by Cameron Jace
“I’m Mary, my Majesty,” she said. “Just a girl. I will always be at your service.”
“Mary? Are you the mirror, or are you trapped inside?”
“I will tell you, my Majesty, but not now. Snow White is coming. She shouldn’t know about us.”
Chapter 68
The Queen’s Diary
And so the mirror became my new addiction. I’d spend my painful days, looking old and listening to the maids predicting my death soon. Then, whenever possible, I’d make excuses for Shew to leave her room, so I could enter and meet with my new friend Mary.
The girl in the mirror wouldn’t tell me much about herself. Sometimes she wouldn’t talk to me at all, but she never ceased to reflect my matched beauty. And I didn’t mind. This was my fuel. My revenge against the world, until the mirror did what she promised me; to make others see me the way I looked when staring into her surface.
One day, I was struck by a sudden overwhelming feeling. It was tense and illogical, but it was motherly and rose from the guts of my soul. I suddenly felt as I had awakened from the hypnotizing effect of Bloody Mary. I sensed that this was all a work of evil.
“No, I am not the fairest of them all.” I resisted Bloody Mary’s suggestions. “And if I am, I know that I shouldn’t be seeing a beastly reflection in all of the other mirrors but this one,” I said while reaching for a candlestick to do away with the mirror. “This isn’t right,” I said. “You’re an evil mirror, and you have to be destroyed.” I swung the candlestick at the mirror.
But before I could break it, the mirror’s surface rippled and showed me images of other vampire women who seemed to suffer from an aging condition like me — of course, none of them were a Chosen One’s mother, but they were all aging after giving birth. The vampire women in the mirror seemed to have no problems with their aging condition, because they had a solution for it. They fed on young human girls and consumed their youth, so they themselves wouldn’t age. Once they fed on them, the young girls grew older instantly and died, while the vampire women grew younger and healthier.
The women in the mirror were checking out their beautiful faces in their hand mirrors, enjoying their eternal youth. They were combing their nurtured hair, checking their fine skin, putting on makeup and lipstick and rubbing their lips together, putting on mascara, slightly squeezing their cheeks into reddish patches full of life and energy.
“What good is beauty if one can’t see it?” Mary asked me, toying with my weakness. “You have done nothing wrong to deserve to become a beast. You deserve much better. You’ve sacrificed your youth, your love, and yourself for your daughter.”
I couldn’t argue more, all but the part of me becoming a beast. I was just aging and withering away. “I am not a beast,” I had to comment.
“Really?” the girl in the mirror snickered. It was her first real introduction to me, showing her sinister side of beauty to me.
“What do you mean?”
“Just look closer,” she snickered again.
And then I saw it. In my excitement, fear, or whatever conflicting emotions I was experiencing, I saw something on my face. Something I had never seen before. Something in my teeth.
I saw fangs drawing out.
I should have known since that time on the Demeter that I was a vampire. I was one of them. One of the Sorrows, disguised as a Karnstein.
Chapter 69
The Queen’s Diary
I dropped on my knees and began crying.
“I should have known all this time,” I sobbed. “I am one of them. That’s why Charmwill thinks I will hurt the Lost Seven. That’s why others believe I am evil.”
“But you’re not one of them, my Majesty,” Mary said. “Stand up and hold your ground. You’re much stronger.”
“Then why do I have sharpened teeth growing out of my mouth?”
“It’s a consequence of being bitten by Angel for so many years,” she said. “You were never one of them, but you’re slowly turning into one of them. Of course, your daughter had her part in it, too.”
“What about my daughter?”
Mary didn’t answer, but preferred the images in the mirror to say it all for her. The images in the mirror turned into a single image of a seven-year-old Snow White, who looked lovely.
“Will your daughter ever appreciate what you’ve sacrificed for her?” Mary commented. “All this beauty she has sucked out of you has gone to waste,” Mary continued. “Your pain was never appreciated. You could have simply died young and beautiful, without having to bring her into the world.”
The mirror rippled into a liquid surface and showed another live scene of Snow White in the future, wearing her white dress and walking barefoot in a garden of purple and yellow poppies. Men of all ages watched her with longing eyes in the background; knights, huntsman, and princes, as one of the servants placed a crown on Snow White’s head. The queen’s crown.
“Sooner or later,” Mary said. “Snow White will be the fairest of them all by feeding on your pain.”
The scenes in the mirror showed Snow White walking into a cemetery, now wearing a warrior’s armor stained in blood, thousands of vampires lying dead at her feet. She stomped over to an abandoned grave that was left behind with no care. Snow White kneeled down and touched the tombstone. Upon it, my name was engraved. I was pronounced dead in 1812, a few years ahead.
The Snow White in the mirror laughed in a tone very different from the way she laughed in real life. It was an evil tone.
I shielded my face with my hands from the mirror. “She wouldn’t do that.”
“Why wouldn’t she?” Mary wondered. “She is the Chosen One. And you’re slowly turning into a vampire.
I had dropped the candlestick at this point, but it was time to pick it up and smash this daunting mirror.
