Free Ravencliffe (Blythewood series) by Carol Goodman Page A

mirrors. The thought that he was standing behind the glass watching me was sickening.
    Of course I see you, Ava,
van Drood’s voice purred from behind a mirror. I stepped toward it, staring at my own face as if I could find van Drood behind the glass.
I’ve always seen you. Since you were a little girl.
    My image in the mirrors wavered, blurred, and another image took its place. I was looking into eyes that looked like mine but weren’t. They were a deeper green, older, and shadowed by fear. They were my mother’s eyes. I followed them down to a little girl playing on the beach, running in and out of the surf like a sandpiper. My mother was watching me as a child . . . but why were her eyes so fearful? Then I saw
him
, a dark figure standing in the misty verge between land and sea.
    I turned back to see my mother’s face, but the scene had already changed. I saw myself, older, walking down a street in the city beside my mother, both of us under a large umbrella.
    “It’s stopped raining!” I cried, springing out from under the umbrella to leap over a puddle and holding my arms out. In my black cloak it looked like I had wings. As I lit down on the pavement I nearly collided with a man in an Inverness cloak.
    “You were watching me to see if I was turning into a Darkling,” I said.
    I wasn’t the only one
, he replied.
    His voice came from behind me. I whirled around and saw another scene from my childhood: my mother standing behind me, brushing my hair. I could almost feel the brush stroking my scalp and the weight of my mother’s hand on my shoulder . . .
    And her gaze on my back, eyes shadowed by fear.
    She was afraid you were turning into a monster
.
    “No!” I cried, turning toward the voice. A kaleidoscope of images spun around me: my mother measuring me for a dress, watching me reach for a book on a library shelf, her eyes always shadowed with fear, a look that I’d known throughout my childhood but that I’d assumed was from her own demons.
    You were her demon.
    “No!”
    She was waiting to see what kind of monster you would become. That’s why she fled from her friends and family, why she hid herself in shame. Knowing that you would become a monster like the demon that ravaged her.
    “No! That’s not how it happened. She was in love—”
    How do you know that? Did she tell you that when you saw her in Faerie?
    “No,” I admitted. “But Raven told me . . .”
    Of course he wouldn’t tell you that one of his own kind attacked a defenseless girl. That you, too, are becoming a monster. Look.
    The images from my childhood vanished, leaving only my present self. But as I stared at my reflection my wings burst through the confines of my corset and spread out behind me, and feathers began erupting from my skin, not just on the enormous wings, but from my hands and face—rough, ugly feathers that made me look like the bearded lady or the ape woman of Borneo. I turned from the sight, but the image followed me, multiplied a hundred times.
    It’s a trick,
I told myself,
an illusion van Drood is creating.
    But even as I said the words to myself I knew that if I didn’t banish the images I would see them forever. I would be trapped forever in this fun house, a hall of mirrors as cracked as my mind.
    That was it. I stepped closer to the mirror, cringing at the closer view of the monster in it, and pounded the glass with my fists.
    The glass shivered and I heard a faint tinkling sound . . . like
bells
. Why wasn’t my bass bell gonging if I was truly in danger?
    Once before in the dungeons of Blythewood my bells had failed me. They’d been muted by the
tenebrae
. Were they muted now by the mirrors? Was that why van Drood had lured me here—because my bells didn’t work in the Hall of Mirrors?
    Where’s your power now, chime child?
Van Drood’s voice mocked me.
Did you think you would keep it while you became a monster? Did you think that the power of Merope would remain in the body of the