by Tim Pratt
Trey was trying to get to his feet, and the Firstborn did her flicker-fast movement thing again and picked him up by the throat. She swiveled on her heel and held him out over the edge of the railing, letting him dangle over the living room below, his feet kicking, his face turning red. “Give me the mirror. Renounce your claim to the door and the sanctum.”
She shook Trey like a martini canister and I said, “Fine, take the mirror, you can have it, and the sanctum, just let him go!”
“Bad choice of words, sister.” She opened her hand, and Trey fell.
I kind of lost my shit. The sword was no good for some reason, but the sheath was solid wood, and I smacked it right upside her head. That made her squawk, but didn’t knock her out, damn it. She rushed into the bedroom, and I went after her, straight-up beating on her, hammering blows as hard as I could on her back and shoulders. Then the room got in on the act, the covers on the bed flying through the air and trying to strangle her, the lamp on the bedside table hurling itself at her head, every random object in the area flying at her like iron filings pulled toward a strong magnet.
The Firstborn slapped the attacks away, looking more pissed off than frightened, and then she picked up the mirror in both hands, held it over her head—
And vanished. Another flicker, and she was gone, the mirror with her. Whatever force or spirit had animated the objects in the room failed, and everything thumped inert to the floor, leaving me standing alone in the midst of wreckage, a sword in one hand, a sheath in the other.
With the boy I’d kissed not so long ago downstairs, maybe dead.
I stumbled out of the bedroom, half fell and half ran down the stairs, and knelt beside Trey. The fall from the railing was only twelve feet or so, but he’d fallen badly. His eyes fluttered, and he moaned, but he didn’t move otherwise. One leg was twisted underneath him, and though I didn’t want to look too closely, I was pretty sure there was bone sticking out, and his neck…his head wasn’t supposed to tilt at that angle.
My house was full of broken things. The Firstborn had seen to that.
But the only broken thing I was concerned about just then was Trey’s neck.
Episode 2
Sword
“Bekah.” Trey’s voice was all rasp and broken glass, and when he swallowed, it made the bones in his broken neck shift visibly. “The sword.”
I looked at the unsheathed sword cane in my hand. Was he asking me to put him out of his misery? “Trey, I’m not putting you down. I’m calling an ambulance.”
“No…the sword…it healed her…”
When I’d stabbed the Firstborn—formerly my neighbor Melinda—it hadn’t harmed her in the slightest…and she’d thanked me for curing her heartburn. The idea of a sword healing anyone was ludicrous on seven or eight different levels, but so were a lot of things I’d seen that night, and I didn’t have much to lose by trying.
Yet I wasn’t quite comfortable with the idea of shoving a bare steel blade into Trey’s broken body, so I nicked the ball of my own thumb first. I felt pressure, and I saw the blade sink into my flesh, but there was no blood, no pain—and the headache I’d developed in the past ten terrifying minutes vanished like a candle flame being blown out.
I took Trey’s hand in mine—his limb was heavy, inert, like something made of wood—and drew the blade across his palm. It cut a bloodless channel that closed up as soon as the blade passed by. Gasping, he shuddered and opened his eyes wide. His neck turned around way too far, like an owl’s, and then back to a normal angle, while his twisted leg uncrooked, once again sticking out straight from his body. He sat up as suddenly as if I’d jabbed a syringe full of adrenaline into his heart.
He stared at me for a moment, then clutched me to him, squeezing me tight against his chest. “That…I almost…she…I nearly…”
“Yes. That pretty much covers it.” I drew back before touching his neck, then reached down and checked his leg, both of which were unbroken and whole.
“I’m okay, it doesn’t even hurt anymore. Is she—that woman, did she leave?”
“She grabbed the mirror and then disappeared. I mean, poof.” I thought about describing how the room had come to life to try and drive her away, but we were already dealing with serious levels of unreality here, and I didn’t want to pile any more on him. Speaking of which…
Trey looked at the sword, still clutched in my right hand. “That thing…I don’t know how, but it healed me.”
“I don’t know why I’m surprised.” I put the blade down gently on the floor beside us. “We found a magic mirror. Why not a magic sword?”
