Obsidian Mirror Read Online Free

streaked with rust, each of their pillars crowned with a sitting lion, one paw resting on a shield. She threw herself against them, but to her despair they were securely locked, and only a battered mailbox with WINTERCOMBE ABBEY. STRICTLY NO VISITORS leaned in the hedge.
    She’d climb. As she put her hands to the metal, a click alarmed her and she stared up. A small white camera, mounted on one of the lions, had shifted. It swiveled down. The round blank lens scrutinized her.
    “Let me in. Please! I need to speak to you. It’s urgent!”
    A low growl. She spun around, back against the wet metal. Something was creeping through the dim undergrowth of the wood.
    The gates moved.
    A bolt slid. They shuddered apart, just a fraction, but it was enough, she’d squeezed through and was limping up the dark, overgrown drive, leaping logs, ducking under the untrimmed boughs of trees. The path twisted, all gravel and mud; above her a mass of branches tangled against the twilight. She looked back, saw the wolf’s snarling silhouette, stumbled and crashed headlong over a fallen trunk, sprawling in nettles and mud.
    The wolf’s belly was low to the ground. Its eyes gleamed ice-cold, as if they caught the arctic sun.
    “Go back,” she whispered. She groped in the leaf-litter; clutched a brittle branch.
    The wolf slavered, its spittle hanging. Then, quick as a flicker of moonlight, its eyes darted to the left. She turned her head. And held her breath.
    In the eaves of the Wood a shadow stood. A boy in agreen coat, barely visible in the gloom. He leaned on a spear tipped with a flake of sharp flint. He wasn’t even looking at her, as if she didn’t matter at all, but he had fixed his gaze on the dog and his lips were curled in scorn.
    One-handed, he swung the spear and pointed it. “Puppy,” he whispered. “Little scared puppy.”
    The wolf whined. It cowered, hunkering down as if it wanted to sink into the earth. It scrabbled, panicky, at the mud.
    Sarah said, “What are you doing? How are you doing that?”
    The boy glanced at her. She scrambled up, watching the terrified beast abase itself in the dead leaves, watching it scrape itself backward. Then it turned and fled.
    Amazed, she stared. “I don’t know who you are, but…”
    “But I know you,” he said. “Don’t I.”
    “No. You can’t. I…” Her eyes widened. There was no boy. Just tree shadows. Gnarled and twisted.
    For a moment she stood there. Then, slowly, she turned and limped on down the path, to the house that waited for her in the moonlight.
    Wintercombe Abbey was no burned ruin. It stood tall, a rambling manor house of gables and twisted chimneys, its darker, medieval stonework juttingout—the silhouette of a tower, a row of arcaded windows, all unlit. From gutters and gables waterspouts leaned, the long-necked griffins and heraldic yawning dragons she had imagined for years in her dreams. The house crouched in its wooded hollow; its murky wings ran back into gloom, and with a deep roar somewhere beyond, the river crashed through its hidden gorge.
    She moved carefully from tree to tree, as if the house watched her coming.
    There was a lawn of waist-high grass; she would have to cross that, and she would prefer it if no one saw her from the high dark windows.
    It was time to become invisible.
    Sore and muddy, she summoned up the small itchy
switch
in her mind, just as they had taught her in the Lab.
    Done.
    Now no one could see her.
    She stepped out and limped painfully through the dead grasses until the house loomed above, the moon balanced on its highest gable, then slipped around the side of the building, over frost-blackened flower-beds, through a small wrought-iron gate.
    She came to a window, ground floor, but higher than her head. It was ajar. A fragment of curtain gusted through it in the cold breeze. She waited, secret andshadowless, listening. Nothing. The room must be empty.
    She stretched up and grabbed at the sill. Barely reaching, she