Daisy’s first impression of the mansion nestled between the hills, full of conical roofs and white shingles, yellow paint and watching windows, was that they were late.

  “I’m getting psychic mist,” she said. It swirled gently around the house, drifting in and out of open windows and gathering in the bushes. The wind carried it in puffs, but not as far as their vantage point on the hill. “Not partic-u-larly strong or active, but there’ll be no way to avoid inhaling it, once we’re in the house.”

  “Upper-level activity,” Lawrence judged. For the first time since they’d worked together, Lawrence wore silver gloves. Not gloves like Daisy’s, with their intricate lacing and fine detail. These were clunky, chunky, old-fash-ioned gauntlets. Not good for much beyond directing blunt psychic force, but also less finicky, less delicate, less easy to ruin. Neither agent carried any conven-tional weapon; in a scenario like this, doing so would only endanger them. Instead, they wore pointed diamond rings on the third finger of each hand.

  “It is typically possible to enter a Decadent House on any of the upper layers,” Lawrence said. “There can even be advantage in starting several layers down..”

  “Maybe, but I don’t like the idea of breathing that stuff in,” Daisy said. “How about we go grab rifles, wait until Constance reaches the deepest layer, and snipe the mirror? Or we could lure her out, I suppose. I might be able to detach her.”

  “Sniping wouldn’t work,” said Lawrence. “A gust of wind would redi-rect the bullet—possibly into her. A bomb would either fail to detonate or if it did detonate, fail to destroy the Heart.”

  “But if it’s on the deepest layer—”

  “Constance would be on the deepest layer,” Lawrence said; “we would not. There is a very slight possibility of success; but if we tried and failed, the Heart would mark us as its enemies, and we would never be able to get close without being attacked.”

  “Psychically attacked, you mean?”

  “Hallucinations and madness, mostly. House Hearts can be surpris-ingly strong; if this one turns its full attention to us, it might be able to over-power our defenses. It may also employ space-time distor-tions. More than one Horror agent, discovered by a House, has had the oxygen sucked from a room—or the walls crushed inward—or the stairs removed from beneath him.”

  Daisy sighed. “Leave it to a repeat offender to make everything worse.” She tucked away her binoculars and got up, brushing off grass and dust. Below her, the house’s walls were upright, its doors closed and windows open, its foun-dation firm and shrubs manicured. Perhaps that smell was only lilies. “We could retreat and wait the scenario out,” she suggested. “Stop anyone else from arriv-ing. Destroy it while porters are carrying it out of the house, in between victim cycles. Constance brought this upon her-self.” She smiled at Lawrence charm-ingly, the breeze ruffling her short curls, the sunrise red and orange upon her skin.

  “I wouldn’t need you for that,” Lawrence said, and started down the hill.

  Daisy’s smile dropped off, and she clenched one hand into a fist as she watched her partner go. Morning light glinted off her eyes and shadowed the lines under her mouth. So they were back to this. I will make you need me, Daisy swore to herself, more than I need you. Then she fastened her smile back into place and jogged down the grassy hill, charming and carefree as ever.

  Constance Jones met them at the door. She looked even older than in her photo, a tottering lady with a bare touch of dementia detracting from the spark in her eyes. Daisy had almost never worked a Romance with such an elderly lead-ing lady; they were typically used as disapproving matriarchs and subversive nursemaids.

  “This is wonderful!” Constance exclaimed, clasping her papery hands before her heart. “Welcome, agents, as honored guests. We’ve been waiting for you!”

  “Are we the last?” Daisy asked, not letting her expression flicker. Was it so easy for a repeat offender to identify them as agents? And was it right for that repeat offender to be delighted in their presence, when she had sought out the scenario herself?

  “I knew you’d come,” Constance explained, shaking their hands in turn. Her teeth, though yellowed, were strong and straight; and her skin, though dry, was pleasantly smooth and warm. “Because, you see, I was sure I’d found a real one, and this proves it. I found it for myself this time, I mean, instead of it finding me.”

