#avacore

“What’s wrong with it, princess?” the American pilot asks his Lady Di as he toys with the iron lock on the thin chain keeping the fancy cloth on a gilded mirror older than his granny.

“She trapped a demon inside it, a demon that tried to take over her life when I was a baby.” The dark-haired heiress says as if it were something as minor as a scratch or broken glass.

Then knowing exactly what sort of man she married, warns him, “Don’t you dare pick that lock, or so help me God, John Clarance Egan!”

“Then why the hell did she give it as a gift to us then, Di?” he asks as he puts it back into the crate it arrived in.

“We are supposed to go to Lake Superior and toss it in there, I suppose we can do that once we finish settling in the house and visit your family.” The witch answered and picked up another crate holding things they’d bought in England to furnish the fine townhouse in the least racist neighborhood in DC his father-in-law gifted them as a wedding gift.

“A shame, this looks like something that would look nice in the living room.” Bucky carefully placed it back on the crate and added a hastily scribbled note with instructions knowing they’ll forget with all the work to be done.

And they do.

The house is fully settled, they have been to Lake Superior at least five times and the two girls Di had seen in their future go from babies to children and are joined by a brother born five months after John Clarance Egan Sr’s untimely death in the same living room he had hoped to place the mirror in.

“Toss in L.S. Do not open.” Bucky Junior is ten years of age when the newly engaged twenty-five-year-old Rosemary finds the crate in search of the wedding things their parents had saved from their elopement in London twenty-seven years ago.

“You know, I was your age when daddy taught me and Lizzie how to pick locks. I think this old thing might be a good way to show you.” The tall young woman with her father’s twinkling blue eyes and her mother’s signature mole whispers to her little brother remembering that afternoon they spent hours picking apart every lock on the kitchen table while her mother was out at the country club.

The note with the instructions is forgotten in the crate as the bride to be takes her brother back upstairs and brought out the lock picking kit her father had hoped to give her that Christmas before his death. He’d been forty-one when he died from a heart attack and would have been fifty-one if he had lived.

Bucky with their mother’s mismatched eyes and daddy’s looks took to it like a fish to water and soon enough the iron padlock opens and the velvet reeking of the herbs and other things Rosie Gale mastered before she could master reading the cards is carefully removed from the vintage mirror.

It is not ordinary; her mama and grandmama were witches, and both Lizzie and Rosie had inherited their power despite Bucky Egan being an ordinary mortal. It is cold with a curse and like all the things that originate in evil, it also contains an inscription in Latin. Latin she learned to read because far too many spells come in it and because she studied literature in Oxford.

“Speculum speculorum.” Rosemary Gale Egan- Shelby reads the inscription out loud and adds for her baby brother’s benefit, “It means Mirror of Mirrors.”

The glass begins to ripple, and the young woman sets it back on the table before standing between it and her little brother. It ripples and clears revealing a blonde image of their grandmama in a hairstyle that looked too modern to have been anything from the 1920s.

“Oh, hello! Thank you for waking me!” the blonde creature greets them with a bubbly voice that reminded Rosie of all the bitchy snobs she’s met. The creature doesn’t stay in the mirror, manicured hands grip the edges and after much struggling it escapes the mirror wearing a fashionable pink ensemble.

“My name is Ava; I am your grandmother’s doppelgänger in the Mirror World.” Ava smoothed her skirt and extended her hand to Rosie.

They had heard the story about a world inside a mirror that showed a being composed of the worst attributes ---or best depending on the person and the mirror--- the subject has. Ava the Mirror Demon had been a selfish and cruel thing who had gone to lengths to usurp Eva and her life in revenge for Eva trying to send her back into her world.