Page 2

2

J ack

Roaring wasn’t all that impressive when it came from a human throat.

Luckily, that wasn’t a problem for me.

When Joe Bob Turner planned his day, he probably didn’t expect to be cowering in the corner of Dead End Pawn with a five-hundred-pound tiger snarling in his face.

“I didn’t do it! Tell him, Tess! I didn’t do it!”

Tess, with the courage of her red hair and Irish ancestry, stepped between me and the criminal and shook her finger in my face. “Jack! Cut it out. He didn’t mean it. Remember, we talked about overreacting?”

We had talked about overreacting.

Still.

He tried to rob the woman I loved.

I leaned around Tess’s slender legs and snarled at Joe Bob one last time, and then I licked the side of Tess’s face to make her laugh. Gently, though, because tiger tongues are like sandpaper.

“Yuck!” She scrubbed at her cheek with her sleeve, but she was laughing. “Stop it! It’s a good thing I don’t wear makeup to work. Now, back to human, or you won’t get any tiramisu.”

When she put it that way … I shifted back.

Back when I was a soldier and rebel commander, people told me I was still pretty terrifying in human shape, especially when I was angry. The expression on Joe Bob’s face right now said they weren’t wrong.

“I didn’t take anything! She said she’d tell my mama at church,” he said, looking perilously close to tears.

I sighed. Being mean to Joe Bob felt like growling at a kitten. He never meant to do anything wrong; he was just one of those hapless people who had good intentions but usually messed things up along the way to his goal.

“Take this as a lesson. Never, ever threaten Tess again. With robbery or anything else.”

Tess rolled her eyes. “Enough. Leave my customers alone, or I’ll tell everybody about the jitterbugging.”

Joe Bob blinked. “The what?”

“Never mind,” I growl. “What do you want?”

“Jack!” Tess crossed her arms over her chest, narrowed her eyes, and tapped one foot. These were all very clear Danger, Danger signals when it came to annoying my girlfriend.

I held my hands up in surrender and backed away from Joe Bob, but scowled at him one last time over her shoulder.

When he flinched, she elbowed me. “Ignore the mean tiger in the room, Joe Bob. How can I help you?”

Trying not to look at me, Joe Bob unwrapped the large, rectangular, flat package he’d been clutching since he walked in the door. “I was hoping you’d buy this, Tess. I got it for Donna as a wedding present, because she loves magical stuff, but she said this is too weird, and if I don’t get rid of it, the wedding’s off.”

Tess’s shoulders slumped. “Why is ‘if it’s so weird your fiancée will call off the wedding, take it to Dead End Pawn’ a thing? Why?”

His blue-green eyes widened beneath his shaggy blond hair. “Because you always buy it, just like Jeremiah did when he owned the shop.”

My uncle Jeremiah had left half the shop to Tess in his will, and the other half to me. I’ll always be grateful to him for that. If he hadn’t, I might not have ever come back to town after his death, so I never would have met Tess.

That would have been a tragedy.

The stone in my pocket felt like it was burning a hole through the cloth at the thought, and I suddenly realized telling Mrs. Frost about it might have been a bad idea. I’d only been trying to distract her from putting an arrow in her husband, but still. I’d be lucky if she didn’t tell everybody in Dead End by dinnertime.

Or before.

“Okay.” Tess walked behind the counter and pointed to the glass top. “Please put it here, and let’s see what we’ve got.”

What we had was an ornate antique mirror that looked like a prop out of a fairy tale movie.

“That’s beautiful,” Tess breathed, gently touching the gilded frame. “Scots pine with real gold leaf on the wood. Joe Bob, where did you get such a gorgeous piece? This must be more than a hundred years old. Do you see this sparkly patch here?”

Joe Bob and I leaned over to look.

“And the cloudy bit here? That’s from mercury oxidation. Old mirrors were made by layering liquid mercury over a thin layer of tin, which caused a reaction and created the reflective material against the glass. When the mercury oxidizes over the years, it causes this effect.”

“I thought mercury was poisonous. Isn’t that why they don’t put it in thermometers anymore?” I knew I’d heard something about that.

