Dark Siren (21 page)

“There was. I know I saw something when I took it, I felt the camera drain my energy, too, and it only does that when it works. There should have been someone here. I remember seeing the impression against the flash. I thought I had taken a picture of one of the flying shadow things, but what I saw was a woman.”

“The shadow woman?”

Alice nodded. “It must have been. I couldn’t capture her the first time, so I wouldn’t have captured her this time either.”

“Alice,” Isaac said, “Steady yourself and think. You can’t ignore what’s going on here. You know better than anyone else what happened to me back then. You know who did this to you, what she is capable of.”

She could no longer avoid it. The truth came bubbling up in a cold wash of realization. All of the pieces were fitting together, had fit together from the very beginning, only Alice hadn’t wanted to believe it, had wanted to deny it until the very last moment—until it came up and slapped her in the face.

First there was the manner in which Emily disappeared. Humans didn’t just get dragged into the Reflection, this was a special power Alice had only ever seen when she had been stolen across herself. Then there was the song, the music. Alice had heard this music when she was trapped in the Reflection, too. All the time. She had even heard it before she was taken—a dark siren which only she could hear. Finally, there was the pain Alice felt on her back where she had been surgically cut open by
Pain Children
; spirits that had been created by the very entity who had wanted to take Alice’s skin and wear it.

The shadow woman’s name was Nyx. After two long years, she was back.

“Nyx,” Alice said.

Isaac nodded. He had tried to get her to see it back at the theater, but she had ignored him. “It has to be.”

“Then we need to leave.”

“I am not leaving.”

“You need to get the fuck out of here, Isaac. I’m not kidding around. You need to go, and I need to go too.”

“Go where, Alice? Where are we supposed to go?”

She was already moving to her bedroom. Isaac followed, his body both warm with thrill and cold with dread, a sensation which made him feel like he was walking a tightrope above a chasm without a safety net. Alice slammed the bedroom door shut, denying Isaac entry and forcing him to wait outside.

“Alice!” he said through the door, “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know where I’ll go,” Alice said, “But if she’s here, then I need to get the hell out of here.”

“Why? You’ve encountered her before. Help me understand why this is different.”

“You don’t need to understand. You just need to leave. I shouldn’t have gotten you mixed up in this.”

“I am already mixed up in this, or have you forgotten?”

Alice let out a cry of frustration as she yanked open the door. “I used to think you were stupidly smart but now I think you’re just
stupid
. You know very well who Nyx is, what she wants, and why she’s a danger to us both.”

“Of course I know who Nyx is. What I’m trying to figure out is why your initial reaction is to run. You’re strong. I’ve seen it.”

“If I tell you, will you
leave
so that I can grab my shit and get out of here?”

Alice wasn’t the kind of person to wear her emotions on her sleeves, but she was letting her fear hang out for Isaac to see without concern. To hell with it. Everyone was allowed one fear, one phobia, one thing they didn’t ever want to get near again if they could help it. For Alice, this fear was
Nyx
.

“If you leave, what happens to Emily?” he asked.

Alice swallowed her anger, even if she couldn’t swallow her fear, and thought hard. “Emily will have to strike out on her own. I can’t help her.”

“I don’t believe you’ll leave her to die in the Reflection if you can help it. Not after what happened to you.”

“You don’t know what happened to me.”

“Don’t you dare,” he said, “I was there with you, Alice. I knew only what you told me, but I figured out the rest and tried my best to help you. All I wanted to do was get you through the worst of it and find ways to make your life more comfortable. If I don’t know everything, then tell me the rest, Alice. Allow me to understand. I am the only person who can help you, and you are the only person who can help Emily.”

“Yeah? And who helps you?”

“My Guardian,” Isaac said, flatly.

Alice had tried to unbalance his argument and it hadn’t worked. Now her logical mind was starting to gain ground over her emotions. There was a pause, long and heavy with the sounds of hard breathing. She planted a hand on the door frame, sighed deeply, and looked up at Isaac.

“When I was in there, in the Reflection,” she said, “Nyx was there.”

“This much you’ve told me. What you haven’t told me was what she wanted with you that she couldn’t have gotten from anyone else.”

“They hurt me,” she said, “Her Pain Children—the spirits—they hurt me. Over and over again. I forget the specifics, but the scars are still there, the ones in my mind and on my back. She wanted to keep me there, to transform me, and to possess me so that she could advance her own fucked up agenda. She told me my song harmonized with hers more than it did with anyone else on the planet. Me out of eight billion people. It was flattering for a while, but then she hurt me again, and she fed me a soul so that I wouldn’t die. Then she sang to me, she possessed me, and she used a mirror to get us both out of the Reflection. I only escaped her grasp because… because I was smarter than her, stronger willed than her.”

“A mirror?” Isaac asked, as if he had ignored everything else she had just said.

“Yes, a mirror. She used it to bridge a tunnel between the Reflection and this world; it was her way of getting out.”

“I think I know what mirror you’re talking about.”

“What?”

Isaac didn’t reply. He seemed to be thinking, deeply lost in thought.

Alice started to shake. “Jesus, Isaac. Can you say something?”

“A couple of months ago,” he said, “I struck a deal with a woman named Helena for an item called Hermes’ Mirror. It was going to be—
it is
—the prized display at my Greek exhibit. It’s hundreds of years old and somehow still in very good condition. I offered to restore it for the owner of the item, and Helena was able to negotiate with him to lower the asking price, putting it within the museum’s budget. One day, when I was working on the mirror—dusting it and using magic to repair the frame—I thought I saw someone reflected on the glass, someone who wasn’t really there.”

