Crown of Glass

by Isabella August

  Adrian groaned from the floor. Jenna didn’t bother to suppress her snort. “Morning, sunshine,” she said. “Had a little too much caffeine?”

  The vampire blinked red eyes at her. “Jen?” he mumbled.

  She grasped at a shaft of moonlight, twisting it around to coil at his throat. His eyes widened at the purely physical display of magic.

  “Do not call me that,” Jenna hissed at him. “You bloodsucking, medieval parasite.”

  Adrian sucked in his breath, still staring at the serpentine moonlight that wavered just beneath his chin. “What… exactly would that do to me?” he asked carefully.

  “I really don’t know,” Jenna told him. “In the real world, it would probably dig up your worst memories and feed them back to you bit by bit. But in Arcadia…” She shrugged. “Maybe your worst fears will show up to have a word with you in-person.”

  “…so this is Arcadia,” Adrian observed, with a calmness that she was sure he didn’t really feel. “I suspected, but I wasn’t entirely sure.” He closed his eyes. “All right. This is entirely fair. I understand why you’re upset.”

  Jenna raised her eyebrows at him. “Upset is an understatement,” she said. “You threatened to drain me dry, and tried to use me as a bargaining chip to steal a warlock’s true name.”

  “That is all entirely true,” Adrian admitted. “I did threaten to kill you. I was bluffing on that count. If you’ll recall, I thought you were blissfully unconscious and incapable of fear at the time. I didn’t think it would do you any harm in the long run.”

  The moonlight at his throat twitched, and he stopped breathing. “You tried to sell me to a warlock!” Jenna burst out.

  “If I had his true name, I could have gotten you back afterward!” Adrian’s breathing sped up minutely. “I swear, Jenna, I was just trying to work with what I had! I’m not a monster!”

  “Swear,” Adrian’s voice commanded from the mirror. His reflection stared down at him with imperious red eyes. “Swear to Jenna, monster. With his true name.”

  Adrian glanced at the mirror, wide-eyed. “What… what is that?” he whispered in horror.

  Jenna smiled in satisfaction. “That,” she said, “is the Lord of the Looking Glass. And if you want to discuss nightmares… boy, are you in one now.”

  Adrian closed his eyes, and stopped breathing entirely.

  “You want to discuss nightmares?” Jenna’s voice whispered from behind the mirror. “You are in the Looking Glass, boy.” Adrian’s reflection flickered into shadow. Silver burned away at his red eyes. The shadows closed in around them, ominous and threatening. “Swear to Jenna,” his own voice commanded again.

  Adrian shuddered. The sheer desperation of his situation must have penetrated. Slowly, he stuttered out an oath. “I swear on the name Adrian Cloutier,” he choked out. “I am telling you the truth.”

  The weight of the shadows lessened very slightly. Slowly, they retreated back to their corners. The Lord of the Looking Glass straightened in the mirror, arrogantly pleased.

  Jenna knelt down next to the vampire. “Adrian Cloutier,” she enunciated carefully. He cringed at the sound of his true name on her lips, and she smiled. “You’re going to have a hell of a time trying to hypnotize me now that I have your name. That’s good for you. It means we get to have a real conversation now, and you get a chance to earn some brownie points with the angry faerie lord over there.”

  Adrian licked his lips. “I’ve given you an awful lot of control over me,” he said carefully. “Might I ask in return that you loosen this spell?”

  Jenna considered that. “You could still attack me physically,” she observed. “You’re definitely faster than I am... but I really don’t think you’re faster than a faerie lord in their own realm.”

  She gestured toward the rippling moonlight at his throat. It coiled slowly away from him, wrapping itself back around her like a serpentine aurora.

  Adrian sat up gingerly, still shivering. He cast a wary glance toward his sinister reflection. “I was only trying to help you,” he told Jenna.

  “Now you’re stretching,” she said acidly. “You brainwashed me into being your personal blood bank.”

  Adrian winced. “…yes,” he said. “I have little excuse for that. You presented the opportunity, and I took advantage of you. A witch’s blood is potent. Every time I fed on you, it sustained me for a good long while. I didn’t have to search out anyone else.”

