“These are perfect,” Letizia said quietly, though if Jude had to describe her expression, it would be much closer to pensive and sad. “And now for mine. An anchor in a storm of will.”
She reached one finger out and touched it to the mirror’s surface, tracing a shape—or maybe letters. Jude couldn’t tell what they were, but there were three, and the glass seemed to ripple in the wake of her finger, as if she were touching the surface of a still pond. Letizia let the silence hang, then nodded to herself, as if confirming something, and turned back to them.
“I’m ready to begin,” she said, and now her eyes were clear and present. “Think of yourselves as my ground control—stay calm, stay still, and do not break the circle, no matter what you see within the mirror. Unless…”
She paused, and Jude did not at all enjoy the silence and all the unknowns that could fill it. “Unless what?”
“Unless it looks as if I am getting lost in the working. Try to keep me on course, and to keep the circle closed. But if I fly beyond your reach—run.”
“What does that mean?” Pixie asked, sounding alarmed. “If you get lost? Why should we run?”
“Working with powerful magic is like moving into deep water,” the Witch said, steel beneath her words. “The forces are like currents, and it’s too easy to be pulled under, especially alone. Your presence should ground me, remind me that there is a world here, that I am a real person, and I have other living beings depending on me. That said, if anything feels wrong—run. Get as far away from me as possible. I can weather the arcane storms, but you may be swept away.”
“Letizia, none of us are going to leave…” Jasper started, then faltered as she fixed him with a sharp gaze. “All right. Understood.”
The witch hesitated, then, wordlessly, held out both of her hands, Pixie on one side and Jasper on the other. They took her hands without hesitation, as did Jude when Jasper held one out to him. Pixie hadn’t let go of Jude’s either, and the circle was closed.
Letizia held perfectly still, and everyone else took her cue, watching the dark mirror. Jude realized he was holding his breath, a common anxiety response, and made himself suck in a lungful of air. Held it for the count of four. Then let it out as he counted to seven. They were safe here, she’d said. Nothing was going to come leaping out of the shadows. If it did, they’d be ready.
But it didn’t. Nothing attacked or erupted. For what seemed like forever, nothing happened, or at least nothing Jude could tell. They all kept waiting in silence, and after a while, Jasper's hand in his started to feel sweaty. Pixie’s didn’t, likely because vampires didn’t sweat. Or did they? Jude didn’t actually know for sure, and trying to remember if he’d ever seen an example took up what had to be at least a minute of silence.
By the time he stopped wondering about vampires and sweat glands, he’d started to feel more than a little silly, holding hands in a circle and staring at a mirror in a cave. Waiting for the Witch with a lap full of bones he knew uncomfortably little about to cast a spell he knew even less about. He was just starting to feel less silly and more concerned when Letizia sucked in a sharp gasp.
“Are you all…” Jude started to ask, then stopped, the thought instantly jolted from his head.
The mirror wasn’t dark anymore. Suddenly he realized that the papers and rings they’d placed on it were gone, only clear and unbroken glass in their place. Firelight shone from the mirror’s surface, but there was no light in the cavern for it to reflect. Suddenly it looked more like a lit window on the floor or a screen playing a movie, clearer and more high-definition than any Jude had ever seen.
And stranger. Black spires like pieces of broken onyx—like the shattered glass shards the mirror had once been—thrust toward the sky. The image was silent, but if there was sound, it should have been the crackling of wood fires. The stones’ smooth surfaces reflected red-orange flames framing the mirror’s edges, as if the ‘camera’ was in the midst of the fire.
Water. Ocean waves, regular and calming. The far-off cry of sea birds.
Jude sucked in a breath of cool, moist air that smelled like water and salt instead of a stale cave, and tasted in the strangest way like a home he’d never seen. A cold chill ran through him, even as he remembered the warmth of the sand between his toes, the sun on his shoulders.
He gripped Jasper and Pixie’s hands harder, filled with a painful understanding of what Letizia had meant when she’d talked about getting lost and needing them to find her again. His head filled with the crashing of waves.