“Isaac,” Alice said, raising her hand to her mouth.

“I’ve never seen Nyx. Spirits are mutable, only conforming to the shape they choose to take. But now that you’ve told me all this, and I’ve had a chance to piece things together, I’m starting to believe it was her I saw that day. It was only for an instant, but it must have been her. It must have been Nyx.”

She remembered seeing a picture of the mirror in the paper just yesterday, but she hadn’t recognized it. She hadn’t even considered that it could be
the
mirror—Nyx’s mirror. Nyx was here in Ashwood, and her Pain Children—the things responsible for the scars on Alice’s back—weren’t far behind.

One of them, in fact, may be sitting in her closet right now.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Half-Lich

Alice felt like her throat had shrunk to the size of a pinhole, and that she might pass out at any second. Nyx wasn’t just
not gone
, like Alice had thought. She was back, she was in Ashwood, and she had stolen someone across to the Reflection just as she had done to Alice two years ago. It was history repeating itself. The only difference this time being that Alice would get to experience it from the other side of the mirror. Emily was the victim, and Alice was the only one who could get her out.

But Alice hadn’t quite made up her mind whether she would stay or not. Staying meant fighting, and when she dug inside herself she found an empty well from which to draw strength. It had taken everything she had to break away from Nyx last time. She had barely made it out with her life still in her own hands. Thinking about the fight made her feel tired and weak. She sat down on the edge of the bed, buried her face in her hands, and sighed deeply as she considered her next move.

It now made sense that the gas mask man had escaped confinement—it was no ordinary spirit. The gas mask man and the three shadow entities were some of Nyx’s Pain Children, ghosts elevated by her touch to become something else entirely. This changed everything. She had been able to catch the gas mask man, but his strange nature had enabled it to break out of her Chest of Haunts and attack the wards on the closet door.

But it had come from one of the film reels in the theater, hadn’t it? Nate had said the man had come out of the projector. Alice herself had seen the shadow entities on the main screen before they began attacking. Were her magic wards weaker than the ones at the Cinema Royale? If so, who had made those?

“That’s where she was hiding,” Alice said, “In the mirror.”

“I’m sorry,” Isaac said, “I knew there was something curious about the mirror but I didn’t know what it was. This spirit was clever enough to avoid my detection.”

Alice resurfaced and looked at Isaac. “She isn’t just clever, she’s powerful, Isaac. I don’t think you understand just how powerful she is.”

“I probably don’t.”

An instant of silence fell between them as Alice considered what to ask next. Outside, a distant police car siren blared, racing into the depths of the city to halt some crime or another.

“Nyx used a mirror as a conduit into this world,” Isaac said. “When you came out, you didn’t destroy Nyx, you cast her back into the Reflection. She may have had some kind of control over the mirror—she would have to—in order to ensure it would not be damaged when you regained consciousness. She must have moved it somewhere safe, maybe into the hands of some unsuspecting collectors who could, later on, deliver it to someone who could repair it. To me.”

“That’s a real stretch, Isaac.” Alice stood, approached her closet, and pulled it open. There was a suitcase inside that she pulled out. “You’re saying Nyx wanted to make sure the mirror found its way to you.”

“Think about it. She didn’t start acting until I repaired the mirror. Maybe her using it to leave the Reflection had damaged it somehow.”

Alice didn’t reply. Instead, she began throwing clothes into the suitcase.

“There’s something else,” Isaac said.

“What now?” Alice asked, turning around to face him.

“You said yourself you took a piece of her with you. So, however powerful she was, she isn’t anymore. It could be that she’s here to take back what you took.”

“Don’t you think I don’t know that? I didn’t want
this
to begin with. I only took a piece of her because I thought it would help me break away. And it did, though I still don’t exactly know what I’ve become. The point is, after I came back from the Reflection, everything changed. I was happy before, Isaac. Happy in my job, with my house, with my life.”
Happy with you
, she thought, though she didn’t allow the last part to leave her lips.

“I think I know,” Isaac said.

“Know what?”

“Know what happened to you, what you’ve become. I had noticed a couple of things about you, but it wasn’t until I discovered your hunger for souls, and after what you’ve told me, that I realized.”

Alice stared at him like a six-year-old might look at a teacher, eagerly awaiting the answer to a tough question. “I want to know,” she said.

Isaac nodded and began.

“They say the first vampire wasn’t a vampire at all, but a powerful Necromancer who, upon dying, discovered he could manipulate and consume human souls with magic. This Mage went on to develop dark, blasphemous rituals which would enable him to steal the essence of a person’s soul, capture it, and consume it in order to extend his own life and keep Death at bay. But like all Mages, he got greedy.

He wasn’t satisfied with extending his life by minutes or days. He wanted years, and then he wanted centuries. So he recorded his rituals and continued to experiment, amassing a cultist following who would help him with his work. One day, one of his cultists killed him, and they feasted on his blood, his flesh, and his soul. He was, in essence, the father of vampires—creatures who must drink the blood, the life force, of humanity in order to survive. This man’s name is lost to time, but any who speak of him or his condition refer to him as
Lich.
”

“Are you saying I’m some kind of vampire, then?”

“Not exactly. You’re alive. Vampires aren’t, and neither was the
Lich
. According to the story, Lich died before he started eating souls which makes him one of the undead. After they ate him his cultists all died too, and
they
awoke as undead, as vampires, under Lich’s control. You can capture—and need to eat—souls, but you’re alive and, as far as I can tell, you aren’t immortal.”