When Ashley opened his eyes, he saw an arm made of metal, with knives where the fingers should be, stretched out in front of him on the floor like it was part of his own body.
He jerked away, and slammed his back against something hard that echoed with the impact. Pain ricocheted across his shoulders and through his body. He could feel a bruise throb in the small of his back, just above his kidney, and his thigh screamed in protest when he kicked his leg and tore open a scab.
"Sweet Christ," he hissed.
It was agony but it was good, because it ripped him out of sleep and into awareness. He looked again, and saw there was no metal arm. There was only his own hand, covered to the elbow by the leather of his gauntlet, and a thousand shards of glass that sparked orange and gold in the sunlight falling through ruined windows. He eased onto his back, panting through his mouth when the pain flared.
Turning his head slowly, very slowly, trying not to wake any more injuries he'd managed to forget, he searched for the details that would tell him exactly where he lay. In front of his face were panels of wood, one flowing into the next as if they had grown that way on the tree, so closely joined that he wouldn't be able to slip his fingernail between them. They were carved with patterns of flames and the chi-over-bar that was the rood.
He was lying at the foot of the high altar in the cathedral of Lea Monde.
That the combined strength of earthquakes and sorcery the night before had not been able to topple the walls said more for the sophistication of the cathedral's construction than the power of the magic. Columns still stood, but they stretched up into empty air, and when Ashley stared upwards he saw a hole where the rood had been drawn in glass. Above that were buttresses with nothing to buttress. Above that, past arches that no longer touched in the middle, was the sky.
The last he could remember, it had been night. Now the sun burned around the edges of where the roof should have been. God alone knew how long he'd been lying there.
Well, perhaps not only God. Perhaps the dark knew, too. The dark seemed to know many things it shouldn't.
He swallowed. His throat was terribly dry. He couldn't remember how he'd come to be lying here, though he remembered killing Guildenstern. Or killing the thing that had been Guildenstern, before the dark got to him and ate him from the outside in. He remembered taking in a breath, thinking it was over, and then being struck by one specific pain, very deep, like ice, just where his skull met his spine, that overrode the rest of the cries coming from his body. And then he remembered... remembered...
Then he wasn't certain what he remembered. Coming down. Somehow. Finding Sydney, who had seemed dead, but then Sydney had seemed dead before in places where death was far more final than in Lea Monde, and hauling him out of the attic and down stairs that shifted under his feet even as he felt for the next step. Had he made it to the bottom? Had he fallen?
Where was Sydney?
Ashley took a deep breath because he'd been hurt before, never precisely like this, but badly enough to know what was coming. He rolled to his knees. Using his leg like that ripped open the wound and he shook with pain, dry heaving over the stones, all his weight on two hands and one knee and his head hanging down like a dog's. He could feel the blood trickling down his thigh. It would be wonderful if the rest of his body felt so warm. He clenched his teeth, forced his stomach to calm, and hissed the words of a healing spell.
Nothing happened.
"Now would be nice," he said to no one.
Still nothing.
With a sick feeling rolling through the pit of his stomach, he closed his eyes and thought about the advantages of just lying back down. Never mind if odds were he wouldn't be able to get back up again.
Of course nothing had happened. Spells couldn't work with the wellspring closed. There was no place to draw power from. Either the dark was restrained or the dark flowed free; it didn't work to have it both ways.
It would be incredibly ironic if he died after making it this far. Leaving things unfinished was a particular talent of his. He saw no reason why he should change his methods now and start cleaning up the disasters he left in his wake. Sweat made his palms slick and he slid down to one elbow.
A sliver of ice peeled away from his chest and screwed through his gut. At first, he thought that might be what it felt like when the muscle of the heart finally gave up and stopped beating. Then he realized he'd felt something close to this before. Just yesterday. Repeatedly.
