Page 63 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 2

She tilted her head to the side. “All right, not bad. A little rough around the edges, but I can definitely polish it. What about unofficially?”

I grinned at her. It almost certainly looked manic, but Gwendoline only raised a perfectly groomed eyebrow.

“Unofficially? I’m going to go be with the woman I love.”

22

EVANGELINE

The hidden spot in the woods was not what I’d expected. It wasn’t warded or marked with warning signs and standing stones—none of the signs I’d gotten used to. Lately, every time I was in the woods it was because I was around ley line crossings, and the landscapes there tended to reflect the magic surging through them. So, it was a little odd to be in what was basically just a normal patch of woodlands.

The cottage didn’t have the decency to look mystical or dangerous, nor did it look like something out of a storybook. It was just a tiny, shitty house that had been abandoned. A large, fallen branch lay across one corner of the roof, and the paint was off the boards. The windows were dingy but intact.

“This is it?” I meant to make it sound more certain, but the place just seemed so… normal.

Damien shot me a wry glance. “Roland tended to save the flashy shit for when he had an audience,” he said. “This is more his individual style.”

I checked the door for spells but didn’t find anything. When I reached for the knob, Damien put a hand on my arm, stopping me.

“Let me go first,” he said, nudging me aside. “There’s a lot more than just magic that Roland could’ve used.”

“Suit yourself.”

Standing off to the side, Damien opened the door carefully. A crossbow bolt flew out of the darkness with a noise like an enraged hornet and buried itself in a tree across the clearing. If I’d opened the door, the bolt would’ve hit me in the center of my chest.

“Okay, yeah,” I said. “You can definitely go first.”

I sent a small ball of light into the cabin ahead of us, and the light reflected back from dozens of surfaces. Mirrors covered the inside of the cottage. They hung from every surface in all shapes and sizes, ranging from full-length and four feet across to tiny flecks of silver the size of my thumbnail. The mirrors were speckled with age, but there was still plenty of surface area left unblemished. It felt like walking into an inside-out disco ball. A cluster of bottles and brushes gathered dust on one table along with a few sheets of thick glass. More sheets of glass were tucked into racks below the table, and the green edges of them caught the light oddly. Not just a cottage, then. A workshop.

I tried to meet Damien’s gaze in one of the mirrors, then rolled my eyes. He was invisible in all of them, of course. It was bizarre to see the room reflected from so many directions without the man next to me appearing in any of the mirrors. On every side of me, the mirrors reflected each other, sending images of me arcing away into infinity. I shivered. The infinite repeating reflections put me more on edge than the crossbow bolt had. I was gonna freak the fuck out if one of my reflections moved in the wrong direction.

The crossbow was mounted to the wall across from the door. Damien broke it out of its mechanism, hefted the thing, glanced around, then dropped it to the floor.

“No extra bolts,” he said. “Probably not worth looking for them.”

“Let’s just find the wand as fast as we can and get the fuck out of here,” I said. “I’m not someone who freaks out easily, but I can honestly say this place gives me full-blown heebie-jeebies, and I don’t say that lightly.”

Damien snorted.

There were multiple rooms in the cottage, I discovered, but they were all extensions of the workshop. No doors separated the rooms, only curtains. I pushed one aside, holding my breath as a cloud of dust rolled off it. Even more mirrors covered this room, and a larger rack of glass was set against one wall. There was a small, utilitarian kitchen with a wood stove and a fridge that looked like it was from a time when people still had to get ice delivered. A small bed was tucked against the wall on the other side of the room. It was more of a cot with delusions of adequacy and pushed out of the way like whoever had lived here had considered sleep a necessary inconvenience.

I kept trying to look at Damien in the mirrors, and it kept not working. There could’ve been another vampire in here with us, and I would be so focused on the mirrors, I wouldn’t spot them until it was too late. It wasn’t a reassuring thought.

“I don’t even know where to start,” I muttered.

Damien was exploring the tiny kitchen—the mirror-maker had even hung their work on the cabinet doors. The reflections swooped dizzyingly as he opened the doors.

“Wait,” I said. “Close that one again. Slowly.”

He did, keeping it in place when I held up a hand. With the mirror on the door angled, I could see something in the one near me that my own reflection had blocked. One of the mirrors, just one, reflected a drawer that wasn’t in the room.

I approached that mirror slowly, reaching out to feel for magic. A faint buzz came from the glass, so distant I wouldn’t have noticed it unless I already knew what I was looking for. The mirror was an oval one, maybe one foot wide and two feet tall, with a simple black frame. I touched the glass, and it rippled. It was cool to the touch and moved under my fingertips with a texture similar to a water balloon. I pressed forward, and my hand sank into the surface. It was tricky work—I had to watch the reflection of the mirror on the cabinet and then coordinate my hand to fumble toward the handle of the reflected drawer. It was like trying to fix your hair in a non-mirrored webcam turned up to a thousand. Finally, I felt the handle. I grabbed it and pulled, and the door slid open smoothly, gliding out of the surface of the mirror. Inside was a long, narrow, velvet jewelry box, the sort of thing a necklace might be put in. It opened with a satisfying snap, and I sucked in a breath. Inside, resting on a cushion, was a wand.

For a thing that apparently held so much power, it was simple. Really more of a stick, honestly. The birch bark was still around the handle, and the whittling to shape the length of it was rough. A lump of polished jet was set into the back of the handle, making it look like the pupil of a mad, staring eye marked out by the wood rings. Even with how crudely made it was, it was still appealing. It looked like it would be good to hold, nicely balanced, a perfect fit for my hand…

Damien snapped the lid shut, nearly catching the tips of my fingers. I’d been reaching for the wand without even realizing it. I shook myself. With the box closed, the pull of the wand faded. Still, I handed it to Damien.

“I think maybe you should carry this,” I said.

---