Free Heirs of Grace by Tim Pratt Page A

showed me the screen with his contacts, and at first it seemed like it was in Cyrillic or something, but then I realized it was mirror writing—all the letters were reversed.
    Strange as that was, I was distracted by something else. I pointed at the window. “Trey. There’s light coming in there.”
    “Yes. That’s true.”
    “Trey. It’s dark . At least back in Meat Camp.”
    He winced. “I didn’t think about that. I guess we’re not in Meat Camp anymore.”
    “Doesn’t have quite the same ring as ‘Kansas,’ does it?”
    I did that mental taking-a-step-back thing. “So my dead relative invented teleportation. Okay. That’s quite an inheritance.” I needed to focus on something real, so I climbed up on the chair, and then up on the desk, and tried to reach the window, but it was still a good three feet above my head. Even Trey wouldn’t be able to reach it. Maybe if we put the chair on the desk…no, the chair had wheels and it would be kind of dangerous. I could jump and smash at the window with the sword cane…but I had no idea what was outside, and my curiosity only went so far.
    In fact, the thought of breaking the window made my guts go cold. I could imagine myself losing my balance and falling off the desk and rolling into the reverse-mirror and somehow breaking it and then we’d be stuck here and how had I just now noticed that there weren’t any doors ? “Let’s get out of here.”
    “Works for me.” Trey picked up the blue book from the desk, tucking it under his arm, slung the jacket over his shoulder, and then put the spoon in the coffee cup and picked them both up. I looked at him oddly, but he simply shrugged. “What? The mirror is a magic door . Maybe the spoon is just a spoon, but aren’t you a little curious? At the very least I want to know what this book is—there’s not even a title on the front, maybe it’s Mr. Grace’s journal or something. I’d read it right now, but I am probably not in my right mind. Anyway, I bet it’s written backward.”
    “Yes. Good points.” I accepted the hand he offered and hopped down from the desk. “Let’s do the further-investigations bit back in the world. And maybe when we get out of here, let’s turn the mirror to face the wall until we figure this stuff out, all right?”
    “I was thinking hide the mirror in the cellar, but sure, your way works, too.”
    This time, I reached out to the mirror while he held my hand, and we plunged through the icy membrane and back into the master bedroom. I looked down, and my ring was on my right hand again. Trey put the book and cup and jacket down on the bed—
    And then we heard a crash downstairs, and someone cursing.
    I kept the sword cane in my hand and went out on the landing, looking down to the living room, where Melinda was inexplicably tearing shit off the shelves, flipping over tables, and generally wrecking up the place. “What the fuck ?” I shouted.
    Trey joined me, and said, “Melinda?” in a baffled voice.
    Then Melinda’s face started changing, the flesh shifting and sliding like it was made of melting wax. Her cheeks hollowed out as the color bled from them, her nose lengthened, and her chin became pointier. She started tearing out chunks of her hair and flinging them to the floor.
    If I were the fainting type, that might have done me in, but I’d walked through a mirror twice, so maybe I was temporarily immunized against psychotic breaks. Instead of fainting, I unsheathed my sword cane. Holding a few feet of bare steel in my hand did wonders for my morale.
    The woman below tore off the last of Melinda’s hair and sloughed off the last of her face, revealing a very different person underneath: eyes of icy blue, skin the color of titanium-white paint, hair long and white-blonde, nose sharp as an arrowhead with a chin to match, and a mouth like the slot you put a dollar into if you want to get a soda out of a vending machine. She tore her clothes off, revealing a shapeless