I stop, take a breath I don’t need, and try to center myself. It’s not as easy as it would be if I had eyelids I could close or hands I could see, but I’ve had a long time to grow accustomed to the troubles of this world. Sometimes my body is solid and seems alive. Sometimes it passes through walls. Right now, it might as well be missing altogether. It’s all the same. I endure. I last. I am Jenna Pace, I am no longer Jenna-who-runs, and I will find my way out of this.
I don’t know how long I wait, a snake poised to strike, for my mirror to be uncovered. The world shifts subtly around me. I don’t know what that means, whether the mirror is being moved or whether mirror-landscapes just move sometimes, but I keep my place and my peace, and I wait as patiently as I can. Anything else would mean giving up, and that’s the one thing I can’t do. Patty wouldn’t want things to end this way.
I’ve been fighting to earn my way back to my sister for so long. I refuse to let this be what stops me.
When the mirror is finally uncovered, the shift is sudden enough to be jarring. One moment, the world is gilded silver, unbroken and unyielding, and the next, one entire wall of my existence has been replaced with a face I’ve never seen before, a man with wrinkles in the skin around his hope-filled eyes and a tight, miserly set to his sunken mouth. There are calculations scored into his skin like hooks, numbers I can almost see in the way he is assessing me. This man can see me.
“A ghost under glass?” he says. “That’s your miracle solution? How did you—”
If I am to do this, I must do it. I’ve never killed anyone before. I’ve saved so many lives, but I’ve never killed. Maybe the scales will balance. Maybe there’s a cosmic score sheet somewhere, and it will show that I am still a good girl. Maybe I don’t care. I will not end my existence under someone else’s glass.
Without thinking, without feeling, I move. I flow out of the silver and into the dusty blue of this stranger’s eyes, the mirrors he uses to see the world. I don’t see him as he stiffens, but I feel it, feel his heart start and stutter in his chest, feel it fall out of synch with itself. If I was going to let him go, this would be the moment to do it. I can’t, I can’t. I still feel the mirror pulling on me, trying to drag me back into its borders. If I let go of the man who has become my anchor to the real world, I’ll be pulled back into the silver in an instant, and I don’t think I can do this again. It hurts. The silver clings to the outline of what should be my skin, burning and blistering me.
The first one who looks will die, I think, and that’s what the stories always said: that the mirror had to be covered until the ghosts had gone, or the first person who looked would feel their heart stop in their chest, would feel the world ripped away and shredded into nothingness. Not the second, not the last; only the first. Witches don’t count, or I wouldn’t be able to move, but still. This is not something I can do again.
The world has always had rules. The trick is finding them.
I am not possessing him, this cruel-lipped man who picked up my mirror and looked at me like I was the answer to a question he’d almost given up on asking. I am . . . inhabiting him, shoving myself into the space between the intake of breath and the beating of the heart. His breath hitches in his chest one more time before he collapses, crumpling to the floor like so much discarded meat. The silver tether snaps as the mirror drops from his hand and shatters, smooth glass becoming powder on the concrete floor of the alley behind the theater.
I am free.
Substance comes back to me in an instant, my feet hitting the ground a split second after the mirror, standing over the fallen body of the old man who would have used me to make himself young again. I turn, and there she is, the new witch with Brenda’s eyes. Teresa. That’s what Danny called her.
She stares at me, eyes wide and frightened. Then they narrow, fear giving way to rage.
“You little poltergeist,” she spits. “Do you know what you’ve done? That was Jack Bandy. He was the oldest water witch this side of the Mississippi. He has allies you can’t even imagine, and you’ve killed him. They’ll end you.”
“First person looks in a mirror, their heart will stop. If he was a witch, guess you didn’t count because you put me there.” I step away from the body, cooling meat that I made, corpse that I put into the world. My eyes remain on Teresa. I can’t trust her not to have another mirror ready and waiting. Woman like this, when she goes to war against the world, she does it with all the tools she thinks she’s going to need. “Where’s your mama? She probably has a few things to say about this whole thing. Don’t think she’s going to be too happy with your part in it.”
My accent is coming back, stronger than it’s been in decades. I sound like the Hollow, and not like the washed-out memory of the South I’ve been since I left. I’m glad of that much. If this is where I end—if this alley is where I get locked in glass forever—I may as well go knowing that I sound like home.