Page 123 of Oath of Revenge

He pulled out a larger hand-held mirror with a long handle. It was the size of Wulfric’s giant hand, with similar runes on the edges as the pocket sized ones. He pressed a few of the ruins, and magic shimmered as he talked.

“I’ve been cataloging all the mirrors in Busparia in my spare time.”

Kris snorted. “Who has spare time these days?”

John shrugged. “It helps me fall asleep. Anyway, this doesn’t have any sound, but do you see what I see?”

Scarlet stepped closer and narrowed her eyes. The image was murky, but she saw a shimmering yellow gown on the floor of a library. The woman was bent over, her lips moving as Scarlet watched her profile.

A pack of forks and spoons pushed a book off the second to bottom shelf, and the woman sat back on her haunches and clapped, a beaming smile on her face.

Scarlet gasped, “The queen.”

“Aye,” John said. “But something’s not quite right. See how she’s almost coaxing the silverware to open the book and flip the pages?”

“Where is this?” Scarlet demanded. Anger raced through her. The woman looked unchanged, happy and smiling in the library. It wasn’t fair, when Scarlet’s own world had been irrevocably changed six months ago. Her stomach tightened, and dinner threatened to come back up.

“Demerel in Busparia. The Winter Palace,” John said quietly. “When we reverse engineered the king’s spy mirrors, we began to find the patterns and sequences to the runes and magic. Each mirror has its own signature, so to speak. It’s taken months to go through, but the signatures just keep going. This is the only mirror left in the Winter Palace, though.”

Scarlet frowned, her brain whirling. The latest reports had the queen in the capital. What was she doing back in Demerel?

John touched some runes on the side, and the image wavered, fading to black before revealing a town square.

“This is a village ten miles outside the capital on the Newing River. We’ve watched it at various times and have seen the monsters that keep the curfew. This isn’t the only village like this, but the one most preyed upon.”

“Probably because of its proximity to the army base,” Kris scowled.

“You think they really are monsters?” she asked, watching as shadows raced down the dark street. It was too dark to truly see what they were, but they didn’t move like Growlers.

John stroked his white beard. “Daemons, most likely. Leopol showed us the one you defeated, and what we’ve seen in the mirrors are very similar in structure and movement, but not the abilities.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, her heart racing as she watched the shadowy creature.

“Not all of them can make a whirlwind of ice. Some burn down buildings and others simply suck the living into a pit of darkness.”

She frowned, her mind racing through the books that they’d poured over the past few days. She turned and found the stack on a side table.

As she flipped through it, she said, “That does sound like the daemons in this book Leopol found. Look here.”

She held it out, and John took it, nodding as she turned to the window. They talked quietly to each other as she walked away.

She could barely see the stars, it was so dark outside, the sliver of the new moon not yet risen. The Hunters—once armed with enough knowledge about the daemons—could probably handle them. They’d be able to track them down and eliminate them.

“Have you seen any other monsters in Busparia? Growlers perhaps?” She turned to face them.

John’s hand froze on the book, and they looked at her with eyes wide.

“Any that wear Buspartan clothing and a medallion on their cloak?” she pressed, not giving them a chance to respond.

John and Kris looked at each other, then John picked up the mirror and pushed more runes on the side. The image flickered to a dark room lit by a roaring fire below the image. Three cots lined the left wall and three the right, each with neatly tucked corners and nary a thread out of place. The entire room looked cleaner than any she’d ever seen.

Just then the door in the image swung open and in strode two Growlers. They ducked under the doorway as they entered, and she saw their shifted jaws moving as they spoke.

“Still no sound,” John said. “We’re working on it, but they are definitely in Busparia. We weren’t sure what they were doing there last month when we first saw them, but based on what Leopol told us while we were waiting for your dinner to end…”

He trailed off, but Scarlet didn’t need him to finish. The medallions on their cloaks were bright as day.

“Where is this?” she asked, licking her dry lips as her hands shook.

---