10.01
“Evan,” Rose said. “Step away from the mirror.”
“Why?” Evan asked.
“Because stranger danger,” Ty said.
“But he’s got sparrows on him. Sparrows like me,” Evan said.
“Johannes likes dogs, you don’t want to be a dog around him,” Rose said.
“No, but…” Alexis said. Her gaze was fixed on me. It was clear that she didn’t recognize me, and that wounded me as sure as anything.
Even if I knew she was a stranger, a false friend that had been propped up somehow to make me a part of this world… it hurt. I knew myself for what I was, but I was still Blake. My memories were still in my head, they impacted who I was.
I still felt a bit of an ache when I looked at Alexis, a whole mess of complicated feelings.
I stood in the midst of the light that leaked through the window and into this mirror realm. Where the mirror’s field of view didn’t reach, there was only darkness.
I’d known from the moment I’d seen the graffiti, reversed. From the moment I’d exited the drains, I’d been in the mirror world.
“But, Alexis?” Rose asked. “You’re going to need to elaborate.”
“The bird tattoos… that looks like my work.”
“It is,” my voice came out a little hollow, a little rough at the edges.
“But I don’t do projects that, uh, extensive. Never work on the face.”
“You didn’t,” I said, staring down at the tattoos. “It sort of got away from me. Took on a life of its own. Technically, you didn’t even do these, I don’t think, but it is your work, all the same.”
“Who are you?” Rose asked.
“That’s a very good question,” I said.
“It’s a question that I’m wanting an answer for,” she said, “I don’t want evasion.”
“Oh?” I asked. “But you’re so very good at it.”
Stupid, I thought.
But somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to take back the words, or to go on talking. With a kind of hunger, I studied her expression, to see if her betrayal ran so deep that I could somehow see a tell or clue in her eyes or the tilt of her frown.
She’d lied to me from the start, risked my life. She’d stonewalled me and frustrated me at every other turn, and why? Because I wasn’t real, and she’d known. Now she was risking the lives of my friends.
Yeah, not quite my friends, but people that I wanted to protect all the same.
She was talking about dealing with Demons. Using them.
I watched the others exchange glances. Rose didn’t turn away from me, always keeping me in the corner of her vision, but she did give the others sidelong looks.
“You have me at a disadvantage,” she said, turning her gaze away from my friends, back to me. “You seem to think you know me, but I don’t know you.”
That I. I smiled a little, then walked off the edge of the patch of light and over to the nearest reflective surface. The television screen. I watched them collectively turn, a little too fast, even alarmed.
“Once upon a time,” I said, “You got quite upset with me for that use of ‘I’. You’re part of a team, Rose, remember? Try rephrasing it to ‘You seem to know us, but we don’t know you.”
“Let’s skip the quibbling and cut right to the part where you tell us who you are?”
I touched the television’s surface. The surface vibrated at the touch, like a plucked guitar string. The other’s reactions suggested they didn’t see it.
I sighed. “I’m Blake Thorburn. I was second in line to get custody of the Thorburn household.”
Rose arched her eyebrows. “There’s a few big holes in that idea.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m missing a bit of chromosome. People that stand up to pee aren’t supposed to inherit the house.”
“Yeah,” Rose said, “that’s one.”
“I was your metaphorical stunt double, Rose,” I said. “Metaphysical? Both?”
I paced back to the other patch of light. Transition from one patch of light to the other was near-instantaneous. There was no space between but what my mind needed to piece together to make sense of the relation of this space to the real world.
I continued, “I was the second custodian, but that doesn’t mean I was the second heir. You were. Grandmother apparently wanted someone with an unhealthy amount of paranoia and tenacity to weather the initial attention. You got stuck in the mirror, and you got the time you needed to read up and figure stuff out while I fought the faerie and the chronomancers, and the Hyena and all the others. Then I get taken out of the picture, and you get to hit the ground running.”
“That sort of fills in the gaps,” Ty said.
“Yeah,” Alexis and Tiff agreed.
Rose was silent, frowning a little.
“You stopped the Hyena?” Evan asked, a small note of awe in his voice.
“Yeah,” I said. I held up the remains of the sword, then realized that the particular details weren’t even visible anymore. The image of the Hyena’s head on the guard, the pommel… it had been worn down too much by the drains. “This was him, after he was bound. Maggie said something about that, and there might be something about goblins becoming weapons in the books…”
I trailed off. Evan was still looking up at me. He was falling apart, feathers coming out in clumps, sticking up where they were starting to come out.
I gripped the top of the mirror, hanging from it as I leaned forward.
“…We were allies, Evan,” I said. “You were my familiar. A soul with a bit of freedom spirits and wind spirits and spirits of escape and whatever else. Then Ur ate that connection, that bond, and maybe a little bit of you is falling to pieces and a little bit of me is falling to pieces, because that connection is now some gaping wound.”
“Were we friends?”
“Yeah. We got along quite well,” I said. “I think… I dunno, a familiar and his practitioner are supposed to have a connection, and we had that. Mutual admiration, maybe, if that’s not making too much of an assumption.”
“You admired me?”
“Damn straight I admired you,” I said. “You survived, you endured, you escaped.”
I let my arm fall from the mirror’s frame on my side of things. My finger brushed the border. A bar on my extensive cell.
“I died, though. I’m dead, you know,” Evan said.
“I know. It’s not like I did that fantastically myself. Look at me.”
“So we know who you profess to be…” Rose said.