Chapter 55

The room they found themselves in was little more than a corridor. The light was a little stronger at one end. Once Sirius was cleaned up to Lorelei’s satisfaction, he led the way to the end of it and peered cautiously out into the light.

It was a tiny study, he realized. The walls, floor, and ceilings were rough stone, but there were fancy rugs strewn about and fancy furniture on top of those. There were desks and bookshelves and the light was coming from an ever-burning candle in a votive that had once been a cat’s skull. Dust lay thick over everything. There were no footprints in it.

“What do you want?” a voice asked. Both Sirius and Lorelei spun around, a flare of red light from her wand and silver one from the ring. Lorelei was taking no chances. She blasted a spell without an instant’s hesitation. There was a silent explosion of flames and then nothing. She had charred the entire wall black, but the speaker still stood.

It was a woman, pale skinned and dark haired, wearing a filmy gray dress and standing in the middle of the smoking-hot rock. She appeared unruffled and not at all singed. The fireball had gone right through her. It was a ghost, Sirius realized, and it took him another heartbeat to realize WHOSE ghost.

“Messalina,” he said aloud, and the ghost looked at him. It wasn’t a filmy dress, he thought dizzily. Her whole SELF is filmy.

“I’m afraid I don’t remember you, sir,” she said, looking unhappy. “Why have you come here?”

“We’re looking for someone,” he said awkwardly.

“My sister,” Lorelei added, covering up her own shock nicely. “We were following the music.”

“Oh that,” Messalina sighed. She raised a transparent hand to her forehead. “Yes, I suppose that IS why you’re here. Come with me, please.” The ghost turned and walked away, her dress not stirring the dust at all. They followed.

“What happened, Messalina?” Sirius asked as she passed through a door in the far wall. “Your brother said that you were alive, just reclusive.” He had to pull the door open quickly to hear her reply.

“Which brother?” she asked. “The one that betrayed me? The one that abandoned me? Or the one who killed me?”

“Gilles killed you?” Sirius sputtered. She looked over her shoulder at him.

“It was my Christmas present,” she said. “But he never knew about Mother’s private room. He doesn’t know I’m here still. Please don’t tell him.”

“We won’t,” Lorelei said crisply. “He may well be dead himself. Your house is full of vampires.”

Messalina’s face made that sudden transformation that he had seen years ago when the mirror had been broken, a look of fierce, savage glee. Sirius thought perhaps it was at the news of her brother’s demise, but the word she whispered was “Vampires… Oh. They must love all the mirrors.” Then, she chuckled in a way that made the hair stand on the back of his neck.

Then, they came to another room. It looked like an abandoned greenhouse that some fool had built in a basement. There was dirt and sand, probably imported for some exotic nocturnal plant, and shards of glass everywhere. Flowerpots of every shape and size were lined up along the walls. The withered remains of plant life still stood out of a few of them. The ceiling had caved in here and there, spilling dirt and rock fragments throughout the mess. In the middle of it all, oddly enough, was a fainting couch. On that couch, lay Esme.

Lorelei gasped and ran the short distance to her. Sirius found himself hanging back. If Esme was dead, he didn’t want to be the one feeling for a pulse in a cold throat again. It would be bad enough to hear Lorelei say the words without feeling and smelling death too. Messalina had stopped a pace behind him.

Esme was curled up on her side, tatters of her black shirt clinging to the stripes of dried blood from the vampire’s claws. Underneath the new wounds, her claw scars seemed faded. Her jeans were even more filthy and ripped than before.

Lorelei pulled her sister’s arm aside and rolled her to her back. Esme’s lower arm still clutched something to her chest, but Sirius saw the flicker of breath and felt himself relax with relief. Esme’s head rolled back and Lorelei squeaked. It was a sound so unlike her that dread tightened his chest again.

“What?” he asked coming closer to look. “What’s wrong?” It was obvious though. The whole side of Esme’s neck was encrusted with dried blood. In the middle of it all were two oozy-looking scabs that could only be covering a vampire bite. Lorelei looked like she was trying not to be sick.

