Broken Mirrors Read online

  “Just a street. Kinda dirty. Same old gray van with flat tires and a hundred parking tickets stuck under the windshield wipers right under your window. Nothing weird, no.”

  “Because last time, when B and me went to see the witch, that was the price, that we got stuck on Alcatraz flipping through I don’t even know how many alternate realities, a new one every few minutes. We were there all night, and we didn’t have time to be there all night, which was why it counted as a price, I guess. Some of those Californias we saw were practically prehistoric, and some of them were in the middle of ice ages, and some of them had riots, and some of them were on fire, and some of them looked so beautiful, you wouldn’t believe how beautiful, and after a while the spectacle got boring and we talked, that’s when B and me first became tight… but no celestial channel-flipping this time. Which means the price is something different. Damn. I don’t mind paying, not if we get B back, but it’d be nice to know what I’m paying with.”

  “Maybe she decided to give it to us as a freebie,” Rondeau said.

  Marla snorted, and finally looked up from B. “It cost you something, didn’t it? What the witch did, it hurt you, right?”

  Rondeau nodded, but slowly, because just moving his abused head seemed as potentially dangerous as jumping up and down on a land mine.

  “Okay,” Marla said. “You did good. You stepped up. I’m not saying we’re square, I’m not saying I can forgive or forget because I’m lousy at both of those, but… I’ll remember you did the good thing, too. That you went into the presence of the possible witch not knowing what it would cost you, not knowing if you’d live through the ordeal, and you said yes anyway.”

  Rondeau wanted to say a lot of things – more apologies, more assurances that Bradley’s death had been an accident, more outpouring admissions of guilt – but, maybe because Bradley’s psychically-sophisticated gray matter was better at reading the vibe of a room than Rondeau’s had ever been, he just nodded, and said, “I’ll leave you alone and make sure we weren’t gone more than a day and that nothing important burned down while you were gone.”

  He stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him, and thought he heard, faintly, someone singing a lullaby. Rondeau didn’t think he’d ever heard Marla sing a note before.

  #

  Back in San Francisco, the sky over the bay crackled with lightning, startling the residents of that city where thunderstorms were rare, especially since there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and because no crack of thunder followed – just the fork of jagged light splitting the air silently. On Alcatraz Island, inside the prison, two bodies appeared in mid-air and fell half a dozen feet to the hard floor. One of the figures landed in an ungainly heap, groaned, and cursed – a little lick of bluish flame emerged from his mouth – before sitting up, rubbing his unusual jaw.

  The other twisted as she fell and landed in a crouch, as supple and self-assured as a cat, her long dark cloak fluttering as she landed.

  “Crapsey.” She prodded her complaining companion with the point of one of her steel-toed boots. “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

  “Of course not, boss.” He stood up. “You turned Kansas into a tornado laboratory. No buildings left there. Barely any ground left, even.”

  “So that’s one place we’re not. Good. Narrows it down. Though not enough. What the hell is this place?”

  A woman stepped forward, dressed in a gray suit, feathers woven into her hair, eyes glowing with spectral light, blood drying on her beat-up face, cold fury in her voice. “This is my place, and it will be your hell.”

  “Look, Crapsey.” The cloaked woman nodded. “It’s a local rustic we can question. I wonder if she truly speaks our language, or if she just memorized those words of greeting phonetically, like a parrot?”

  “Either way works. I’ve got my universal translator right here.” He flipped open a butterfly knife and advanced, grinning.

  Given the nature of his face, it was a very memorable grin.

  Chapter 3

  The Warden, who’d only been granted possession of Alcatraz about six weeks before, watched the point of the intruder’s knife weave back and forth above her eyes, catching little twinkles of ambient light and seeming almost to sparkle in its motion. She’d tried to bind up the man kneeling on her chest, using magic to chain him, drag him away, bury him in tons of invisible stone, but every incantation broke, every charm sputtered out. The woman standing a few feet away murmured whenever the Warden tried to use her magic, so she was the likely source of the counterspells, but that knowledge didn’t help. The Warden was reduced to merely human means for fighting back, and she was not wholly devoid of such skills, but the man holding her down easily deflected her every attempt to thrash, slash, bite, or grab, and now that knife point wandering about just above her eyes, threatening blindness at best and brain-skewering at worst, had forced her into fearful stillness.

