not listening to them presently. It was safer not to take any chances, however. And no matter how anxious he was for his own safety, Cronos still could not look away.
There was no reflection of light where there should be in the inky, watery glass.
Only a ghostly reproduction of a pale hand reaching…
The Master’s fingertips touched the glass gently, stroking downward in an almost loving caress. His hand turned palm side up, slowly, so slowly, as a lover might do when carefully cupping a woman’s soft, full breast.
Then with precision and intensity, the fingertips trailed patiently upward.
The Master’s head turned, just enough so that Cronos could see beyond the borders of the cowl.
Eyes of malachite and black widened slightly as they fixed on the progress of his own hand against the mirror. They were large, haunted eyes with pupils that flickered with swift-moving phantoms of death, suffering wraiths, and impending misfortunate fate. Set into deeply shadowed sockets, the eyes seemed to fairly glow with their wicked splendor.
This eerie illumination was fringed with lush, spiky lashes that curled upward in abundance. These lashes were deceptive, mockingly emulating those of an innocent, wide-eyed child whose lashes seemed to go on forever. These were not innocent. They were reaching.
Reaching. Reaching toward thick black brows. Brows that seemed to curl down in their centers, as if attracted toward the lashes. Both were waiting.
Waiting for the tiniest morsel of a fly.
Cronos’s stomach turned sour and he shuddered as he looked quickly to the floor. He could never look long upon those eyes, even when they weren’t trained piercingly upon him. Even when they weren’t boring into him and sucking…sucking at his frantic, twisted soul.
Little fly that he was.
But he quickly drew his faint courage back around himself and looked eagerly back to the mirror and the thing he knew was about to happen.
Gently, without a ripple or a single smudge of a fingerprint, the Master’s hand slipped into the blue waters of the glass.
The Master drew in an audible breath. It was almost a sound of pleasure, echoing in the vast room before disappearing in the refuge of the smothering shadows. He leaned forward slightly until his wrist had become enveloped by the mirror as well. An oppressive feeling of power began to bleed forbiddingly into the room. The torchlight quavered and dimmed, beaten back by this new, overwhelming darkness.
Suddenly, an electric blue and white finger of energy, like a small bolt of lightning, jumped from one of the curling tendrils of the mirror’s iron frame. Cutting a quick, jagged path to the Master’s wrist, it touched and ricocheted off. It rebounded in a precise V, heading directly to the framework on the opposite side of the mirror.
This one spark was the first of a cascade of similar bolts of static energy, each starting from and ending at a new claw of the reaching frame.
A charge built in the room, causing Cronos’s hair to stand on end in long gray spikes. The mirror was alive with lightning now. The Master’s eyes reflected the blue-white glow with unearthly intensity and a hunger for its power.
Then the mirror went abruptly dark and forbidding again. Yet the hot, nerve-tingling charge of power continued to fill the room until it created a whining hum.
The Master yanked back his hand, suddenly alive with movement as he shoved the cowl back from his head. A contorted growl erupted from him as he tore the entire cloak from himself, revealing his ghostly white, naked flesh.
He stepped up to the glass in such a way that one step might take him entirely through, his muscles flexing and twitching with potency and expectation.
The step was taken.
Cronos blinked once as the Master disappeared.
The torch guttered once before dying.
Chapter 1
He entered her sleeping mind with an unexpected thrust of force. But he should not have been surprised by her resistance. She always resisted sleeping, it seemed, as if she didn’t have time for it and wished she could do away with the restful state completely.
Not that it was going to be restful now that he was there.
At the moment there was no cohesion to the visions in her mind, the things surrounding him merely remnants of the electrical impulses and memories of things from the boring waking world in which she lived. He didn’t understand why anyone would want to wake up. The worlds of the mind were so vast and creative and could keep a person entertained forever.
Of course, they could also torment them endlessly, he conceded with a private little smile to himself. The emotion-evoking land of nightmares could range from simple guilt and self-induced fears to the roaring dramatics of beasts and the running from or falling to certain death.
The latter was a somewhat lazy method, he felt. It took the finesse of a true artist to work an environment and the mind of his subject in such a way as to turn every part of her own psyche into an antenna of fear, emitting the emotion in powerful, satiating waves of energy. Energy he needed. Energy he craved.
He found her at the very center of her mind, the exhausted need for sleep having forced her under, and her uncooperative imagination was simply tossing up flickering images of a sick girl in bed or her father’s robust laugh.
“No, no, this will not do at all,” he murmured.
He painted their surroundings in perfect pitch of night, the sparkle of stars above and below them as if they were flying among them. She was, as yet, unaware of him, but she responded to the change in her surroundings with awe and wonderment. Her heart raced at being unsure of her footing. Physics and reality were suspended, but her mind had a hard time accepting that.
When a subject first began to dream, the person was only a black shape of himself or herself. Like a person in a head-to-toe body stocking, the subject had no color, no hair, no skin or bone. Just the semiformed black mannequin the subject’s perspective allowed for at first. But depending on the nature of the dream, that would quickly change. The heavy and encumbered could become thin and spry, the ugly could become beautiful, and the beautiful could become plain; all according to the subconscious needs of the dreamer at hand.
But what he liked about this particular woman was that she never once altered her base appearance. The moment she began to dream with him, the blackness would melt away, giving shape to her tall frame with its wickedly long legs and the wide expanse of hips that filled out every outfit she wore with such a nicely pronounced curvature that led to an equally delectable backside. She was busty as well, every movement making her curve in one way or another. Her face was something else, though, aristocratic and elegantly planed, the look of a stern but beautiful schoolteacher. Perhaps it was the tight and strict ponytail she kept the incredible length of her chestnut hair in or it was her gray eyes that made her seem so severe at first, but then she would smile or cry and it would all change. Or she would become gloriously angry and her beauty would truly explode.
He was convinced that this was the way she looked in the waking world. There was never any variation and, in his opinion, there was hardly any need for it. The changes in her appearance came later, by his hand, when it suited his mood, and it was rarely anything more dramatic
