She couldn’t see Bridgette’s reaction, but imagined a hefty eye roll. “Well,”—Bridgette sniffed—“big surprise, they’re just as lazy as the staff Daddy has to keep replacing.”
Conrad sniped back that they weren’t lazy, but they could probably hear her so shutting up would be wise. She gasped and whined at him not to be so mean, to which he sarcastically apologized, and she griped about his terrible apologies. As they delved into a new argument about how, even with so much practice, he was still abysmal at saying sorry, Lorelei tried to block them out.
Conrad had stared at Bridgette dumbly for far too long the night before when she asked, in no uncertain terms, “What in the nether are the two of you whispering about in the middle of the night?” His brain landed on the starkest version of the truth—the deed to Moonlit Shores Manor had been misplaced, and Lorelei agreed to help find it. He didn’t tell Bridgette anything else, not about his brother attempting to murder them or the conundrum he was in about his inheritance. How he had explained the broken nose and black eye Byron had given him, Lorelei didn’t know, but she had a feeling if he’d mentioned his inheritance being in peril, Bridgette might not have been so keen to root around in the dirt and grime with them on their search for the deed the next evening.
The basement was rather mundane to Conrad, he slept down there after all, but the rooms and corridors beyond where his bedroom stood at the front of the hall had low lighting, were windowless, and didn’t tend to keep still, so, in a word, they were creepy. Lorelei tried to orient herself every time she spied the door with the red flame to the subbasement furnace, the one constant, but would often lose it after taking a few too many corners.
They hunted within the store rooms and closets littering the halls, including doors that Conrad pointedly told them weren’t normally there. Moonlit Shores Manor was funny like that, though, and magic on the whole was even funnier. Unfortunately, it was hard to laugh so deep underground in the eeriness of the dark.
Still empty-handed after a few hours of searching, the three entered a room at the dead end of a corridor that was not there half an hour prior. Inside, the walls were a rougher stone than the rest of the basement, and there was no light to be flicked on, not even candles set into sconces on the walls, ever-lit by the manor’s magic. Their steps scuffed quietly against the floor, and they each inched toward a different wall, light in hand.
Lorelei found a small cabinet in one corner and crouched down before it. The wood was coarse and hand-carved, the doors fitting together tightly, needing a hefty tug on their brass knobs to open. She shone her flashlight inside, but could see that it was empty. The sides and base of the cabinet were the same rough wood, but the back of it had been painted black. Though—she cocked her head—her light didn’t reflect the way she had expected. The blackness seemed to swallow up all of the light instead, and while she knew humans had come up with a paint that did something similar, only one egomaniacal artist had access to that. She reached out to touch the painted surface and was intrigued to find the back of the cabinet was much farther from her hand than what she perceived.
“What do you think this is?”
Lorelei turned at Bridgette’s voice to see her standing before a tall object draped in a heavy canvas cloth. “Not the deed,” Lorelei whispered, mostly to herself. She closed up the empty cabinet and got back on her feet beside Bridgette to stare up at it.
Conrad circled the thing, his lips drawn into a frown. It was only an inch or two taller than him, and Lorelei wondered how it was maneuvered down the hall and into the room in the first place. He shrugged, went around the back side, and pulled off the drop cloth.
The canvas kicked up years of untouched dust, and Lorelei inhaled a mouthful of it. Her lungs stung, and she coughed so sharply she lost her balance. At her side, Bridgette was sputtering and choking too, but the cloud was so thick she couldn’t see her. Conrad was saying something but was muffled and distorted as if he might have pulled the canvas down over his head.
When the dust finally settled, a frame stood before them, narrow and tall. The wood spiraled up on both sides to meet in a point at the top, and the bottom was identical, the whole piece suspended on a rack at its center so that it could be spun top over bottom. Lorelei would have thought it was a massive mirror, but neither she nor Bridgette were reflected in the glass. Instead, Conrad was standing on the other side of an empty frame.
“Uh oh.” His eyes were wide, face illuminated ominously from below by the light he held.
