Resist the urge to dismiss what you just saw.
I stood up from bed, staggering for the bathroom. I stopped, the tremor in my hands gone. Every inch the startled prey animal, where a sudden crisis leads to utter stillness.
My heartbeat felt slow, my gaze was no longer darting here and there. I was making eye contact.
It wasn’t my face in the mirror above the sink. Nor my body. A girl looked at me, her forehead creased in worry. She was wearing a camisole and pyjama bottoms. She looked strangely familiar.
I had to touch my own chest and face to verify it wasn’t my reflection. I was shirtless, wearing different pants. Her movements didn’t follow mine.
Instead, her fist struck the other side of the mirror. When she spoke, it was only a little muffled.
“Run,” she said. “Get to the house, now.”
“Which house? Who-”
“Molly’s dead,” she said. “You’re next.”
The conviction in her voice left me with no doubt she was telling the truth.
My voice was thin as I responded. “Molly’s dead? She was supposed to call if there was trouble.”
“Blake, I get it. I do. But you’re next, understand? Grandmother made other arrangements, and those arrangements just came into play. The house is in your custody now, and so are all of Grandmother’s enemies. Understand? She has a lot. The house is sanctuary, Blake. Molly died because she panicked, and she left the safe ground. Don’t make that same mistake. Move. Run.”
“But-”
“Run!” She hit the mirror, and it cracked from the point of impact. Pieces on my end fell, landing on the countertop and sink.
I ran.
1.02
I was dressed and heading out the door in less than a minute, a plain black toque pulled over my hair. I had to fumble around for a moment to manage the coat I was getting on, the backpack I’d stuffed with spare shirts, sweaters and underwear, and the keys I needed to lock my apartment.
I reached the stairwell and took the stairs three at a time, descending each half-flight of stairs in two steps.
Mirror people, visions of talking dogs and stretched faces, vampire hunters or witch hunters or whatever they were. It was unbelievable, impossible to wrap my head around. So I didn’t believe it, didn’t try to understand it. I didn’t disbelieve it either. I was processing it, really, filing it all away for future consideration.
It was stupid, maybe, crazy, to dismiss it. By all right, my worldview should have been turned upside down by this.
Except other things were taking a kind of priority, demanding consideration, turning my life upside down.
Molly was dead. I’d heard it, and I believed it. Taken alone, the statement might have meant little, but I’d had an ominous feeling since leaving the inheritance gathering. Right here, right now, I felt like it fit. I didn’t want it to, but it fit.
The gathering had been the first time I had seen Molly since we were kids. I could barely guess what she was like now, as a near-adult.
What she had been like, as an almost adult. I felt a twist of worry, and a fair bit of anger. Why hadn’t she called me?
For all the impact my family had had on my life, there were very few people I had ever had a connection with. I had never been mistreated, exactly, but there hadn’t been a lot of love to go around either. Molly and Paige had been the ones to greet me with smiles on their faces, to hug me instead of offering an informal handshake. We’d played together, laughed, and bridged the gap between being family to being friends.
When I thought of Molly, I thought of the child she had been ten years ago, not the young woman I’d briefly met at the end of the summer. When I reminded myself that she could well be dead, I felt like I’d lost something from a relatively small pool of happy family memories.
I reached the bottom of the stairwell, and as I hurried down the length of the hallway, past the elevators that would have taken too long to use, I was still trying to frame it all in my head.
Molly’s death wouldn’t have been random. There had been a reason, and that reason had driven my grandmother to do what she’d done. All of the fallout from that, the divide in the family, the animosity that had driven me from home to a cold, hostile, unfriendly world, shared that same root cause. It was hard to pin how much of my haste was self preservation and how much was my desire to get answers.
Molly was dead. I believed it. I could figure it out, I could get the world in alignment again, so things made sense.
If it was even possible for things to make sense with talking animals and twisted mirror-cities.
I stopped at the doors at the end of the lobby, paused, then knocked.
It took time for the door to open. I worked on getting my scarf on and making sure my backpack was buckled shut, keys stowed away.
The door opened, and my bear of a landlord stood in the way, leveling a stare at me. He wore an undershirt that strained across his stomach, and pyjama pants with pink and magenta stripes, with thick-frame glasses and thick caterpillar eyebrows on an otherwise hairless, unadorned head.