casual, pretending to ignore that I was a hostage in some creepy mirror-lined circle, but the truth was that my feet dragged and I had to focus on each step. My heart was racing, though. It thudded hard enough that I thought it might be trying to jump right through my breastbone and drag the rest of me out of here.
“I wouldn’t get too close to that,” Tem said as I approached one of the mirrors.
I frowned at him. His tone wasn’t threatening. If anything, he sounded concerned, which was rather ironic since he’d been the one who put me inside this circle. With my hands still behind my back, I couldn’t reach out to the magic physically, but this close, I could feel it thrumming through the circle. I had no idea what the magic did—I’d never felt anything like it—but there was a whole hell of a lot of it. I considered sticking the toe of my boot in the space between two of the mirrors, but this didn’t feel like a barrier spell. Or at least, not only a barrier spell.
“The last time I saw Jenny, she was working for Ryese,” I said, trying to make my voice conversational even as I tried to wrack my brain for a way out of this mess. “But he’s not a king. So who are you two working for now? Hell, which court even?”
Tem only frowned at me, then he turned and walked out of sight. When he returned, he held a small orb glowing with silver magic. He touched it to one of the mirrors, and magic sparked, activating glyphs I hadn’t noticed in the frame surrounding the glass. One by one, he walked to each mirror, tapping the backs with the orb and making the glyphs on them shimmer. I assumed this was how he was calling the enigmatic him Jenny had mentioned. The spell didn’t seem to be particularly threatening, and yet I cringed with each glyph that lit up, a cold sweat trailing down my back.
Once he was done, Tem disappeared long enough to put the orb back where he’d gotten it, and then he walked back to the edge of the circle again, watching me. I backed away from the now-glowing mirrors until I was in the center of the circle again. I stared at the mirrors, and they reflected back hundreds of me, my eyes a little too wide and my curls stuck to the side of my head where gray liquid smudged my cheek. I had the ridiculous urge to try to watch all the mirrors at once, as if I expected one of the hundreds of reflections of me to change and prove not to be me at all.
“Did you mean what you told Nori?” Tem asked, watching me watch the reflections.
I was trying to focus on only one mirror, because every time I so much as twitched, all the reflections moved as well, making it look like an army was swarming around me. Yeah, it was an army of myself, but given the situation, it was freaky. If the glyphs were a call, whoever was on the other side apparently wasn’t inclined to answer. I could only hope that was good for me. It gave me more time for the spell I’d been hit with to wear off. Not that I knew what I planned to do next, but I wanted to be able to peer across planes again. With my shields locked, I couldn’t see through glamour, and I definitely couldn’t unravel the spell around me.
“What did I tell her?” I asked, not bothering to look at Tem. I needed to get my hands free. It wasn’t metal binding me, and it didn’t feel like rope either. I was guessing plastic zip ties, which sucked because plastic was a material that broke down slowly, even in the land of the dead. If I could reach my magic without fainting, I could push the bindings over the chasm, but I was going to have to push the plastic deep for it to dissolve enough to break. Or I was going to have to get to my dagger. That would be a hell of a lot more noticeable, but at least I wouldn’t risk passing out again. It would give away the fact that I had the dagger, though.
Tem studied me, his face drawn tight in contemplation. “That you were planning to negotiate a door, and all the fae, regardless of court,