But then Jasper gave his hand a quick squeeze and little shake, and Jude almost dropped his, realizing he’d been clenching it in what had to be a finger-crunching death grip. He loosened his grasp and Jasper didn’t let go. Pixie never altered his steady grip, even if Jude had definitely been doing the same thing to him. Instead, he stroked the back of Jude’s hand with his thumb, the way Jude had done several times with him before. Jude shuddered, but from emotion and gratitude instead of fear. Sometimes he forgot how strong the sweet little vampire was, in more than one way.
Letizia began to lean forward over the mirror, face eerily lit and cast in strange, shifting shadows from the orange fires below.
“I’m here,” she whispered, and her eerie voice sent a new wave of shivers down Jude’s spine. Jude could barely see something shining travel down her face. A tear, he realized, glittering in the firelight—but she was smiling more brightly than Jude had ever seen her, as if she’d only just now begun to hope. “I’ve always been right here, for so long. Please… come back to me.”
Now she swept the bones up, pulling them into her lap and hunching over them as if protecting something priceless and fragile. Their part was apparently done, and the rest left to the mirror. Letizia’s shoulders shook with every breath.
If the mirror was acting like a TV screen, its ‘signal’ left something to be desired. Maybe it hadn’t been fully assembled and used in centuries, or maybe it was still fragile, but the image of the stone circle, clear as it had been to start with, soon warped and dissolved into something like static snow. Letizia began to mutter quietly but fervently under her breath, and images began to flash across the glass, fast and disorienting, from different angles. The circle from above, the bonfire in the center, the night sky as if the ‘camera’ had fallen to the ground.
Then the mirror cleared. Free of all distortion or interference, the image resolved itself into something unmistakable: a human face, gray, with bright golden eyes.
“Oh, God,” Pixie whispered, and his grip tightened on Jude’s hand so hard it almost hurt.
“That’s him?” Jude asked, though there was no mistaking the look of stunned horror on Pixie’s face. He didn’t pull his hand away, squeezing back instead.
“That’s him.” Pixie stared at the screen, as if physically unable to look away.
Jude looked back at it, studying the face of the monster who’d inflicted so much pain on all of them in different ways. Aside from the telltale skin and teeth, Wicked Gold looked like an ordinary middle-aged white man in a nice suit, an incongruently unassuming appearance for someone capable of such brutality. Or he would have been, if he hadn’t been smiling, sharp white teeth bared in a shark’s grin as he regarded something off-screen, something nobody looking at the mirror could see. Jude didn’t like the look of satisfaction on the vampire’s face—he didn’t like anything about him, really, but that was somehow the most ominous.
“I didn’t think we’d actually...” Pixie said faintly. “I mean, I know we were supposed to see him, but still, actually seeing him is—”
The image shifted. A flurry of static-like distortion, and the vampire’s face disappeared, replaced by two more. Undeniably human. One unfamiliar, a smart-looking but haughty young man in another nice suit. The other, seemingly restrained, and obviously furious, sweating, disheveled, face bruised and smeared with dirt—
“Eva!” Jude gasped, almost letting go of both Pixie and Jasper’s hands in
shock, but they barely managed to hang onto him. “Eva, she’s there, they have her, she’s—”
“Don’t break the circle!” Letizia’s voice snapped through the darkness, and Jude squeezed Pixie and Jasper’s hands again. Panic rang through the cave, loud and clear as, in the mirror, a silver claw reached toward Eva’s face, touched it, then drew a line of red. “Keep the spell alive! No matter what you see!”
Jude looked up to argue, shoot back that he didn’t give a fuck about a spell anymore, or anything but his missing friend who wasn’t so missing anymore, and don’t bother arguing because he was done, done and gone—but there was no one to argue with.
Letizia was gone.
Just before midnight, someone headed through the woods toward the stones. Alone, hood up over their face, and hunched over a bit against the cold. Still, they had never been the best at stealth or hiding, and as Milo barely avoided tripping over an exposed tree root and planting face-first into the ground, their hood flew back and a wisp of purple hair caught the dim moonlight.