It curled over his kidney and took away the ache of the bruise, and wound through his leg and flicked over the injury like the tongue of a cat, ungentle but cleansing. It didn't improve the pain in his head, but he was more than willing to settle for everything below his collarbone once again made whole.
Odd. When he'd cast for healing before, it had come over him like a blanket, wrapping his body and soaking inward through his skin. This healing was delivered with precision.
It didn't matter. He was able to push himself up, sit back on his heels, and not be swamped by dizziness. His thigh still ached. He rubbed his hand over it and started the spell again. The words came louder this time, but he hadn't gotten the first phrase out before the cold returned and drove out the last of the damage.
This was more than just odd.
It was also not his foremost concern. He looked amongst the shards of glass for a body, but saw neither flesh nor metal. He gained his feet, staggering, because healed wounds did not negate joints made stiff by a night spent lying on stone. Glass crunched under his boots as he stepped forward. He still saw nothing.
The chancel was not extensively damaged, but the nave was piled with the debris that had formerly been the galleries and the attic and the roof, and Ashley worked the knots out of his limbs by climbing over what wreckage he could not circumvent. He considered calling out, but the ruin was so full of silence that didn't see the necessity. Surely he would be able to hear if anything else was alive and moving.
Was Sydney buried under this, then? In the grandest sepulcher imaginable? Or had he gone to snowflies while Ashley lay unconscious in the quiet of the morning?
There. Just this side of the transept, near the aisle. A stain of blood on the marble, perhaps as far across as his outstretched arm at the widest point, and not yet dry in the divots where the stone had been worn down by two millennia of passing bootheels. Ashley circled it, but saw no spatter leading away.
Snowflies, then.
It was what they'd both claimed to have wanted, Parliament and Cardinal, though they'd never admit to sharing the same goal. One rebellion punished, one cult crushed, and both achieved with the same death.
But that left Parliament once more played for a fool by Bardorba, and the church outmaneuvered by the same man. And left without the power to fuel her revolution.
Pity that Ashley didn't give a damn about either. He should have known better then to trust the VKP, he of all people, when he knew the details of the things they sent him out to do. Certainly they had led him to believe what they knew was not the truth. The extent of the lie was questionable, but unimportant; he was done with being a tool of the powerful. They could send out another of their pets if they wanted a report. They'd get nothing more out of him. Anything he did now would be for himself.
He flashed on the image of a cloud of snowflies trailing behind him, dogging his steps wherever he went, through the years until he was too tired to run very fast, and decided it was beyond time he got out of this place if he was starting to see the humor in an image like that. His stomach growled, and gave him another reason to be gone. He'd be damned before he would take anything of Lea Monde for a meal.
Small mercy that the door was not blocked. He left the cathedral without looking back.
The streets were deserted.
He had not expected to encounter the living. Anyone besides him would have had more sense than to linger. Yet he kept a hand on the hilt of his blade as he strode down the first few streets, out of habit, and the remembered sting of lessons learned the hard way, unable to quite believe that he could walk around a corner, just like that, and not meet a threat.
There was change here. Yesterday the stillness, the stasis, the collective held breath of the city was enough to convince even him that magic existed. Today, he could look at a mulberry sapling rooted between the cobblestones, grown a foot and a half high, and believe with the same certainty it would one day kick up the pavement and start the city tumbling towards decay.
The air smelled like honeysuckle weed.
The catacombs were cold, with drafts coming from new fissures in the walls and the floor in front of him. There was enough rubble that he gave serious thought to the chance that the ceiling would collapse without the help of another quake. The shelter of an altar was questionable at best, but there was none here to offer even the possibility.
It was easier than the first time he had come this way. The only dead to be seen were the bones spilled from the loculi by the tremors. Anything more had gone to wherever the dead typically went. He wasn't a priest; he didn't care where so long as they weren't hunting him. Maybe they'd gone into nothing. Maybe they were still here, ghosts of ghosts, only he'd killed enough to have the scent of the dark on him and they had learned the wisdom of keeping to their holes.