  The most troubling thing was, the Warden didn’t know who these intruders were. She’d assumed it was Marla Mason and her associate, but now that this man’s face was inches from hers, he was obviously someone else. There was a resemblance, even beyond the fact that both were Hispanic young men dressed in funky old suits with wide lapels – this one might have been the other’s heavier, musclebound, more thuggish brother. The most obvious difference was this man’s prosthetic lower jaw, made of dark polished wood inlaid with metal in sinuous designs that made her eyes blur if she looked directly at them. When he smiled, she saw the polished, white, sharpened artificial teeth jutting up from that wooden jaw. The prosthesis had obviously been created with magic – the surface of the wood moved like skin, flexing as he smiled, and blended seamlessly into flesh where it met the skin of his face, but if you were going to use magic, why not just grow him a new jaw, something any competent sorcerous surgeon could manage?

  The answer was obvious. You’d give him an artificial jaw in order to make him look scarier.

  “There, there,” the man – what had the woman called him? Crappy? – said in a soothing voice. “Good girl. Just a few questions and we’ll get out of your way. What settlement is this? Whose riding?”

  “I – I don’t understand –” The Warden tried to keep her voice level, but being asked incomprehensible questions by a man who used a knife to compel answers was terrifying.

  The woman in the deep purple cloak came closer and crouched beside her, laying one cold finger against the side of the Warden’s face. “Forgive my lackey. He’s a bit slow on the uptake sometimes. He thinks we’ve merely been moved in space, to another part of our world. But this is another world entirely, isn’t it, from the place we come from?”

  She was not Marla Mason, but again, there was a resemblance that seemed obviously familial. This could have been Marla’s sister, younger by at least a dozen years, surely no more than twenty, her complexion smooth and her skin wholly unlined, almost mask-like. It was not a beautiful face, no more than Marla’s was, but it was, in a way the Warden found hard to define, an eerily perfect face, like something cast in flawless porcelain.

  The Warden swallowed. “I don’t know where you’re from.”

  “Of course. Why don’t you just tell us, in your own words, where we are?”

  Delighted to have a question she could answer – the knife had never stopped its dance, even when the woman called its wielder a lackey – the Warden said, “Alcatraz prison, on Alcatraz Island, in San Francisco Bay.” She paused. “In California. In the United States. On, ah, Earth.” Who knew where these people were from?

  “Well, well, Crapsey,” the woman said. “We’re in San Francisco again. And you had so much fun here last time.”

  “Do you work for the Jaguar?” Crapsey said.

  The woman who wasn’t Marla sighed and rolled her eyes, and the Warden shook her head. “The… I don’t know who that is. My mistress is Susan Wellstone, chief sorcerer of San Francisco.”

  The woman whistled, and Crapsey lifted the knife away.
“Susan?” His voice was bewildered, which was better than low and threatening. “She’s been dead for more than ten years.”

  “Only in our world, Crapsey. This is another world. A parallel dimension.”

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “Let me put it in terms you understand. It’s like in that episode of Star Trek you like, with Evil Spock, from the mirror universe. Remember?”

  “Oh right,” Crapsey said. “When Spock has a goatee. That’s how you can tell he’s evil. Huh. So you think there’s another version of me in this place?” He stroked his wooden chin. “I’m obviously not the evil one. I couldn’t grow a goatee if I wanted to.”

  “As usual, your logic is unassailable. Hmm.” She looked down again. “What’s your name, little gray dove?”

  “I’m called the Warden.”

  “Ha. And yet, here you are, a prisoner. I guess irony’s the same in every universe.”

  The Warden decided to risk a question of her own. “Who are you?”

