The police were investigating the blond man’s murder. He’d carried no identification and they’d issued a statement asking anyone who might know something about him to come forward.
All of which begged the questions: If the rest of the world could see the blond man, too, did that mean she wasn’t crazy?
Or did it mean that the blond man was real, but she’d still hallucinated the man in the mirror and accompanying events?
Or did it mean she was so-far-gone crazy that now she was hallucinating news programs in a sick (though—if she had to say so herself—admirably determined and impressively cohesive) effort to lend credibility to her delusions?
Ugh. Tough questions.
She’d mulled over such convoluted thoughts for hours, until finally, in the wee hours of dawn, she’d achieved a measure of calm via a firm resolution: She would approach her current predicament the same way she would approach an archaeological inquiry, by applying the meticulous methods of a scientific analyst.
She would gather all the facts she could and, only when she had everything she could dig up, would she endeavor to piece the facts together into the most accurate representation of reality she could achieve with them. There would be no further talk of crazy, nor thoughts of it, until she’d completed her investigation.
Critical to her investigation: a talk with Professor Keene. She needed to ask him questions about the relic she’d come to wish she’d never laid eyes on—like where the heck it had come from?
Maybe it wasn’t a relic at all, she thought, briefly buoyed by the possibility, but a gag-relic of some kind, a special-effects prop from a Stargate episode or some other SciFi channel program. And maybe it had state-of-the-art, highly technical, cleverly hidden audio/visual feeds hooked into it somehow. And it all powered some really tiny, extraordinarily sophisticated projection screen system.
Which . . . er, didn’t exactly explain the interaction between attacker and man in the mirror, but hey, she was just working up possibilities, devising and discarding.
Possibility: Maybe it was . . . uh, well, uh . . . cursed.
That thought made her feel inordinately foolish. Didn’t sit well with her inner analyst.
Still, better foolish than mad-as-a-mirrormaker.
She’d phoned the professor last night, using the direct line to his room that he’d left her in one of his gazillion messages, but he’d not answered. She’d tried again first thing this morning, but no luck. Still sleeping, she supposed.
Bottom line, she was a pragmatist. She’d not gotten this far in her life by being illogical or prone to whimsy. She was a what-I’ve-got-in-my-hand kind of girl. And after intense reflection, she decided that she didn’t feel crazy. She felt perfectly normal about everything except for this idiotic ongoing mirror-incident.
Maybe she should smash it, she thought peevishly. End of problems. Right?
Except, not necessarily. If she was crazy, her illusory sex-god would probably just take up residence in some other inanimate object (that certainly brought to mind a few intriguing ideas, especially something in her bedside table drawer). If she wasn’t crazy, she could conceivably be destroying one of the most pivotal, dogma-shattering relics in recent human history.
“Looks like I’m stuck fact-finding.” She puffed out an irritated little sigh.
Rummaging in her pack for her cell phone, she withdrew it, flipped it open, and glanced down at the screen. No messages. She’d been hoping the professor would call her back before she got tied up in classes all day.
Too late now. She turned off the phone, tucked it back in her bag, grabbed her coffee from the counter, paid the cashier, and hurried off.
She had classes back-to-back until 4:45 P.M., but the second she was done she was heading straight to the hospital.
5:52 P.M.
The Dan Ryan Expressway at rush hour was a level in Dante’s Hell.
Jessi was hopelessly gridlocked in stop-and-go traffic that was way more stop than go—so much stop, in fact, that she’d been working on homework for the past half hour—when her cell phone rang.
She tossed aside the notes she’d been taking, crept forward a celebration-worthy eighteen inches, whipped out her phone and answered, hoping it was the professor, but it was Mark Troudeau.
The statement was just forming on her tongue that there was no way she was taking on even one more paper to grade when he ripped all the words right out of her mouth by telling her he was calling to let her know the campus police had just informed him that Professor Keene was dead.
She started shaking, clenched the steering wheel, and exhaled a sob.
“And get this, Jess, he was murdered,” Mark relayed in an excited rush, clearly fascinated and clearly oblivious to the fact that she was crying, despite the wet snuffling sounds she was making. Men could be so dense sometimes.
Dimly, she realized traffic was creeping forward again. Eased her foot off the clutch. Dragged the sleeve of her jacket across her face.
“The cops are talking like he got mixed up in something bad, Jess. Said he recently pulled a lot of money out of his retirement and mortgaged his house big-time. I guess he owned some land somewhere in Georgia that he just sold too. Cops have no idea what he suddenly needed so much money for.”
Belatedly realizing the car in front of her had stopped again, she hit the brakes and came to an abrupt halt a bare inch behind the rear bumper of the car in front of her. The guy behind her honked angrily. Not just once, but laid on it, complete with assorted hand gestures. “Right,” she snapped through tears, making a gesture of her own in the rearview mirror, “like it’s my fault traffic stopped moving again. Get over it.”
Traffic was the least of her concerns. She closed her eyes.
The cops might not know why the professor had needed the money, but she did.
It would seem the mirror was a bona fide relic, after all, albeit one that had come—she was now willing to bet serious money—hot off the black market.