Bridgette coughed once more, her tongue sticking out. “Ugh, what?”
“This…might be a problem.” The wall behind him was exceptionally dark even with his light shining back.
The urge took her before she knew why, and Lorelei reached forward. Her hand stopped abruptly in the air between them, hovering just inside the frame. There was something there, a barrier, hard and smooth, and it didn’t give at all when she pushed.
“What are you doing?” Bridgette was glaring at her.
Conrad reached forward as well, rapping his knuckles solidly against his side of the invisible barrier.
Bridgette’s eyes flashed when she heard the sound. “No way, I don’t—” She and Lorelei saw the lights at the same time, brilliant and yellow on one side of them and silvery and blue on the other, wobbling and shifting so that the source couldn’t be sussed out. “No freaking way.”
Lorelei swallowed, peering around the frame. As she expected, Conrad wasn’t actually there, but the lights continued on, beyond nothing but darkness as if they and the frame were standing in the middle of a long tube that went on forever. Her insides started to feel like they weren’t all quite where they ought to be.
“I’ve seen this before.” His voice rattled, but he cleared his throat. “Not this one specifically, but something like it.”
Bridgette’s lips were pursed tightly, but she managed to growl. “Don’t tell me it’s a—”
“Hephaestian mirror.” Conrad rubbed a temple. “Happened to Seamus when I was about thirteen. Apparently, the manor’s got a few.” He ran a hand along his side of the frame. “Problem is they only have one jump in them at a time. And this one is…damn, it’s good.”
“We’re stuck here?” Bridgette hissed.
“No,” Conrad answered quickly. He pulled his hands in front of him and drew a circle, blue lines alighting the air to form geometric shapes, and then he pressed the glowing symbol forward. It lit up the barrier, then fizzled right out. “Well, maybe.”
“Wait, I’m sorry.” Lorelei found her voice, looking from Bridgette to Conrad. “What exactly is going on?”
“Hephaestian mirror,” Conrad repeated, his face a bit more shadowed than a moment earlier. “They work sort of like the portals at the train station, but with time instead of space.”
“So why can’t we come back through?”
Conrad scratched the back of his head. “This magic is really complicated and usually just one way.”
Bridgette jabbed her finger against the glass. “Why’d you have this stupid thing in the basement?”
“Well, I didn’t put it down here,” he shot back, just as snotty.
Lorelei listened to them bicker as she looked back at the strange colors beside her. They were blurry, like neon watercolors ever moving over a too-saturated canvas, and she lifted a hand to touch them.
“Lorelei, don’t!” Conrad’s voice cut through the barrier and made her freeze. “Bridgette, do you think you can keep the changeling from getting obliterated, please?”
Bridgette squealed and stomped her foot. “Excuse me, but I’ve got bigger things to worry about like where this side even is!”
“Technically, you do know where.” Conrad’s image had gone hazier, and the lights around them had dimmed. “You just don’t know when.”
“Well, when I get back there, I swear—”
“Shh!” Lorelei grabbed Bridgette’s arm to quiet her. There was a creaking coming from behind them, the fir
st sound she’d heard since entering the weird, blotchy lights other than their quarreling voices.
They both turned, and in the darkness straight ahead shapes began to form, a small table, a cot, a set of drawers, and a door.
“Is someone coming?” Conrad’s voice was barely audible, even in the quiet of the room that was replacing the lights around them.
Bridgette nodded, then gasped. His reflection was no longer in the mirror, but hers and Lorelei’s both were. They stared back at themselves, horrified, and then there was another noise from beyond the door.
Lorelei and Bridgette scrambled behind the mirror, sliding into the tight space between it and the wall. Bridgette tried to shove Lorelei out, but Lorelei pushed back, and the two slapped at one another as they fumbled to be completely hidden from whatever was headed their way.
The door clicked open, footsteps came into the room, and both women froze, holding their breath and each other, listening. A floorboard creaked under a silent step, then again as the intruder moved across the room. There was an interminable moment where the silence was so overwhelming, she thought for sure they’d imagined it, and then a voice spoke up from the mirror’s other side in a language Lorelei didn’t recognize. But she didn’t have to understand the words to know the voice was directed at them, and it was angry.
