Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day(32)

“Go to hell.”

She raises an eyebrow. She can hear me, then; the glass goes both ways. That’s a relief. I may be toothless in here, but at least she hasn’t gagged me. “Feisty, aren’t you? I’d peg you at what, mid-twenties right now? That’s fine. You’re good for at least another seventy years.”

“What are you talking about? How did you get my sister’s mirror? Let me out of here!”

My porthole shifts as the mirror is moved, and I find myself looking out at a sheepish Danny. “Sorry, Jenna,” he says, refusing to meet my eyes. “You could have stayed in New York. I mean, you didn’t have to do this.”

“Let me out of here. Danny—Danny! Look at me. You know this isn’t right. You know that ghosts don’t belong in glass. Danny! Let me out!” Maybe he can see me, even if I can’t see myself. I wave my arms, trying to get his attention, trying to make him look at me.

He doesn’t. Instead, he looks to the unnamed witch with Brenda’s eyes, and says, “Jenna was the coffin nail for this town. We can’t stick around here if you’ve got her in that mirror.”

To my surprise, she laughs. “Oh, no, that’s where you’re wrong. People think so linearly. She’s not the one keeping Mill Hollow moored. There’s an old oak’s ghost in the deepest part of the hollow, two hundred years old and still haunting. She’s extraneous. Humans are not always the most important thing in the world. We’re staying, and we’re having our market, and that’s that.” She tilts my mirror back toward her face, frowning as she touches the skin near her eye. “Think I could do with a little less age on me before the auctions begin?”

“You’ve bled twenty years in the last two weeks,” says Danny. “None of your clothes fit right anymore.”

“I know, isn’t it wonderful?” She laughs. “All right, little ghost. Dazzle me.”

I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this, and I have no choice: she has me prisoned in glass. Her fingers touch the mirror’s surface and I bleed the time off of her, leaving her fresh-faced and gasping with pleasure. I manage to stop myself shy of my dying day, but barely. This woman, this witch, has forced me to take the rest of the time I had coming to me. It shouldn’t hurt. It does.

If I get out of the mirror now, I can’t move on. Not without giving her time away.

“There,” she says, smiling as she takes her hand away from her face. “I’ll be able to afford to go shopping very soon. Anything I want can be mine. You have no idea how lucrative this sort of thing can be.”

“You’re selling us?” I can’t keep the revulsion out of my voice. I don’t even want to try. I still ache all the way down to my insubstantial bones from the force of her violation. “You can’t do that! We’re people!”

“You were people,” she says. “Now you’re just shadows on the wall. Show me where the Constitution says ghosts have rights. Show me the politicians who swear to support their phantom contingent. You die, we bury you, we put the muslin over the mirrors to keep you from getting caught and frightening Grandma to death, and we move on. But you can’t. You’re just shadows. Shadows don’t get to choose their fate like that. If I’m smart enough to figure out how to catch you, if I’m quick enough to come up and get you to look in my glass, why shouldn’t I claim you? Shadows need a light to cast them. I can be that light.”

“We may not be alive, but we have lives,” I snap. “There are people who will miss me.”

“I’m sure there are. You’re the one who works at the suicide hotline, aren’t you? You know, I never could figure out whether that was noble or petty of you. Keep people from killing themselves too young, keep the ghost population down, stay special.” She shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter. Busybodies who think answering a phone can change the world are a dime a dozen. They’ll replace you with someone who has a pulse, and everyone will be better off.”

The world outside my prison shifts again, dizzyingly fast, until it goes away and is replaced by more of the silvery nothingness. She’s put my mirror facedown on some surface. I stay frozen where I am, unsure how to walk when I can’t see my feet, staring, furious, into the nothingness.

Glass. She’s prisoned me in glass, and she’s going . . . going to sell me? Going to sell all of us. I don’t need to ask myself why: the motives are clear without thinking about them too deeply. Ghosts take time. Ghosts can reach into a mortal life and make it longer, just by pulling away the time that has already passed. She said I was good for another seventy years, but that’s just an estimate, because a ghost prisoned in glass can’t move on to whatever comes next. Until the mirror is broken, we’re trapped. Whoever buys me—whoever buys us—will be able to use us to stay young and beautiful in a world that’s become increasingly obsessed with youth and beauty.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that this is happening. The surprise should be that it’s taken this long.

“All right, Jenna, pull yourself together,” I say. There is no echo here, but there are surfaces, gilded in silver, beckoning me with the illusion of a world. I can’t see myself. Do I exist? Closing my eyes changes nothing, so I tilt the idea of my head back until I’m looking upward, then reach out in front of myself and tell my hands to find each other. It’s harder than it should be. I’ve touched my body in the dark a million times since I was born, and even more often since I’ve died, but I wasn’t thinking about it then. It was something that just happened. Now I have to feel around, trying to guess where my hands are in a world that has no points of reference—