“You knew she’d been bitten,” Sirius leaned in to slide an arm under Esme to lift her upper body. “What’s the matter?” It was unpleasant, certainly, but Esme’s skin was warm and she was breathing and her pulse was steady against his arm. That was enough to make him feel better than he had all day.

“My bites…” she gasped. “They all h-healed up in a few minutes. Except for the first one.”

“So she’ll have a scar like you do,” he looked down at Esme’s face. “You’re twins after all. No one will mind.” She looked pale and broken, lashes and brows looking almost black against her skin. Her shirt was in rags and so he looked away quickly. He slid his other arm under her legs and lifted gently, expecting some sound of pain.

The only noise was that of the object in her arms sliding down to thump gently on the couch. It was a small radio. Now that he wasn’t so distracted he could make out the words of the song again.

I don’t want to be alone anymore
I was checking you out, I was just making sure (whoa-oh-whoa)
No, I don’t want to be alone anymore
And I want you tonight, though you’ve hurt me before
I didn’t matter that I felt like a fool,
I forgot when she-

Lorelei’s finger stabbed a button and the machine fell silent. She had gotten a hold of herself again.

“We’ve got her,” she said. “Now we get out. Can you Apparate well enough to carry her?”

“You can’t Apparate down here,” Messalina said. “Mother put up certain safeguards to ensure her privacy.”

“Of course,” sighed Lorelei. She turned to pin Messalina with a look that would’ve damaged a living person. “Is there a way out of the manor from here?”

“Of course,” Messalina smiled at them. “You used an ice bridge to avoid it last time.”

“You don’t mean down that hole,” Sirius groaned. He looked at her pleadingly. She laughed at him.

“I had to die before I was brave enough to go down there,” she told him, her polite smile becoming smug. “The fall is so long, I became bored.”

“Would you rather jump down that hole or go back through the house,” Sirius asked Lorelei. “Seriously now. I have an invisibility cloak, we can sneak out as easily as we got in.”

“He won’t need eyes to know we’re there,” Lorelei whispered. She was clutching the necklace-pouch again. Sirius waited for her to decide something. He could feel Esme’s breath warming a spot on his shirt. He glanced down at her again, and his eyes went back to the bite. As soon as they got back in the water, he would have to scrub the scabs off, he told himself.

“Do you want us to bring you anything when we come back?” he asked Messalina to give Lorelei time. “Do… you want to be buried, or anything like that?”

“It doesn’t really seem to matter,” the ghost made an airy shrug. “All I ever really wanted was to be left alone. So maybe it wasn’t such a bad Christmas gift after all. Then this one fell through the back way and the radio started playing…”

“Back way?” Sirius and Lorelei both looked up quickly. “What’s the back way??”

“That’s none of your business,” Messalina looked annoyed at being spoken too so sharply. “It’s bad enough you’re snooping around the waterways.”

“How did Esme get here?” Sirius asked. Messalina seemed to be losing patience fast now. “Tell us that much, so we can leave you alone if that’s what you want.

“How should I know?” The ghost shot Esme’s unconscious body a withering glare. “She could barely walk when she came through and then she took the radio from my desk and collapsed on my mother’s couch and I had to listen to those stupid songs over and over again.”

“I know that feeling,” sighed Lorelei. “But please. Messalina. What is the back way?”

“It’s a mirror way,” Messalina eyed her coldly. “My father’s specialty was magic mirrors. The house is full of them. I don’t even know which mirror you’ll come out in. It could plunk you out in the middle of the vampires that did that to her.”

“If she was on her feet, then she was escaping,” Sirius said.

“So, why should we take her straight back to what she escaping from?” asked Lorelei.

“The sun should still be up,” Sirius grinned at her. “You could fireball them all while they sleep. Vampires don’t use magic after all.”

“I don’t care how you go,” snapped Messalina. “Please just go.”

“You know battle magic,” Sirius nudged Lorelei with an elbow. “You could just blast a way out from here.”

“I might collapse the whole house down into these caves if I do that,” Lorelei said reasonably. Behind her, Messalina’s spectral eyes widened.