  Jenna narrowed her eyes. “You feed on other patients,” she accused him.

  “I need to eat, for god’s sake!” Adrian burst out. “I tried doing it the right way, Jenna. For years, I tried to be reasonable with people, forthright. I explained myself every time, and I asked permission. Do you know what it got me? Ostracized. Threatened with murder. Starved and exiled.” He shook his head. “I defy you to spend a hundred years desperate for food, when you know there’s an easier way right at your fingertips. It may not be right, but sometimes there are no right options.”

  “And sometimes,” she gritted out, “you really go above and beyond. I trusted you, even though everything I’d ever heard told me I shouldn’t have — and you mindscrewed me. And now, you get to dig your way out of the very deep hole you’ve dug for yourself, without the benefit of your moral high ground.”

  Adrian leaned his forehead against his arm... but not before Jenna caught the flicker of shame that crossed his face. “What do you want from me?” he asked quietly.

  “The same thing I wanted before,” Jenna told him. “I need to fix Gabe. His mind is in pieces. If I don’t find a way to stitch him back together, the Looking Glass might just fall apart with both of us in it, among other things.”

  Adrian shook his head slowly. “I meant what I said before, Jenna,” he told her. “Warlocks accept a shard of Arcadia into themselves. It takes an incredible amount of discipline and a strong sense of self to endure that kind of transformation. The talent that you and I carry would shield us from that somewhat, but Gabriel didn’t have that buffer. If he really was mortal before that happened to him, I can’t see a way to restore him to his old self. That kind of power displaces and disrupts things.”

  “He really was mortal.” Adrian’s voice echoed calmly from the mirror. Jenna glanced toward the faerie lord there. “An incredible mortal. Talent and discipline. Gabriel meant what he said before, to accept the power of Arcadia. I can’t restore him to his old self. Arcadia disrupts him; he disrupts Arcadia.”

  Jenna set her jaw. “I’m not going to give up on him,” she told Adrian. “So we’d better figure out a way to do the impossible.” She gestured around them at the eerie café. “It’s not like you’ve got anything else to do right now, is it?”

  Adrian sighed. “I guess not,” he muttered. He pushed slowly back to his feet. “I only interacted with him for a little bit. He’s clearly in a dissociative state, but I couldn’t tell much more than that. There’s little chance that he’ll let me hypnotize him — but he’s got a pre-existing relationship with you. That means he might trust you enough to let you muck around.”

  Jenna crossed her arms over her chest. “With my magic?” she asked. “Like with the phobia patients?”

  “Like with the phobia patients,” Adrian confirmed. “Though this is likely to be a lot more delicate and a lot more dangerous. Do you know what happened to the pieces that he’s missing? The ones that Arcadia replaced?”

  Jenna shifted uneasily on her feet. “He stashed them in the Looking Glass,” she said. “That’s why it’s falling apart. They’re… not good memories. Or maybe they’re not memories, exactly. I think they’ve got pieces of who he is bundled up with them, too.”

  “You need to stitch them back in, then,” Adrian said. “You’ll need his explicit cooperation. I don’t expect it will be a short affair — you should probably plan to take advantage of every edge you can.”

  Jenna pressed her lips together. “You’re my first edge,” she said. “So grab another cappuccino and settle
in. I want you to walk me through this.”

  It was hard telling time in the Looking Glass. But as Jenna slipped back out of the Java Lounge, she found herself with the distinct impression that many hours had passed while she strategized her approach with Adrian.

  The Lord of the Looking Glass had followed Jenna out of the café, shadowing her movements in the form of her reflection once again.

  “Where’s Gabe?” Jenna asked with a frown. “Is he still asleep?”

  Jenna’s reflection paused. Her eyes narrowed. “Where’s Gabe?” she muttered. She sounded vaguely annoyed. The faerie lord’s eyes flashed silver again. Ghostly images flickered across the mirror where she stood — brief impressions of a thousand different strange reflections, all of them just a little bit wrong, compared to the things in the real world that they reflected.