Milo crouched a small distance away from the stone circle and waited, eyes on the eerie light of the bonfire inside, and the pair of dark silhouettes. They’d cast every masking and stealth spell short of flat-out invisibility that they knew, like layering on sweaters made of magical camouflage. It wouldn’t stop anyone searching for them specifically, but if they’d done a good enough job at laying low—always arguable, they had to admit—nobody would expect them to make an appearance tonight.
They kept their gaze locked on the pair of figures by the fires, one in particular. Owen leaned casually against one of the spires, his expression and stance haughty, as if he owned not only the place, but the magic happening therein.
“Some things never change,” Milo said quietly to themself.
“What never changes?” a voice whispered from directly behind them.
Milo jumped and narrowly managed to avoid falling over again. “Wha—what are you two doing here?” they whispered back urgently as they recognized the two winged, gray-skinned, pointy-eared-and-fanged figures lurking just beside them. It was impossible for anyone to have crept up on them like that without making some noise—anyone human, at least.
“You said something big was going down,” said Maestra in a dignified tone that said their presence were entirely reasonable and natural. “And we thought—”
“That you’d come see what it was, even though I said not to come anywhere near the place for a few days?” Milo demanded, eyes narrowed in an annoyed glare that looked out of place on their usually mild face.
“I mean, it was mostly because of that, yeah,” Nails said with a nod, obviously unbothered by the human’s ire. “Kinda played yourself there.”
“That, but mostly we wanted to make sure you were okay!” Maestra cut in quickly. “That looks like a major magical thing, and it has to be dangerous.”
“It is,” Milo said, looking wary, but this time not because of them. “And I’m here to try to stop it, if possible. If it’s not, there’s someone I need to grab, and get as far away from here as possible.”
“Who?”
“Him.” Milo pointed to Owen. “He thinks he knows what he’s doing but he doesn’t… something that seems to be going around quite a bit lately.”
“Hey, believe it or not, we do know what we’re doing,” Nails retorted. “We’ve been around for about a hundred and fifty years longer than you!”
Milo sighed and dropped their head a bit. “That’s exactly what I meant. I’ve gotten this far, but I… well, I have no idea what I’m doing, actually.”
“Well, we’re here now,” Maestra said levelly. “We can save him together.”
“Thank you,” Milo said, giving them a tired but grateful look. “You’re good friends. I still wish you weren’t here.”
“Who is that guy anyway?” Nails asked, squinting at the young man Milo had pointed out. “He looks familiar. Like really familiar.”
“Yeah,” Maestra said thoughtfully, then let out a soft gasp. “I know where we’ve seen him before! Milo, he looks just like—hey. Where’d they…?”
They looked around, but Milo wasn’t where they’d been a moment ago—then Maestra pointed to the small, hooded figure creeping at the edge of the light, hiding behind a spire and inching closer to their intended target. No human should have been able to move quietly enough to slip past a pair of vampires, but then, witches were something else.
“Oh boy,” Nails murmured. “There they go.”
Maestra rose to her feet and made to follow their friend. “And here we go. Again.”
The mirror and its magically projected firelight cast strange shadows on the walls that did nothing to reassure Jude that they weren’t all about to die in some horrible way or another. Dark shapes flickered across the glass surface, moving too quickly to catch another solid glimpse. He couldn’t tell if Eva was still there, or if she was hurt, or much of anything else.
“Should we follow her? Or stay where we are?” Pixie asked, sounding obviously apprehensive about either possibility. “The spell’s still going, I think. Does it need a witch to work? Or is it like, on autopilot or something? She told us to run if something went wrong, not what to do if she bugged out!”
“I don’t know, I only saw Eva for sure,” Jude said tightly. Her dirt-smeared and bruised face blazed in his mind as brightly as any bonfire. He, Jasper, and Pixie had rejoined hands, not knowing what else to do, and now both of his were thoroughly sweaty and cold.