“Don’t break me, my Majesty,” the mirror pleaded. “I can give you what you want, Your Majesty. You could have everything. If you want to stay beautiful each day of your life — and stay alive — I can help you.”
I admit I should have broken the mirror by now, but again I was in a paradox of feelings. My illness must have had a mental part to it, and I ended up listening to Mary’s suggestion, desperate to feel anything but the continuous pain I was in.
Mary showed me what turned into my biggest sin ever. She showed me women bathing in blood, milk, and chocolate, the ultimate cure for half vampires against aging. It turned out that the mixture wasn’t just proof I was the mother of the Chosen One, but it could also reverse my aging process.
Hypnotized by the temptations of youth and beauty, I fully gave in to Mary. All I had to do was to order the pirates at the borders to import a certain milk from Europe and expensive chocolate from England.
All that was left was the blood, which Mary had an atrocious idea on how to get. I’m sure you may have heard of it by now. To kill young peasant girls and swim in their blood.
The mention of killing young girls was what really woke me up from this journey of smoke and mirrors. It was the moment I had decided to kill the mirror and the girl in it forever. There was no more room for reluctance. I may have fallen to her temptations. I definitely wanted youth, I wanted to be cured, but I would never kill young peasant girls and swim in their blood.
It was time.
I picked up the candlestick and struck the mirror, watching it shatter to pieces in front of me.
Chapter 70
The Queen’s Diary
“Do you know of a girl called Mary, trapped in a mirror?” I asked Dame Gothel.
“Why, Queen?” her face went pale.
“I need to know everything about her. Do you know her?”
Dame Gothel hesitated. “I know myths about her.”
“Myths?” I knew she was real. What myths?
“We shouldn’t really talk about her, my Queen. She is really evil.”
“I need to know. How evil? Why are you afraid to talk about her?”
“Her name is Mary.”
“Elaborate.”
“People call her Blood Mary,” she said. “She lives in mirrors.”
I shrugged, knowing she is the one I met.
“She feeds off of people who allow the invisible walls between mirrors and real life to break. She is vicious.”
“Who is she, really? What’s her story?”
Dame Gothel told me about Mary’s story, how she had been once the bastard daughter of a Countess called Elizabeth Bathory, which I had heard about when I was younger. Bathory had not declared Mary her daughter, and she had never known of the father. She even attempted to kill her own daughter to get rid of her. Through a long trail of events, Mary is said to have been resurrected somehow and then taken revenge on her mother. It’s said that she may have killed her.
“Killed her?” I said.
“Trust me, you don’t want to think about this family a lot.”
“Why is she in a mirror then?”
“Her mother trapped her somehow, I’m not sure. There are so many myths about this.”
“Tell me what you know,” I demanded.
“One of the things I heard was that this mirror Blood Mary had been trapped in was the mirror the devil used to blind the world with. It’s an old myth about a mirror the devil found in Hell, and while examining it, it fell down on earth, splintered into pieces and turned people into evil.”
“It’s quite an unbelievable myth.” I did actually believe in this myth, but since I may have met the devil myself, and knew of his story of being only an employee for the Piper, I didn’t quite see it plausible. But my concern now was Bloody Mary, so I continued my investigation. “Tell me more about Elizabeth Bathory, her mother.”
“She was a vicious Countess in Eastern Europe.”
“Was?”
“She is dead. Had been killed gruesomely in a well-known story. It happened…”
“No, tell me about her life first, before she and her daughter had a clash.”
“Bathory may have been insane. It was hard to tell. She loved blood and killed young girls and bathed in their blood.”
“Oh,” I sensed I was getting closer now. “Really?”
“She continuously bathed in their blood to preserve her beauty.”
“Was it just blood, or a mixture of blood and other things?” I asked.
“The myths I know said blood, but there were rumors that milk and chocolate could have been added ingredients,” Dame Gothel said. “Milk and chocolate have always been known to be useful to the skin, so to beauty as well.
“On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine blood being useful for the skin,” I said.
“Blood runs in ones veins, so it must be useful somehow in the ritual.”
“Did Bathory get younger this way?”
“It’s hard to tell. Her family soon knew of her crimes and locked her up in a tower in Eastern Europe.”
“A tower? Did it have a name?”
“I am not sure, my Queen,” she said. “But what I heard was that Bathory turned out to have a creepier reason to bathe in girls’ blood.”
“Which was?”
Dame Gothel hesitated, her eyes locked with mine. It was so intense I didn’t know what it meant. “They said Bathory was a vampire.”
“A vampire?”
“You know the blood and such wasn’t for beauty. It was just her excuse to suck off all the blood she needed.”
“And was she?”
“No one’s really sure. However, I heard she was staked in her death,” she craned her head lower and whispered. “By a thousand men.”
“A thousand men. A thousand stakes?”
“Yes. But you know what? Even that didn’t kill her.”
“Then what did?”
“Blood Mary, her own daughter. She was the only one who knew of her mother’s weakness.