  “Me?” The woman pressed one hand to her chest. “Why, I don’t have a name for myself. I’m the only being in the universe that actually matters – ha, in any universe, it seems – so why should I need a name? But some people call me the Mason. It’s a little joke, you see, because once, it was my surname, but also, masons build things. And I’m a builder.”

  “Be honest, boss,” Crapsey said. “Mostly you build things for the pleasure of knocking them down again when you’re done.”

  “Oh, you,” the Mason said, and while the exchange had the shape of playful banter, her words were utterly without emotion. “My lackey is mistaken, there, as he so often is. Some things I build forever. Like empires. Now, my little Warden, my little ward, tell me – did you bring me here? Work some magic, on purpose or by accident, to rip a hole from here to there through which my companion and I… fell?”

  The Warden shook her head vigorously. “No! It wasn’t me. But someone was here, a little while ago, someone else, it must have been her!”

  “Mmm.” The Mason knelt and touched the Warden’s cheek, gently, and the Warden gasped at pain that felt like an icicle being shoved deep into her brain. “You speak the truth, as you understand it. Can you tell me about this mysterious other person?”

  “She said her name was Marla Mason. She… looked like you, but older. There was a man with her, I didn’t get his name, but he might have been that one’s skinnier brother.” She lifted her chin toward Crapsey, who still had her pinned. “I don’t know why they were here, they live across the country in Felport, they’re not welcome here, but –”

  “Where are they now?”

  The Warden closed her eyes and extended her senses to feel the whole of her island domain… but the earlier intruders were gone. “Not here. It’s like they just vanished.”

  “Aw hell boss,” Crapsey said. “It’s your evil twin. And my evil twin! They hang out together too, that’s wild. This’ll be fun.”

  “Interesting, at the very least.” The Mason put her finger on the Warden’s cheek again, turning the woman’s face so she could look into her eyes. “Now, my ward, you can do a favor for me. Set up a meeting with Susan Wellstone. Bring her here. I should introduce myself to the local potentate. But, ah, don’t tell her about me. Just say you need to talk to her. Something very urgent. Very mystical. Be vague. I want her to be surprised. Does she like surprises?”

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  “Not so different from the Susan Wellstone I once knew, then. But no matter. We’ll surprise her anyway.”

  “You want me to call her now? It’s the middle of the night.”

  Crapsey flicked the lobe of her ear with his finger, hard. Though the pain was nothing compared to the throbbing from her broken nose and cheekbone, it was somehow even more humiliating for its casual cruelty. “Sorcerers keep weird hours. If you don’t know that, you must not be much of one.”

  “I’ll need to get my phone.”

  The Mason nodded. “Let the poor thing up, Crapsey, you’re squishing her boobs.”

  “Sure boss.” Crapsey moved aside, and the Warden took her first deep breath in many long minutes. She sat up, reached into her suit jacket’s inner pocket, and removed her smartphone.

  “Damn, look at that phone,” Crapsey said. “Shiny! Is this mirror universe also in the future or something?”

  “I doubt it,” the Mason said. “They’ve probably just had a working consumer electronics sector for the past half a dozen years. Some technological advancements are to be expected over our world, since our focus has been… different. Maybe they even have flying cars and eat their dinners in pill form by now.”

  “Yum,” Crapsey said glumly.

  The Warden rang Susan Wellstone’s direct emergency line, which she’d also only had for about six weeks, following her ascension to Susan’s inner circle of lieutenants, an ascension that had involved grueling tests of ability and, even more important, loyalty. She’d passed with flying colors. Especially the tests about her willingness to die for Susan’s cause.

  Her mistress picked up on the first ring. “Speak.”

  “The moon is beautiful tonight,” the Warden said.

  “Code.” Crapsey smashed the phone away from her ear and put the knife back, now at her throat. With his free hand he reached out and honked her broken nose, and she screamed and fell to her knees, but he held onto her nose, still squeezing, and dragged her back to her feet. The agony was extraordinary – her pulped nose felt like a bomb going off – but she didn’t care. She’d given her mistress the code that told her there was a hostile and dangerous force at this location, and nothing else mattered. She’d done her duty.