A left turn, then one to the right, then straight through until he was forced to detour, temporarily, finding his way back to the path he wanted easily enough. That he was clear-headed even when fighting was one truth Sydney had gotten right, given how well he was able to remember the way out. Once again to the left, and when he had to crawl under a line of pillars that had failed to support the ceiling, he repeated, "Steady, steady," as he wormed his way elbow over elbow. It was debatable whether he addressed the pillars or himself.
"Almost there," he said, and he was; a handful of chambers remaining and he would be free of this place. He would see about finding food, and sleep, and then he would do something about the answers he thought he deserved. There was an old manor, in the north, where the Bardorbas had lived before seizing power over the Parliament, and finding they needed a palace to contain it all. The duke would be holed up there.
Ashley turned to his right, walked under an arch, and stopped dead.
There was nowhere to go. The doorway was filled with rock.
Not an illusion. Not a door, proper, sealed with a grimoire, but possessing a handle and hinges and the promise of opening if he only found the key. There was always a key when there was a lock. This was a barrier of boulders, of pieces of the wall, chunks of fresco, all outlined by the doorframe; solid, immovable.
Impossible.
He raised his hand and held it before the blockade, not quite touching, as if to touch it would be to make it real in a way that seeing it could not, but he lifted and held his palm before the door that wasn't. In supplication. In hope that he would feel some draft of air to negate the solidity of the granite. There was no draft. And he was not Sydney, to walk through stone.
He curled his hand into a fist. To be stopped by this. To be trapped by something as uncomplicated as rock, after the magics he had overcome. He shuddered with cold and his head throbbed, again, but instead of dulling his thoughts, it served as one more target for his anger. He considered driving his fist into the stone. Just because it would hurt. Half of all pain did not come from damage suffered by the body, but from the mind's fear that it would be permanent, and he was beyond that. He could heal. Considerable punishment could be self-inflicted, for that very reason, before he would have to stop. Breaking each of his fingers against the wall was not inconceivable.
His anger grew, and the pain fed on it, until it shot down his back like bone. The longer he held it in, the longer he waited before lashing out and not hurting the stone, the more it swelled until it was bigger than his body, and he felt it would turn him inside out and he wouldn't be there anymore. He stared at the rock that held him back and screamed, "I will leave!"
So he left.
One second, he was trapped under the city. In the next, he stood outside, under the sun, high field grass brushing the backs of his knees and watching Lea Monde gleam in yellow innocence across the water, with his throat sore but the headache disappearing as rapidly as it had come.
It had been like turning inside out. Only twice over, so that everything was as it should be once more.
Stubbornness was what kept him on his feet. Shock at having done what should not have been possible. Not without standing on a portal, or knowing the words of a spell, or having some resource beyond ignorance and a temper.
This wasn't him.
There had to be another explanation.
Only he couldn't think of what it was, just now.
He stood there, trying not to think, until his feet decided to move on their own, and carry him into the Graylands.
*
Two hours of steady walking brought him to a town.
He was walking into a wind that blew from the northwest, but he could hear no sounds of human activity. The roads should have been crowded at this hour of the afternoon, yet he saw no people. The buildings were loosely clustered on one bank of a river, and on the floodplain proper were the trappings of a camp, precisely laid out, with a dozen canvas tents still staked down and snapping in the breeze.
Apparently, the surviving Blades had been in too much of a hurry as they fled to stop and salvage their comrades' gear.
"Can't imagine why," said Ashley.
One building stood away from the rest, nearest to the road Ashley stood on. It bore a trade sign painted with an ivy bush, which creaked in the breeze. He peered through the window and found it uninhabited, but light from the window diffused off an elaborate mirror and illuminated racks of bottles, lying neatly side by side, their necks slanted down to keep the corks damp.
