Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day(34)
“Getting old doesn’t help them either.”
“Getting old is natural. It’s what we didn’t get. Every time I take a call, I am fighting to help someone else get old. This is sick. It’s wrong, and you need to let me out of here.”
“That’s not going to happen. I could maybe convince Teresa not to sell you right away. If you wanted to stay. We could talk more about why this is okay. Why this is how things ought to be. If you wanted.”
I’m so tired. “Go to hell, Danny,” I say, and he looks surprised for a moment before he puts the mirror down and disappears.
I start to pace. I’m trapped in glass. I’m going to be exploited and held prisoner forever, like an unwilling genie in a breakable bottle. The old stories said you needed to cover all the mirrors after someone died so that they wouldn’t prison your ghosts. They also said the first person who looked at their reflection after a ghost did get caught would drop dead on the spot, frightened out of themselves, but Teresa looked at me, and she lived. Is it because she’s a witch? Are witches immune to that sort of terror? Is it because she’s the one who prisoned me there? Or is there something else I ought to know, something I’m missing because this has never happened to me before?
One ghost to a mirror. Can’t share your prison. And people who look in mirrors containing the dead sometimes die for no apparent reason, like they weren’t able to stand what they saw. Ghosts can move time. What if that’s not all that we can do?
Trouble with being a teenage runaway is no one tells you anything. Most people grow out of it, though; start making connections, start making allies, start making friends. Forty years I’ve been running, and I can count the friends I’ve made on the fingers of one hand. They’re bright, precious things, every one of them, but they’re not enough. They didn’t tell me the things I needed to know. Forty years in the ground, and I’m still lost when it comes to the realities of what I am.
In a world of anchors and moorings, I am a nail in someone else’s coffin, and no one can tell who’s been buried beneath me.
I stop, take a breath I don’t need, and try to center myself. It’s not as easy as it would be if I had eyelids I could close or hands I could see, but I’ve had a long time to grow accustomed to the troubles of this world. Sometimes my body is solid and seems alive. Sometimes it passes through walls. Right now, it might as well be missing altogether. It’s all the same. I endure. I last. I am Jenna Pace, I am no longer Jenna-who-runs, and I will find my way out of this.
I don’t know how long I wait, a snake poised to strike, for my mirror to be uncovered. The world shifts subtly around me. I don’t know what that means, whether the mirror is being moved or whether mirror-landscapes just move sometimes, but I keep my place and my peace, and I wait as patiently as I can. Anything else would mean giving up, and that’s the one thing I can’t do. Patty wouldn’t want things to end this way.
I’ve been fighting to earn my way back to my sister for so long. I refuse to let this be what stops me.
When the mirror is finally uncovered, the shift is sudden enough to be jarring. One moment, the world is gilded silver, unbroken and unyielding, and the next, one entire wall of my existence has been replaced with a face I’ve never seen before, a man with wrinkles in the skin around his hope-filled eyes and a tight, miserly set to his sunken mouth. There are calculations scored into his skin like hooks, numbers I can almost see in the way he is assessing me. This man can see me.
“A ghost under glass?” he says. “That’s your miracle solution? How did you—”
If I am to do this, I must do it. I’ve never killed anyone before. I’ve saved so many lives, but I’ve never killed. Maybe the scales will balance. Maybe there’s a cosmic score sheet somewhere, and it will show that I am still a good girl. Maybe I don’t care. I will not end my existence under someone else’s glass.
Without thinking, without feeling, I move. I flow out of the silver and into the dusty blue of this stranger’s eyes, the mirrors he uses to see the world. I don’t see him as he stiffens, but I feel it, feel his heart start and stutter in his chest, feel it fall out of synch with itself. If I was going to let him go, this would be the moment to do it. I can’t, I can’t. I still feel the mirror pulling on me, trying to drag me back into its borders. If I let go of the man who has become my anchor to the real world, I’ll be pulled back into the silver in an instant, and I don’t think I can do this again. It hurts. The silver clings to the outline of what should be my skin, burning and blistering me.
The first one who looks will die, I think, and that’s what the stories always said: that the mirror had to be covered until the ghosts had gone, or the first person who looked would feel their heart stop in their chest, would feel the world ripped away and shredded into nothingness. Not the second, not the last; only the first. Witches don’t count, or I wouldn’t be able to move, but still. This is not something I can do again.
The world has always had rules. The trick is finding them.
I am not possessing him, this cruel-lipped man who picked up my mirror and looked at me like I was the answer to a question he’d almost given up on asking. I am . . . inhabiting him, shoving myself into the space between the intake of breath and the beating of the heart. His breath hitches in his chest one more time before he collapses, crumpling to the floor like so much discarded meat. The silver tether snaps as the mirror drops from his hand and shatters, smooth glass becoming powder on the concrete floor of the alley behind the theater.