Thorns & Twilight

Chapter 1: It Was Waiting For Me

"You're late again, Violet."

Mr. Sebastian didn't look up from his phone when he said it.

"By four minutes."

"Four minutes is four minutes."

He stood behind the counter in his brown cardigan with his reading glasses around his neck and his phone in his hand and he looked at me the way he always looked at me. Like I was a minor inconvenience he never got around to fixing.

"It won't happen again," I said.

"You said that on Thursday."

"And I meant it then."

He made a sound that was not quite a word and shuffled toward the back office. I watched him go and then turned to face the shop.

I hung my coat on the hook by the door and grabbed the inventory clipboard from the counter and that was the end of our Monday morning conversation. That was usually the end of all our conversations. Mr. Sebastian communicated in short sentences and long silences and I had learned to work around both.

The shop smelled the way it always smelled. Old wood. Furniture polish. The faint dusty weight of things that had belonged to other people and now belonged to nobody in particular. I liked it, actually. There was something honest about a place that didn't pretend to be more than it was.

I started on the new inventory.

"Someone's dropping off a delivery," Mr. Sebastian called from the back. "Sign it."

Two men came through the door struggling with something wrapped in brown paper and moving blankets. Something tall. I set down the clipboard.

"Rose?" one of them said, reading off a label.

"That's me."

He held out the clipboard. I looked at the delivery form before I signed it.

Sender: Unknown. Origin: Unknown. Contents: One ornamental mirror.

Recipient: Violet Rose.

Personal.

I read that last word twice.

"This says personal," I said.

"Yeah."

"It's addressed to me. Not the shop."

"Yeah." He shrugged. "Are you signing or not?"

I signed.

They set it against the far wall and left without another word. I stood there looking at the brown paper wrapping and the moving blankets and the shape underneath, which was tall and dark and had a quality about it even wrapped up that made me want to take a step back instead of forward.

Mr. Sebastian appeared in the doorway of the back office, glanced at it, and disappeared again.

I unwrapped it myself.

The frame was dark metal twisted into a pattern my eyes kept sliding off.

Every time I tried to look directly at the design my focus moved sideways on its own. Like the frame was saying, politely but firmly, that it was none of my business.

The glass was perfect.

Not the slightly warped silver of old mirrors. Something deeper. Something that showed me my reflection and also, somehow, suggested that the reflection wasn't the whole story.

I stood in front of it for too long.

Brown eyes. Dark hair half out of its knot. The shadows under my eyes I'd been carrying since I was seven and couldn't put down no matter how much I slept.

"Well," I said quietly. "You're ugly."

I reached out and touched the frame.

The cold hit me so fast I pulled my hand back before I even thought about it.

It was a deep, deep cold. Like the cold of deep water. The kind of cold that has been waiting for a long time, for one exact moment. It felt like it lived at the bottom of something.

It spread from my fingertips up to my wrist and stayed there. It didn’t hurt. It just felt… there.

In the glass, behind my reflection, something moved.

Not the shop.

Not the shelves, the clocks, or the ceramic owls I thought were creepy. Something else. A flicker. Like light coming from somewhere that wasn’t this room. It felt golden and warm

And then I saw a figure.

Tall. Dark-haired. Standing somewhere that was definitely not behind me.

He turned his head.

His silver eyes looked straight at me through the glass.

I jumped back so fast I hit the table behind me. Three ceramic vases fell over. One hit the floor and broke.

"Violet," Mr. Sebastian called from the back room.

"Fine," I said. My voice sounded steady. I didn’t know how. "I knocked something over. Sorry."

I turned back to the mirror.

It was just my reflection, just the shop.

Just me standing there with my heart racing and my hands still a little shaky. The cold from the frame was still in my fingertips, like it had settled in and wasn’t leaving.

I crouched down and picked up the broken pieces.

I told myself it was nothing.

I was tired. I was always tired. The dreams got into everything when I didn’t sleep, and I never slept well. It didn’t mean anything.

By the time I locked the shop at five, I had told myself it was nothing fourteen times.

I walked home. I made dinner but didn’t taste it. I sat on the couch with a book but didn’t read it.

At ten I went to bed.

I closed my eyes.

The forest was there right away.

Gold trees. Purple sky. That light from nowhere. The ground was soft and dark under my feet. I have been here a thousand times. I knew every detail, the way the leaves chimed, the way the air tasted like rain and something older than rain.

He was closer than ever before.

Close enough that I could finally see his face clearly. Sharp features. Dark hair across his forehead. Silver eyes watching me with that look I’d tried to understand for seventeen years and never could.

He opened his mouth.

I froze.

He was about to speak. For the first time in twelve years, he was actually going to....

My alarm went off.

I lay in the dark staring at the ceiling. My heart was pounding. The dream was slipping away.

One thought sat in my chest, where the empty feeling usually was:

He was about to say my name.

I knew it, even though I didn’t know how.

He was about to say my name.