Syrsee looks me up and down before meeting my gaze. “Cute pants.”
I beam. They were always my favorite too. “Thanks.”
She nods, then looks at Lucia, who didn’t get pulled through with me, but is here nonetheless. “Now what?”
Lucia looks around, taking in the space. She seems a bit awed by where we are, so she doesn’t answer Syrsee immediately, but allows herself a moment. Then she tugs on her long dress, as if to put it back into place, and lets out a breath that is surely unnecessary, since she’s a ghost or something. Once she’s collected herself, her gaze comes up to meet Syrsee’s. “Now… well… now you bring Josep into the nightmare and trap him there.”
“What are you talking about?” This question is on my mind too, but Syrsee is the one who asks it out loud. “What nightmare?”
Lucia doesn’t look as confident as she did on the other side of things. In fact, she seems very distracted by the space we’re in. Because it’s kind of like a hall of mirrors in a funhouse. Something you’d walk through in a cheap traveling carnival. But it’s not all cramped and seedy. It’s actually rather beautiful. The mist alone is something worth gawking at. The gold and purple swirls give off a fairy-tale atmosphere. And the mirrors are surrounded by thick, gold frames.
I walk over to one and peek in, only to see a woman with long dark hair doing something on the other side. “Who’s that?” It comes out automatically as I point. But the answer to my own question hits me as soon as I’m done speaking.
Syrsee comes over, looks into the mirror, and gasps. “Holy shit. That’s me?”
We both look over at Lucia, but her confidence has not reappeared. She looks a little lost.
“Lucia?” Syrsee growls. “What is going on here? What are these mirrors and what the hell is the nightmare?”
Once again, Lucia attempts to collect herself. “Sorry. It’s just…” She kind of laughs here. “It’s just, I’ve never seen it before. After hundreds of years of reading about it, and being told about it, and hoping it was real—I never actually believed it was.”
I finally find my voice. “What was real?”
Lucia smiles. “The Coyrah.” She points to Syrsee. “But here you are. And there you are too.” She points to the mirror we’re looking at. And now she’s really laughing.
Syrsee lets out a long breath. “I guess I didn’t believe it either. But there’s no denying, that’smein there.”
I stomp my foot, tired of being the last to know everything. “What the fuck are you two talking about!”
“Sorry,” Syrsee says. “I’m some kind of ancient witch that has been split into many, many pieces. And that’s how the Black blood is propagated to feed vampires.” She pans a hand to the mirror, then indicates the hundreds of others all around us. “All my pieces are in these mirrors.”
This is so crazy, my head is spinning.
Syrsee looks at Lucia. “OK. So now what? Why do we need that other mirror? The one Tristin gave me?”
Lucia hesitates and it’s very clear she doesn’t really know what comes next. But she rallies and takes a good guess. “I think these mirrors are just glimpses into what your other pieces are doing. The other mirror, the real one, the ancient one—that mirror is where the magic lives.”
“Fine,” Syrsee says. “But that doesn’t tell me what todo.”
Lucia frowns, then throws up her hands. “I don’t know what to do. All I know is?—”
But that’s as far as she gets, at least from my perspective. Because suddenly I am yanked back through the water, and then next thing I know I’m in the cave and Josep the Vampire is staring down at me.
He is… angry.
Terrifying.
Evil personified.
He smiles. “You have been a bad, bad,badLittle Baby.”
And then he attacks me.