The professor had indeed gotten mixed up in something bad.
“Garroted,” Mark was saying. “He was actually garroted. Nobody does that anymore, do they? Who does that kind of thing?”
She palmed the microphone on her cell, stared unseeingly out at the sea of stopped cars. “What on earth is going on?” she half-whispered.
Mark continued talking, a distant, chafing din.
The professor and I have already had our time together this evening, the blond man had said. And she’d pushed the comment brusquely aside, too wrapped up in her own petty concerns and interests.
And now the professor was dead.
Correction, she thought, a little chill seeping into her bones, according to what Mark had just told her—time of death 6:15 P.M. Monday—he’d been dead before she’d even gone to pick up his books that night.
The whole time she’d been standing in his office he’d been dead.
“And get this,” said Mark, still blathering away, “Ellis, the department head, tells me I’m gonna have to take the professor’s classes for the rest of the term. Can you believe this shit? Like they can’t afford to hire—”
“Oh, grow up, Mark,” Jessi hissed, thumbing the OFF button.
When finally she managed to escape the tenth level of Hell, Jessi made a beeline for side streets and headed straight back to campus.
Thoughts tumbled in disjointed confusion through her mind. Amid them all was a single clear one, drawing her like a beacon.
She had to see the mirror again.
Why—she had no idea.
It was simply the only thing she could think of to do. She couldn’t bring herself to go home. In her current state of mind she would climb the walls. She couldn’t go to the hospital; there was no longer anyone to visit. She had a few close friends, but they tended to work as much as she, so dropping by unexpectedly wasn’t the coolest thing to do, and besides, even if she did, what would she say—Hi, Ginger, how have you been? By the way, either I’ve gone insane,
or my life has taken on distinct shades of Indiana Jones, complete with mysterious relics, foreign villains, and spectacular audiovisual special effects.
When she got back to the office there was police tape across the door.
That stopped her for a moment. Then she noticed it was campus police tape and tugged it aside. Violating university procedures didn’t seem quite as felonious a felony as breaking a law in The Real World.
As she jiggled the key in the lock, making sure it really was locked this time, she asked herself just what she thought she was going to do once she was inside.
Strike up a conversation with a relic? Lay her hands on the glass? Try to summon a spirit? Make like it was a Ouija board or something?
As fate would have it, she didn’t have to do a thing.
Because the moment she opened the door, a shaft of light splintered in from the hallway, straight onto the silvery glass.
Her feet froze. Her hands clenched on the door. Even her breath stopped mid-inhalation. She wasn’t certain, but she fancied her heart paused a long, ponderous moment, as well.
The towering, half-naked, absolute sex-god of a man standing inside the mirror, glaring out at her, snarled, “ ’Tis high damned time you came back, wench.”
* * *
5
When Jessi was seventeen years old she’d almost died.
She’d gone to one of those indoor rock-climbing gyms (because her best friend had called to tell her that the football player she had a crush on was home from college that weekend and he and his friends were supposed to be there) and taken a horrible fall, breaking multiple bones and splitting her skull.
She’d missed the best parts of her senior year in high school, recuperating at home with her head shaved from where they’d inserted a metal plate to piece her skull back together, listening to other people’s stories of proms and parties and graduations.
And the guy she’d been so crazy about hadn’t even been at the climbing gym that day.
She’d learned a few things from the experience. One: the whole “best laid plans of mice and men” adage was absolutely true—she’d not gotten to rally her football team to the State finals the only year they’d made it in the past seven; she’d not gotten to wear the scrumptious pink prom dress that still hung in her closet; she’d not tossed her cap; she’d not attended a single senior party. And two: Sometimes when things got bad, a sense of humor was a person’s only saving grace. You could either laugh or you could cry, and crying not only made you feel worse, it made you look worse too.
It occurred to her as she stood there, staring at the thing in the mirror that couldn’t possibly be in the mirror, in a room where a recent attempt on her life had been made—said room’s previous occupant having been murdered recently himself—that events of the past few days certainly qualified as bad, even by conservative standards.
She started to giggle.
She couldn’t help it.
The sex-god’s dark eyes narrowed and he scowled. “ ’Tis no laughing matter. Get in here and close that door. Now. There is much of which we must speak and time is of the veriest essence.”
She giggled harder, one hand to her mouth, the other clutching the doorjamb. Time is of the veriest essence. Who talked like that?
“For the love of Christ, wench, summon me out,” he said, sounding exasperated. “Someone needs to shake you.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” she managed between giggles. Giggles that were starting to sound just a tiny bit hysterical. “And I am not a wench,” she informed him loftily. And giggled.
He growled softly. “Woman, you summoned me out the other eve and I did you no harm. Will you not trust me again?”
She snickered. “I thought I was sound asleep and dreaming the other night. It had nothing to do with trust.”
“I killed the man who was trying to kill you. Is that not reason enough to trust me?”
She stopped laughing. There it was. He was the one who’d snapped the blond man’s neck and left him lying dead on the commons. Though a part of her brain knew it had to have been him—whether such events had transpired in a delusional world or The Real One—his remark drew her gaze to his hands. Big hands. Neck-snapping hands.
