ended. The pain was gone and so was the cold. I stood in a gray, hazy room in front of her between two identical seeming mirrors. Through one, I could see my bakery. Across the way, through the other, there was an expanse of green. The woman didn’t look like a ghost. She appeared as corporeal as I was. She was definitely the woman from the vision, though. “Why are you here?”
“This is better than I ever imagined. Would you like to come back with me? I have so many questions,” she said in a soft, refined voice. “You’re really here! I can’t believe it finally worked. This is going to change the world. I wish I brought my notebook with me. I have so many questions and I need to remember everything. What did you experience? I knew you would be different from the moment I first saw you. It was figuring out how to make the connection that was the real trick. What time did I reach?”
“2016,” I managed to croak, my mind racing. “What year are you from? Where are we? What do you want from me? How did I get here?”
“I live in the year of nineteen hundred and twenty three.” She pointed over her shoulder. “That entrance takes you to my home in Chicago, Illinois.” Her shoulders pressed back and she smiled wider. “We are conversing because I brought you here. I did it. My experiments worked. I found a way to the between. I’ve been trying to make contact for ages. And finally, here you are. I wonder why 2016, though. You obviously own my mirror, but it is no longer in my house. That is curious. I thought the location would have needed to be the same. You don’t know how long I have been waiting for anyone to notice me. What is your name?”
“Maggie Edwards,” I said, offering my hand. “I don’t understand anything you’re telling me. You’re going to have to start at the beginning. What experiments? What is the between?”
“Josephine Eleanor Quinn.” She shook my hand once. “We do not have much longer. The moon is about to shift. I wish I would have contacted you sooner in the cycle. I am afraid you must go back, but now that we know how it is done, we can talk anytime. Tomorrow night, in fact. I will reopen the portal earlier so we have more time. Everyone here should be in bed by one-thirty. Will that work for you?”
“Um, I guess, but—”
“Come back to the mirror then.” She turned and started away toward her mirror. “Don’t forget! I have so many questions for you. You can’t imagine how exciting this is for me.” She crouched low and stepped back through the mirror.
“What about the gunshot?” I called out. She stopped and looked back, half in, half out. “What happened with that? Has it even happened yet?”
Her eyebrows furrowed. “I have faintest notion of what you refer to. Tell me tomorrow. You must go—but do promise you will come. I will be so disappointed if this is my only chance to speak with you. No one will ever believe me.”
“I’ll come.” And I would. I had just as many questions as she did. “So you live in 1923?”
“Yes,” she said with another grin. “Until tomorrow, Maggie Edwards.” She disappeared into the mirror.
I watched for a moment longer, then stepped through my own mirror, but not before hearing the music again, louder and more present. Whatever the “between” was, that’s where the music was coming from. I’d bet the bakery on it.
The next instant I was back at the bakery. I touched the mirror again and again, but it was just a mirror. Josephine hadn’t known about the gunshot, but I was positive of what I’d witnessed in the greystone. There was a party in her home and someone was shot. In her time, it must not have happened yet, which meant I was probably supposed to stop it. Change it. She knew I was from the future, so she’d probably believe me if I told her the truth. It was just a matter of figuri
ng out what the truth was.
Boone said the house had one owner all of these years. Josephine probably wasn’t the one who died if she stayed the owner. But I saw her go into the room with my lookalike and Baker. Maybe she wasn’t the victim, but the killer. Maybe I needed to stop her from killing someone who looked like me, and that’s why the mirror was meant for me. I was saving my past life, who apparently knew Baker. Just the thought made me shake my head.
If it didn’t sound crazy, it obviously wasn’t my life.
“Maggie,” Izzy called from the kitchen, her voice worried.
I glanced at my watch. Holy crap, I was way behind.
