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Miercurea glanced away from the mirror. Mari had taken advantage of his distraction to slip away. He would remedy that later.
The annoying voice belonged to a short man with a grimy light-brown shirt and a name-tag proclaiming "Mitch."
"To begin," said Miercurea, "you may sell me this mirror, Mitch." His deep tones rang contempt upon the name.
The old man examined it. "It doesn't have a price..." Miercurea's face darkened. "...tag," he stammered. "No price tag! Here, take it! No charge! It's worthless anyway!" He scuttled off, like a roach shooed from the dinner table.
Miercurea took the mirror off its wall, and slid the huge round weight under his arm. Leaving the store, he headed east, the streets becoming darker and emptier as he journeyed. Soon, he reached the building he had claimed on a desolate street, one with just enough rats and rubble to be shunned, but not demolished.
The building, one of a drab set of early nineteenth-century tenements, had been designed with no wasteful inner shafts to admit sunlight. Miercurea had found it condemned, sealed with stone and mortar, blind and mummified in perfectly preserved decay.
Miercurea passed the boarded-up front entrance and went to the back of the tenement. He always entered the house through the cellar's iron hatch, not bothering with a lock. If some misguided urban thrill-seekers mistook the place for an abandoned building, the stench of rot inside would drive them out. Miercurea himself had taken a long time to get accustomed to it.
The hatch clanked shut behind him. Kicking bones aside, he sloshed through the wormy decay on the ground floor towards the ruined wall in which six doors were set, one atop the other. He had cut out all the staircases, and only used the top floor. Crouching low, he sprang, landing on the narrow ledge in front of the door. Miercurea pushed the door open.
A stained wooden chair and table furnished the airless room, and thick dirt carpeted it. Miercurea closed the door behind him, a lazy cloud of soot rising and settling at the disturbance. He set the mirror on a half-rotted mantelpiece. Oaken frame blending into the surroundings, the mirror mimicked a perfectly round window.
Miercurea hesitated to look into it, to take up where he had left off in the store. Where Mari had evaded him. Three nights of watching her, hearing her music, the game almost at an end. Now I must use the cat's skin I stole. He felt a rush of anger. Mirror, you had better be worth the delay. Or are you a mirror? Mirrors don't reflect vampires.
I am the dark mirror, it answered. Only those who dare much hold discourse with me. Why do you draw away? Are you afraid?
"No," lied Miercurea, and stepped defiantly before the mirror.
A face stared out past him, a white oval in the midst of long black hair. For a moment Miercurea mistook it for himself.
He recognized Mari. Her image turned and saw him.
Their eyes met, clashing like distant harmonies, repelling each other and fusing. No longer the simple object of his thirst, Mari seemed magnified in beauty, recalling past faces Miercurea had loved and destroyed. In her green eyes he wanted to quench all his guilt, thirst and isolation. Desire overcame him as he had not known for centuries, haunting him with the lines of the last song he had ever sung:
Your sorrows, they are mine;
One touch will restore me . . .
Mari's image drew breath, trembling like glass at a high note, about to shatter.
In a low, passionate moan, Miercurea threw his head back, opening his jaws in anticipation. Mari disappeared from the glass, and Miercurea saw his own pallid face, his sharp ashen teeth.
His passion died at the ugliness of his open mouth. Turning from the mirror, Miercurea bit his lip.
Pain at a distance: two stakes driven into faraway white flesh. Blood like molten lead welled from his lower lip, viscous with the blood of many, dusk red, almost black. Miercurea slid his tongue over the burning lip. The punctures twisted shut, blackened; healed, leaving no trace.
Behold the reflection that perished, said the mirror. Miercurea contemplated himself: the greyish translucence of his skin, his unkempt black hair, the hatred and mourning in his black eyes. A portrait not unlike that of centuries ago, but unbearable now.
Turning away, Miercurea thought of Mari's green eyes, angry with himself for his weakness and desire. For centuries Miercurea had had no desires save one; anything beyond bloodthirst would place him in danger, as it had long ago. Mari was food, and he must treat her so, when he found her again. He must kill desire, since it had brazenly shown itself.
"Why did you first show her image in my stead?" Miercurea demanded.
You see yourself in her, do you not? asked the Mirror.
"Don't taunt me!" Miercurea spat. A drop of his spittle, black with blood, hit the ground. "She's prey. Had you not distracted me, her blood would be mine now."
Her blood is indeed yours. Go; find her.
Miercurea frowned, suspecting the mirror ridiculed him somehow. It still displayed his image. "Get rid of that, then, and find her for me," he snapped. "I thirst."
Miercurea's image trembled, as if a single raindrop troubled the surface of a pool of water. "Stop wasting my time," he told the mirror. "Show me the girl." The image tripped and shuddered like a pool of water beaten by rain, impossibly distorted. Miercurea glared at the mirror. "Mari's image, and clearly, or I'll shatter you now."
A profusion of raindrops burst Miercurea's image into a thousand shards. The mirror turned deep blue. Shadows tossed dizzyingly in the glass, darkening. Flakes of light like rose petals fluttered downwards, covering the mirror-pool, the petals dissipating.
Deep blue again, the pool calm.
In the pool, a row of apartment houses appeared. Miercurea recognized Mari's building on Seventh Street. Bare trees swayed to the old music of the winter wind as a cold rain beat down. Strangers passed by on the street.
Then Miercurea saw Mari, distracted and overdressed in her evening gown, walking fast, face pale. She ran up the stoop, almost knocking down a blue-haired old woman, apologizing. Inside, Mari shivered, hugging herself, and started up the stairwell.
2
______________________An irritated voice broke Miercurea's concentration. "You got some kind of problem?"
Chapter 3....