He stared at the palm of his own hand, the one I’d cut, then turned it over and stared at the back of his hand, frowning. “Is this the part where we wonder if we’ve been drugged?” Trey said. “Or think we’re going crazy, or, I don’t know, go on and on about how there must be a rational explanation?”
I shrugged. “Maybe it’s just because I’m so tired, but…I don’t have anything to go on except the evidence of my senses, and those are telling me this really happened. My house is wrecked. There are bits of fake hair—and real blood—all over the living room floor. Your leg was broken, your neck was broken, and now they’re not. I saw a woman who used to be an entirely different woman vanish in front of me. Maybe it’s all fake, somehow—maybe you and your granddad planned all this, set up a trick sword, hired that crazy woman, staged the whole thing, to drive me out of the house or something—but it seems like a pretty needlessly elaborate way to achieve that goal.”
“Bekah. I’d never—”
I shook my head to allay his concern. “I didn’t think you would. Not because I know you that well, but just because nobody would do something like that. It’s crazy. So the alternative is…Archibald Grace knew magic, and so does his eldest daughter. For whatever reason, he left everything he owned to me—and that’s a whole other level of “‘wow’” we can discuss later—the daughter who doesn’t know anything. And big sister is pissed about missing out on the inheritance. Seems unlikely, but it fits the facts.” I had to laugh. Trey looked at me as if I were losing it. “It’s just, you know—the facts. All this impossible shit is what we’ve got to go on here.”
He managed a smile, but he was preoccupied. “There’s my scar, too.” He stared at the back of his hand again. “It’s gone.”
“The scar on your hand?”
“Yeah—I’ve had it since I was a kid. I was helping my mom cut up vegetables, the knife slipped, and I got a deep gash across the back of my hand. My folks were afraid I’d have nerve damage, the cut was so deep, but it healed up okay. There was always a scar, though, a long white line…and it’s gone. The sword must have healed that, too.” He looked up and met my eyes. “I don’t think we were drugged. I don’t feel like I’m crazy.”
“That leaves being under attack by my half sister the sorcerer. Also a lousy option.”
“Do you want to call the sheriff? Make some kind of report? I mean, the break in, the assault…”
I frowned. “I think it would be pretty tricky to explain what happened. You see, officer, my long-lost half sister disguised herself magically as my neighbor, broke into the house, threw Trey down the stairs, stole a mirror, and then teleported away. Oh, and then I healed Trey with a magic sword.” I shook my head. “We’d have to tell a more plausible story, you know? Or else they’d find a nice cozy place to lock us up for our own safety.”
Trey nodded. “We could say we came in and found a woman trashing the place, and that she ran off with an antique mirror. I’m not sure what the cops could do about that, besides take her description…and that isn’t much help, since she can make herself look like other people.”
“‘‘Theft of antique mirror’ doesn’t bring quite the same level of attention that attempted murder does, so I doubt the police would do much, unless they’re way more diligent out here than they are in Chicago. I think we’d better leave the authorities out of it for now.”
Trey s
tood up, a little shakily, but he didn’t look like he’d just been dropped off a flight of stairs. “It’s your call, and I see why you’re making it. But…Bekah, if you don’t feel safe here, you could come stay at my place tonight, I’ll take the couch—”
“Do take the couch,” I said. “But take the couch here. Or one of the other bedrooms—there are lots. I don’t want to be alone, you’re right about that, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to leave this house. It’s mine, and that bitch isn’t going to drive me out.” I thought about how the house had come alive, objects flinging themselves at the Eldest Daughter, protecting my right, and my claim. My father—and it seemed pretty likely now that Archibald Grace was my father, and wasn’t that some shit to process?—had left me this house full of ordinary-looking wonders for a reason, and I wanted to figure out why.
“Do you think she’ll come back?” Trey said.
“She seemed to want the mirror, and the room it leads to. She can have them. I want to know about my family, my father, but the sanctum just seems like a creepy little room, so I don’t think I really lost much. The thought of my body’s chirality flipping around every time I walked through the mirror is too freaky anyway…”
“Chirality. Smart girls are hot.” Trey said it almost absentmindedly, and it nearly got a smile out of me. “The—the Firstborn? She seemed to think she’d find something inside the room, though. Some kind of vessel.”