After a moment’s hesitation, she stepped warily into the office. Another pause, then she slowly closed the door behind her.
The giggles were gone. A thousand questions were not.
Jamming her hands into the front pockets of her jeans, she stared at the mirror.
She closed her eyes. Squeezed them shut hard. Opened them. Tried it twice more for good measure.
He was still there. Oh, shit.
“I could have told you that wouldn’t work,” he said dryly.
“Am I crazy?” she whispered.
“Nay, you’re not daft. I am here. This is indeed happening. And if you wish to survive, you must credit what I tell you.”
“People can’t be inside mirrors. It’s not possible.”
“Tell that to the mirror.” He thumped his fists against the inside of the glass for emphasis.
“Funny. But not convincing.” Oh, that was weird, seeing him pound on the mirror from the inside!
“You must resolve your own mind on the matter. Best do so before another comes to kill you.”
His blasé response argued his case to her. Said he knew he was real, and if she was too dense to figure it out, it wasn’t his problem. Surely a delusion would endeavor to self-persist, wouldn’t it?
But how could he be real?
She had no precedent for dealing with the inexplicable. Fact-finding. All I can do is explore what’s happening, and reserve judgment until I know more.
Toward that end, shedding light on things, she reached for the wall switch and flipped on the overhead.
And got her first truly good look at him.
Crimeny, she thought, eyes widening as if to drink in even more of him. The two prior times she’d caught glimpses of him, they’d been briefly snatched and the room had been heavily shadowed. She’d absorbed only a general impression of him: a big, dark, intensely sexual man.
She’d not seen the details.
And what details they were!
Stunned, she looked down. Up. Down. Up again. Slowly.
“Take your time, lass,” he murmured, so softly she scarcely heard him. His next comment was deliberately beyond her audible range, a silky “I plan to with you.”
He was tall, stuffing the mirror from top to bottom of frame. Powerfully built, with wide shoulders and rippling muscles, he wore a fabric of crimson and black around his waist—an honest-to-God kilt, if she wasn’t mistaken—glittering metallic wrist cuffs, and black leather boots.
No shirt. Wicked-looking black-and-crimson tattooed runes covered the left side of his sculpted chest, from the bottom of his rib cage, up over a nipple, across his shoulder, and to the edge of his jaw. Each powerful biceps was also encircled by a band of tattooed crimson-and-black runes. A thick, silky trail of dark hair began just above the navel on his ripped abs, slid down into the plaid.
Oh, God, was it tenting? Was that a bulge lifting the tartan?
Her gaze got stuck there for an awkward moment. Her eyes widened even further. Sucking in a shallow breath, she jerked her gaze away. A flush heated her cheeks.
She’d just ogled his penis.
Stood there, blatantly eyeing it. Long enough that he had to have noticed. Something was just not right with her. Her hormones had somehow gotten seriously out of whack. She was an artifact-ogler, not a penis-ogler.
She forced her gaze up to his face. It was as sinfully gorgeous as the rest of him. He had the chiseled, proud features of an ancient Celt warrior: strong jaw and cheekbones, a straight, aristocratic nose, flaring arrogantly at the nostrils, and a mouth so sexy and kissable that her own lips instinctively puckered, then parted, just looking at it, as if sampling a kiss. She wet them, feeling strangely breathless. Dark shadow stubbled his sculpted jaw, making his firm pink lips s
eem even more sexual against all that rough masculinity.
His hair wasn’t black as she’d thought in the dark, but a rich gleaming mahogany shot with shimmering strands of gold and copper. Half of it was caught in dozens of narrow braids, banded at the ends with glittering metallic beadwork. His eyes were burnt-whisky, his skin tawny-velvet.
He dripped primeval, elemental power, looked as much a relic as the mirror itself, a throwback to a time when men had been men and women had Done As They Were Told.
Her eyes narrowed. She couldn’t stand men like that. Chauvinistic, domineering men who thought they could order women around.
Too bad her body didn’t seem to be of the same mind. Too bad her body seemed downright intrigued by the various orders possible, like: Take off your clothes, woman; let me get the taste of you on the back of my tongue . . .
It didn’t help that he looked like the kind of man who wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, who would tolerate zero inhibitions on a woman’s part; the kind of man that, once he got a woman in bed, didn’t let her out again until he’d done everything there was to do to her, had fucked her so thoroughly that she could barely walk.
“Summon me out, woman,” came the tight, low command laced by that sexy Scots burr. His voice was as incredible as his appearance. Deep and rich as hot, dark buttered rum, it slid down into her belly, pooling there in a slow burn.
“No,” she said faintly. No way she was letting all that . . . whatever it was, too much testosterone by far . . . out again.
“Then I bid you, woman, cease looking at me like that.”
“Like what?” she bristled.
“Like you wish to be using your tongue on me again. And on more than my back.” He caught his lower lip between his teeth and flashed her a devilish smile.
“I didn’t mean to lick you,” she snapped defensively. “I told you, I thought you were a dream.”
“Any dream you wish, woman. You need but summon me out.” His gaze raked over her, burning hot, lingering at her breasts and thighs.
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