Systematic. Network-wide. This wasn’t malfunction or accident. It was demonstration.
Gideon had just proved his reach. Every mirror, or reflective surface, in the Quarter—probably the entire city, possibly beyond—was compromised. The network was active. Operational. And completely under someone else’s control.
“You’re seeing it,” Maman said. Still on the phone, waiting.
“Network activation,” Bastien said. “Charlotte’s mirrors, or something built using her theories. Covering at least the Quarter. Maybe the entire city.”
“The supernatural community is panicking. Everyone suddenly realizing that privacy doesn’t exist anymore. That every reflective surface is potentially hostile. That someone’s watching through their bathroom mirrors, their car windows, their phone screens.”
Bastien’s phone buzzed again. Then again. He glanced at the screen without unlocking it. The count kept climbing.
“I need to go,” he said. “I’ve got to check on Delphine.”
“That’s where I’d go too,” Maman said. “But Bastien? Be careful. If Gideon can watch through mirrors, he’s been watching her too. He knows where she is. What she’s doing. How close you two are.” She paused. “He knows everything now.”
The line went dead.
Bastien stood at the window for another thirty seconds. Processing. Calculating. The scope of what Gideon had built required resources beyond what one practitioner should have access to. Money, certainly. But also knowledge. Charlotte’s complete research, not fragments. And time—years, maybedecades, spent studying her work. Understanding not just what she’d done but why. How to improve it. Scale it. Weaponize it.
The question was whether Bastien could respond through the same network Gideon controlled.
He turned from the window and went to the locked cabinet in the corner. The one warded with protections he’d spent decades layering. Physical lock first—key kept on a chain he wore. Then the magical lock, released by a gesture only he knew. The door opened with a soft click.
Inside, materials most practitioners couldn’t access without decades of networking and favors owed. Silver powder ground fine as flour, sealed in a jar that kept it from oxidizing. Ink made from lampblack and holy water and ground mirror glass—he’d mixed it himself following instructions from Charlotte’s journals, the ones she’d written in cipher that took him three years to decode. Ritual tools that had been old when he’d acquired them from an estate sale in Prague. Candles made from beeswax and rendered fat, blessed by priests who didn’t ask questions about what the blessings would be used for.
Charlotte had documented the mirror-forged ink process in her journals. Not complete instructions—she’d been too careful for that, too aware that the knowledge could be weaponized. But enough for someone who understood the underlying principles. Who’d studied the theory until it became instinct.
Bastien had done this before. Years ago, when distance made ordinary correspondence impossible and he’d needed to reach someone through glass. The working had cost him blood and three days of recovery. But it had functioned.
He cleared space on his desk, pushed aside the maps and notes, and stacked the legal pads carefully on the file cabinet. He needed a clean workspace. Ritual was about precision. Intention made physical through exact measurement and proper materials.
The silver powder first. He poured it into his palm, measured by weight rather than volume. Felt for the right amount—his senses extending through the particles, checking for purity, for resonance. Then he traced a circle on his desk with the powder. Perfect circumference, no gaps, no irregularities. The circle created boundaries. Defined inside from outside. Protected the working from interference.
The ink next. He opened the vial carefully—the contents were volatile, reactive to intention. Sharp scent rose from it. Metallic. Blood and rain and something else underneath, something that existed in the space where material met immaterial. He set the vial in the center of the silver circle.
Paper. He cut it to exact dimensions with a straight edge and razor blade. Five inches by three inches. The proportions mattered. Sacred geometry. The same mathematics Charlotte had used in her mirror placements, the ratios that created resonance across distance.
Ritual tools arranged around the circle. Candles at cardinal points—north, south, east, west. He lit them with matches, not magic. Flame born from friction, not conjuring. More honest that way. Less likely to attract attention from entities that watched for power being used carelessly.
The incantation came from memory. Old French, pre-revolutionary, the kind spoken in Louisiana when it was still colony rather than state. But older meanings layered beneath the words. Latin roots. Greek influences. Languages that pre-dated Christianity but got folded into its symbolism.
He spoke the words quietly. Precisely. Each syllable enunciated the way Charlotte had written them, with accent marks indicating which vowels to hold, which consonants to soften.
The candle flames steadied. Stopped flickering. Burned straight up despite the air movement from the open window.
Bastien dipped his pen into the ink. A tool from the same era as the mirror—steel nib, wooden handle worn smooth by decades of use. He’d bought it at an estate sale, felt the residual energy in it from whoever had used it for correspondence across a lifetime.
He wrote on the paper in careful script. Charlotte’s handwriting style—he’d studied it long enough to replicate the specific curves, the way she connected letters, the pressure she applied to thick and thin strokes:
I know what you’re doing. It won’t work.
Direct statement. No flourish. No philosophy. Just tactical assessment delivered as fact.
Then he held the paper up to the mirror Gideon had sent. The one still sitting on his desk, surface still faintly fogged. He focused his will through the paper. Through the ink. Through the glass. Felt for the connection he knew existed—the network Gideon had activated, the channels that now linked every reflective surface in range.
The connection caught. He felt it like a hook setting. Like a door opening in space that shouldn’t have doors.
Power flowed through him. Not his power. The network’s. Gideon’s infrastructure, accepting his message because Bastien was using the right protocols. The right magical grammar. Charlotte’s techniques that Gideon had inherited or stolen or reconstructed.