FLASH. A brilliant light flared from the center of the mirror, shocking all of them into silence, except for a startled squeak from Pixie. Then it was gone entirely, as if the mirror were a lightbulb that had exploded, plunging them all into near-complete darkness.
“What happened?” Jude demanded. “Did we break the spell? Was it supposed to do that? Did Wicked Gold—do something?”
“I have no idea,” Jasper said breathlessly, sounding like he was still holding it together, but only just. “But I don’t think that’s how it was meant to go, and I’d say that a wildly malfunctioning bit of magic is our cue to leave!”
“Second!” Pixie said, before promptly turning into a small pink bat that attached itself to Jude’s shoulder.
The circle of hands broken, the three of them made a frantic dash for the cave exit and thankfully didn’t get lost on the way, bursting back into the mall without incident, which was, equally thankfully, still dark and empty.
“Wait,” Jasper panted as Jude made to sprint for the exit, coming to a stop. Jude whirled around, a frustrated retort on his lips, but stopped, seeing Jasper looking pained and more than a little scared. “Felix—I have to get home. I didn’t tell him about—I have to make sure he’s—”
“Go, I’ll go find Eva, and hopefully Letizia too,” Jude said, and Jasper headed off toward his shop, and its back exit leading toward home. “You can go home too, if you want,” he said to Pixie, who’d transformed back into a human, standing so close he was almost touching Jude’s elbow. “It’s probably safer there. Actually it’s definitely safer there.”
“I don’t think so,” Pixie said. “After what I saw in that thing—after seeing his face—I don’t want to be alone. Even if you’re going to where he is, I don’t want to—”
“Are you sure?” Jude certainly wasn’t.
“Yes, Jude!” Pixie practically shouted, voice echoing in the empty mall as much as it had the caverns below. His hands clutched at the scarf he always wore, the one covering the worst of his scars, and Jude was painfully reminded of exactly whose teeth had left them on Pixie’s neck. “I’m not letting Wicked Gold hurt any more of my friends!”
“Okay,” Jude said, as calmly as he could, though his mind still raced through possible ways to get Pixie out of there fast should tonight go even more wrong than it already had. “Okay, let’s go find them.”
Eva strained at the ropes binding her wrists. It was useless, and she knew it. She could no more escape them than sh
e could sit there and not even try.
“Don’t fight it,” Sanguine said quietly. “It’ll just make everything harder. Believe me, I know.”
“Well, you don’t know me, kid,” Eva returned, teeth gritted, but she stopped her struggling for a moment. If she pulled much harder she’d cut her skin, and if there was one thing she didn’t want to do around a hostile vampire, it was bleed more than she had already. “And you don’t know my friends. They’re all over this, and they’re coming for me—for us.”
“I told you, that is exactly what I’m counting on,” Wicked Gold said with a roll of his eyes, as if she’d just pointed out that water was wet, or that he was a bloodthirsty predator. “Are all humans this slow, or—ah!”
He exclaimed in delight and snapped his silver-clawed fingers, gesturing to the edge of the bonfire’s light, where a figure appeared from the darkness. Tall in flowing black, with a wide-brimmed witch hat. At the sight of the familiar silhouette, Eva let out a startled cry that quickly turned to one of joy. “You’re here!”
“Oh, good,” Wicked Gold said, a bright, gold-flashing smile spreading across his pale face. “Now it’s a party.”
“Let her go,” Letizia snarled, her voice distorted into a blood-chilling snarl no human throat could hope to replicate. “We all know it’s me you want anyway. You’ve got one blood bag, surely you don’t need another.”
“You can never have too much fresh blood,” the other vampire returned, picking Eva up by the collar with one hand and raising her up until her toes barely touched the ground. “And believe me, I’ve got exactly who I need.”
At the sight of Wicked Gold’s growing, terrible smile, Sanguine shrank back and slipped over to shelter by one of the stones. Owen also took notice, but he stayed where he was, straightening in clear interest for the first time.
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