  The images stopped flickering on a broad, sunlit city square. All straight lines in concrete, steel, and glass, it was a place that Jenna knew well. “Dundas Square?” she muttered. It was one of the busiest areas in Toronto. Surrounded by downtown shops, Dundas Square was often a center for festivals and concerts, and a common area for buskers. The Looking Glass seemed to have gotten some weird ideas about the square, though.

  Digital screens advertising bizarre things stared down upon the fountains inset into the ground. “Money is all that matters,” one flashed, over the picture of a luxurious sailboat. “We’re a community,” protested another one, as the discordant strains of a city busker hummed through the screen. “Buy more things!” one gushed, over the face of a gorgeous, smiling supermodel.

  Gabe was striding through the square with purpose, heading toward the center, where one of the fountains dribbled into a glassy green pool. He gestured toward the fountain, and light refracted sharply away from it, opening the Hidden Path back to the real world.

  The Lord of the Looking Glass stepped back from the mirror — and Jenna saw that it had become less solid than before. On a hunch, she stepped through… and found herself standing a few feet away from Gabe, in the mirror image of Dundas Square.

  He glanced toward her sharply, his pale green eyes alarmed. “Jen,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  Jenna frowned at him. “You’re leaving,” she observed. “Why?”

  Gabe took an uneasy breath. His glass-green eyes evaded hers. “…the fetch disappeared,” he said. “Um. Violently.”

  A chill went down Jenna’s spine. “Someone killed me,” she said. “That’s what you mean.”

  Gabe held up his hands. “I’m just going to go look around,” he said. “I shouldn’t be long.”

  Jenna narrowed her eyes at him. “Like hell,” she said. “I’m not letting you run off alone to go chat up whatever psycho just killed me.”

  Gabe shook his head slowly. “Jen,” he said. “It’s not a good idea for you to leave.” There was a vague, distracted look in his eyes as he said it.

  “It’s not a good idea for Jen to leave,” the Lord of the Looking Glass repeated, behind her. Jenna whirled, and saw that the faerie lord had taken on Gabe’s form once again. Two pairs of uncanny glass eyes considered her from either side, and she felt a spike of irritation.

  “I really don’t give a damn,” Jenna informed them both. “I’m not going to sit here like a good little girl, waiting to find out whether Gabe is ever coming back or whether he’s gotten himself hurt on my account.”

  Gabe’s expression closed off. “You can’t come with me,” he said. It was a flat declaration… and all the more infuriating because she knew it was him saying it, her Gabe. His voice had a familiar, stubborn tilt to it. Go back to bed, Jen, he’d say in that tone. Don’t strain yourself, Jen. I’ll deal with it, Jen.

  “You said you wouldn’t force me to stay here,” Jenna hissed at him. “Was that a lie, Gabe?”

  Conflict flickered behind his eyes. He hesitated. “It’s not a good idea,” he said again.

  “I’m not letting you do this alone,” Jenna told him quietly. She met those blank eyes directly. A slow, growing worry had unfurled within her stomach. I can’t trust you. I don’t know who you’ll hurt, if I’m not there to stop you.

  Gabe didn’t move. She saw him hardening himself again, getting ready to deny her.

  Jenna took a sharp breath… and shoved past him for the Hidden Path.

  Gabe’s eyes widened. He reached out to try and stop her. But just as his fingers closed around her arm, Jenna stepped the toe of her boot into the fountain’s reflective pool…

  …and the world turned upside-down.

  The real Dundas Square came rushing in like a freight train. Noontime daylight hit Jenna in the face full-force, accompanied by the sounds of the busy lunchtime rush. Someone shoved past her, splashing through the fountain’s puddle. Gabe kept his grip on her arm, catching her against him, and she realized that he had followed her through the Path.

  “You need to go back!” Gabe yelled over the crowd. Even standing right next to her, he had to pitch his voice louder just to be heard. “You shouldn’t be here—”

  Danger pinged on the edge of her senses. Jenna opened her Witchsight on instinct — just in time to see a wash of inky darkness yawn up from the ground to close around them both.

  A deep, cold blackness settled into Jenna’s chest, prying at her emotions. The little bit of hope and happiness she’d managed to claw back for herself in the last few days leached away from her, into that darkness. The world felt numb.