  “Naughty,” the Mason said. “But not unexpected. And what did the treachery achieve? Susan will still come here, won’t she? She’ll be expecting something, but I can guarantee she won’t be expecting me. You have to be punished, though. I have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to disobedience. Crapsey? Why don’t you explain what’s going to happen to her?”

  Still holding her nose, he leaned over to whisper in her ear. “You’re going to be erased, sweetie. Sent to oblivion. You won’t even burn in hell, and you sure as hell won’t frolic in paradise. You’ll just be gone.” He let go of her nose, took a step back, and sat down cross-legged on the floor.

  The Warden stepped forward, planning to aim a kick right at the middle of his face, to make him feel a fraction of the pain he’d inflicted on her, but then his body slumped, chin drooping to his chest, and something happened, a jolt like a bucket of ice water hitting her brain, and the Warden gasped, eyes crossing with the effort to hold on… to what, and even with what, she wasn’t sure, but she felt like she was being driven out of herself, her body, her own head, and then she lost her vision, and hearing, and sense of smell, and taste, and touch, and finally – but not soon enough to be merciful – her consciousness.

  #

  Crapsey swore when he took up residence in the Warden’s body, because damn, the chick was in pain, her face was totally messed up, and it took him a moment to shut down the pain centers in her brain. Once upon a time, Crapsey wouldn’t have been able to exert such fine control – hell, he hadn’t even been able to switch bodies at will until the Mason taught him, and it hadn’t been a pleasant learning experience – but he’d taken over so many hundreds of people at this point that he could do all sorts of things with the bodily systems he hijacked. They were just machines, after all, nothing but electricity and chemical reactions running on meat hardware. The trick was to remember you were in the body, not of the body, to treat it like a car you were driving. He was only really comfortable in his usual body, though, the one he’d stolen first and lived in the longest. There were preservation spells on that body so it would stay alive indefinitely in his absence, though he didn’t like to leave it for more than a day or two at most, because the dehydration headaches were wicked.

  “So what now, boss?”

  The Mason pointed at
his now-uninhabited body. “Drag that into one of the cells, out of sight. Then we’ll wait for Susan Wellstone and her entourage to show up. You’re wearing the body of one of her lapdogs, so we can mess with her head a bit before I kill her.” She cracked her knuckles. “That’s a rare pleasure, Crapsey, getting to kill one of your enemies twice.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You’ve done it before. I’ve seen it.”

  “Sure, but that usually involves using magic or medicine to revive them, and then they’ve only been dead for a couple of minutes, and when the second death comes so close to the first, it’s only a little thrill. But to kill someone ten years after the first time you did it, that’s enough distance to savor the whole experience over again.”

  “Right.” Crapsey had his doubts about whether the Mason really savored anything. She talked about hate and enemies and the joy of crushing people and all that, but her voice was always so cold, and she never actually seemed to take pleasure in any of the things she did – the closest was the occasional look of interest, when she was usually so bored. It was like she was pretending to have human emotions, and if she was pretending with him, her oldest servant, then he was pretty sure nobody saw her true self.

  Which was probably for the best. Her untrue self was bad enough. Crapsey did terrible things at her behest on a regular basis, and he’d gotten used to the work, and had an aptitude for it, but if he thought he could leave her without repercussions, find a beach somewhere and live by himself forever in just one body, he’d do it. But he was a useful tool for the Mason, and she’d see him broken before she set him free.

  As he dragged his empty body toward one of the jail cells – the Warden had pretty good upper body strength at least, that was good – he thought about the one time he’d tried to take control of the Mason’s body. His only act of rebellion had taken place during their early years together, when she was merely the scourge of Felport and not yet the world, and he was just a kid. After his takeover attempt failed and he bounced off her protective magics, she’d spent a week hurting him for his transgression… and then a month nursing his broken body back to health. It was the closest he’d ever seen the Mason come to mercy, and after that experience, he knew he was hers forever, like it or not. Sure, it was Stockholm Syndrome, but you took what you could get in this world.