  Lawrence gave her a long, slow look. “You have done something very fool-ish,” she said.

  “Foolish?” Constance laughed. “I am old and will die soon. What does it matter how or when?”

  “When the time comes,” said Lawrence, “it will matter very much to you.”

  Lawrence wasn’t going to make any impression on a lady like that, with a stubborn heroine streak. Daisy stepped up. “We really appre-ciate the welcome,” she told Constance. “Whatever you know about us, please call us the Bronsons. I’m Daley and this is Leslie.”

  “Of course, I have no other names for you,” Constance said. They beamed at each other in a silly, girlish fashion, each to her own thoughts. “Won’t you come in? I’ve set aside the nursery for the Bronsons, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy it too.”

  “Thank you,” said Daisy, and stepped over the threshold.

  The house’s interior matched its exterior, full of velvet and horse-hair and swirling mist. The nursery, in keeping with the rest, was a blue-and-beige space with three twin beds, heavy curtains, mahogany dresser, and clinging wisps of white.

  The mist was interesting. Not the fact that it was every-where, but the fact that there weren’t any threads to go with it. Could they not be visible on this level, or was this Heart a rare pure psychic type?

  The mist swirled with the movement of air. It would tell her more, if she could discern its pattern; but seeing the mirror in person would be most important.

  “How long has the mirror been in this house?” Lawrence asked Constance.

  “Only about an hour,” came the response. “I had the auction house hold it until I was ready. I meant for it to be delivered after my guests arrived. Clever of me, I think you’ll agree?”

  “No,” said Lawrence.

  The mist, Daisy decided upon meeting their fellow guests—a middle-aged man with eager eyes and a nervous woman barely out of her teens—preferred people. Especially these two, both of whom showed signs of psychic instability that Constance, for all her flaws, did not. The five of them sat together in the library, among old books and drifting mist, drinking tiny coffees and eating egg tarts. Tinsley picked at her pastry and Oswald praised the parsley garnish, and Daisy thought there wouldn’t be much to choose between them, when it came to psychic defense. Both would be particularly susceptible to violence—and violence, as Constance explained, was the mirror’s specialty.

  “The Lebensford Mirror does not follow a consistent timeline,” Constance said, “but it does follow a consistent pattern. In every house—in almost every location—in which the mirror resides for a significant period of time, the result is murder. One person murders another and is murdered in turn and sometimes everyone is murdered, but none of it is random. That is the most fascinating piece of this mirror’s lore; the first person to be murdered—”

  “Is being punished for his crimes,” Oswald said. He seemed about to add more, but Constance turned such a severely old-fashioned look on him that he instead blushed and muttered something defensive.

  “The first person to be murdered,” Constance said stiffly, “is always guilty of something. The crime is moral rather than legal in nature—infidel-ity has been used twice, for example. But that is the middle of the pattern, not the beginning. The full pattern is as follows: the mirror protects those who protect it until some-one violates its rules. Then the murders begin with the criminal and do not end until everyone has fled or died.”

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  “We know all that,” Tinsley said. “That’s why you brought us here: because we’re the ones with the knowledge and the will to destroy the mirror before it murders. What we don’t know is your plan.”

  Tinsley Proust—known as Cassandra to her followers—was in her videos a safe medium through which people who had never experi-enced real fear could play at it.

  Tinsley didn’t need to play. She had listened to her father kill her mother and then himself. The sun had set and risen again long before the sounds had ceased. Some instinct kept her in hiding for hours longer than that. Then she crawled out of her closet and down the stairs into the living room. She found her parents there, spread out before the mirror.

  It’s watching them, she thought, driven by that same instinct. It did this. And it’s watching me. I should destroy it.

  But she was afraid. She was so afraid that she didn’t follow her instinct to attack the mirror. She ran away instead and banged at neighbors’ doors until one of them let her in. Even then, with her sobbing all over him, the neighbor did not believe her at first. He thought she had had a nightmare, that she was mistaken. He tried to take her back to her house. He could not com-prehend the deaths that the police report would later confirm.