  This is Capricorn magic, Jenna thought dimly. A really powerful Capricorn. It’s weighing me down, sapping my motivation.

  Knowing that was the case and doing something about it were two entirely different things, though. It took so much effort just to breathe.

  Gabe’s hand tightened desperately on her arm. A flicker of silver light fought back against the darkness… but it was splintered, frenetic. The Looking Glass was good at fighting back light. Darkness was a different matter.

  Someone else grabbed her other arm. Jenna fought back sluggishly, but she would have had trouble breaking that iron grip, even if she’d been at full strength. Her assailant hauled her away from Gabe, and out of the darkness.

  Jenna choked on sunlight. The leaden misery of that magic began to leak away from her bones.

  The woman who held her arm was a bit shorter than she was, but much more solidly built. She was dressed in slim, utilitarian black clothing; her long, dark hair tangled around her face, barely-brushed. Her eyes were hidden by opaque, mirrored shades — the sort that Jenna liked to call bitch glasses. In her other hand, she held an ivory charm that looked as though it had been pried from the bracelet at her wrist — the anchor for her Capricorn magic.

  “Run,” the woman told Jenna, in a low, harsh voice. “I’ll deal wi’ him.”

  Jenna blinked.

  I know her, she realized, as she fought her way free of the heaviness that still lingered on her soul. The woman next to her had a broad, murky accent that Jenna couldn’t identify, but she was sure she’d heard it before. Where do I know her from?

  The inky cloud shifted and blurred. From the outside, Jenna could see an occasional glimmer of gold within the velvet blackness. The lunchtime crowd in Dundas Square continued rushing past, mostly oblivious to the invisible confrontation occurring in front of them, but subconsciously aware enough to give it a large berth. A smartly-dressed businesswoman on her phone stepped around the black cloud, shivering off a strange feeling. A dog tugged against its leash at the edge of the square, eager to drag its owner further from the uncanny magic.

  Jenna dragged in a ragged breath. “S-stop,” she rasped out, tugging weakly against the arm with the ivory charm.

  The small woman shoved her back roughly. “This is out of your league,” she said sharply. “Run back to that stupid flower shop, an’ wait for th’ Ice Queen to come get you.”

  Jenna’s eyes widened. Elaine. Oh, shit. I called her. She sent someone to help me.

  Belatedly, Jenna remembered where s
he’d seen the woman in front of her. Jenna’s mentor Elaine had returned from Arcadia one night as a brand new warlock of Blackfrost. Leaning heavily on her arm had been the woman now in front of Jenna — ragged, bloody, and freshly-blinded by the Briars. Valentine, Elaine had called her.

  “You don’t understand,” Jenna managed. “He’s trying to help, you’ve got to stop—”

  Silver light flickered madly against the glittering darkness. Slowly, the cloud turned in upon itself, roiling. The golden glimmers within it changed, reflecting into silver… and then, it began to expand across the square.

  Valentine stepped back quickly. “Damn,” she muttered under her breath. “Every time I think I’ve got a handle on these bloody faeries—”

  The darkness enveloped them both. It was a thin veil this time, rather than an impenetrable cloud. Semi-translucent figures writhed within the square like smoke, imitating the passers-by. One of them reached for Valentine. Its fingers passed through her, seemingly harmless — but her already-pale face blanched, and she staggered back from it, clutching at the place where it had touched her. The stagger took her back into a tall businessman, who yelped and nearly toppled over.

  “Get away from me,” Valentine hissed at the shadow, ignoring the man she’d just run into. Her sightless eyes somehow fixed upon the shadowy figure from behind her shades, angry and horrified. “You can’t be here. I killed you — you’re dead!”

  The businessman’s eyes widened, and he scurried back from Valentine with alacrity, alarmed at the way that she seemed to be addressing thin air.

  Jenna saw Gabe still standing at the center of that fountain. His glassy green eyes burned with silver fire. One of his feet brushed just against the Path to the Looking Glass. It was difficult even to look at him; something about his figure made her mind revolt in confusion, as though he were standing simultaneously upright and upside-down all at once.

  He’s stolen her magic, and added his own, she thought. What is he showing her right now?