“So, that makes me, what, a half-vampire?”
“No, you don’t drink blood; it makes you half-Lich.”
Alice didn’t know how to process this, so she stood and put her hands on her hips. The story Isaac had just told her was exactly that: a story. An old folk tale. You could usually trust a Mage to hit you with a lot of tales and fables, given that knowledge was their trade. But could the story be believed in its entirety? Probably not. How could this
Lich
character have learned his magic would work on souls after he died? And where did Nyx fit into all this? She had been the one to feed a soul to Alice, not Lich. How did this act, performed by someone who didn’t even feature in Isaac’s story, relate Alice to Lich?
This story had more holes in it than Swiss cheese, but going over it in her mind wasn’t going to help her figure out the here and now.
“We’re going to have to table this story, Isaac,” Alice said, “I’m having a hard time trying to figure out why the hell Nyx went for the theater instead of coming straight for me. Is she trying to get more power before she comes to get me?”
“I don’t know, and we won’t know until we study the mirror further. It could be the source of her power, the reason she’s still active even after what you did to her.”
“Study? No. One of two things is going to happen here. Number one, I’m going to get the fuck out of town. Or number two, if the mirror is the source of her power, I’m going to destroy it and send her back to wherever the hell she belongs.”
“We can’t destroy it, Alice. What about Emily?”
“You said yourself that Nyx was the one interfering with your magic. If we destroy the mirror and send Nyx packing, you’ll be able to get Emily out of the Reflection no problem. Won’t you?”
“I… don’t know. It’s possible.”
“Then all you have to do is let me get close. I’ll do the smashing.”
“That,” Isaac said, standing, “I can’t do. Not unless you want to destroy some ancient heirloom moments before it is unveiled to the general public.”
Alice had walked toward her bedroom door, but she rounded on Isaac now, her brows pinched together. “What?” she asked.
“I told you earlier. I’m displaying the mirror tonight at the museum in front of hundreds of guests and esteemed colleagues, as well as possibly the artifact’s owner. Unless you want to be the one to explain to them why it’s been shattered to pieces, I cannot take any action that would put it in danger.”
“Wait a second, the owner is going to be there?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“How do you not know?”
“Because I’ve never met the owner, only Helena, the agent. And she hasn’t confirmed his attendance.”
“If the owner is there, I need to ask him some questions.”
“You’re assuming the owner is involved with Nyx. I don’t think he is. I think he’s just reclusive, like most billionaires and collectors tend to be.”
“Okay, fine, maybe he isn’t involved—maybe the mirror found its way to you all on its own. All the more reason to destroy it, don’t you think? You’re the curator, you have pull and influence. You can make this happen.”
“Being curator means I can sneak in an extra guest or two. Asking an entire security staff to look away while someone destroys our exhibit is something quite different.”
“So you’re saying we have to wait? That we can’t do anything today at all? Nyx
is
growing in power, Isaac—I can feel it. I need to destroy that mirror before she gets any stronger. I’ll break in and do it myself if I have to.”
Isaac approached—advanced toward her—and said, “You will not break into my museum or destroy the mirror. I forbid it.”
“Forbid it? You can’t forbid me from doing anything.”
“Alice, the Imperial Museum is
mine
.” Alice’s entire body shuddered at the sound of the word
mine
leaving Isaac’s lips. “You won’t get close to it, or the mirror, without my help. Help I am willing to offer, as long as you abide by my terms. But if you take any action that endangers my job, my artifacts, or the tight ring of secrecy I have built, you and I will be at odds. You don’t have any idea how relevant the mirror is or isn’t to Nyx. It could be worthless to her, for all we know. Destroying it could be a fruitless endeavor at best, or Emily’s death sentence at worst. If you know me at all, then you know I’m not a gambling man.”
Alice knew the mirror was important to Nyx. She could feel it in her gut that she had to destroy it, and
she
had to be the one to do it. As far as she was concerned, the matter was settled.
“Alright, Isaac,” she said, “You win.”
“This was never about winning, Alice. I want to help Emily as much as you do, but there’s a right and a wrong way of doing things. As it happens, I know what the right way is.”
“And what’s that?”
Isaac took a breath. “Come with me tonight, to the unveiling. I’m the curator which means I get a plus one.”
“You want
me
… to be your plus one? Isn’t there some other woman more suitable to be on your arm all night and make you look pretty?”
Isaac wanted to say
no
, that there was no one else he wanted at his side except for her, but he held back and kept things strictly business. “It wouldn’t be like that,” he said, “I could sneak you in, sure, open a back door for you. But if you came with me as my guest, once the event is going I can give you time in the room alone to learn what you can from the mirror. The guards wouldn’t interfere with you.”
Guest
, she thought,
not a date.
At first she wasn’t sure how she felt about his choice of words. She didn’t know whether being considered a guest and not a date stung, or whether it was the right thing for him to have said. It was possible, she suspected, that he could have said the right thing and for it to have still stung, but this implied a whole bunch of things Alice wasn’t willing to open herself up to yet.
Or at all.
“If there’s no other way for me to get close to this thing,” Alice said, “Then I’ll have to take it.”
Isaac smiled, walked past her, and then went through the door into the living room where he stood, checking his phone. “Come to the museum at eight,” he said, cocking his head over his shoulder, “And you know, I expect to see you in a dress.”
Alice turned around to face him, hand on her hip, blood rushing to her cheeks in a wild flush. Was she
blushing
? “You expect, do you?” she asked.
“It’s up to you, but if you want to blend into the crowd, you’ll wear a dress.”
“I’ll wear a dress,” she said, “But you have to get Nate in.”
“Nate?” Isaac’s smile melted away. “Why Nate?”