Lorelei glanced at Bridgette who was glaring back and shaking her head in warning. Well, if Bridgette didn’t want her to say anything—Lorelei peeked out from behind the mirror. There in the center of the room stood a pale woman with a pointed face, blonde hair pulled into a knot at the back of her head. She wore a stiff top and a striped, ankle-length skirt, and looked as though she’d stepped right out of Weir’s Embarkation of the Pilgrims. Of course, Lorelei realized, the two more likely had stepped into it. “Hello, there,” she said in her softest and cheeriest voice.
The woman tilted her head and cocked a nearly translucent, blonde brow. Then, in a sudden movement, she grabbed something from the waistband of her skirt and pointed it at Lorelei, her arm stiff as she crouched low, speaking again in a foreign tongue.
Lorelei threw her hands up even though the weapon just looked like it was a simple, if pointy, stick. “Oh, this is a mistake,” she said carefully. “We didn’t mean to be here, and we’re happy to go, if that’s what you want.” She glanced back to where Bridgette was still hiding, though her dark eyes were so angry there was no way the stranger couldn’t feel the hatred seething out from behind the mirror.
The woman muttered something in her language and moved the point of her stick toward the mirror. “Show yourself, all of you,” she finally said in English, her voice low, but it had a bouncing melody to it, an accent Lorelei couldn’t place outside of perhaps one of the Dakotas which was certainly not where they’d gone unless she had been wrong about the Great Plains all her life.
Rolling her eyes, Bridgette emerged from the mirror’s other side. The woman squinted at them, moving her stick smoothly to point at one and then the other. It felt particularly menacing despite how silly it seemed. “Do not move.”
Bridgette gestured at her and turned to Lorelei. “Oh, my gods, we’re so far back they don’t even have tools yet. Ow!”
There was a snap, and Bridgette drew her hand up to her mouth. Her fingertips were sizzling. “Excuse me, but what in the nether was that?”
The tip of the woman’s stick glowed in a familiar blue before going out, then she leveled it at Lorelei again. Lorelei didn’t even shake her head. “Still not moving.”
“I will cut you both down where you stand.” Her cheekbones were carved out in the candlelight making her face that much more severe, and she eyed them like an animal despite being so rigidly put together. “I have no fear of Zyr or any servant he sends. I have killed plenty of your kind already.”
“Ew. Who?” Bridgette shook out her hand.
“You think you are powerful for getting through my wards, but that is only because they stand to keep out something much stronger than you. Impostors, fakes, animals in human skin,” she snarled. “Zyr will never have the source again. Not while I am alive.”
“Zyr?” Lorelei looked at Bridgette who just shrugged. “I think there’s a little confusion. No one sent us here. Except that mirror, technically, but that was an accident.”
“Mirror?” She practically spat out the word, weird on her tongue, then her eyes brightened. “Spejl. You mean…it worked?”
“Well, the stupid thing brought us here.” Bridgette defied the woman’s orders again, throwing her hands up. “So, if someone was dabbling in Hephaestian witchcraft then, yeah, it totally worked.”
The woman stood a little straighter. Giving them a look over, her mind seemed to reel suddenly. “By the powers, I did it. An escape.”
“You made this?” Bridgette finally smiled. “Great! Fire her up, we need to get back.”
“I did not make the mirror, it has its own enchantment, but I did cast the spell. However, I had the ingredients for only one cast,” she said, gesturing to a pile of burnt herbs on the ground. “I prepared it with all intentions to never return to this place, but it did not take me. I know the mirror exists in that time, but it wouldn’t let me through when I tried moments ago.”
Bridgette’s smile fell. “You were thwarted by a drop cloth? And then we stole your cast? Ugh, this is so not cool.”
Lorelei finally lowered her arms, looking from one witch’s severe face to the other. “We can’t just do it again?”