  Tinsley never returned to her childhood home. She later learned it had burned down, and she rejoiced, believing the mirror had burned with it.

  “Destroy the mirror?” Constance echoed. “Oh no, no! Attempting to destroy the Lebensford Mirror would be a crime in its eyes and would bring down upon us the fate of those before us. I didn’t spend half a year search-ing out the mirror to be controlled by its story but to control it. In short, my friends, I do not intend to destroy the mirror. I intend to rehabilitate it.”

  Ah, yes, Daisy thought. This is the level of idiocy I expected from her.

  “My dear woman—” Oswald began.

  “But—” said Tinsley.

  “How?” Lawrence asked.

  “Yes,” said Daisy. “What’s your plan—to wait until it starts using us to murder one another and then go tell it off with very firm words?”

  Constance regarded her with positively parental pride. “Precisely.”

  Mist swirled and clung, creeping over feet and tickling nostrils. Not strong, not yet, but everywhere. It hears what we say, Daisy thought, and sees what we do. What will it do, to those it thinks endanger it?

  “What a ludicrous plan!” cried Oswald. “The scientific approach—”

  “But it should die!” Tinsley shrilled.

  “Everyone deserves a chance,” Constance said complacently. “And I have reason to believe the mirror isn’t purely evil. Have you noticed? It has a soft spot for children.”

  The Agency analysts had noticed; they had pointed it out. Not that it neces-sarily meant anything good, especially in a Horror. The question was whether the fact could help them here, when Daisy and Lawrence were clearly adults. Daisy sat back thoughtfully, listening as Oswald began recit-ing cases in which children had survived. Tinsley was talking too, muttering to herself about her gran, gasping in too many small breaths.

  “Well? What about you two?” Constance asked the agents.

  “We are your guests,” said Lawrence. “And we were those children once, too. We spent days before the mirror, years in the same house, and it did not harm us. We will follow your direction.”

  The mirror protects those who protect it, Daisy thought, and we have not broken its rules. But it would be strange to do nothing. She stood and moved to sit by Tinsley and pat her hand, calming her. To Constance, she said, “Surely we’ll do more than simply tell it off. No one likes being scolded for some-thing they didn’t know was wrong.”

  “An excellent point,” said Constance, resettling her old bones on the embroidered violet-and-mist settee. “Which is why we shall begin with general counseling sessions to work on growing its current moral frame-work. As for murderous impulses, I have prepared a journal for each of you. . . .”

  In his book, Professor Terrance Oswald claimed to have never person-ally met the Lebensford Mirror. In fact, he had been seventeen years old, in his first year of college, and terribly bored of everything.

  He had applied to his local college with the vague plan of becom-ing a lawyer, because lawyers were supposed to make a lot of money. He also had some notion that people at colleges were interesting and intellectual, but this delusion did not survive orientation week.

  Parched for any form of entertainment, Terrance picked up a flyer for a party. People in movies often made fools of themselves at parties; and though he didn’t think he’d see anything overly amusing, he supposed he might gather some information to make use of later.

  The party far exceeded his expectations. What began as foolish-ness gave way to violence, and he observed with delight the ways in which his peers utilized CDs, teeth, knives, and their own hands.

  It was the greatest regret of his life that he had been forced to run away before he’d had a chance to experience the mirror’s influence for himself.

  “How did you recognize Vivienne in this scenario?” Daisy asked under the orange streetlight, on the far end of the village, more than three miles from the mansion. “Is the mirror’s design that unique?”

  Lawrence shook her head. “I barely saw the mirror back then—and there are many mirrors in Horror.”

  “Then it was the inscription. ‘Girls should stay in their rooms.’”

  Lawrence nodded. She was calmer now, the ice of her mind more stable, but her eyes were distant with memory. Dangerous. Daisy needed her here in the present, not doing things like wandering off alone to chat with the mirror.

