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)
The mirror needed to be destroyed.
Not emotional destruction. Deliberate choice.
Bastien placed it face down on his desk. He opened the drawer and pulled out a small hammer—jeweler’s tool, precise weight, designed for delicate work. He positioned it over the back of the mirror’s frame.
One controlled strike. The sound of glass shattering was louder than he’d expected.
But even broken, something came through the fragments.
Not sound. Resonance. Laughter that existed in the space where observation met consciousness. Gideon’s amusement vibrating through the shards.
Bastien looked down at the pieces scattered across his desk. Each fragment showed something different. Not his office. Delphine at the Archive, leaning over a ledger. Maman’s shop, candles burning. The Quarter streets from angles suggesting there was surveillance from every reflective surface in the city.
Gideon was everywhere now. The network had become fully active.
Bastien collected the shards carefully. Each piece went into a warded box—lead-lined, inscribed with containment marks that would block resonance. He locked it and set it on the cabinet shelf.
“Charlotte,” he said quietly. Not to the mirror. To himself. To the ghost of her that lived in all the theory she’d left behind. “If you left a way to stop this, I need to find it.”
Not prayer. Tactical thinking. She’d built systems that transcended death. She’d understood how to preserve information across lifetimes. Somewhere in her work, she would have left a failsafe. Something that could dismantle what Gideon had created.
Bastien looked at the maps on his wall. At the notes covering his desk. At the mirror fragments locked safely away.
The hunt had shifted. No longer about understanding what Gideon wanted. Now about finding what Charlotte had hidden.
He picked up his phone. The messages kept coming in. The supernatural community demanding answers he didn’t have yet.
But one name stood out. Delphine, from ten minutes ago.
Delphine: Are you okay? Mirrors here are acting strange.
He needed to see her. Needed to check that she was safe. Needed to tell her—what, exactly? That the city had become a panopticon? That privacy no longer existed? That the man targeting him could watch her through every reflective surface?
Bastien grabbed his jacket and headed for the door. He could be at the Archive in fifteen minutes.
Outside, the Quarter conducted its morning business. Tourists photographing architecture. Street performers setting up in Jackson Square. Delivery trucks blocking narrow streets while drivers maneuvered hand trucks.
All of it reflected in windows, mirrors, polished brass, chrome fixtures.
All of it watched.
Chapter
Ten
Bastien found the mirror fragment where he’d left it, wrapped in silk at the bottom of his research bag. It had been a couple days since Gideon’s messages in the hand mirror and he still hadn’t cataloged this piece properly. Sloppy. But exhaustion made everything take twice as long.
He spread the silk on the Archive’s conservation table and unwrapped the glass carefully. Delphine had given him access to this room when he went to see her—better light than his apartment, and she could check his work. It made her feel useful, and made him feel less like he was lying to her, which was its own kind of useful.
The room smelled like old leather and lemon oil. Afternoon sun cut through the high windows, giving him maybe two hours before the angle got bad. He positioned the fragment on black velvet and adjusted the examination lamp.
Charlotte had built warps into this mirror deliberately. Not flaws—features. The distortions would amplify certain resonances, make the glass remember what ordinary reflection forgot.
He turned up the lamp’s intensity and watched patterns emerge in the silvering. Hairline striations radiating from a thickened center point. Typical of her work from the 1770s, when she was refining the techniques that would eventually—
The reflection shifted.
No transition. One second his face rendered in lamplight. The next, someone else occupying the space where he stood.
Delphine appeared in the glass. Her expression intent, focused, the way she looked when tracking connections between documents. Her hand moved like she was tracing text on an invisible surface.
Then her features blurred. Precise transformation—not optical error but deliberate alteration. The mirror reshaping what it showed him.
Charlotte materialized. Twenty-three, positioned at her workbench in the atelier she’d kept in her family’s home.
Echo Bleed. The fragment triggering, showing him what Charlotte had sealed into it during creation.
The conservation room vanished.
He stood in her workshop—not watching through glass but present in the scene itself. Air thick with gold dust catching afternoon light through shutters. Candle smoke pooling in corners. He could smell heated wax, fresh-ground pigment, and iron tools warming near a brazier.
Charlotte worked at her bench. Tools arranged in patterns that suggested ritual as much as craft—brushes by bristle count, files by tooth fineness, pigment pots positioned according to celestial correspondences. A mirror frame waited, glass already silvered and set, wooden edges bare.
She held a brush loaded with gold leaf, the metal beaten thin enough to tear under breath. She applied it to carved rosettes in the frame’s upper corner with strokes that looked more like prayer than decoration.