“Think about it. If we want to try and get Emily, we’ll need him. She didn’t trust us, but she’ll trust his voice… assuming we can even make contact with her.”
Isaac considered her request for a moment, then nodded. “I could make that work. I’ll need to pull some of those strings I mentioned earlier, but I can make it work.”
“Thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me. It’s a good idea. I was just looking forward to the idea of having you all to myself.”
“You forget we’re supposed to be on a mission, Mister Moreau.”
“I don’t forget anything, Miss Werner.”
The banter they were sharing filled her with a kind of relaxed joy she hadn’t felt in months. The smile that spread across her face was almost inevitable. Isaac was clever and sharp. He was never the kind of guy to tip-toe around a girl’s feelings and say only the things she wanted to hear. This was one of his best qualities: the courage he had to always speak his mind and challenge her. She had once loved him for it, had missed him for it.
She was beginning to feel something close to heartache when she felt it.
It happened in slow motion. First, her skin began to crawl. An instant later, she saw a shadow person manifest, like inky blackness spreading through the air, directly behind Isaac. Her heart jumped. She yelled for Isaac to duck, and he did so without question, throwing his hands up to cover his head just as a black tendril with a razor sharp edge came cutting through the air, slicing at the spot where Isaac had been only an instant ago.
The shadow didn’t make a sound, but the room had filled with a kind of whooshing rush, as if strong winds were spinning in an angry cyclone
inside
the apartment.
“Isaac, stay down!” Alice said. She lunged into the living room unarmed and without a plan.
The shadow’s writhing form melted, warped, and twisted to face Alice. When it opened its mouth, she saw row upon row of sharp, copper colored teeth sitting inside an unusually pink throat. Alice, out of options, put her head down, dashed across her living room, and charged the shadow creature.
She was expecting to go through it, but her shoulder made contact with something solid and she tumbled to the floor with the thing. For an instant, she had a hold of a shadow. Its body, if it could be called a body, was cold and airy, and smelled like the inside of a cave. But the thing jerked and shook itself loose, dispersed into the air, and reappeared in front of the closet door.
It cocked a thick, dark tendril over its head and poised itself to strike the closet door. Alice fought to get to her feet and threw herself at the shadow again, noticing only in passing that her hands had begun to glow with soft, blue light, and her veins looked like they were filled with black ink. But she was too late. The shadow struck the door with enough force to cause it to implode, and then fall off its hinges.
Alice felt the world tilt to the left while her stomach lurched to the right. She stopped in her tracks, as if the shadow had just hit her in the stomach. The ward was gone, the seal broken, and soon
they
would come pouring out of that dark room and back into the world of the living, eager for people to torment and possess. A heartbeat passed and nothing happened. Alice choked down her fear—even if she couldn’t release herself from the grips of shock—and willed her body into action. She couldn’t worry about the shadow. If her Chest had been opened, she only had one chance to shut it.
Isaac suddenly sprang into action ahead of Alice. He had his right arm curled parallel to his chest, his left arm low and by his side, and the bangle on his right wrist was glowing brightly. “I command you, spirit,” he said, “Attack me. Attack me!”
The shadow warped into a formless cloud and, an instant later, returned to a humanoid shape facing Isaac’s direction. It cocked a set of inky tendrils over its head, crossing them over its back into an X, and swung them at Isaac, but it was as if they had struck a solid wall of steel. The razor tendrils made a sound like clashing swords and the thing seemed to stagger.
Alice dashed toward her closet door, hoping that the Chest of Haunts was closed—that the wards within had held. She had to dig through the splintered remains of the closet door to get to it, but the chest was there—and the lock was broken. Pieces of it were scattered on the floor like a broken toy. Most worrying of all, though, were the two white Polaroid Instants she found face down on the ground.
As a battle raged behind her, sounding like something out of a medieval movie—steel ringing on steel—she held the chest shut with one hand and plucked the Polaroids off the floor with the other. One of them was a picture of a small store room littered with broken bottles, toppled over boxes, and shattered shelves. In the middle of the picture was a thick, wooden support beam rising from the ground to touch the ceiling, but the scraggy old man with the impossibly long limbs and sunken face wasn’t there. The other Polaroid was blank with the exception of a shimmering white light where the shape of a huge man wearing a gas mask strapped to his face once stood.
Alice’s heart was thumping so hard it was difficult to hear anything else. She stood upright, though doing so felt like it had taken hours and not seconds, and turned around just in time to see Isaac make a fist with his hand. As the shadow figure folded into itself, Isaac wound back his arm, made a throwing gesture aimed at the far wall, and the ball of living, writhing shadow went hurtling out.
The window broke apart with a deafening crash, sending hundreds of little pieces of glass into the afternoon sky. They glittered like diamonds as they fell out of sight. Isaac pulled his arm across his chest like an archer drawing a bowstring. His magic bangle glowed brilliantly, and each of the tiny pieces of glass flew right back into place, rearranging themselves into a perfect, unbroken window.
Isaac was panting, and the bandage on his forehead had turned red again.
Blood
. Alice, meanwhile, felt fresh—like she could run a marathon. She supposed this was the soul she had just consumed at work, instilling her body with vigor and vitality. The thought that she may have truly become some kind of vampire had crossed her mind once or twice, especially in moments like these when she felt almost invincible. Now that Isaac had used similar terms to describe her, she felt it more than ever.
But these were scary thoughts. Vampires were parasites, leeches—
lich
—feeding on the jugular of the world. Alice thought, though she supposed so did many vampires, that she had some kind of service to provide her fellow humans. Although, when she stopped to consider the things she needed to do to feel truly enriched and powerful, she couldn’t help but catch herself wondering about the similarities.