Read Chapter 12: The Warehouse of Mirrors

The air in the warehouse was wrong. Not the damp rot of abandonment or the chemical bite of old industry—it was the smell of glass dust and cold iron, the scent of a thousand reflections that had never seen a face. Julien’s footsteps echoed too sharply, as if the space itself was listening.

The mirrors stretched in rows, hundreds of them, leaning against steel beams and stacked in precarious pyramids. Broken, yes—cracked from corner to corner, shattered at the center, spiderwebbed into blindness—but each one had been carefully preserved, mounted on wooden frames or held together with brass fittings that gleamed even in the dark. His flashlight swept across them and caught a hundred small disasters of light.

Romy moved beside him, silent, her own beam tracing the floor. She stopped at the nearest mirror and ran her fingers along its frame. Her breath hitched.

“Julien.”

He came to her side. The engraving was small, neat, done with a steady hand: *Marguerite Moreau, 1902–1949.*

His mother’s grandmother. The one who had died in a fire, according to family records. The one who had supposedly been in Lyon at the time.

He moved to the next mirror. *André Moreau, 1874–1931.* The first archivist. The man whose watch had started this whole damned journey. His mirror was cracked so deeply it was nearly split in two, but the engraving was still legible, still accusing.

“They’re all Moreaus,” Romy said quietly. She had moved further down the row, her light playing over another frame. “Every single one.”

Julien walked the line of mirrors like a man reading a graveyard. *Étienne, 1911–1967.* *Claire, 1948–2003.* *Sophie, 1973—* he stopped. His mother’s name. The date of birth, but no date of death.

The mirror was whole. Unbroken. Polished and clean, its surface dark and waiting.

“She’s not dead,” he whispered. The words felt like a confession.

“We don’t know that—” Romy started.

“Her mirror isn’t broken.” He touched the glass. It was cold, impossibly cold, colder than the air around it. “All the others are broken. She’s not.”

A sound came from the back of the warehouse. A heavy, wet thud, followed by a dragging scrape. Julien’s hand went to his sidearm, and Romy’s flashlight snapped toward the noise.

The beam caught a shape that was barely human. Seven feet tall, shoulders too broad, head too small for its body. Its skin was the color of old putty, and its face—when the light shifted—was smooth, featureless except for a mouth that opened too wide, full of teeth that gleamed like broken mirror shards.

Behind it, bound to a steel chair, was Claire Delacroix.

She was thinner than in her file photos, her hair a wild gray tangle, her wrists lashed to the armrests with cords that glowed faintly. Her eyes found Julien’s and went wide with desperate recognition. She tried to speak, but a strip of cloth was wound across her mouth, muffling whatever warning she was trying to scream.

The monstrous man turned.

It had no eyes, but it saw him. Julien felt that gaze like a blade against his throat.

“Romy,” he said, his voice steady even as his pulse hammered, “that thing moves through mirrors.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I’ve seen it before.” He hadn’t, not really, but he’d read about it in Étienne’s file. A creature called a *glaceur*—a mirror-eater, a guardian that could step into any reflective surface and emerge from another. The Brotherhood had employed them for centuries.

The glaceur took a step forward. Its mouth widened, and the glass shards lining its gums caught the light like a threat.

“Claire,” Julien said, raising his hands, weapon still holstered. He didn’t want to fire. Not yet. “I’m here to take you home.”

The glaceur’s head tilted. It made a sound like glass grinding against glass, and then it moved—not toward him, but sideways, faster than something that size had any right to move. Romy shouted a warning, but Julien was already sprinting, cutting across the warehouse floor, vaulting over a collapsed shelf.

The glaceur reached Claire. Its hand closed around the back of her chair, and it began to drag her toward the nearest mirror—a tall, full-length piece that was utterly intact, its frame carved with the Moreau crest.

“No!” Julien drew his weapon. He fired twice. The bullets hit the creature’s back and flattened against its skin like coins dropped on pavement. It didn’t even flinch.

The mirror behind the glaceur began to ripple, its surface softening to something like liquid silver. The creature stepped backward into it, pulling Claire and her chair with her. Her eyes locked on Julien’s, and she made a sound—muffled, desperate, but unmistakable.

*Remember.*

The glaceur vanished. The mirror rippled once, twice, then went still.

They were gone.

Romy reached Julien’s side, breathing hard. “It took her. Through the glass.”

Julien stared at the mirror. His reflection stared back, pale and furious. His hand was shaking. He didn’t remember drawing his weapon again, but it was there, and he wanted to put a bullet through that mirror just to feel something break.

Instead, he holstered it. He walked to the mirror and placed his palm flat against its surface.

Cold. Silent. Nothing.

“It’s a portal,” he said. “The mirrors aren’t just records. They’re doors.”

“Doors to where?”

He didn’t have an answer. He pulled his hand away, and as he did, he noticed a shard on the ground—a piece of a broken mirror, about the size of his palm, its edge sharp and jagged. He bent to pick it up, intending to take it as evidence.

The shard cut him.

It wasn’t a deep cut, barely a nick across his palm, but the blood welled up instantly, dark and warm. Before he could drop the shard, the glass drank it.

He felt it—a pull, a hunger, a recognition. The shard went hot in his hand, and then the cracks that spiderwebbed across its surface began to glow, silver light bleeding through the fractures like veins. The glow grew brighter, and Julien nearly dropped it, but his fingers wouldn’t open. The shard was fused to him, drinking deeper.

“Julien!” Romy grabbed his wrist. Her hand was cold, but her grip was yanking. “Let go!”

“I can’t.”

The light swallowed the shard entirely, and then it wasn’t a shard anymore. It was a mirror—small, oval, fitted to his palm like a talisman. And in its surface, the reflection was not his own.

His mother looked back at him.

She was younger than in the photographs he’d been given, younger than the woman who had died in a car accident when he was seven. She wore a grey dress and an apron, and around her were clocks—dozens of them, hundreds, walls of ticking faces and swinging pendulums. A workshop. His mother stood at a workbench, holding a screwdriver, her hair tied back, her face intent on some mechanism in front of her.

She looked up.

Her eyes met his. Through the glass, through the years, through whatever impossible barrier separated this place from that one, she saw him. Her lips parted. She said something he couldn’t hear, but he read the shape of it, the word forming in the air between them.

*Julien.*

The light in the shard swelled. His palm burned, and his vision went white, and the last thing he saw before the world vanished was his mother’s face breaking into a desperate, terrified smile.

Then the workshop was gone.

He was on his knees on the concrete floor, Romy’s hands on his shoulders, shaking him. The shard was cool in his palm now, a dull grey oval, its surface blank and dark. The cut on his hand was already closing. His blood was gone, absorbed into the glass.

“Julien.” Romy’s voice was sharp. “What did you see?”

He looked up at her. His mother’s face was still burned into his mind, the clocks ticking behind her, the screwdriver in her hand. She wasn’t dead. She had never been dead. And now he knew where she was.

“The workshop,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “The one from the file. Étienne’s notes. He called it the Harbinger’s Chapel.”

Romy’s face went pale. “That place doesn’t exist.”

“It does.” Julien tucked the shard into his pocket. It was warm against his thigh, like a heartbeat. “She’s there. And I’m going to find it.”