Page 1 of The Mirror of Beasts

GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT

Summer storms had a way of waking the house’s slumbering ghosts, drawing them out of the shadows and through locked doors forgotten decades ago. They peeled away from the walls, wilting with the faded silk coverings. They fell like dust from the sheets that covered once-sparkling chandeliers and the ornate furniture. If you closed your eyes, you could feel them gliding like ribbons around you, greeting you in every dark hall.

The trouble with these old houses, Emrys decided, was that the longer they stood, the more magic and energy and darkness they absorbed, until they became living things themselves.

They allowed their families to repaint their faces, to break the bones of their walls and reset them. They watched as children left and never returned, suffered the silent indignation of being sold to wealthy strangers. And all the while, as years turned to centuries and the houses remained, they patiently collected the dead of their families, swallowing the magic woven into their souls before their bodies had the chance to cool in their beds.

Once, when Emrys was five, maybe six, barely old enough to understand that death was the only certain promise of life, his mother had told him to talk to their house. To greet it as he came and went, and treat it like a friend, so that it might treat him like one in kind.

So he had. Hello, house; goodbye, house; you look exceedingly lovely today, house … Good morning, house. Sleep well, house …

And sometimes, in the haze of exhausted delirium, or after polishing off one of the lustrous bottles in his father’s liquor cabinet, he could have sworn Summerland House recognized him. Answered back.

Hello, boy.

And each time it happened, all he could think was I can’t die here.

Not like the generations of ancestors who’d come before him. The ones who’d laid the house’s first stones. The ones who’d expanded it into an estate. The ones who’d found the first relics now lavishly displayed in its halls. Both sides of his bloodline were brimming with Cunningfolk, and he knew the house had greedily sipped at their magic as they performed their talents, the way he could sometimes feel it doing to him when he worked in the gardens.

Named for the Otherland of the mysterious, and perhaps mythical, beings known as the Gentry, Summerland House wasn’t so much a member of Emrys’s family tree as the tree itself. All their lives had been carved into it, or maybe from it.

Emrys cleared his throat as he made his way down the shadowed hallway, listening to the rain battering the roof. With the invading damp came the musty smell of age. It clung to the carpets and velvet drapes, revived the moment the storm clouds appeared in the distance. The wind tore at the side of the house, as if trying to rip it out from its rotten roots. His garden would be a mess by morning, the flower beds flattened and the vegetables drowned.

“Evenin’, Grandmother,” he said as he passed the portrait of a stiff-backed, glowering woman. Emrys stooped slightly, using the clouded antique mirror beside the painting to tame the waves of his rain-slick hair. “How’s the view from down in hell?”

He almost laughed when a crack of thunder answered.

“That’s what I thought,” he murmured. He could practically feel her long fingernails digging into his earlobes to silence him. “Stay toasty, you old bag.”

The note crinkled in his jacket pocket as he tucked his shirt back into his jeans. He’d found it on his bed after crawling up the trellis to get back into his room. His father’s precise handwriting had sent a chill through him. See me in the study once you’ve returned from your tantrum.

Tantrum. His top lip curled.

After a dinner that saw his mother’s face cut by his father’s wineglass, and the struggle to get her safely to her room, which had left him hoarse and burning with rage, Emrys had gone for a drive. Through town. Through the next. Through the empty, winding roads until the sky was cloaked with midnight and the car’s gas gauge was begging him for mercy.

He’d had to get out of the house before he added one more ghost to its collection of Dyes.

Not for the first time, Emrys had been frightened by his own fury. Suffocated by knowing he’d inherited that darkness and it lived inside him like a seed, only waiting for the first drop of claimed blood to bloom.

I’m not like him, Emrys told himself, the words sounding as hollow to his ears as they felt in his heart. He could never keep that icy veneer of control that came so naturally to his father. I’m not a monster.

His lungs gave a painful squeeze as he checked his appearance again, swiping the back of his hand over his mouth.

The note hadn’t been a surprise. This was their routine, and Emrys knew what to expect next: his father would be brooding in his study with a glass of Scotch. Emrys would apologize. His father would not. They would agree never to speak of it again.

On and on, turning like the Wheel of the Year.

His feet slowed as he passed his parents’ wing of the house, but if his mother was still barricaded inside her bedroom, he couldn’t hear even a whisper of evidence. Rain thrashed against the windows, as desperate to get in as his mother was to escape. Neither ever succeeded.

On sunny days, Emrys could make a case for Summerland House feeling like a museum dedicated to the accomplishments of his great-something-or-others. The sword of Beowulf, its ferociousness dulled by age and the glass case that imprisoned it. Herakles’s bow. On and on; countless relics, stolen and traded and bought.

But on nights like this, when a chill crept through cracks in the window frames, when there wasn’t another soul around and the ornate sconces cast even the most brilliant treasures in ghoulish light, Summer-land House felt more like a mausoleum.

The long hallway brought Emrys to the marble staircase in the foyer. Then, just to the right of the entrance hall, the ancient black oak doors that guarded his father’s study. The spiraling patterns of crystals and iron hammered into the wood had their own dark beauty, but also told the story of his father’s poisonous paranoia. The sigils carved around them created a protective ward, impenetrable to anyone—mortal or otherwise—without an invitation.

Emrys, however, had the misfortune of being invited.

Ordered, more like, he thought, reaching for one of the silvered door handles. The shape of it, like a gnarled branch, reminded him instantly of the ridiculous pin his father and his cronies from the various Hollower guilds had taken to wearing. They fancied themselves a secret society, but their collective brainpower seemed to be somewhat lacking. As far as Emrys could tell, they mostly just met to complain about the sorceresses hoarding the best relics.

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