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A piercing pain spread through Aldor’s heart at the utter disappointment in her eyes. “I will find it,” he vowed again with fervor.
She shifted silently to the table at the center of the room, and he watched her every movement with bated breath. She pulled a wooden box from one of the table’s square recesses and withdrew a blade. A dagger the color of night itself.
Fear flooded his bones. “I will die before I fail you,” he breathed, falling down onto his hands. His back seared with pain, but Aldor barely noticed. “Please, give me one last chance,” he begged.
She whispered a spell. Even though he was unable to understand her words, Aldor’s blood felt chilled. It was a spell of death. He closed his eyes, waiting for the end.
“Your last chance,” she told him. Aldor stuttered. “When you find the vampire, use this.”
He raised himself slowly, his body trembling. She held the handle of the small dagger out for him. With a shaking hand, Aldor took the blade. He felt unease from the dark energy within it.
“One cut is all it requires,” she told him.
Aldor nodded, barely able to believe he was still breathing. That she’d given him another chance. “Yes, Mistress. I will see it done.”
“The creature is your salvation in more ways than one,” she purred, gently cupping the petals of a thin, blood-red flower nearby. “Do not fail me again.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.
His life—his soul—depended on it.
* * *
Aldor stepped into the tomb of his grandfather. A veiled priestess, who’d been laying flowers and reciting a prayer, rose suddenly from the alcove. She gasped, not expecting to be interrupted, and immediately dropped her eyes when she realized who he was. Without a word, she hurried past him, hugging the wall, and fled out the door.
He knew she would say nothing—as she’d been instructed. Not that she would have otherwise. The priests and priestesses of the Temple of Light would not dare speak of him, for fear of tainting themselves. Aldor was no more than a ghost to the Temple’s devout. A soulless creature only present to do their High Priestess’s lowly, but necessary, bidding. The half-breed bastard of a great bloodline.
All would be different soon. Soon they would all gawk as he strolled amongst them. No longer a reviled creature lurking in the shadows, but his mistress’s loyal champion. His curse would be lifted, and he would be welcomed in her Court, amongst his people. All that stood in his way was the woman.
“Hello, Grandfather,” he grumbled as he always did, sliding by the sarcophagus. He briefly glanced at the flowers the priestess had left—white chrysanthemums—and opened the hidden passage behind the alcove. Once he’d descended into his rooms, he crossed the sparsely furnished space to a tapestry that hung at an odd angle on the wall.
Aldor pushed the tapestry aside and looked into the tall, gilded mirror it kept hidden. He stepped toward it without pause and entered through its reflective surface as if it were merely an open door. Familiar magick stirred as he passed into the Hall of Reflections.
The existence of the Hall was his greatest secret. Not even his Mistress knew of it. It was the one gift that had come with his curse. A place only a cursed soul from the Pool of Mirrors could enter.
Aldor knew hunting the woman by mirror would bear no fruit after his attempt back at her apartment. He’d tried to track her in every other way he knew how. He’d threatened those he knew to threaten. He’d snarled. He’d beaten. He had nothing.
Time was running out. His mistress wouldn’t tolerate failure again. Aldor needed guidance.
With haste, he made his way through the labyrinth of passageways, rooms, and nooks that made up the vast, seemingly never-ending Hall of Reflections. When he finally came to the long chamber he’d sought, Aldor’s pace slowed.
A mirror hung, large and round and ominous, on the far end of the room. The gilded, thick frame molded with ancient symbols. This mirror didn’t reflect his image or any other. It was simply black.
The dark surface splintered rather than rippled as he came near. A chill spread over his skin in response. Aldor tried to steady himself. He’d come for a reason. He couldn’t turn back now.
The shadows stirred within, and from the inky abyss a creature appeared.
His long coal-black hair was tied back to better display the symbols marked down his snowy white forehead and the shaved sides of his head. The lower third of his face, from his bottom lip down, appeared stained solid black from all the overlapping symbols. The high-necked midnight blue robes he wore lay open, revealing a dark trail of symbols all the way down to his muscled sternum, where they melded with the pale skin of his smooth chest.
“Back so soon?” Xel’voth mused. His dark, slithering voice made the very air that carried his words feel tainted.
Aldor willed himself to keep his eyes locked on the dark creature’s silver irises despite the cold sweat that spread over him. This was the only mirror in the whole of the Hall he wouldn’t dare enter. The mirrors themselves seemed leery of Xel’voth’s presence. How he’d come to be trapped within the mirror, Aldor didn’t know. He never wished to know.
Xel sensed his discomfort, and a smirk teased the corners of his lips. “Still so uneasy, Aldor? I thought you would be beyond that by now.”
Aldor swallowed the lump in his throat. “I know who she is,” he declared, clearing himself of emotion as best he could.