A very practical merchant. He knew there was profit to be made by trafficking in Lea Monde's vintages, but was not fool enough to think his neighbors would stand for a cache of bottles from a cursed city resting amid their homes.
He encountered no one as he walked through the streets. This place had stood too close to Lea Monde when the wellspring overflowed for there not to be consequences. And if there had been any stragglers too stubborn to leave at first signs of unrest, then occupation by the Blades, and the turmoil of yesterday had been enough to convince them.
There was an open square in the middle of the town, with a fountain at its center. An angel with a sword and robes of limestone stood on a plinth and gazed at the dry basin. Perhaps the spring that had fed it had been interrupted by the earthquakes. The largest house he had seen in this town faced the square, its front door open, and a standard with a crimson rood on a white field fluttering from a window.
If Ashley had been the man who had led knights to this place, he might have chosen this house as his headquarters. He mounted the steps and walked inside.
The first thing he saw was himself.
The wall opposite the door was not a wall at all, but a mirror. It coated the wall from ceiling to floor. It caught Ashley's image and flung it back at him; it caught the light he let in through the door and tossed it around the room to other mirrors, proper mirrors, hung in frames, until the room shone brighter than outdoors.
It made sense in a town so close to Lea Monde for the buildings to be warded this way. Everyone knew demons cast no reflections. A mirror examined each guest that walked into a man's home, and made certain he had not been wandering in the dark and returned with an alien soul appropriating his face. Ashley should have remembered this when he looked in the window of the wineshop; it was an old superstition, and one he'd seen before, particularly in the south, left over from the times before the Church. Of course the Church denied that anything had existed before her. She was immortal; how could there be any before? But her knights could not spare the time for a crusade to smash mirrors when there were enough enemies of flesh and blood to hunt.
Like himself, for example.
In this house, the mirrors spoke of wealth, as did couches upholstered with velvet, and a firegrate with overwrought rosebuds done in steel. There was a hall, and a dining room missing its silver (though whoever had stolen that had left the mirror at the head of the table), and a door that opened onto a garden between the house and the kitchens. Thyme and mint crushed under Ashley's boots when he cut through the flowerbeds to get to the vines. The grapes were only just turning red, but he didn't care; they tasted sweet enough. The kitchen had a cellar, and the cellar had barrels of flour and salt and onions and potatoes, and sides of meat hanging in the corner and scenting the air with a memory of smoke. Ashley found hard summer sausage, and cut some, and took what remained of a loaf of bread with pecans baked in it that sat out getting stale on the countertop.
He wandered the house as he ate. It was strange not to have someplace urgent to be. There were enough things to look at and no one to stop him, though he kept catching glimpses in mirrors and jerking his hand to his weapons before he realized it was his own reflection. He was tired. Too tired, really, to sleep, having pushed himself until this point to go just a little further, so that now his body rebelled and refused to let him rest. So he roamed, and waited for the crash to catch him up.
Most of the house held his interest, if only because he'd never had the opportunity to examine a place as lavish as this. Lavish, but not sensible. The swords and shields hanging in the hall would still be serviceable, if not for the damage that had been done to bolt them into place. He didn't like the study. Heavy drapes kept light from striking the books on the shelves, and there was nothing for the mirrors to show but more red leather. It reminded him of the offices of Parliament where he'd spent too much time waiting for orders. He rifled through the cabinets for the sake of being thorough, and found four bottles on a shelf.
"Please be from somewhere far from here," he asked as he lifted one down, and examined the label. Rhiet. More expensive than he could afford to drink. And from countryside a month's travel from Lea Monde. He grinned, and used his teeth to pry out the cork.
There were four bedrooms on the second floor, but only two, the largest, were filled with the everyday things that meant they were regularly occupied. The wardrobes in the room on the northeast corner held a man's clothes, cut for someone of a size near Ashley's, in fabric that was heavy and fine but for the most part unadorned. He was grateful for the simplicity. His own clothes were flaking dried blood. The selection was such that he doubted the loss of a few items would be noticed, so he took a shirt and a pair of pants, and a coat hanging from a hook in the back, and tossed them onto a chair.
