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)
“Mirror Fever,” he said.
“That’s what I thought.” She pulled a flask from her jacket and took a pull. “Except it’s not hitting humans. Just us. Seven wolves in two days, all of them showing the same symptoms. Eyes holding images that aren’t there. Voices echoing before they speak.”
Bastien stood. His reflection in the water moved half a second after he did, lag visible enough to make his teeth ache. The temporal delay that had infected every mirror in the Quarter was spreading. Natural water amplifying reflection magic, treating the river itself as one more surface for Gideon’s network to corrupt.
“Where are they now?”
“Quarantined. Pack Alpha’s orders.” She capped the flask. “I’m here because you’re the only one in this city who might know what we’re dealing with, and because—” She stopped and stared at him. “Because Gabriel Jr.’s one of them. Tib’s nephew. Twenty-three years old, good kid, never caused trouble in his life. And now he’s seeing himself die in seventeen different ways every time he closes his eyes.”
The way she said it—flat, controlled—told him exactly how scared she was. Roxy didn’t do fear well. She did action, solutions, tactical responses to problems that had clear cause and effect. This was something else.
“I need to see him.”
“Can’t. Quarantine means quarantine. But I can show you this.” She pulled a phone from her pocket, thumbed through photos, handed it over.
The image showed a young man strapped to a bed, chest bare, covered in marks that looked like someone had carved them with light instead of blade. Glyphs, precise and intricate, spreading from collarbone to navel in patterns that pulsed even in the still photograph. Bastien had seen these before—Charlotte’s work, refined by someone who’d studied her methods until they could replicate her techniques with disturbing accuracy.
But these were different. More aggressive. As if the mirror magic had adapted to werewolf physiology and found ways to exploit the additional power flowing through their bloodlines.
“When did the markings appear?”
“Hour after he showed symptoms. They started at his sternum and spread outward like something was writing on him from the inside.” Roxy took the phone back, stared at the image for three seconds longer than she needed to. “Tib wants to know if you can stop it. If you can’t, he wants to know how to contain it so it doesn’t take the whole pack.”
Bastien looked at the river. His reflection stared back at him, perfectly synchronized now. Then its mouth moved—forming words his actual mouth wasn’t saying, speech articulated through mirror-space while his physical form stayed still.
Every bond demands a sacrifice.
He stepped back from the water.
“It’s not a disease,” he said. “It’s contamination. The mirror network is learning pack bonds, treating your connection to each other as another form of reflection it can corrupt and amplify.”
“English, Durand.”
“The mirrors are storing what they see. Including how werewolves communicate through pack magic. Now they’re replaying it wrong—showing your wolves things that haven’t happened yet, or things that happened to different pack members in different timelines. The network is teaching glass to speak your language, and glass doesn’t understand context.”
Roxy processed that. Her hand went to the flask again, stopped halfway. “So what stops it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“It’s what I have.” He turned to face her. “Gideon Virelli built this system over decades. I’ve had two weeks to figure out how it works. The mirrors aren’t just reflecting anymore—they’re remembering, storing, reproducing. They’ve learned to archive conversations and replay them on command. I call it Glass Tongues. And if they’ve learned pack bonds, if they can access the connections that hold your wolves together—”
“Then they can use those bonds against us.” She said it flat, the way she’d say it’s going to rain or we need more ammunition. ”Can you break the connection?”
“Not without breaking the mirrors. All of them. Every reflective surface in the city.”
“Then break them.”
“And trigger a cascade that would fracture reality across six parishes? No. We need another approach.” Bastien wasn’t actually sure that would happen, but the fact of the matter was they couldn’t destroy every reflective surface in the city either way.
Roxy turned away from him, looked out at the water that refused to move. “You know what the worst part is? They can feel it happening. Gabriel says it’s like someone’s rewriting his memories while he’s still using them. He’ll remember a hunt from three years ago, and halfway through, the memory changes—shows him dying instead of bringing down the deer. Shows the pack turning on him. Shows Tib putting him down because the infection made him dangerous.”
Her voice didn’t waver. That was the thing about Roxy—she’d learned a long time ago that emotion was luxury you couldn’t afford when people were counting on you to solve problems.
“Based on how quickly it has manifested, how long do you think before it spreads to the rest of the pack?”