But she’d asked a simpler question.What the hell is this?
“Mirror Fever,” he said. “Relic contamination spreading through any surface that can hold an image.”
“Can you stop it?”
“I’m working on it.”
“That’s not a yes.”
“No.” He stood and pulled a small leather pouch from his coat pocket. “It’s not.”
She stood with him, watching as he opened the pouch. Inside was silver powder, ground fine enough to dissolve on contact with water. He pinched a measure between thumb and forefinger and scattered it across the river’s surface.
The powder floated for three seconds. Then it began to glow—pale blue, the color of winter ice. The glow spread where the particles clustered, forming patterns that shifted and reformed too quickly to follow individual shapes. Geometric configurations that looked almost intentional.
“What are you doing?” Roxy asked.
“Testing for resonance. Silver reacts to the boundary between here and the Elsewhere. When that boundary thins, you get this.” He gestured at the glowing patterns. “The stronger the glow, the worse the contamination.”
The powder blazed brighter.
“That’s bad,” Roxy said.
“That’s very bad.” He stood and brushed his hands clean. The silver residue clung to his fingers, still glowing faint blue. “Same signature as the mirror shard from the auction house. The contamination’s spreading,” he muttered to himself.
Roxy crossed her arms. “How far?”
“Your pack’s catching it. That’s far enough.” He gestured toward the river. “Mirror Fever doesn’t travel through air or water. It spreads through any surface that can hold an image. This is one of the biggest in the city.”
“So every shifter who’s looked at the water?—”
“Is at risk.” Bastien turned his back to the river and scanned the opposite bank. Lights from the Quarter glittered in the distance, doubled and tripled below. “How many in your pack?”
“Forty-three.”
“Quarantine everyone who’s shown symptoms. No mirrors, no windows, no standing water. Rooms with matte walls if you can manage it.”
Roxy’s arms stayed crossed. “You’re talking about caging them.”
“I’m talking about keeping them alive.” He met her eyes. “Mirror Fever moves in stages. First the reflections go wrong.Then the victim starts seeing themselves in places they’ve never been. Eventually they step through—into the Elsewhere—and they don’t come back.”
“Step through where?”
“The Shadowglass Mirror.”
Roxy said nothing for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped lower. “The pack elders told stories about that thing. I thought it was just a cautionary tale to get us to eat our vegetables and whatnot.”
Bastien tried to grin at the light joke, but the situation was serious. “It was real. The Lacroix family owned it until it cracked during a summoning in 1847. The Archives sealed the fragments.” Bastien looked back at the water. “Someone broke the seals.” Some of this was fact he’d surmised from the things he and Delphine had learned, but some was just now starting to add up as he talked it out and speculated how the things they knew fell into place.
“And you think it’s your fault.”
He didn’t answer, nor did he look at her. “I don’t know,” he said quietly.
Footsteps approached from behind—lighter than Roxy’s, quicker. A third person coming up the levee access at a jog. Bastien turned.
Lark Rousseau emerged from the morning shadows wearing running shoes and a windbreaker. Early twenties, built lean and angular, with black hair that fell past their jaw and dark eyes that registered everything in a single sweep. They ran pack security—perimeter checks, intelligence gathering, the kind of work that required noticing details before details became problems.
They stopped three paces from Roxy and nodded to Bastien. Professional acknowledgment, nothing more. Lark didn’t waste energy on social pleasantries when information needed sharing.
