Total pages in book: 100
Estimated words: 95475 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95475 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)
His phone buzzed. Once, then twice in quick succession, then continuously. The vibration pattern that meant multiple messages arriving simultaneously.
Bastien picked it up. The screen showed seventeen notifications in the last thirty seconds.
Roxy had texted him, not two minutes ago.
Roxy: Whatever you’re doing, stop. Every mirror in my bar just went haywire.
Another text, from a vampire contact he hadn’t heard from in months. Marcel, who ran a gallery in the Warehouse District and never reached out unless circumstances were dire.
Marcel: Reflections reversing. Clocks running backward in glass. What’s happening?
Then another werewolf from the Crescent Moon Pack.
Unknown: Alpha says the pack house mirrors are showing wrong rooms. Security problem.
More texts flooding in. The supernatural community realizing simultaneously that something fundamental had changed.
Then his phone actually rang. Maman Brigitte.
He answered. “I know—”
“Get to your window,” she said without preamble. Her voice carried an edge he’d rarely heard. “Now, mon cœur. You need to see this.”
Bastien crossed to the window and looked down at Dauphine Street.
What he saw made his tactical assessment of the situation shift entirely.
Car mirrors showing vehicles driving in reverse. Not reflecting backward—showing actual reversed motion. A taxi backing down the street, its reflection moving forward. They corrected after a few seconds, snapping into synchronization with an almost audible pop.
Shop windows across the street reflecting the wrong interiors. The coffee shop’s window showed the bar two doors down—he could see the liquor bottles on shelves, the pool table in the back. The window next to it showed someone’s apartment, a bedroom with rumpled sheets and morning light through different windows than existed on this street.
A woman walked past below, paused to check her reflection in a parked car’s window. Her image moved independently for three full seconds—turned its head, looked directly at Bastien’s window two floors up, and smiled—before snapping back into normal reflection behavior. The woman shook her head, muttered something, and kept walking, unaware her reflection had just operated with autonomous consciousness.
The clock tower visible past the roofline showed 9:47 a.m. Its reflection in the glass building beyond, the modern office structure that caught light like a mirror itself, read 9:51. Four minutes ahead. As if the reflection existed slightly forward in time.
Bastien watched for another minute. Counted incidents. Three reversed cars. Five windows showing wrong locations. Two pedestrians whose reflections moved independently. The clock discrepancy holding steady at four minutes ahead.
Systematic. Network-wide. This wasn’t malfunction or accident. It was demonstration.
Gideon had just proved his reach. Every mirror, or reflective surface, in the Quarter—probably the entire city, possibly beyond—was compromised. The network was active. Operational. And completely under someone else’s control.
“You’re seeing it,” Maman said. Still on the phone, waiting.
“Network activation,” Bastien said. “Charlotte’s mirrors, or something built using her theories. Covering at least the Quarter. Maybe the entire city.”
“The supernatural community is panicking. Everyone suddenly realizing that privacy doesn’t exist anymore. That every reflective surface is potentially hostile. That someone’s watching through their bathroom mirrors, their car windows, their phone screens.”
Bastien’s phone buzzed again. Then again. He glanced at the screen without unlocking it. The count kept climbing.
“I need to go,” he said. “I’ve got to check on Delphine.”
“That’s where I’d go too,” Maman said. “But Bastien? Be careful. If Gideon can watch through mirrors, he’s been watching her too. He knows where she is. What she’s doing. How close you two are.” She paused. “He knows everything now.”
The line went dead.
Bastien stood at the window for another thirty seconds. Processing. Calculating. The scope of what Gideon had built required resources beyond what one practitioner should have access to. Money, certainly. But also knowledge. Charlotte’s complete research, not fragments. And time—years, maybe decades, spent studying her work. Understanding not just what she’d done but why. How to improve it. Scale it. Weaponize it.
The question was whether Bastien could respond through the same network Gideon controlled.
He turned from the window and went to the locked cabinet in the corner. The one warded with protections he’d spent decades layering. Physical lock first—key kept on a chain he wore. Then the magical lock, released by a gesture only he knew. The door opened with a soft click.
Inside, materials most practitioners couldn’t access without decades of networking and favors owed. Silver powder ground fine as flour, sealed in a jar that kept it from oxidizing. Ink made from lampblack and holy water and ground mirror glass—he’d mixed it himself following instructions from Charlotte’s journals, the ones she’d written in cipher that took him three years to decode. Ritual tools that had been old when he’d acquired them from an estate sale in Prague. Candles made from beeswax and rendered fat, blessed by priests who didn’t ask questions about what the blessings would be used for.
Charlotte had documented the mirror-forged ink process in her journals. Not complete instructions—she’d been too careful for that, too aware that the knowledge could be weaponized. But enough for someone who understood the underlying principles. Who’d studied the theory until it became instinct.