****
It wasn’t until we closed for the day that I was finally able to breathe a sigh of relief. The late start had set the entire day off, and nothing had gone right. I snapped at Izzy and Emery, burned three batches of cookies because my mind wandered to the conversation I had with Phoenix the night before, the delivery of my weekly order was incorrect, and for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel like cooking. All I wanted to do was go home and not talk to anyone. But somehow we made it through the relatively minor disasters still on speaking terms. I was just pulling out a batch of soft maple sugar cookies for the shelter when Izzy came into the kitchen.
“Want to talk about it?” she asked.
I didn’t look up from the pan as I transferred the cookies to the cooling rack. “What?”
“Maggie, I know that look. You’re sad.” Before I could deny that I had any “look,” she carried on. “You’re grumpy, which is rare, you look like you wouldn’t mind crying but you’re holding it back until you are alone, and you haven’t mentioned your date with Boone or brought up Phoenix even once today.”
My date with Boone seemed like a million years ago. “I don’t think it was really a date.”
She sat on the stool. “Is that what’s bothering you?”
I shook my head, focusing on the dishes while I swallowed back my emotions. I wanted to tell her everything that happened with Phoenix, but she couldn’t know most of it and if I happened to cry, my tears would be pink and how was I supposed to explain that? Somedays I really hated having to keep secrets and being a half vampire.
“You told Phoenix, didn’t you? And now he’s mad. When did you even see him?”
“He’s not mad,” I said. At least I didn’t think he was. But even if I was wrong, it didn’t much matter. “I don’t know what he is. I told him we should take a break.”
Izzy came over and stood next to me. “You’re choosing Boone? I mean it’s your life, but…” She shook her head. “You know what you’re doing.”
My teeth clenched together. “It is my life. But for the record, I’m not choosing Boone. I’m not choosing anyone. I’m just trying to do what’s right.”
She nodded and chewed on her bottom lip. I could practically see her rejecting things to say next which only irritated me more.
I sighed. “There’s more to Phoenix than you think. And I just don’t know how to deal with it and my own baggage. We’re not right for each other. We’re too different. It can’t work.”
“You know I completely support whatever decision you make,” she twisted her hands in front of her, “but just to play devil’s advocate here, are you guys really too different to work or are you afraid that maybe you work too well? You’ve changed since you started dating him. You’re braver, you take more risks, and you’ve stopped worrying so much about what other people think. I can’t help but feel those new qualities are good things. Just mull it over.”
I nodded, wiping my hands on a towel. “I’m ready to go home and for this day to end.” There was a knock on the alley door. “Boone,” I told Izzy with a sigh. I went to answer it.
“Hey…” His smile faded. “You look stressed.” He came inside and placed his hand on my shoulder. “What happened?”
“Hectic day,” I said, pulling away. “But I’m finally caught up.” I flashed him a grin. Smiling, even when I didn’t feel like it, always made my problems seem less impossible—but today it wasn’t doing the trick. At least seeing Boone reminded me of our mystery, which was just the distraction I needed until I figured out what to do about Phoenix. “I’ve got news about the case.”
“What case?” Izzy asked, raising a questioning eyebrow.
Shit. I had forgotten she was still there. I scrambled for something to say, settling for the truth—or as close to the truth as I could get. “The mirror. I know who owned it and the approximate year it’s from.”
“Is that all?” Izzy made a face. “That’s hardly a case. I was expecting something juicy.”
“Well, it is kind of interesting. There was potentially a murder.”
Boone shot me a look, but I shrugged. What was the harm in her knowing something that happened over ninety years ago? “It was made sometime around 1923 and it belonged to Josephine Eleanor Quinn.”
Boone did a great job keeping his face neutral. “I bet we could find out more about her at the library.”
I smiled. “Exactly what I was thinking.”
“But what about the murder? What happened? Was she killed?”