“The only vessel in there was a coffee cup, and we took that out. Apart from the furniture, there’s nothing left in the sanctum. If she doesn’t find what she’s looking for, she might come back, though, yeah. I’ll have to think about how to handle that.” I’ve never been a big fan of firearms, but if I needed to get my hands on a shotgun, rural North Carolina was probably a good place to do it.
Or maybe there was something in the house that could fight her off, or keep her out, at least. We had a sword that healed people, and a mirror that led to another place, and the house itself seemed willing to fling things around violently on my behalf, so who knew what else I might discover, now that I knew to look? “I want to check out the stuff we found in the sanctum. Maybe there are answers in that book. Or maybe the spoon can make bad guys explode, or the velvet jacket lets you fly, or the cup makes a literally bottomless cup of coffee. That last one could be handy.”
“Sure, that makes sense. Or, rather, it doesn’t make sense, in exactly the same way nothing else makes sense, either.”
“Clearly argued, counselor.”
We went back upstairs to the master bedroom. Trey took in the disaster—lamp on the floor, bedding in a pile in the corner, general disarray—and shook his head. We looked through the blankets, and under the bed, and beneath the wardrobe, and in all the corners, but the objects we’d taken from the sanctum were gone.
“Did the Firstborn take it all?” Trey said.
I hmmed. “I don’t know how she could have. She picked up the mirror in both hands and held it over her head. She didn’t have a hand to spare to grab all that other stuff. I don’t know where the book and jacket and all that went.” I sat on the edge of the bed and slumped. “This is demoralizing.”
“It’s been a long night. Everything’s demoralizing at this hour. Do you want to go to sleep? I could…I don’t know…stand watch?”
It seemed cruel to point out that he hadn’t been much help when the Firstborn attacked. Especially considering he was only here because I’d asked him to stay, and that he’d almost died because of me. “Sure. That sounds good. But I want to clean up some first, to try and calm down.”
“I’ll give you a hand.”
I found garbage bags and heavy rubber gloves in the kitchen. We picked up the shreds of hair and clothing the Firstborn had strewn all over the living room when she removed her disguise. I’d expected the remnants of her Melinda-guise to include things like latex rubber and wig hair, but it was more disgusting than that—the hair seemed like clots of fibers pulled out of a drain, streaked with mysterious blackness. The bits of torn dress didn’t look like a ripped sundress, either, but just messy rags, bits of tablecloth, and moth-eaten lace handkerchiefs. All of it seemed to be rapidly rotting, disintegrating in our hands, and once we’d gathered the mess together, Trey took it all outside and shoved it down into a steel barrel that had clearly held many fires, squirted in a generous blast of lighter fluid, and dropped in a match.
I had a sudden inspiration, and hurried inside to get the “artwork” Melinda had given me: the nest and the little stone eggs. I tossed those into the barrel, too. I didn’t want anything from the Eldest Daughter in my house. The very idea felt wrong, abrasive, like having a bit of grit lodged behind a contact lens.
Trey and I stood for a while on the porch and watched the Firstborn’s remnants burn, the foul-smelling smoke eddying into the night sky. Once the flames had burned themselves out, we went back inside silently and once again fell to cleaning up the living room, setting things to rights. Part of me wanted to collapse right then—it had been a long day and night before the Firstborn attacked—but I knew I couldn’t sleep until things were somewhat settled.
I was shelving a few of the books my supposed half sister had thrown to the ground when I encountered the thick volume bound in blue leather we’d retrieved from the sanctum. The book was shelved innocuously between a book of recipes from the Christian Women’s Auxiliary of Pomegranate Grove, Georgia, and a book with trippy geometric shapes on the cover called The Prospect of Immortality. I pulled the blue book down and called to Trey, who was sweeping up the fragments of a broken lamp. “Did you put this book here?”
He came over and shook his head. “No way.”
“Do you think it…shelved itself?”
Trey chewed his lower lip for a moment. “It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing to happen tonight.”