“Hephaestian magic, time magic,” Bridgette stressed, “is, like, totally the most complex there is, and she didn’t even get it right. What, I bet you needed, like, Transcendental shore sand or something ridiculous?”
“That is what the mirror is made of, yes. You know of my craft.” The woman raised her weapon again. “You say you are not a servant of Zyr?”
“Lady, I don’t know who in the nether that is.”
The woman stepped up to her and used her previously-glowing stick to poke at one of Bridgette’s curls, making it spring back on itself. “From when are you?”
Bridgette smacked the stick away. “The future.” She glanced around at the sparsely decorated room. “Unless something goes super wrong at some point after our time. But I’m not telling you anything more about it—we’re already risking too much just being here.”
“I must be sure,” she said, stepping back, and knelt to the ground. She took her stick and ran it over the floor, keeping her eyes on the two as she drew a symbol. The lines took on that blue glow again, so similar to the one Conrad conjured, and when she connected the final line of the circle around her image, a smoke rose up from the ground and rolled out over the room in one, fast blast, running into the walls and dissipating. As it traveled over Lorelei’s feet, she felt the tiniest tingle, but then nothing.
“Happy?” Bridgette crossed her arms and tapped her toe.
“So, these are your true forms—you are not a field mouse and a viper then.”
Lorelei’s forehead wrinkled. “Which of us is supposed to be the rodent and which is the reptile?”
Bridgette rolled her eyes, grunting. “How long til you can get the ingredients together to cast this again?”
“I had to barter for one of the components for three months.”
Bridgette looked like she might explode. “Unacceptable.” For once, Lorelei was keen on Bridgette’s no-nonsense attitude. “We’ll figure it out. Or at least I will. I don’t know what good a siren’s going to be.”
“I’m a lorelei,” she said as if it were true.
“Whatever. Magic’s evolved a lot, we don’t even need wands anymore. Look.” Bridgette flicked both of her hands out confidently. And, confidently, nothing happened. She stared at the space in front of her and the nothing happening there. Then she flicked her hands again. “Gods,” she whispered. “I can’t…I can’t?”
The woman crossed her arms. “I was cautioned Hephaestian travel would affect craft when jumping to a time in which you
do not belong. As you do not belong now, your powers have not caught up. It should only last an hour or so.”
“Oh, yeah, weird.” Lorelei mimicked Bridgette, flopping her hands around and wriggling her fingers. “Powers are all gone. Would you look at that!”
The woman arched a thin brow. “Well, the two of you have ruined my escape and will need to assist in recrafting the spell regardless.” She sighed. “I will have to go out again, past my wards.”
“Escape?” Lorelei repeated. “Why do you want to get away?”
Bridgette scoffed. “Look around: why wouldn’t she?”
“It is none of your concern.” She walked back to the center of the room. “I only need oison root, but that is found in the feer alfer’s domain, and they are stingy at best and murderous at worst.”
“Fine, whatevs, she can do that.” Bridgette gestured to Lorelei who didn’t like the sound of that plan at all. “In the meantime, I guess we’ll just check in as guests.”
“Guests?”
“Here. At the manor. The big, old building we’re currently standing in. Duh.”
The woman tipped her head to the side. “This is the small home of a woodworker and his daughter. I am their guest, but I have…convinced them of that.”
“You mean this place isn’t a hotel? Hasn’t it been one since, like, forever?”
She looked like she didn’t know the word.
Lorelei groaned, remembering the plaque that hung on the wall in the foyer. “The manor wasn’t established until 1663.”
CHAPTER 7
SOURCE
Hephaestian mirrors didn’t move their query in space, not really, but a Hephaestian mirror would spit its user out where it had been sat, and if the mirror had been moved, then so the user would too. As it stood, Bridgette and Lorelei had been spat out in the small bedroom of an equally small cabin in the middle of a very large wood where Moonlit Shores Manor would someday stand. The manor would be enchanted and well known, but the woodworker’s cabin was a lone structure that was decidedly unmagical save for the presence of one similarly displaced witch.
The Wayward Deed (Vacancy Book 2) Page 7