The whole time she’d been standing in his office he’d been dead.
“And get this,” said Mark, still blathering away, “Ellis, the department head, tells me I’m gonna have to take the professor’s classes for the rest of the term. Can you believe this shit? Like they can’t afford to hire—”
“Oh, grow up, Mark,” Jessi hissed, thumbing the OFF button.
When finally she managed to escape the tenth level of Hell, Jessi made a beeline for side streets and headed straight back to campus.
Thoughts tumbled in disjointed confusion through her mind. Amid them all was a single clear one, drawing her like a beacon.
She had to see the mirror again.
Why—she had no idea.
It was simply the only thing she could think of to do. She couldn’t bring herself to go home. In her current state of mind she would climb the walls. She couldn’t go to the hospital; there was no longer anyone to visit. She had a few close friends, but they tended to work as much as she, so dropping by unexpectedly wasn’t the coolest thing to do, and besides, even if she did, what would she say—Hi, Ginger, how have you been? By the way, either I’ve gone insane, or my life has taken on distinct shades of Indiana Jones, complete with mysterious relics, foreign villains, and spectacular audiovisual special effects.
When she got back to the office there was police tape across the door.
That stopped her for a moment. Then she noticed it was campus police tape and tugged it aside. Violating university procedures didn’t seem quite as felonious a felony as breaking a law in The Real World.
As she jiggled the key in the lock, making sure it really was locked this time, she asked herself just what she thought she was going to do once she was inside.
Strike up a conversation with a relic? Lay her hands on the glass? Try to summon a spirit? Make like it was a Ouija board or something?
As fate would have it, she didn’t have to do a thing.
Because the moment she opened the door, a shaft of light splintered in from the hallway, straight onto the silvery glass.
Her feet froze. Her hands clenched on the door. Even her breath stopped mid-inhalation. She wasn’t certain, but she fancied her heart paused a long, ponderous moment, as well.
The towering, half-naked, absolute sex-god of a man standing inside the mirror, glaring out at her, snarled, “‘Tis high damned time you came back, wench.”
5
When Jessi was seventeen years old she’d almost died.
She’d gone to one of those indoor rock-climbing gyms (because her best friend had called to tell her that the football player she had a crush on was home from college that weekend and he and his friends were supposed to be there) and taken a horrible fall, breaking multiple bones and splitting her skull.
She’d missed the best parts of her senior year in high school, recuperating at home with her head shaved from where they’d inserted a metal plate to piece her skull back together, listening to other people’s stories of proms and parties and graduations.
And the guy she’d been so crazy about hadn’t even been at the climbing gym that day.
She’d learned a few things from the experience. One: the whole “best laid plans of mice and men” adage was absolutely true—she’d not gotten to rally her football team to the State finals the only year they’d made it in the past seven; she’d not gotten to wear the scrumptious pink prom dress that still hung in her closet; she’d not tossed her cap; she’d not attended a single senior party. And two: Sometimes when things got bad, a sense of humor was a person’s only saving grace. You could either laugh or you could cry, and crying not only made you feel worse, it made you look worse too.
It occurred to her as she stood there, staring at the thing in the mirror that couldn’t possibly be in the mirror, in a room where a recent attempt on her life had been made—said room’s previous occupant having been murdered recently himself—that events of the past few days certainly qualified as bad, even by conservative standards.
She started to giggle.
She couldn’t help it.
The sex-god’s dark eyes narrowed and he scowled. “‘Tis no laughing matter. Get in here and close that door. Now. There is much of which we must speak and time is of the veriest essence.”
She giggled harder, one hand to her mouth, the other clutching the doorjamb. Time is of the veriest essence. Who talked like that?
“For the love of Christ, wench, summon me out,” he said, sounding exasperated. “Someone needs to shake you.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” she managed between giggles. Giggles that were starting to sound just a tiny bit hysterical. “And I am not a wench,” she informed him loftily. And giggled.