The Thorn & The Thistle

The first thing Evangeline Thorne noticed about the mirror was that it refused to show her face. It stood propped against the back wall of McAllister's Oddities, its wrought-iron frame twisting into thorned vines that seemed to writhe when the gaslight flickered. Where Eva's reflection should have been, the mercury glass swirled with shadows, like ink dropped in water. "Reflections are souls glimpsing their own edges," her mother's journal had warned on page forty-seven. The page Eva had found stained with what might have been tears. "Where did this come from?" Eva traced the Latin inscription along the frame's edge—*Sanguis et veritas. Blood and truth. The shopkeeper shrugged. "Gravedigger's auction. The late owner insisted it be kept covered." He eyed her ink-stained fingers and patched skirts. "Five pounds to you, miss." Eva hesitated only a moment before paying. She'd spent three years chasing whispers of her missing mother's occult research. If this mirror held even one clue... --- Midnight found Eva alone in her attic flat, the mirror propped against her dresser. The candlelight made the silvered glass ripple like a pond disturbed. She opened her mother's journal to the marked page and began reciting the incantation written in the margin—words that tasted of rust and honey. The mirror screamed. A sound like shattering bone filled the room as the glass fractured into a thousand spiderweb cracks. Black smoke poured through the fissures, coiling around Eva's ankles with unnatural warmth. Then— A boot struck the floorboards. Then another. A man stepped through the broken mirror, smoke clinging to his shoulders like a king's mantle. Tall, pale, and dressed in a black frock coat fifty years out of fashion, he looked like a portrait come to life—if portraits had eyes that swallowed the light whole. "Ah." The stranger brushed a fleck of mirror dust from his sleeve. "A summoning. How... quaint." Eva's knife was at his throat before his last syllable faded. "Name yourself." His lips curled, revealing elongated canines. "Asmodeus Valac. Though you may call me my lord* if you're feeling formal." The blade turned red-hot in her grip. She dropped it with a hiss. "Lesson one," Asmodeus said, stepping over the smoking knife. "Iron won't harm me. But this—" He flicked the rosary at her throat—"—might've stung. Had it been blessed." Eva's pulse hammered. She'd summoned one of Hell's seven princes. And judging by the way his shadow stretched unnaturally up the wall—forming twisted horns and lashing tail—he found her deliciously amusing.