The wine was half gone, but he felt no closer to sleep. He opened the doors to the adjoining room.
It was the room of the wife, or of the mistress, to judge by the mirrors, abundant even for a room in this house, including a cheval glass massive enough to reflect both a woman and the full skirts of her gown. The boxes on the dresser spilled combs and perfumes and paints. And jewelry. Ashley opened the lid of the largest box and flicked at the rings with their colored stones. He had no intention of taking them. Clothes, food, even wine he could rationalize as necessities. But only a thief would take gold. He dug his fingers into the tangle of chains to watch them slither over the back of his pale, slim hand, over the fine nails that were fragile white crescents of moon.
He hissed and ripped his hand back. The lid of the jewelry box clapped shut.
He stared at his hands, andt the black gauntlets that covered them to the elbows. He yanked them off and looked at the skin underneath. It was paler than his upper arms, but only because his forearms were so often covered by the gauntlets and did not see as much of the sun. Not the blush of the fingers that he had seen in the box. The nails were cut to the quick, and a scar shaped like a fishhook ran from the webbing between the first and middle fingers of his right hand to the meat of his thumb.
He recognized the hand in the box. He had held it in his own yesterday. Tasted the fingertips when they'd pressed against his lips.
It was Tia's.
"Too much wine," he said, and drained the bottle to prove it. "On too little sleep."
Or not enough wine, if he was capable of remembering Tia with such clarity that he had seen the twin freckles on the back of her hand. He considered backtracking to the study and fetching a second bottle. He did not want to be able to think.
He was cold, and he shuddered like someone was walking over his grave. Or as if he was walking over someone else's. Did Tia have a grave? He couldn't remember where it lay.
He turned and looked into the cheval glass, and saw Tia gazing back at him.
He stared.
He feared to blink, if it would break the vision. He walked closer. So did the reflection. She wore a white dress, and a lattice necklace at the throat (the one she said reminded her of chain mail, which reminded her of the soldiers in the storybooks, which reminded her of him), and there was an empty wine bottle dangling from her hand.
He dropped the bottle and glanced down as it fell, and saw Tia's dress, Tia's legs, Tia's feet in her leather sandals with beads tied to the ends of the laces.
"Christ," he swore, and it was Tia's voice, too. Although the true Tia would never have cursed so.
When he moved her arms, they felt light, the joints turning in a way that was smoother than what he was used to. The hemline of her skirt tickled his calves. One bottle of wine could not cause illusions like this. Before yesterday, he might have suspected he was going mad. This would be some peculiar form of delirium which twisted the senses, but left the mind expecting the normal, and shocked when it did not come. It would be like him to go mad and not enjoy his delusions. But he had seen delusions yesterday, and this was not delusion; this was inhabitation, with the world around him as vibrant and fully realized as it had always been.
Sydney had said Lea Monde granted gifts, but he had not said what he considered the difference between a gift and a curse. The Tia face in the mirror watched him.
Marco. He could be Marco.
He closed his eyes. It seemed like the proper thing to do. Not because he knew anything of how this magic worked, but because he didn't think he wanted to see how it happened if it did work. He tried to picture Marco's face. The images he managed were sketchy, features drifting out of focus, and if he had been asked to draw what his own child had looked like Ashley would not have been able to do so. What he could remember was how it felt to look at Marco. What he thought of when he saw that face with Tia's mouth and his own mother's eyes. So that was what he focused on.
He did not feel any change in his (Tia's) body, but it was ridiculous to stand alone in a bedroom with his eyes closed, waiting, so he opened them.
