Mags didn’t budge.
“Mags,” I said, a little more forceful.
“Fuck you!” Callan shouted. “You come here? You make us more miserable, bringing shit up like this? Why? Why the fuck can’t you just give us some damn peace? So you can relieve the guilt a little? Fuck you!”
“Mags, get a grip. Callan feels guilty too, it’s part of why he’s seizing on this so forcefully,” I said. “Repeat after me. ‘Don’t you wish you could have done something more?'”
Mags spoke, as if she was very far away. “Don’t you wish you had done something different, too?”
“Fuck you,” Callan said.
But there wasn’t even half the heat in the words that there had been earlier.
“Fuck you too,” Mags said. She turned around, and she faced the pair. Molly’s ghost hovered a little higher off the ground. Mags’s voice was just a little choked. “Fuck all of us. This… this situation sucked. It was fucked up, and a lot of people weren’t able to see just why. I hate that.”
“You want to philosophize?” Callan asked. “Do it somewhere else.”
“Yeah,” Mags said. “Right.”
She made her way up the hill, taking a few steps at a time before pausing to look back and check on the scene.
“That didn’t work so well,” I said. “The family’s emotionally charged, and-”
“-And that right there is my frigging kryptonite,” Mags said. She injected false cheer into her voice, “But hey, bright side! When things go that shitty, the nightmares have gotta pale in comparison, right?”
“I think this is your prophecy at work,” I said. “It feels just a bit too contrived, pieces falling down in a very specific way. A leading to B leading to C…”
“We need to head it off,” she said.
“We do,” I said. “Listen, you might need to engage with Molly. If we can get a rapport going between you two, we can buy you time to do the thing. Do you think you can push through? I can talk to you, if you think you can focus on my voice.”
“Yeah,” she said. The mirror jerked, and the angle shifted vertically. She was bending down. I heard something crunch.
“Setting up?”
“I can have the rope soaking. I don’t know how well it’s going to hold moisture, but I figure we can pour the rest of the salt so it’s bordered by the rope, and the rope should freeze in place, at least a little… ah, they’re leaving.”
“Ready?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Molly’s coming to us, she’s not following her family.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“That’s-”
The perspective shifted. I had to shift over to avoid being caught outside of the light.
I had a view of the slope and of the little memorial, the latter of which was now clean and free of snow.
Molly held a position at the base of the slope.
“Frick,” Mags said.
“That’s where you stood when you watched,” Molly said.
Mags was frozen. Her eyes were fixed on Molly’s, and Molly’s stare was hard, still hollow with loss.
“Respond,” I urged Mags. Whatever my feelings were toward Molly, as one of my few good family members, the priority was keeping this situation from graduating from ‘shitstorm’ to ‘prophecy of fire and whatever else coming true’.
“Yeah,” Mags said. “This is where I stood.”
“I don’t know why I remember this,” Molly said, “But when they found me, they thought I was a mauled animal at first.”
“I told you that,” Mags said. “One of the first times I came to that memorial there.”
“You told me you were sorry,” Molly said.
“A lot of times.”
“Tell her you weren’t the only one responsible,” I said. “Laird played a part, and you were manipulated when you were weak and scared.”
Mags shook her head.
“No?” I asked.
“I’m not going to make excuses,” she said, not taking her eyes off Molly.
“I wouldn’t accept them anyway,” Molly said, with venom in her voice. She’d apparently heard.
That venom…
“Yeah,” Mags said. “I didn’t think so. What would it take?”
“You took my life, didn’t you?”
“Kind of.”
“Mags,” I said.
“Give me yours,” Molly said. “Give me that body. It doesn’t make up for it, but it’s close.”
Mags shook her head. “I can’t do that.”
“She’s a wraith,” I said, my voice low. “She’s… fuck. She absorbed the negativity from me, and the Thorburns, because they’re connected to her. And-”
“-She probably absorbed it from me too,” Mags said, without flinching. “Stupid of me. Selfish.”
“I don’t think it was selfish at all,” I said. “It was a sacrifice, the blood you gave her, to keep that memory alive.”
“Sacrifices can be selfish,” Mags said.
“Callan wasn’t wrong, was he?” Molly asked. She drew closer.
“He wasn’t a hundred percent right either,” Mags answered.
Molly changed course, toes barely touching the ground as she moved to keep about two arm lengths away from Mags and me.
Her hand took hold of the same branch that one of the goblins had been plucking twigs off of.
She lifted it.
“Fuck me,” I said. “How much power did you give her?”
“It’s not just me!”
“Molly,” I said, cutting in. “Listen, I know you don’t remember, but I have memories of us being close. You, me, and Paige, okay? If we could back down for five seconds-”
She talked over me. “This is between me and her.”
I fell silent.
Then I saw her moving the stick. The broken end dragged on the ground-
Drawing.
“Mags!” I said.
Mags moved, reaching for the stick.
Too late. Whatever Molly had been drawing, it was already finished. A rune.
The wraith swung the branch at Mags, who caught it relatively easily. Molly had strength, but that didn’t mean she was necessarily strong.
Molly let go, and raised her hand.
A gaping hole in the middle, one finger broken.
A dribble of ghost-blood fell on the rune.
“No way,” I heard Mags, as if she were barely in earshot.
Wind stirred, and blew at my hair. I felt feathers at my side shift.
“I think I need some space,” Molly said.
The wind picked up. But instead of shifting gears, so to speak, and cranking up to the next level of force, the wind kept getting stronger. A steady, constant speed.
There wasn’t supposed to be wind in my mirror domain.
“Get the rune,” I said.
I didn’t have a good view of what happened next. My attention was on fighting the wind. I dropped to all fours, to have more points of contact with the ground, my sweatshirt fluttering. Snow and ice swept over me.
I heard Molly speak.
“You’re sorry? Kneel.”
I half expected the wind to get stronger until I was forced out of the patch of light. That wasn’t what happened.