The Death of Jane Lawrence(102)

“Elodie,” she said, addressing her own reflection. “Elodie, come!”

Her own eyes stared back.

Of course; Elodie had never come when called, appearing only when Elodie herself willed it. Where did she go, when she was not there? Jane tried to sort through her harried thoughts, organize them into sets and work through each with logical precision.

First: Elodie had died, and from her body Augustine had worked a spell that pulled the ghosts of the dead back into the world of the living.

Second: Magicians changed the workings of their bodies. Things grew out of place. Natural occurrences were not merely natural in the hands of a magician.

Third: When Jane had seen Elodie’s life, she saw a hole where Elodie should have been. But when Jane had seen Elodie’s death, Elodie had been present, and since her death she had appeared to Jane, out of place, out of time.

From these points, she could construct a chain that linked Elodie’s presence directly to magic, and from there, a solution: Magic should be able to call her back, and Jane could work magic.

There was no way to make chalk and salt stick to the slick surface of the mirror, so Jane pulled out her hairpin and began to scratch at the glass. The metal squealed, loud enough that her ears hurt. She was careful to make it as perfect a circle as she could manage, holding the radius steady by way of a strip torn from her dress and the straining of her thumb upon the mirror.

Her reflection, as she worked, was wild. Unhinged. Her eyes had grown as red as Elodie’s, blood vessels burst from constant wakefulness and her injections. Her hair fell around her face in knotted tangles, matted with oil and dust. Her lips were colorless and cracked, her fingers ink-stained and swollen.

But it felt good, to see the violence of the house written upon her flesh. It meant she was real. It meant this was real.

The circle inscribed, she used the pin to cut her thumb. She pressed her blood into the grooves, and it caught in the channel and spread, wicking halfway around before she had to add new drops. Then she crawled back, until her whole reflection was encompassed by the circle, until her image was centered. She hugged her knees to her chest and reached for the eel.

It leapt to her, eager for blood. She built the wall, doubled, around her image and through the other side of the mirror. It made a tunnel, and in it she heard a roaring, rushing sound. Her blood within her ears? A storm building outside?

Power. Power, flowing.

Jane stared into her own reddened eyes, her tangled hair. Her reflection was almost Elodie’s already. All she had to do was know it to be Elodie in truth. But she hesitated. When Jane cast the spell, Elodie might appear, but might know only as much as Jane herself did. Or Elodie might take the place of Jane’s own reflection and, from there, Jane’s entire self. The dangers that had kept her from looking out the windows of Lindridge Hall, fearing what she would learn to be true, stilled her hand. They were the same dangers that had kept her from pulling down the crypt door when she might still have had a chance to save Augustine, afraid of what she might create when she conjured the open stairs.

But she had no choices left. She could hear footsteps again, the Cunninghams’ slow processional reaching the third floor.

Sharply delineate and define the bounds of your knowledge. She did not know Elodie’s mind. She knew that Elodie and she were not the same. She knew that Elodie had come to her before, with her own mind, her own intentions. She did not know what those intentions were.

Jane looked at her own reflection, and knew only that Elodie had come to her, and nothing more.

Elodie looked back at her, face shifting, features distorting.

She wore her bloody visage, her gown split, her flesh moving as she breathed. Behind her, darkness and the palest stone of the crypt floor where Jane’s gaslight fell upon it.

Jane’s breath caught in her lungs, pushed down beneath her heart.

The crypt.

“Is Augustine alive?” Jane whispered, the only question she could form.

Elodie said nothing. Jane crumbled, sagging, fisting her hands in her hair. She struggled to breathe at all, then to breathe evenly. She had thought him dead for sure until just a few minutes ago. To know it again was not so bad.

But she had let herself hope, and that tremulous hope was crushed with every second that passed.

“Were you with him, when he died?” she asked, fingers twisting at the torn edge of her skirts. “Was that what kept you away?”

Elodie twitched. It was almost a nod. Jane cried out, but Elodie made no more motion, and, as always, made no sound.

Another variable described. Elodie was not like the creatures down below. Her very silence, and her confinement to reflections when not inside the crypt, set her apart. Whatever Augustine had done to bring the ghosts, he had done something altogether different to her. She did not seem hungry, after all.

Jane licked her cracked lips with her papery tongue and ventured, “Is there something I can do to fix this? To save him?” Elodie hadn’t nodded, after all, when Jane had asked if Augustine was dead. Silence was not certainty. Jane clung to that thought, and held her breath, and waited.

After what felt like an endless stretch of time, Elodie nodded.

Yes.

Elation made her heart hammer painfully in her chest. “Can you tell me?” she asked, barely louder than a whisper. Again, Elodie nodded. “What? What must I do?”

Elodie opened her mouth, but no sound came out.