Aunt Zoe’s bar stool scraped across the cement floor. “They’re ancient alchemy symbols.”
“Alchemy? You mean the study of how to change lead into gold?” I remembered seeing an eighteenth-century painting at the Denver Art Museum of an alchemist years back. There were interestingly shaped vessels all over the man’s table and floor, books with symbols splayed wide here and there, and a human skull on the table next to him.
“Converting lead to gold, and the process of how other substances transmuted from one element to another, was only one school of practice in alchemy.” She joined me, standing behind me while staring at me in the mirror. Her blue eyes were lined with worry. “Many alchemists also explored and experimented with how certain substances were related to magic and astrology.”
“Magic?”
Aunt Zoe nodded. “Mr. Black was right. It’s a special mirror. A magic mirror of sorts.”
“Mirror, mirror on the wall?” I said, making big googly eyes at her.
Her smile was short-lived.
So was mine. “So tell me about it.”
“Well, I’ve never seen the mirror used, of course, so I only know what your great-grandmother told me about it.” Aunt Zoe nudged me aside and lifted it off the wall, carrying it over to her worktable. She pushed the vases and goblets aside and then gently laid the mirror down.
I joined her, moving several trees out of the way, and hopped up onto her table where I’d sat many, many times since childhood. I turned toward the mirror, bending and tucking one leg under the other. “Wait, don’t tell me. I’ll bet Grandma-Great said it was an evil mirror and told you to keep my picture wedged into it so you’d never forget how deadly both it and I were.”
Aunt Zoe grabbed a cloth from a cupboard under the adjacent work counter and began to wipe away the dust that had accumulated on the outside and in the corners of the frame. “Contrary to what you think, Violet Lynn, your great-grandmother did not think of you as evil incarnate.”
“Ha! Then why did she talk about my hidden danger and the smell of death when I was near? Those aren’t exactly words of comfort and love.”
She frowned up at me for a moment and then returned to polishing the mirror. “She saw the seeds of a killer in you early. That’s why she told me to watch you closely for signs of our family birthright.”
“More like family curse most days,” I muttered.
She sighed, looking up at me with narrowed eyes. “Are you going to sit here and whine about what is now a fact of life, or are you going to listen to what I have to tell you about this mirror so we can decide if it will help you catch the lidérc?”
My cheeks warmed. “Sorry. I’ll be good and listen. It’s just sometimes I wish I had as good of a relationship with Grandma-Great as you had.”
She reached out and lifted my chin. “I’m going to say this once today, and then we are moving on. Your great-grandmother did not loathe you, as you tend to think. She loved you. It may not have seemed like it with how she sometimes treated you, especially when the budding killer in you showed itself in ways that would scare her. However, she spoke often to me of your potential, and she wanted to make sure I knew how to help you to live long and kick ass.” She brushed a curl out of my face and smiled, tweaking my nose. “She was very proud of you and what she was sure you would someday become.”
“A screwup?” I joked, but not really.
Her lips thinned. “Violet Lynn, you are not a screwup. You need to get that through your thick skull.” She knocked on my forehead to emphasize her point.
“What do you call letting that imp go free?”
“An accident.”
“See!” I smiled, feeling vindicated. “That’s what I told Cooper and Dominick, but they disagreed.”
“Listen, baby girl. I am a firm believer that there is a purpose behind everything that happens in this life. That imp needed to be freed in order for something else to occur. Only time will tell what that ‘something else’ is.”
“Yeah, well, now Dominick has added it to my to-do list. He says I need to capture his imp because I’m the one who broke the window and let it go free.”
She shrugged. “One fish at a time.”
“I need a trawl net.”
“What you need is to pay attention now, because I’m going to explain what I know about this mirror and then you’ll understand why I’m not so sure it’s what you need to catch the lidérc.”
I nodded once, giving her my full attention. “I’m all ears.”
“First, you need to understand that the mirror is old.”
“Like Venetian mirrors old?”
“What do you know about Venetian mirrors?”
“I know what you taught me years ago. That the Venetians were the ones who perfected mirror making, but they weren’t the first to blow glass. Didn’t that start in Turkey or somewhere in the Middle East?” Before she could answer, I continued. “Anyway, I remember the story about an English queen who sold a huge wheat farm in order to buy just one Venetian mirror. That’s how expensive their fancy mirrors were.”
“She wasn’t English.”
I waved her off. “I also know that some Venetian guy invented clear glass in like the fifteenth century and that’s when mirror making really caught fire.” I smiled at my own pun. “Did you get that? Caught fire? Like a glass furnace fire?”
“Yes, clever girl, I caught that. Your history refresher is close enough for now, but this mirror is not Venetian. It’s younger than that.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because I’ve been studying and working with glass for all of my adult life.”
“Oh, right. So can you tell where it was made?”
“I didn’t need to figure that out. Your great-grandmother