At once he noticed how perspective was skewed, as it often was in a dream, with the walls ascending to unreasonable heights, and the furniture grown large. When he stepped backwards, it did not feel as if he had moved at all because his legs were too short to take an adult's step. The mirrors on the walls, hung too high to reflect a child, showed pieces of the wall and of the ceiling, leaving him alone and intimate with the cheval glass.
To the mirror, Ashley said, "Hello, Marco." He found he had his son's lisp, even though his tongue knew how to shape language. Marco's mouth had not grown enough to bring it forth.
He rocked up on his toes, because he remembered Marco doing that when he was excited. It looked wrong in the mirror. Ashley was used to seeing it from above, from his adult height. He tried smiling, because Marco did that, too, and this serious look on his face reminded Ashley of a boy screaming when he saw his mother fall to the grass, and he didn't want to think about that. The smile looked strained.
Ashley closed his eyes again. Now that he knew he could see Marco, it was enough. This was real enough.
He tried others. His father. He wasn't sure if he was remembering him with any accuracy, or had filled in the haze with his own features. He tried someone living. Merlose. Merlose came easily, and he thought it might have something to do with how recent the contact, and that she had been in Lea Monde with him. This was only speculation. He wondered if there were rules, documented somewhere, and figured if there were they would be hard to come by. Otherwise, there would be legends of this, just as there were legends surrounding mirrors.
He tried being Guildenstern. Easy as well. And thrilling, especially to the strategist that slept somewhere under the exhaustion and the fumes of the wine. Because even while he sneered at the reflection of Guildenstern, he realized he would never be captured, unless it suited him, and he could hide among his hunters by taking their faces. A hart in the midst of warhorses. Uncaught.
Sydney had not said that, either.
The moment he thought of Sydney, he saw metal glint out of the corners of his eyes, and he turned his head away before he could see more.
That body would not be a disguise. Wearing that body would be like standing in the middle of a battlefield and raising his hands to catch the arrows. And he wasn't that eager to die. And Sydney, damn him, had known about this, and had not told him.
Ashley was not a mage. He was not a student of the occult. He did not strain his eyes over faded books in search of the words that would either kill him or make him invincible. He had other ways of being invincible: he killed the threat before it killed him. It was not possible for him to change like this, to vanish and reappear, to heal just by wanting it and reaching out and having the power there, without resorting to formula and cajoling.
If he were to take a crossbow and turn it to his chest and fire a bolt, would he have to make an effort not to die, or would the ice come unbidden to save his life?
He had told Sydney he didn't want this. Sydney never listened. Sydney always ran. It was his role in the hunt.
"Coward," Ashley said, in a not-Ashley voice.
He opened his eyes. Sydney was in the mirror. And this time, he would have to stay until Ashley decided to let him go.
Of course the arms were the first things he studied.
When he willed them to move, they moved, but they transmitted no sensation; when the bladefingers met, he knew they touched because he could hear them click, but he felt nothing. He splayed them, and turned them, and saw the image of Sydney's face that appeared, distorted, on the metal. He pressed the edge of the thumb against the frame of the mirror. The wood scarred under the mildest of pressure. If mahogany submitted, then living flesh would fear.
As Ashley had feared.
And why? He looked at this reflection, and studied it. Saw how frail this body was. Only the arms were strong. He had feared this? This was nothing. There was nothing here but a weak body under the symbols of the dark. And by facing him head on, Ashley could not even see the blood sin, as it had been on Sydney's back before Guildenstern had cut it away.
Ashley thought he should try cutting away the glamor for himself.
He lowered the hands to his hips, to the laces of Sydney's clothing, and severed them. He crouched and gripped the heels of the boots in his infinitely strong hands and pulled them and the clothing away. He left gashes in the leather where it snagged on the fingers. Standing naked before the mirror, he curled his lip and said, "See? This is nothing."
As ordered, the mirror looked. It showed Ashley his victory. It presented him with an enemy who was defenseless, because he could not move unless Ashley granted consent and proved the will, who could hide nothing because Ashley had taken all of his cover away. Ashley grew hot with pride. His sex got hard at this evidence of his own strength.