  Lawrence said, “That was one of the Heart’s catchphrases—it was a Granny. But I began to see other clues too, once I started remem-bering. The layout of this house is an idealized version of that one—the stair arrange-ment is striking, isn’t it? The front stairs only go up to the second floor. Under-standable, if the third floor contains nothing except servants’ quarters, but it does. The ballroom is up there too. Then there are the inscriptions over the doors. Vivienne pointed those out to me. I paid little attention to them at the time, in my ignorance; but I now suspect they were clues to each room’s nature, and I might have spared myself trouble had I heeded them. Have you seen the one above our bedroom door? ‘Girls should be pious.’ That was the Heart’s other catchphrase.”

  “Constance chose which room to put us in.”

  “She thought she did,” Lawrence said. “How long has this victim cycle really been running, I wonder?”

  Daisy briefly closed her eyes and rocked back on her heels. Lawrence would not appreciate sympathy, and she would barricade herself against Daisy if Daisy made the wrong move. But the fragility she was showing—

  An internal earthquake could break apart a solid wall that outward attacks could not, and water beaded that icy surface. Her mask, flame-lit by white moon and orange lamp, was not impenetrable. Her stance, upon dirty concrete and opportunistic weeds, was not confident.

  She is vulnerable, Daisy thought, and rather than letting the Heart use that vulnerability, she is giving it to me so I can stabilize her. Does she think she’ll be able to retreat from me later?

  Air swirled gently, ruffling her hair with chilly fingers. She smelled the dust of the road, the strong perfume of blooming night flowers. She hid her smile by asking, “What was she like, your first partner?”

  “She specialized in control,” Lawrence replied, heavy with memory. “She wasn’t as good as you, and gloves weren’t as advanced in those days—but she had only worked at the Agency for three years, when I lost her. Eleven years have passed since then, and the Heart will have its own power.”

  “So no arm wrestling it unless I have to,” Daisy acknowledged. “But this is worrying. It must have known we were agents even before you went to chat with it.”

  “I didn’t chat with it. I looked at it.”

  And let it look at you. “It would know anyway,” Daisy reasoned; “Constance gave us away the moment she saw us. So how are we supposed to fight it when it knows what we are and knows we’re coming and knows how to fight us—and when it can attack us long before we can attack it?”

  “When the time comes,” said Lawrence, “I will help you.”

  “With those clunky gloves?”

  Lawrence looked at her mildly, professionally, with a comfort-ingly blank iciness. “I will hold it steady,” she said. “You will rip it apart. It will not know how strong you are, and it will never have seen gloves that advanced. Use your most unusual attack.”

  Daisy wrinkled her nose. “That’s a terrible plan, and you know it is. I hate to say this, but the situation is too dangerous. We should retreat and wait for the victim cycle to reset, then snipe it while it’s dormant. Once we get out of its range, it should drop us.”

  “If we retreat,” Lawrence warned, “we will have to kill the remain-ing victims first.”

  How often had Daisy thought it would be easier to just kill the inno-cents? She never had, of course. The wish had only been frustration.

  She closed her eyes. She had never killed people, not real people, not human beings. But if they stayed here, the victims would die anyway—and the agents would die with them.

  She let her breath gust out and looked back to Lawrence, trying to make her own expression as blank, as professional, as her partner’s. This was the reality of Horror. She said: “It’d be a better death than the mirror would give them.”

  The world froze in an image of glass and decision. Then a furious rush-ing filled the air, tearing Daisy’s breath away. Colors smeared and lights swirled, and the village slid off its canvas like a impressionist painting. Orange light smeared into white, concrete sidewalk to ugly wood, houses to plaster and wain-scotting. Mist swirled angrily, prick-ing Daisy’s skin—and the agents stood, as they had all along, in the mirror room.

  The mirror stood with them, listening to everything they said. Constance, Tinsley, and Oswald were there too, their eyes white with mist. They did not move and they did not attack. They didn’t seem to know where they were. They simply stared unseeingly at the agents, hands by their sides, witnessing every-thing.