Self-reflection
A story of mirrors and murder
“Really, Kayla? Really?”
Kayla sat in her boss’s office, and knew she was in the proverbial shit.
“I stand by it,” she said.
Her boss, Felicity Shaw, licked her lips. “So, to be clear, you want—on the official record—your report as to why you murdered a key witness to be, “He had it feckin’ coming,”?”
“He did,” Kayla said. Because he had. “He was a feckin’ wizard.” He was. And he’d been in the middle of performing a nasty little spell, so she hadn’t had much time to think, so the fact that she’d stopped him by doubling the number of pieces he normally came in didn’t seem overly important to her. But apparently, Felicity had her knickers in a bunch about it because he was meant to have told them about some evil wizard attack or some shite, and instead he’d just bled all over the carpet.
“I need you to be more than a blunt instrument,” Felicity Shaw—director of MI37, Britain’s last line of defense against the magical, the alien, and the generally batshit weird—told her.
“I’m a very feckin’ sharp instrument.” Kayla pointed out.
Which was why Felicity suspended her.
#
Kayla was, admittedly, several whiskeys into the evening when the whole business with the mirrors started so it took her a while to notice it. Plus, she was preoccupied with the whole blunt instrument comment. Because it was bullshit.
She was a good field officer. The others poked hornets’ nests, she cleaned up the mess. If she was violent, it was because they faced violent threats. The wizard she’d killed wasn’t about to pull rabbits out of hats. He was about to try and remove skeletons from bodies. She’d done what was necessary.
Anyway, that was what she was thinking about while she stared into the mirror. And because of the whiskeys, it took her a moment to realize her reflection wasn’t staring back.
“What the feck?”
It winked at her.
“What the FECK?”
It turned away. She watched her own reflection walk out of her powder room into the living room, pick up a chair, and fling it at her.
Then her own chair struck her in the back.
She almost head-butted the mirror, caught herself, whirled around, and dropped into a crouch. But there was no one there. She risked a glance over her shoulder. Her reflection was standing in the powder room doorway with a carving knife. She dropped. The knife flew over her shoulder, and slammed into the mirror.
She looked up at the broken glass. Three reflections now peered back down. Then they grinned, and scattered.
She exited the powder room at speed, hurtling through a hail of reflection-flung debris. A book bruised her shoulder. A rolling pin caught her on the thigh. She kicked the powder room door shut. Instantly, other objects floating in her general direction dropped. Which was good.
But then she caught her reflection in the TV screen. In the mirror near the hall. And in the glass of her apartment windows.
And that wasn’t good at all.
#
“Hey Kayla! How can I… oh my.”
She’d called Clyde from work. She wasn’t proud of it, but things were getting out of hand, and Clyde knew about magic stuff. And smashing the mirrors had only made the problem worse.
Much, much worse.
He stood on her doorsteps as—in the reflections—a large number of Kaylas and Clydes launched a large number of objects at them. She dragged him through the onslaught, into her bedroom, and beneath the bed.
“Don’t say a feckin’ word.”
He stared at her for ten mute seconds.
“I mean you can feckin’ talk,” she said. “Just not-‘’
“About all the lace?” he said.
“I said-“
“There’s just so much of it.”
“I will feckin’ end you.”
“I think the reflections might be on that already.”
“Can’t you stop them?”
He hummed. “Well,” he said finally, “it looks like Elzebert’s Autoanimatic Inflection. Which means its probably the attack we were hoping to find out about from Jerome earlier.”
“Jerome?” The name was unfamiliar.
“The wizard you bisected.”
“Ah.” That she recognized.
“Keep me safe, while I get out there and try to untwine it,” he told her. And she did her best, but the problem was now that there wasn’t just a myriad of reflections of her out there, there were also a myriad reflections of Clyde. And Clyde wasn’t just a blunt-sharp instrument. He was a wizard in his own right, and apparently so were his reflections.
#
“Kayla! Kayla, are you… Oh my!”
Kayla had really hoped they’d figure this out before Felicity got here. But she supposed the explosions were hard to ignore. She dove through another hail of shrapnel and drove Felicity out into the hallway and relative safety.
“Reflections,” she said. “But I think if we can just smash anything reflective into small enough pieces, we should be OK.”
Felicity looked very hard at Kayla for a very long time. Kayla remembered she was covered in a lot of her own blood.
“Smash things?” Felicity said. “Is that really the plan, Kayla?”
Kayla ground her teeth.
“Fine,” she said eventually. “But I’m going to need a lot of blankets.”
#
It took a while to cover every reflective surface in the house. And the reflections kept trying to mess with the blankets they’d already put down. But, eventually, the three of them got it done. And that bought Clyde the time he needed to properly undo the spell. He even thought he might have a lead for them to chase down later.
Kayla poured everyone a drink from the one surviving whiskey bottle. They stood in her ruined apartment, sipping slowly, breathing hard.
“And have you learned anything?” Felicity finally asked her.
Kayla thought about it. “I mean,” she said, “upon reflection, I definitely think I was right. That wizard had it feckin’ coming.”