He reached down and touched himself.
He wasn't entirely certain that it was possible, that he would be able touch himself like this with cutting himself as well. But the palms of the hands fit perfectly when he cupped them around the underside of his sex and brought the fingers together, holding them safely away from soft parts of his thighs and abdomen. He should have known better. Sydney had designed these hands for himself, and while Sydney was many things, and most of them able to bring Ashley to anger, he was not a fool. He was not a man who would have designed something to replace nature, made it more perfect than nature, then neglected to provide for his own pleasure.
The metal was cold. Not enough to put him off, but in a way that kept him from imagining it was flesh. The alieness of it made it exotic, and that compensated for the distraction. It grew warmer as he moved the hand up and down. He ran one palm over the head to make it wet-- it was different from flesh in this way, too, because a very little moisture made it slick, and it didn't soak up the wetness as skin would-- and traded hands to make the stroking smoother.
He liked how the hands didn't yield even when he thrust up into them, and he curled the palms more so that it hurt when the skin was forced against the metal. He had never cared to get his fucking mixed up with his fighting. He had always avoided pain, or ignored it when he had to. But this Sydney-body seemed to want it, and took it differently than his own would have. He started twisting his wrist at the end of each stroke. The arms responded instantly, no hesitation between the thought and the action, though the hands themselves were dead. It made it more like being handled by someone else who knew exactly what he wanted and exactly where he wanted it.
His eyes were closed, as they always were when he brought himself off, but when he felt long hair clinging to his forehead and cheeks, he remembered to open them and watch the mirror.
A stranger's dark eyes. Sydney's skin was paler than Ashley's had ever been. It was flushed with blood across the chest and at the cheekbones. If Ashley did not look at anything but the face, he could imagine it was a blush. As if Sydney would ever blush. But if he did not know who this was, if he knew no name at all, and saw only a young man straining for his pleasure, he might believe it was blush. How old had Sydney been when he had failed to summon the dark and paid with his hands? Old enough that he had known what it was like to do this with his real fingers catching between his thighs, worming lower and back?
Ashley wasn't careful as he stared at Sydney in the mirror. He turned the fingers the wrong way and cut two parallel lines into the softest part of his belly. The blood ran down and stained the gold hair between his legs. It made Sydney shudder and gasp.
He was exquisite under the sweat and the blood. His eyelashes fluttered and he worked with fierce determination at his sex. He dirtied his fine voice by profaning the names of gods.
Then Sydney said, "Please."
Ashley burned. He came in pulses against the mirror, marking it, and he watched Sydney pant through to the end, shuddering and sighing, nothing like he had been last night, dying under Ashley's hands. His eyes were bright and cold. His lips curved up at the very corners. He looked like he was laughing.
Ashley froze, and remembered where he was, and who he should be.
He ignored the last twinges of pleasure. He lashed out at the mirror. It rocked back, but did not fall. He wanted it to shatter. He lifted his arm to strike it again, but saw whose arm it was, and could not move it.
He could not get away, because this was him.
Demon.
He sank to his knees and would have buried his face in his hands, like a child, except he could not bear to feel them anymore, and pressed his face into the carpet instead. Stupid child. He screwed his eyes shut and begged for his hands, for his arms, for his body. His.
He felt the pile of the rug itch between his fingers, and that was how he knew he was himself again. It made it safe to open his eyes. Yes, those were his own hands. He was clutching the carpet. He released it, got to his knees, and then to his feet, and looked into the mirror.
When he'd struck the mirror he'd moved it, just so, letting it see its match across the room. By showing one mirror to the other, he showed himself his back, and found the rood inverse tattooed there in red, cut into his skin like lashes from a whip.
A voice came from just behind him, very deep, with breath like ice, lifting the hairs where his skull met his spine, and whispered to him that demons cast no reflections.