“Yes, definitely. It’s really dangerous. That’s why today mirrors are made using silver or aluminum. The process is fascinating! First, they—” She broke off and looked up at us, a rueful grin on her face. “Sorry. Sometimes, I forget that not everyone is as interested in how old things are made as I am.”

“I think it’s fascinating.” It was true. I did. But it was also true that I found it fascinating when she read recipes out of her cookbook out loud.

You have it bad, Shepherd.

I put a hand in my pocket, just to be sure the stone was still there.

Joe Bob just looked antsy. “Well, okay, I’m sure that’s awesome, but I have to pick Deese up from school soon. Could we maybe talk about whether you want to buy it, and how much you could offer? I need to get Donna a different wedding gift now, and she hinted pretty strongly that she wanted a red leather love seat she saw over at the Pottery Barn in Orlando.”

Dead End was an hour or two from Orlando, depending on traffic, so residents did most of our major shopping there, other than what we could buy at the Super Target not too far down the road. There’d once been an effort to put up an UltraShopMart, but the project leads had been criminals who’d tried to kill me and Deputy Andy Kelly, so the entire town had banded together to shut that down.

Tess tilted her head, a puzzled expression in her beautiful blue eyes. “I’m definitely interested in an antique mirror of this quality, but you mentioned weird magic, right? Are we talking portal to another dimension or something of the ‘mirror, mirror, on the wall’ variety?”

The mirror’s glass surface lit up as if it had been waiting to hear the magic words, and a shadowy face scowled out at us.

This was not a pretty face.

This guy looked like he’d hit the century mark around 1810 and had only grown older and meaner ever since.

And then he started talking, which made everything worse. “Ha! Like I never heard that before! ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall.’ So original . And not even correct. Do I look like I’m on a wall, Missy? That looks like the ceiling I’m staring up at. I mean, what do I know? I’ve just lived in this mirror for hundreds of years, and?—”

I grabbed a cleaning cloth from beneath the counter and tossed it over the mirror. He kept ranting, and he got louder, but at least we didn’t have to look at him anymore.

Tess, meanwhile, buried her face in her hands. I wasn’t sure if she was laughing or crying, but the sounds coming from her weren’t good.

“Tess?” I said.

“Tess?” Joe Bob said.

“Hey, lady! Take this cloth off me right now!” the mirror said.

“Why?” Tess looked at me. “I try to live a good life. I’m a good neighbor. I’m nice to people. Why do these things keep happening to me?”

Joe Bob’s face fell. “Does that mean you won’t buy it?”

The man in the mirror made a wordless screeching sound and then started categorizing Joe Bob’s many failings.

When he got to “brain the size of a walnut,” I whipped the cloth off the mirror and leaned over. “I have a hammer.”

Mirror Dude narrowed his glassy eyes at me. “You wouldn’t dare!”

I slowly grinned, letting him see a lot of teeth. “Wanna bet?”

“Fine.” He made a point of turning his back on us.

“Joe Bob, will you wait here a moment, please?” Tess took my arm. “We need to confer in the back for a second.”

She pulled me behind her to the back room. “Okay, have you ever seen anything like that before? Is that a real person trapped inside a mirror, like Jed was in the statue? If so, we have to get him out.”

“Really? Imagine how much more unpleasant he’d be, live and in person.” I didn’t want to think about it.

“Jack! You’d be in a bad mood, too, if you’d been trapped inside a mirror for centuries! What does he even eat?”

Oh, no. My tender-hearted girlfriend was now imagining the poor old man starving to death, trapped inside a mirror. This was headed nowhere good.

“I’m sure it’s just a magical construct, not a real person. How could he be trapped inside a flat mirror?”

She looked doubtful. “Maybe it really is a portal to another dimension?”

“Or maybe you should take a pass on this one.”

“Oh, no! I can’t leave that with Joe Bob. What if he just tosses it into a dumpster or something? No, I’ll buy it on contingency, since I have no idea how to value it, and then I’ll call on some experts I know.”

Experts in nasty old guys trapped in magical mirrors?

Well, those leprechauns took a liking to her that one time.

When we walked back out into the store, Joe Bob was standing several feet away from the mirror, which was still raving at him.

I looked down at Mirror Dude again and gave him a warning frown, but this time, he scoffed.

I may need to work on my warning frowns.

“What’s the matter, kitty cat? Cat got your tongue? Need to cough up a hairball?”

