Smoke and Mirrors (39 page)

Except it didn't seem to be as dark as it should be.

“Amy?”

No answer, just the almost echo of a nearly empty room.

“Stephen? Cassie?”

Nada. Just Karl crying and the band playing on.

Since he was still fairly certain he was alone, precedent suggested that the extra light making it possible for him to see his surroundings wasn't a good thing.
Okay, so maybe I shouldn't have skipped over that protection spell . . .

It was the mirror.

It was glowing. It was glowing like a computer monitor. The mirror was picking up the light of the monitor aimed at it from the far end of the room and reflecting it back. Which was impossible.

Vampires, wizards, ghosts . . . Your life is a freak show and
this
you find impossible?

So what had just happened? He'd been staring into the mirror and suddenly, with Caulfield all up close and personal with the glass, the world went wonky. Odds were good it had something to do with the mirror. Like the mirror had . . .

. . . moved.

“I'm an idiot.”

And the benefit of an empty room was that no one agreed with him.

The mirror had moved. Specifically, Caulfield had moved the mirror. Why would a man carrying a journal he kept hidden in the library move a mirror?

Making a wide circle around the desk, still a little weirded out by the whole Caulfield experience, Tony retrieved his laptop and with it balanced in the curve of his left arm examined the mirror frame. And if he was more than a little careful about not looking in the glass, who was going to know?

There had to be a hidden latch.

If he could get it open and expose the hinges, he had complete faith in his demolition ability. If he could get the mirror off the wall, next time Lucy went swinging he could stand behind the desk and use it to read the reflection of the journal entries. In spite of what Henry seemed to think, the odds were good that the exposed pages wouldn't contain detailed instructions on thing-in-the-basement removal, but any information was more than he had now.

About to run his finger along the edge of the frame, he had a sudden memory of one of the gaming geeks at film school yelling at the screen during
Name of the Rose.

Everyone had roared with laughter when Sean Connery'd fallen through the floor a second later. Best part of a long and boring movie as far as Tony was concerned, given the distinct lack of Connery and some skinny kid actor doing the nasty.

“Homoerotic subtext, my ass.” Setting the laptop down, he pulled his keys from his pocket and opened his knife. “Where was the action?”

The blade caught about an inch from the bottom on the left side, but no amount of wiggling it made anything happen. The light was so low and the wooden frame so dark he couldn't see exactly what was stopping the knife.

“Stephen! Cassie!”

The dark didn't seem to matter to them. Maybe they could spot what he was missing.

“He's calling us.”

“I know.” Stephen turned away from the mirror and smiled. He almost looked relieved. “But so's Dad.”

“He's not . . .”

Stephen raised an eyebrow.

Just on the edge of hearing. More a feeling than a sound. Their father calling them back to the past. Back to the ax. Their wounds disappeared as they faded and the two voices became one.

“I guess death's a decent excuse.” Tony winced as the impact of ax against door seemed to shake the whole house. On the bright side, he had the afternoon sunlight back and could actually see what he was doing. Could see cracks too regular to be actual cracks in the side of the frame.

The mirror was the same in his time as it was now. Same mirror in the exact same place on the stone. So although he couldn't touch this mirror, he could touch the mirror in his time. The same way he could reach out for the door to the ballroom. Right?

Only one way to find out.

From the sound of the screaming, Cassie and Stephen had reached the bathroom.

He pressed his thumb down on the wood between the cracks.

Didn't seem to be any.

The piece of frame under his thumb depressed slightly, then swiveled away. At least that's what he thought it did. He closed his eyes quickly as sight and touch veered off in different directions.

His fingertips found a finger-sized hole in the midst of metal parts.

But a knife blade fumbled in by touch didn't work. Neither did a key.

A final thud from the second floor. He cracked an eye to determine that yes, the lights had gone out. Karl and the band started up almost instantly.

In the light of his laptop held up to the frame, he could see that a two-inch veneer of wood had opened to expose the latch works. Mechanism. Thing. He squinted and tried for a slightly different angle. There seemed to be something
in
the finger-sized hole. Something pointy.

Something pointy that glistened.

“Oh, give me a fucking break,” he muttered as he maneuvered his knife blade back into the hole and scraped a little of the glistening away. In the slightly blue light from the monitor, the drop of liquid on the edge of the steel looked purple.