“So?” Sirius said, beginning to grin. “It’s full of vampires. We’re the only living souls here. Just burn the place down. Fire kills vampires, right?”

“You wouldn’t DARE!” yelped Messalina.

“Oh, of course not,” Lorelei gave the ghost an aggravated look. “He’s trying to get a rise out of you, that’s all. Don’t encourage him. Now, where’s this mirror at?”

“It’s broken at the bottom,” Messalina said grudgingly. “Past that door there’s a hole where one of the waterways collapsed. We turned off the water to it, and after that the house elves would throw the flawed mirrors into it. Father would never use one that wasn’t PERFECT. One has a piece intact enough to still get through.”

“Will you show us the way?” Lorelei asked next and Messalina drew back in a flutter of ethereal fabric.

“No. I don’t go there anymore.” She said. “Go through that door. You’ll see the hole.” She turned on her intangible heel and went back into the study without looking back.

“You handled her nicely,” Sirius said. Lorelei shrugged.

“Part of being a teacher is knowing how to get around attitude,” she said. She gave Esme a worried look. “Are we really going to trust a broken enchanted mirror that was flawed to begin with?”

“We’ll wrap in the cloak first,” he decided. “And if it’s really awful we can just duck back in the mirror. Agreed?”

“All right,” Lorelei sighed. “Is she heavy?”

“Not at all,” Sirius looked at Esme again, too. What had the vampires done to her? He wanted to shake her until her eyes opened and she said something. Lorelei’s fingers clenched too, and he knew she must have been thinking the same thing. Esme lying so still and quiet was wrong.

She turned away without touching her sister though, and walked over to the door Messalina had pointed them too. She opened it and stepped into what looked like a storage closet. The wall had crumbled and there were water lines on the remaining walls. Lorelei climbed bravely into the hole and Sirius heard her struggle into the space beyond.

She turned and held out her arms and he eased Esme into them so that her sister could pull her through. He felt a little silly, worrying about Lorelei being able to lift Esme. From what he had seen of her grip, Lorelei was at least as strong as he was, maybe more so if she would open up her vampiric abilities.

He crawled in after her and the found themselves in a room littered with mirror shards. Yellow light sifted in from above, gleaming off the pieces until it was like being inside a big geode. It was the bottom of one of the pits the water emptied into, they realized, looking up. Leaning almost upright against the side was a chunk of mirror nearly three feet wide. Lorelei looked at it a moment, then eased it carefully down until it was laying flat.

“You hold her. I hold the cloak around all three of us,” she said. “We just step in feet first. Ok?”

“Sounds good,” Sirius pulled the cloak from inside his coat and handed it to her. While she shook it out to its full size, he scooped Esme up. Lorelei draped the cloak over him and then stepped under with him. They inched over to the mirror.

“On the count of three then,” Sirius said when Lorelei hesitated. She nodded. “One… Two…” They both picked up one foot and held it over the mirror. “Three.” They took the step. The mirror crunched under their feet and nothing happened.

“Do you think she lied?” Sirius said after a moment.

“Maybe she meant THAT mirror,” Lorelei said. He looked through the fold of the cloak and saw what she was looking at. Hidden in the dark place, this mirror had somehow survived the fall with only one break. It had broken in two, one piece lying flat, the larger piece braced up on its side.

Where the other mirrors reflected the weak light, this one sucked it in. The glass seemed dark and oily, and their reflections looked distorted into unhealthy things.

“Try it,” Sirius nudged Lorelei from behind. “One, two, three. Go, go, go.”

“There’s something very wrong with that mirror,” Lorelei said, ignoring his impatience.

“There’s something wrong with standing here with a cloak over our heads!” he pushed her again. “Same plan as before. If it’s bad, we come back through. Easy. Let’s go.”

“All right!” she fumbled for her wand and held it ready. “One…”

“Three!” Sirius snapped. He shoved into her and they all went into the mirror together. There was a flicker of black and the surface closed over them like bog water. The room was left empty.