I couldn’t help but see the resemblance between this story and mine and Snow White. Of course it wasn’t as intense, but we were both a danger to each other in a way or another.
“But if I may ask, my Queen,” Dame Gothel said. “Why are you asking?”
“Because I met Bloody Mary in one of my daughter’s mirrors.”
Dame Gothel’s body trembled. She stepped back and looked sideways. “Oh, my.”
“And I talked to her,” I said.
“And what did she say?”
“She showed me I was beautiful, then suggested I swim in young girl’s blood.”
The woman was speechless. Her eyes twitching. “What did you do?”
“I crashed the mirror into pieces,” I said, nearing the point in the conversation that mattered the most.
“I assume it didn’t kill her,” Dame Gothel was disappointed. She knew what I was about to ask her.
“No it didn’t.”
“That’s why she must have tempted Snow White to put the mirrors in a circle in her room. I saw it.”
“You know anything about that?”
“The circle of mirrors gives each one of them power and connects them,” she said. “Now Bloody Mary is able to live in any of the mirrors in that room because of a bond through the circle where most mirrors reflect one another.”
“Which she told me,” I said. “But I didn’t care, and was about to crash all mirrors, but—”
“But you couldn’t.”
“You know why I couldn’t?”
She nodded, almost ashamed. “Because the girl who allowed the bond of circled mirrors would die, too, if you crashed the rest of the mirrors.”
“So it’s true. My daughter will die if I crashed the mirrors.”
“Unfortunately, Bloody Mary and Snow White are now connected in their souls. You will not be able to kill the girl in the mirror unless the Chosen One dies.”
Chapter 71
The Queen’s Diary
That night I ordered Managarm, to drive me through the forest. I was tired, confused, and utterly in pain. The world’s walls were closing down on me and it was time I found Angel. Only he could help me.
Of course, I received no help from the moon, which deliberately darkened every place I reached. She was fulfilling her promise to never light my way in the night and I still wasn’t sure why.
“Keep on going!” I ordered him. “Don’t be afraid of the dark.
Everywhere we went I screamed Angel’s name. We drove up the hills and mountains where he trained his men. We reached the borders and I called for him by the fences. I even called his name by the Field of Dreams.
But Angel was nowhere to be found.
I continued searching, bribing every peasant I came across to tell me if they saw him. Then I drove near the Avalon Tree where Pomona lived. I asked her, but she didn’t know either.
I ended up calling for Death in the forest, but she didn’t answer me. I deliberately showed my red dress, which was the forbidden color, breaking the rules to get Death’s attention, but she still didn’t bother.
It seemed like everyone had just given up on me.
“Angel!” I screamed at the night. “Answer me. Your daughter is in great danger.”
But Angel didn’t answer.
“We should go home,” Managarm offered. “This darkness is getting even darker.”
“I have to find him. He has to help me save Shew. I’m not leaving.”
“But we’ve searched everywhere,” he argued.
“Not everywhere,” I realized. “There is one last place we didn’t look into.”
“Where is that, my Majesty?”
“The Swan Lake.”
Managarm laughed. “What would the king be doing in the Swan Lake? It’s his least favorite place. He doesn’t even like swans.”
But I had to try.
In the darkness we reached the lake, a place where the white swans helped light up the way for me. I disembarked from the carriage, about to ask the swans, but I didn’t need to. Angel was there, kneeling by the lake, unshaven, desperate, and weakened like I had never seen him before.
&
nbsp; “Angel,” I leaned down beside him. “What are you doing here?”
He looked at me as if I were a stranger.
“Is this where you have been hiding all these months, leaving your men behind?” I asked. “Why?”
“Because I’m the worst father in the world.” He cried in my arms. I had to dismiss Managarm, not wanting him to see the king like that.
“Speak up, Angel,” I said. “What do you mean?”
“I gave up on our daughter,” he said. “They will hurt her.”
I wondered how he knew about Shew. He must have known long ago. “I am not sure what is happening,” I said. “But we have to find a way to save her.”
“She can’t be saved,” Angel raised his head. His moist eyes met mine. “I will never be forgiven.”
“What are you talking about?” I touched his face. “It’s not your fault. It’s mine. I was the one…”
“You have been through a lot. It’s my fault, Carmilla.”
“How, Angel? I am confused. How?”
“I gave her away. It was the only way she could stay alive.”
“You gave her away?” I said. “To whom?”
“The one person I should have killed long ago.”
“You’re not making any sense, Angel,” I said. “Shew is still with us. She is only tied to Mary. As long as the mirrors aren’t broken, she is still safe, but we have to find a way to break the bond.”
“Shew?” Angel squinted and pulled my hands away.
“Yes, Shew. Your daughter.” I tried to break a smile, sensing that I was the one who didn’t understand what was going on.
“I’m not talking about Shew,” Angel said.
“Then who are you talking about?”
“Our daughter.”
“Now you’re not making any sense.”
“Our other daughter.”
And that was when it hit me like a lightning strike. It didn’t take me long to put things together. Somehow, my other daughter, the black swan, was alive. And Angel knew about it. How was this possible? What was going on?