I placed the cooled cookies into a box. “I don’t know,” I said. “I was searching the Internet for the mirror and it popped up in an old picture of a crime scene. I couldn’t read the article. But isn’t that cool? This seems pretty fortuitous considering that we’re planning a murder mystery evening. Wouldn’t it be fun to build the mystery around a real person, using details of her actual life? At least that’s my thought.” As lies went this one came a little too easily. I hated that I was getting better at something like that.
Izzy nodded slowly. “I can see where that could give the night a historical element that people might enjoy. Do you want help at the library? I can scan microfiche with the best of them.”
“Like I’d say no to you saving me hours staring at a little screen. Let me run home and change. I’ll meet you there.”
“I’ll drive you,” Boone volunteered.
Izzy headed up to her apartment and I hastily finished cleaning the kitchen. Once we were in the truck, Boone glanced over at me. “Okay, spill. Tell me the real story. How’d you figure all of that out?”
I told him about being pulled through the mirror and meeting Josephine, along with my theory on the gunshot and why he and I were involved. The more I spoke, the more worried he looked.
“Honestly, Maggie, I don’t think you should go back. Don’t movies and books always show that you can’t change the past without completely disturbing the future? I mean that makes sense. If someone died in 1923, isn’t it just best to leave him or her dead? You have no idea what sort of damage you could do to the present.”
“No, I don’t, but the ghost found us for a reason. The mirror came to me for a reason. How can I ignore that? Obviously I need to be there.” Suddenly it hit me. What was more likely than having a perfect lookalike in the past? “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it. We saw someone who looked exactly like me. What if it was me? That would explain why Baker was there.”
Boone nodded. “But we don’t know what that reason is. We don’t even know why I get these visions or feelings. And with this one, I didn’t have a vision at all. It was just feelings. You’re the one who had the vision. It’s just as possible I was thinking about you when I saw the mirror and wanted an excuse to see you.” He parked the car in front of my house. “Or maybe this vision was warning you not to go into the past.”
I pressed my hands into my thighs. “We both know you’re lying. You don’t need an excuse to see me. We see each other all the time. I didn’t get a vision about a gunshot so I could ignore it. I have to do something. You of all people should understand that.”
“I know. I do,” he said. He smiled a little. “But I do make excuses to see you, even if they are just to myself. I don’t have to come to the bakery as often as I do. I probably shouldn’t, but my day feels incomplete if I don’t get to see
you smile at least once. You are my happy place.” He inched closer, like he might kiss me. I leaned back.
Oh, cakeballs. I couldn’t keep putting this off. “There’s something I need to tell you,” I said, forcing myself not to bolt from the vehicle. “I’m seeing someone.”
He opened his mouth a couple times and settled for a nod. “Is it serious?”
“I don’t know, maybe. We haven’t really discussed it, but I felt like I needed to tell you before…” I leaned toward the door, hoping for an escape. “I really like you, but Phoenix and I—” I couldn’t put what we had or didn’t have into words. Sure, we were on a break, but I’d been thinking about him all day. Obviously it wasn’t over between us. No more secrets. Everything had to come out. Maybe it was a passing fling or maybe it would turn into something else. I wanted to find out which.
“I suspected as much when he came to the fairytale world with us.” Boone stared at the dashboard. “It doesn’t really change anything, though, does it? If you don’t know how you feel about him, then is it safe to assume you don’t love him?”
My mouth went dry. I had been trying my damnedest to not think about Phoenix in those terms. His words from the night before echoed in my mind. He had feelings for me, beyond just using me. That was what he said, but did he mean it or was he telling me what I wanted to hear? As much as I tried to doubt him, I knew the truth in my heart. He was upset when I told him we needed to take a break. He had admitted to having feelings, that he wasn’t ready for us to end, and that he did care that I went out with other people, and then I crushed him without even trying to resolve the issue. My head dropped into my hands. God, I made such a mess of things. But did I love him? The last person I had even considered the “L” word with was Baker, and as much as I wanted Baker to be out of my system, feelings for him still lingered in me. I couldn’t love anyone else while I was still in love with him.