Apparently, it took a blood sacrifice to open the mirror.

This blood was fresh.

Creighton Caulfield had just opened the mirror.

With Karl ready to hit the fire, if he was going to do this, he didn't have time to dither. Not that fear of having his soul sucked out his finger was exactly dithering.

It hurt precisely as much as he thought it would. And, oh great, he'd just exchanged bodily fluids with a crazy dead guy from the beginning of the last century.
Kind of makes all those condoms seem a bit redundant.

And closely following that thought:
Henry's going to be pissed.

But the mirror swung open, exposing a shallow hole in the stone about a foot square and maybe four inches deep.

In the hole was a book.

Out of replay or not, Tony half expected his fingers to pass through the book, but they closed around the worn, red leather. It should have smelled of mold or mildew, but it didn't, it smelled like smoke—made sense he supposed, it
was
in a chimney. The leather felt greasy and a little warm. And it was heavy. Heavier than it looked anyway. A quick flip of thick, cream-colored pages showed notes and diagrams written and drawn in thick black ink.

Nowhere inside or outside the book did it say that this was Creighton Caulfield's journal.

But then, it didn't have to.

Tucking the book under his arm, Tony closed the mirror just as the lights came up and Karl started to scream.

Tony almost joined him. Creighton Caulfield's reflection stared at him from just behind his right shoulder. Heart pounding, he spun around, but there was no one in the library, no one standing behind him close enough to touch, and, when he turned again, no one in the mirror.

It wouldn't have been so bad, but the son of a bitch had been smiling.

“Brianna's gone!”

“What?”

Zev yanked Tony the rest of the way into the butler's pantry, cast and crew scattering back from their entrance. “The girls were sleeping over there under the counter. I went to check on them and she was gone. So's the second lantern.”

Tony glanced at Ashley still curled up on a pile of discarded clothes and then stared at Zev in disbelief. “You had got fourteen people in a six-by-ten room. How the hell could she just grab a lantern and leave?”

“Look, it's late. People are tired and that damned music is distracting.”

Wait.

“You can hear the music now?”

“Yeah.” He winced. “The trumpet's off a semitone.”

“She probably went to the bathroom.” Tina lit another two candles and handed them to Kate. “There. This room is lit. I'm going after her.”

“I'm going with you,” Zev declared.

“Maybe she went to look at the burning baby,” Ashley offered sleepily. “She's always boring yack yack yacking about it.”

“She's your sister.” Tina frowned down at her. “You should be worried.”

Ashley snorted. “As if. She once rode a polar bear at the zoo.”

No one in the room assumed it was a scheduled ride.

“How did she get into the polar bear enclosure?”

“No one knows.”

Mason did a fast soft shoe, his white shirt gleaming almost as much as his smile. “Maybe she went dancing.” He started humming along with the band.

“Stop it!” Eyes wild, Mouse grabbed his shoulders and shoved him into one of the canvas chairs which rocked and creaked with the force of the landing. “Stay there! Don't move! Nobody move. They can't find us if we don't move!”

From the total lack of reaction, Tony realized that this was just more of the same. Mouse was dealing with Mason, having apparently worked the no-longer-entirely-stable actor into the scary movie playing out in his head. Kind of the inmates running the asylum, but if it worked . . .

The situation had clearly deteriorated while he was in the library. The thing in the basement had made significant inroads into the minds of the shadow-held. So far, no one seemed about to do its evil bidding—unless its evil bidding involved dancing in an enclosed space—but things didn't look good. Pavin and Saleen sat one on either side of Kate, who was scowling—no big surprise there—and the sound tech held a prominently displayed roll of duct tape. Lee stood by the far wall, arms wrapped around his torso, head down, eyes closed. He seemed to be muttering under his breath but didn't look likely to either make a run for the ballroom or commit mass murder. Or commit mass murder and
then
make a run for the ballroom.

“Tony!” Peter pulled him around. “What about your ghost buddies? Can they find her?”

“I haven't seen them since they told me about the laptop. I called, but they didn't answer.”

Hope faded, but he rallied quickly. “All right, we'll do it without them. Tina, Zev; take the lantern and check the bathroom. While you're up there, check the burning baby room.”