“How does he know you’re a shifter?” Tess asked me, and I shrugged.

“I may have said something,” Joe Bob said timidly. “Sorry. He finagles things out of a person.”

“Okay, I’ll buy this on contingency,” Tess told Joe Bob, who perked up. “That means I don’t know how much it’s really worth, so I’ll give you an amount I’m sure I can afford. After I get an expert valuation or, even better, a sale, I’ll give you a percentage of the total.”

“Ha! Are you going to trust this woman? Did you know, in my day, we thought women with red hair were witches! Why, we used to?—”

Tess leaned over the mirror and spoke calmly but firmly. “Sir, I’d like to ask you to please be civil. I’m going to help you if you’re trapped in there, no matter what. But it would be nicer for all of us if you were … less unpleasant. My name is Tess Callahan, and I’m glad to meet you. This is Jack Shepherd. Will you please tell me your name?”

Mirror Dude’s mouth fell open mid-rant, and he froze in the glass like a computer screen sometimes freezes. I was tempted to tap on the glass and say, “Is this thing on?”

When he started talking again, I was glad I hadn’t, because he was actually … well, not pleasant. But less unpleasant. To be fair, that was what she’d asked.

“My name is Horatio Mercury, Miss Callahan,” he said with dignity.

Mercury. Really?

“Mercury? Really,” Tess said, delighted. “That’s fascinating, since, as I’m sure you must know?—”

He rolled his little mirror eyes. “Yes, mirrors are made with mercury. At least this one is. I’m trapped inside it. I’m not stupid , and if you think?—”

Horatio peered up at Tess and suddenly seemed to think better of what he was saying. “Sorry. Yes. I know.”

“I’d love it if we could talk about mirrors and history and anything else you want to talk about,” she said, and all three of us, tiger, wanna-be pawnshop robber, and mirror dude, could plainly see her sincerity.

Tess was a really good person. Which was why, with my past, I wasn’t sure I deserved her.

But I wasn’t about to let her go.

“That would be … welcome,” Horatio said. “But I’m tired now. We can talk later.”

With that, the mirror clouded over, and he vanished.

“Wow,” Tess said, clasping her hands together as if I’d just given her a present. “This is going to be amazing.”

One of these days, I was going to talk to her about using more of a poker face in her business dealings. “Amazing” when you’re about to negotiate a sale is like saying “I love it” to a used car salesperson. Never a good idea.

But despite an overly kind and trusting nature, Tess had made a genuine success of the shop. She was the living proof that integrity can be its own reward.

She also looks scary in the mornings when she wakes up, my inner voice, who was scared to death right now, muttered in my brain. Talk about bed head.

I grinned and ran a hand down her gorgeous waist-length red ponytail.

I could live with bed head.

After they agreed on a contingent price and did the paperwork, Joe Bob, now grinning ear to ear, rushed out of the shop. “Thanks, again, Tess! I’ll give Donna your love!”

Then he stopped and looked back at us, stricken. “I just, ah, well. Donna isn’t sure about you coming to the wedding anymore. I mean, after what happened at Eleanor and Bill’s reception … I’m sorry. I can talk her back around. Bye!”

He was gone before I could growl at him. Instead, I wrapped my arms around Tess and gave her a sympathetic hug. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“I know,” she said glumly. “It’s just … why do so many things have to be not my fault?”

It took me a moment, but then I understood, and I laughed. “Do you think that dress is salvageable?”

“Who would want to salvage that dress?” She shuddered. “I’m never going to live this down.”

I kissed her, which was such an excellent idea that I kissed her again, for about five minutes, and then the chimes over the door signaled customers.

“Okay. I have to run some errands. It’s almost five. See you at home soon?” I still hadn’t grown used to having a home, after all those years camping out in various far-flung, dangerous locations.

“I’ll close up at five exactly,” she promised.

When she went to talk to her customers, I headed out to my truck. For a minute or two, I just sat there, turning the sapphire over and over in my fingers. It was the most perfect jewel of all the ones the king of Atlantis had given me for helping save the city from demons, and it was the exact color of Tess’s eyes.

I already had a jeweler on standby.

But now, I needed to find the courage to utter the four scariest words in the English language:

Will you marry me?