I could practically hear Kayla snorting in my head, and avoided looking at her and nodded quickly. “I completely understand.”
“Would it be unwise for me to accept your offer of wine?” she asks, staring at me with interest, expecting me to teach her how to be a human.
“No,” I say with a reassuring smile, walking closer and forcing myself to lean down to kiss her soft cheek. “It’s fine as long as you don’t offer me any.”
She nods with a delighted smile. “I do love claret.”
“I think we only have merlot,” Juniper interjects, slipping out of the room towards the kitchen where Mary and I follow.
“That will do just as well.” She says magnanimously.
I hurry into the kitchen and retrieve a glass and fill it with the wine that we’ve treated with Juniper’s heavy medications. I pour her a hearty serving and hand it to her gently.
She takes it with a grateful nod and looks at us all. “Juniper, are you having any?”
“No,” she replies emotionlessly. “It interferes with all the medications I need to take.”
“Kayla?” she says, moving her catlike eyes to Kayla who raises her already full glass, poured before I dumped the crushed pills in. She gingerly takes a sip and sits quietly down at the table, looking at each of us carefully.
I take a seat next to her, taking her hand in mine, willing the charade to encourage her to drink steadily. Neither Juniper or Kayla excel at idle chatter, so I channel Kat and begin to yammer on about a variety of inane subjects.
No matter what I say Mary’s eyes sparkle as she listens and encourages me, throwing her head back to laugh with delight as she steadily sips the drugged wine. She’s on her second glass when her eyes begin to get heavy, the hazel of them starting to disappear with drooping lashes.
Several times she shakes her head, as though she’s attempting to jolt away the drowse that is surmounting her human form. I’m loudly regaling her with a story about the time Juniper attached a rubber snake to my pants and watched me run around screaming when Mary finally slumped forward, unable to wrestle away slumber any longer.
I gather her in my arms and carry her down to the cellar. Ian appears and grabs the mirror with a grunt, struggling to wrest the unwieldy monstrosity through the narrow hallway and down the steep stairs so that it is resting in front of the cell that I lock Mary in. I place her gently up against the bars so that we can access her hand easily to let her blood.
I slam the cell door closed, gagging at the dank smell that pervades the fetid air in the cellar. Both the floor and the walls are slick stone, and the chill in the cavernous space is eerie.
“I cannot believe you have the keys for these cells,” Kayla remarks.
“I cannot believe you have a fucking jail in your cellar,” Ian adds, looking around and shaking his head. “Let’s start there.”
“Well, it made for the most authentic and badass cops and robbers games when we were kids,” I shrug, looking at the weathered, metal keys. They jangle and the smell of metallic rust sparks whenever they touch, and I think again that should I live through this, I will leave this place. The whole house has been my jail, even though the cellar is the only place with actual cells.
“Let’s do this,” Juniper’s voice teeters with nervous anticipation. “Where is the knife?”
“I’ll grab it,” Kayla offers, promptly striding to the stairs and taking them two at a time to find the one knife I’d left out for this purpose.
“Ian,” Juniper begins, breathing heavily with frightened anticipation, and I recognize how particularly scary it must be for her with no ability to actually see what’s happening. “You should get out of sight just in case.”
“Yes, you’re right. I suppose we have no idea how this will go,” he nods at me and starts towards the stairs, disappearing quickly.
I grab Juniper’s hand and squeeze it. “I’ll take care of you, Juni.”
“You always do,” she smiles.
As Kayla is descending down the stairs, the knife glinting in her hands, I am shocked to hear a disturbance from the cell. I whip my head over to see Mary crawling back from the bars on her hands and knees. Her head is down, with Kat’s hair falling over her face as she shakes, forcing herself awake.
“I thought she’d be out longer,” Kayla gasps, rushing up.
“She’s in Kat’s body, so I wasn’t going to give her an overdose.” I looked in the cell critically, my breath catching in my throat. “It should have been longer than this, however.”
“Is she still near the bars?” Juniper asks frantically as she backs away.
“No,” Kayla says, affecting calm. “How do we get her blood?”
Mary rocks back onto her feet, drowsily forcing herself into a sitting position as she glares at us through falls of wild hair. “What a way to treat your beloved, Erik. Tsk tsk.”
“You are far from my beloved,” I sneer, walking closer to the bars.
She shakes the hair from her face and looks around, her luminous eyes finally resting on the mirror. “Oh my, what do we have planned, my love? Busy plotting, I see.”
“It’s time for you to go,” Juniper snarls, head high despite her shaking hands as she steadies herself on her cane.
“No, I don’t think so” Mary demurrs, looking around in awe. “What symmetry that I would end up back here again. Same cell even.”
She bites her lip and looks directly at me. “So what now? You think you can get me to cut myself while I’m in here and you’re out there? That is unlikely, my love. I do hate to disappoint.”
“Perhaps we just break the mirror,” I offer with a shrug.
“I wouldn’t do that,” she shakes her head with a malicious smile. “What’s to say you’ll
