Page 41 of The Eternal Mirror (Lucifer’s Mirror #3)

What’s Left After Burning

T he warmth vanishes.

The mirror opens into my clearing in the trees. Below, the rebel camp is quiet. I think dawn is close, the horizon tinted with pink. The night has passed while we’ve been away in the sun.

Maybe we can slip in without anyone seeing, or maybe we should get changed here, just in case.

But at that moment, a figure detaches himself from the trees.

Zayne. He walks toward us, his eyes widening as he takes in my bikini and sarong.

He shakes his head. “You weren’t in your tent. I came to find you.”

“Why...?”

But he’s already turning and walking away .

We follow him back to the edge of the camp. Then I see Sheela. She’s on her knees beside a still body, rocking back and forth, hands tangled in her mother’s hair.

“No,” she’s whispering. “No, no, no, no, no—”

My stomach drops. I rush forward, falling to my knees beside her. But I already know.

Her mother is dead. Pale. Still.

Sheela looks up at me, her eyes hollow and wide. “I left her alone,” she says. “I thought she was getting better. I thought—” Her voice breaks and she closes her eyes for a moment. “There was nothing left of her. No reason to hold onto life.”

I clench my fists, my hands still gritty from the beach sand. Behind me, Khaosti stands, silent.

What is there to say?

We bury Sheela’s mother later that morning.

Well, actually, we burn her.

Apparently, witches don’t go into the ground. Something to keep in mind, I suppose. They go to ash. Fire, smoke, sky. Returning the magic to the stars or some poetic crap like that. I don’t ask. I just help build the pyre.

Sheela hasn’t spoken since. Her beautiful face is ravaged with guilt and grief.

It makes me wish I’d never found her mother.

Or at least, I hadn’t mentioned finding her.

Maybe I should have just quietly and painlessly ended her life and kept quiet about it.

I gave Sheela hope, and that’s a terrible thing to give someone.

Because inevitably, it’s just going to get snatched back, and you end up worse than before.

She stares at the flames, as if she wants to crawl into them.

Killian stands beside her, an arm wrapped around her shoulder, as though he can physically stop her from throwing herself onto the funeral pyre.

Or maybe I’m being overly dramatic, and he’s just stopping her from slumping to the ground in a heap of misery.

He doesn’t say much either, just guards her grief, like it’s sacred.

Khaosti stands at her other side, staring straight ahead. Which just happens to be my direction. Yasmin was his aunt after all, though she vanished long before Khaos was born, so he didn’t know her.

I still have sand between my toes, though Hawaii seems like a world away.

Actually, it is a fucking world away. It was magical, but part of me wishes we hadn’t gone.

It just makes everything else seem so much darker.

It’s hard to believe there are still people splashing around in the sea, under a bright blue sky, while here, we’re burning a dead witch.

I stand and watch until the last shred of smoke drifts away. Then, there’s nothing left but a pile of ashes and a lot of miserable people.

After that, the days start to slide.

One turns into another. The camp becomes a machine—training, planning, patrols. People eat. People sleep. People avoid eye contact. Everyone is pretending this is going somewhere. That we’re not all just waiting for Khronus to come and finish us all off.

I haven’t seen much of Niall lately. He hasn’t been at training or the morning briefings. Last I heard, he was doing supply runs with one of the outer scouting units .

No one really knows him. They only trust him because I do. And I only trust him because he’s Winter’s brother. Which is stupid. Winter’s gone, not to mention the fact that she betrayed us.

Maybe he’s grieving in his own way.

I try to keep busy. I try to help. But my magic’s...off. I keep reaching for it and coming up empty. Or worse—getting too much. It’s like the magic is coiled too tight inside me, waiting to snap.

I sit with the witches some mornings. The ones we rescued. I try to coax them into spells, circles, chants. Hella helps. She’s young, strong, still fighting.

The others?

They just start dying. Quietly. One by one. Like time is pulling them out of the story. One goes in her sleep. Peaceful. Everyone says it was age, exhaustion, whatever helps them sleep at night.

I know it’s Khronus. Bastard. It seems he wasn’t lying when he said they would die—it just took longer than I expected. But whatever he did to them—there’s no coming back from it. And no cure. I hate him with a deep black hatred that’s eating at my soul.

Then another dies. Then two more.

We burn them all. We run out of wood for the pyres and have to send work parties out to find more timber.

Sheela says nothing. She hasn’t given up trying to heal the remaining witches.

Both of us spend long, depressing hours in the tent, trying spell after useless spell.

I see the way she watches them—as if she’s counting down.

Killian is her shadow. I suspect that before this, their relationship was based on sex and comfort.

Now it’s turning into something deeper. So maybe some good will come out of all these deaths after all.

Zayne tries to talk to me. I dodge him. Josh wants to sit with me. I make excuses. Even Grimlet's tail doesn’t wag when I walk past anymore.

I can’t face them. Not when I’m unraveling. Not when every time I close my eyes, I see another dead witch and feel that powerless burn under my skin. I’m not strong enough to comfort anyone—not even the people I love. Especially the people I love.

If I sit with Josh, I’ll cry. If I talk to Zayne, I’ll scream. I don’t want to break in front of them. So I avoid them, hoping they’ll think I’m busy or tired. Not broken.

Khaosti...stays near. But not too close.

He knows. He sees it. The way I’m pulling inward, like a black hole, like something collapsing in on itself.

He doesn’t try to stop me.

I think he understands.

At night, I fall asleep calling to Selene. I need to talk to her. I need to find out if there’s anything I can do to help the witches. If she’s found a way to break the bond between me and Khaosti. Because I can’t go on like this. If he dies, it will rip me apart. And everyone fucking dies.

But Selene remains elusive.

The only person I talk to is Hella. We sit under the trees sometimes, in my clearing. She asks questions. I give her half-truths. She makes dumb jokes, and I laugh like I mean it.

She's the last one left now, and I see the inevitability of her death reflected in her eyes.

I keep telling myself I have time.

Just a little more time. I’ll find a spell that works. Selene will contact me. Something will happen to break this cycle of death. It has to. Otherwise, what’s the point?