Page 6

“You’ve changed since I kept you in my cage.” The purred taunt comes from everywhere at once.

I ignore it. The glasscrawler wants banter, wants to slow me with memory, but I already killed the man who caged me as a child and bled me for magic until I broke. He still haunts me, but he’s dead, and I survived.

I shatter a mirror with the bat, sending a web of cracks across the nearest five. The shrapnel tinkles to the linoleum, and I dust the jagged edges with salt from my belt pouch to stop the demon from escaping this way, forcing it deeper into the maze.

In the next turn, every panel fills with me, dozens of versions at different ages, all set to disappointed parent mode. I grit my teeth and barrel through, breaking mirrors and spilling salt as I go.

One mirror flashes Caelan, this time too perfect, silver hair in intricate braids, beads and jewels flashing in the woven strands, lips parted as if to speak. I throw salt at his image. It hisses and burns, and the demon screeches through a thousand mouths.

“Sensitive topic, I see.” The accent shifts into Elionn’s clipped cadence, twisting the knife.

I grab a hand mirror from a display and hurl it down the hallway. It reflects the glasscrawler’s true form, spider-thin, glass-limbed, and with too many eyes. The thing scrambles for a new hiding place, trailing a mist of blue-black blood.

I pursue, smashing every reflective surface as I go, careful to keep my back to the wall. Glass bites my palms with every swing, my magic working overtime to heal the cuts as soon as they form.

At the center of the maze, the demon waits. It’s nested in a ring of unbroken mirrors, every panel rippling with different versions of my history. Some real, some fabricated, all weaponized for maximum pain.

One mirror holds a kneeling Caelan. In another, Elionn turns his back, cloak billowing, his profile in perfect silhouette.

I step into the ring, my bat and knife at the ready.

The glasscrawler shifts, flickering between its true form and the fae princes. “Why do you keep running, Amalia Wolf? You know you belong with us.”

“Cute.” I circle to flank it. “Next you’ll tell me we could’ve had a future.”

“Only if you’d stayed,” the demon hisses, and now it becomes me, forcing me to face my loneliness.

I rush it. The bat connects, shattering a panel and severing one of the thing’s arms. Quicksilver splatters across my jeans, burning through the fabric to the skin. The demon spins away, slamming into the mirror behind it. The impact fractures the surface, but instead of a crack, a ripple spreads, liquid and hungry.

“You should see yourself,” it cackles in a dozen registers. “Pathetic. Alone.”

I grab the pouch of salt and pour the rest in a circle, trapping us both.

The demon shifts tactics, its body flickering through all the people I’ve failed, loved, or left behind. For a second, it settles into Caelan, every detail perfect, silver irises, high brow, mouth set in a line of determination.

For one destabilizing moment, I want it to be real. I want Caelan to step out of the mirror and take me into his arms.

Instead, I slice through the demon’s chest, pinning it to the frame.

The demon shrieks, glass exploding outward in a sunburst. Every mirror fractures, and the panels dissolve into nothing, one by one. The House of Mirrors collapses, blackness pouring in from the edges.

But the mirror behind me doesn’t break.

It shimmers and turns liquid, revealing a silver palace and a hall with mirrors of its own. I know that world. I bled for its king. Barely survived to escape. And I swore I’d never go back.

A hand shoots through, long-fingered, pale as moonlight, ringed in silver, and smelling of sweet berries from another realm.

The glasscrawler and I both scream in surprise, neither prepared for this new intruder.

The hand grips my shoulder, yanking me backward, and my tight hold on the knife yanks it from the demon’s chest. The dissolving pieces suck back toward themselves, bleeding but not dead. It scrambles past me, trailing quicksilver as it dives for the only mirror left inside the salt ring.

“No!” I shout, realizing too late the other danger mirrors pose. I didn’t escape the fae realm to be pulled back. I had no intention of ever returning.

The demon vanishes into the mirror’s edge, and the hand yanks me in after it.

3

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GLASS