“I wonder if the other stuff we found in the sanctum just…put itself away. If it’s all in the house somewhere.” I glared at the ceiling. “Which raises the question: If stuff in this house is capable of organizing itself, why are we spending all this time cleaning up?”
“Maybe the answer’s in the book.” Trey sat down on the comfiest of the room’s couches, a brown leather thing. Resting in it was like sitting in an oversized and well-broken-in catcher’s mitt. I took the huge blue tome and sat beside him—the proximity felt good, safer somehow—then opened up the book on my knees to a random page in the middle.
We stared for a while, and I finally said, “Have you ever heard of the Voynich Manuscript?”
He frowned. “No. Is that what this is?”
“Not exactly, but…I learned about it in college. The Voynich Manuscript is this old handwritten book, about two hundred fifty pages long, filled with symbols that look a lot like writing, but it’s not in an alphabet any scholar has been able to identify. No one knows who wrote it—if it’s a code, or a weird art project, or a joke, or the ravings of a prophet. The manuscript is full of pictures, too, drawings of weird plants and stars and things.”
“Huh.” He tapped the open blue book with his forefinger. “I can see the resemblance.”
The pages before us were filled with cramped writing that resembled something between Chinese ideograms and the sinuous flow of Arabic letters, with some symbols that seemed nearly hieroglyphic, and others with maybe a dash of Linear B. Maybe it was written in those languages—I’m not even halfway fluent in any of them—but if so, Grace had switched languages not just midsentence but sometimes midword. There were plenty of drawings, too: on the first page we opened, there was a flower stem topped by a bloom that was either pointillist or meant to depict a spiral galaxy. Turning the pages, we found more bizarre writing and more pictures: sketches of animal skulls, with every tooth meticulously shaded in; a tiny ant perched on the tip of a blade of grass; a tower wreathed with clouds at the top; a deep-sea fish with a face full of terrifying needle fangs; a row of three human silhouettes, holding hands paper doll–style; a scorpion’s tail; a meticul
ous diagram of the structure of a bat’s wing; and more, more, more, all the images ringed around with close-written, tiny words.
The pages were numbered by hand, and the numbers, at least, were comprehensible, even if they didn’t seem entirely accurate—how could we be on page 11,871 when the entire book was surely no more than a thousand pages at most?
“So,” Trey said. “I’m going to guess ravings of a prophet, in this case, because it seems like a lot of work to go through for a joke.”
I sighed. “I was really hoping to find some answers. Maybe an annotated family tree. A daily journal, explaining all Mr. Grace’s motivations. But if this is a code, I’m not going to crack it tonight.” I yawned hugely and didn’t even bother to try and stifle it.
“Get some sleep, Bekah. We’ll think about…everything there is to think about…tomorrow. I’ll be down here on the couch if you need me.”
I kissed him on the cheek, and he turned his head into the kiss, his lips touching mine. I leaned into him a little, and his hand slid to my hip, and for a moment we stayed that way, touching, kissing, his breath mingling with my breath, connected. I considered pushing that connection further—telling him don’t be silly, you can come upstairs with me—but I was tired all the way down to my marrow, and even though I’ve got nothing against sex for comfort, I didn’t want my first time with Trey to take place in the aftermath of fear, and in the midst of weariness. I broke the connection, touched his face, and said, “See you in the morning.”
I picked up the sword cane and took it with me upstairs, resisting the urge to pause on the landing and look back down at Trey, because my resolve might fail me then. I turned my attention to the magical blade in my hand, reassured by its weight and solidity. At least if someone attacked me in the night I could stab myself and get better. Then again, I had no idea how the sword worked, and every kind of medicine I know about comes with side effects—even painkillers stress your liver or your stomach lining. Who knew what the sword was doing besides healing, or what the long-term consequences might be? In Trey’s case, obviously, the alternative had been paralysis or death, and I wouldn’t hesitate to slash him with the blade again if I had to do it over in similar circumstances. Until I knew more, though, I wasn’t going to use it to cure every stubbed toe or hangnail. I’m not that old, but I’m old enough to distrust things that seem too easy and too free. There’s usually a price hidden somewhere.