She stayed on the far side, hands pressed against the ice on either side of the portal, frowning.
Her mouth was stretched in a permanent macabre grin, triangular teeth as long and narrow as any of my fingers meshed together seamlessly. In the relative light, I could make out the individual transparent scales, the veins that webbed beneath her skin’s surface, even the shadows of organs.
“Not too cold?” I asked.
She shook her head. Pale hair floated around her head.
“I wasn’t sure if it would be okay, but once that whole thing started, I couldn’t interrupt it. The portal might have come apart if I tried. I can’t go inside most houses anyway, and I didn’t want you to have a small body of water…”
I trailed off.
She took a second to enjoy her full range of movement, contorting herself as she turned two quick figure-eights in the water, chasing her tail for a moment, then doing another couple of looser figure-eights at the lake’s bottom, where the ice overhead didn’t hamper her movements. She gave me a thumbs up.
“Try talking?” I asked.
She did, raising her voice. Her voice came out muffled, obscured by the water. I couldn’t make out the words.
“You can hear me, but I can’t hear you?”
She touched one hand to her ear, then swam another figure-eight. I could see the vague shadows of her lips. She was smiling.
Better hearing, maybe, by virtue of a longer stay. Necessary for both predator and prey.
Change.
“We’ll need to work out some means of communication before too long,” I said.
She nodded.
While I was thinking about that…
There was an eerie double vision when I looked at her in contrast to the overcast sky that was reflected in the surface, as if both were transparent.
“Are you able to swim freely?” I asked. “Or is there a lot of strange darkness around?
She looked around.
She swam well out of my field of view. Her movements stirred the sand at the bottom of the lake, raising murky clouds. The time she took to return seemed reasonable.
Good. We’d verified she was in the real world.
“I’m stuck where I’m at, Green Eyes,” I told her. “I travel across reflective surfaces. You’re limited to water. Or can you climb up onto land if you have to?”
She shook her head.
“Right,” I said. “I, uh, hope this is better than your prior circumstances were.”
She nodded. She blew me a kiss.
“No killing, please” I said. “No maiming, though I don’t think you’re the type. You should have plenty of food at the lakebottom, and if you need to nourish your nature, you can always scare the wits out of people. Anything else, and you might bring unwanted attention down on your head, you’d get sent back there, to the Drains, and I’d feel guilty.”
She nodded.
She drew a little ‘x’ over her heart.
“I’ve got stuff to do,” I said. “Enjoy… this. Call my name a few times if you need something. I’ll be by to visit sometime soon.”
Fins at her elbows, spine, and the end of her tail fanned open wide, the membrane stretching thin enough to show the veins between the narrow bones. She swam low enough to have some freedom, and did more underwater acrobatics, enjoying the freedom, basking in the light that filtered past an overcast sky and the water around her.
I thought I might have heard the muffled sound of her yelling, through the water and ice.
I hoped I’d just done a good thing.
Hands in my pockets, I walked away.
I went the way Faysal had gone, but I didn’t disappear into any great, brilliant light. I hit the downtown area, passing by the cafe and various storefronts.
I spotted Peter and Aunt Steph in one store, buying clothes.
As far as I was aware, the vast majority of the hotels were in the North End. Prior to Johannes’ expansion, there hadn’t been much reason to stay. I thought I’d maybe seen a motel, but I knew my uncle and parents, and they wouldn’t be the types to take a motel over a hotel.
Out of my reach.
I could check in with Mags, but I didn’t want to intrude.
Let them hash out what they needed to hash out.
I’d made other promises. Stalling the family in their attempt to oust Rose was only one part of it, the Molly situation was on hold, and Rose was still cornered, with a lot of major players out for her head.
On a level, I was one of those players. She was toying with my friends, and she was tainted by Conquest.
I didn’t want her head so much as I wanted to clear it. To remove Conquest’s crown, so to speak, and give her the ability to think straight.
In an ideal world, I wanted her thinking straight before this situation in Jacob’s Bell devolved into utter chaos.
By process of elimination, there were only a few people I could go after.
I knew where Laird’s house was. I’d infiltrated it.
Working off memory and instinct, I skipped across patches of darkness and moved in the general direction of the house, hoping to spot landmarks I could use to close the distance.
In the end, it was easy to spot the house, even from a distance away.
Multiple cars.
Rather than skip across the patch of darkness in the middle of the street, a ten foot gap at most, I moved diagonally. Zig-zagging, I made my way down the length of the street, until the mass of parked cars and the countless reflections from side and rear-view mirrors gave me more than enough light to work with.
Windows were two-way, as reflections went. When I’d jumped through the factory window, I’d passed through the factory window. The only glass that had broken had been the glass I’d carried.
The interior of the house, however, was pitch black. The only thing I could see was the faint reflection of my surroundings and my own face.
Damn.
I paced the perimeter, not watching where I was going so much as I looked at the windows, trying to see if there was anything I could make out about the surroundings.
One rune on the gate to the backyard. I steered clear, even though it wasn’t replicated on my end.
By the time I’d circled back to the front, someone was stepping outside.
Two Behaims, older than Laird had been, but still possessed of the Behaim’s characteristic stockiness and ruddy complexions, heavy eyebrows, dark hair and dark eyes.
They got in their car. I double-checked which car it was, then got in the back seat of the same car, behind the driver. I had to lean to one side to see the driver’s door move, and quickly pulled my door shut at the same time.
Slightly off. It was three doors that closed, nearly in sync but not quite there.
I waited, tense, my eye on the one-quarter I could see of their faces in the rear-view mirror. My hand was on the Hyena’s hilt, though I couldn’t really do much with it.
“What’s wrong?” the woman asked. She seemed like the type that might be called a dowager, the sort of woman who’d have been called handsome more than pretty, back before age had taken its toll with wrinkles and sagging skin.
The man didn’t reply straight away.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Duncan urged us to be paranoid.”
“Don’t badger me,” he said, gruff. “It’s nothing.”
I let out a silent sigh of relief, more out of a desire to do it than any particular need to breathe. I shut my eyes, listening to the car.
I wasn’t entirely sure what dictated how things operated in my mirror world as opposed to the real world – I didn’t see cars traveling up and down the streets, for example. Sometimes things remained the same and sometimes they changed. A part of it seemed to have something to do with my own actions, and the force and effort I put into them. Stuff I put down tended to persist in the mirrorverse, but only if I did it while being mindful of the task, doing it purposefully.