No heart can satiate itself purely upon the reflection of its own desires. The more it turns inward to devour hollow fantasies, the emptier it feels, until it can no longer remember the sensation of fullness. The Lebensford Mirror, not full, leaned against the third-floor wall of an elegantly apportioned mansion. Its glass was clean, its frame untarnished, and its eyes full of nothing but wood and plaster and the shadows of days gone by.

  Daisy’s first impression of the mansion, tucked as it was between grassy rolling hills and grand forest, was of the Wealthy Estate of a Mysterious Suitor. He would be tall and imposing with either severe hand-someness or cursed hide-ous-ness. His manners would be distant, his mind ingenious, his feelings both opaque and passionate. The leading lady would fear him until she learned his Dark Secret, after which fear would turn into pity and pity into love.

  “Constance must have met her husband here,” Daisy murmured, lower-ing her binoculars. “First a Mysterious Suitor strain, now a Cursed Object strain—”

  “This isn’t a Cursed Object strain,” Lawrence corrected, keeping watch over waving grass and drooping trees. Like Daisy, she wore a soft, flexible long-sleeved shirt, light enough for summer but made of a material that would, in Agency jargon, help distribute impact. Since they wouldn’t be focusing on stealth, each agent other-wise colored herself as she pleased: Lawrence in unaffected browns and Daisy in eye-catching pink and white. “It’s a House strain, Decadent variant, Cursed Object type.”

  “But the brief—” Daisy began, and swallowed her words. Briefs were almost never wrong, but they could go out-of-date, as Daisy knew from her own experience. Constance had said she was going to move the mirror, and Horror, Daisy was beginning to learn, was far more location-dependent than Romance. “Are house settings dominant?”

  A light breeze ruffled and swirled Lawrence’s short hair. “More so than any other.”

  “With rigid attributes?”

  “One: environmental layers.” Lawrence turned her ashy gaze to Daisy, her expression nothing beyond the plain blankness of profes-sionalism. Inside of the Agency, Daisy thought she’d made progress reading her part-ner’s emotions. Inside scenarios, where that ability mattered most, Daisy could not pierce her mask. Lawrence said, “Environmental layers are rare outside of Horror. I do not believe Romance has them.”

  That was, Daisy reflected, positively diplomatic phrasing. “Hmm, no,” she admitted, rolling into a seat on the grass and tucking the binoculars away as she gathered her thoughts. “I can guess what they are, though, if they’re anything like the layers in Romance. ‘The love interest is such a cold and arrogant monster! But then she discovers that he is actually so nice he got tricked and betrayed. Now that she sees him in a new light, she realizes he was a great guy all along!’ The leading lady believes the change is only in her understanding; but from an outside perspective, the love interest’s personality clearly shifts as she approaches the innermost layer.”

  Lawrence was still watching, still listening. She had not turned away or interrupted Daisy or tuned her out. “Can you unravel a Romance Heart before revealing what the love interest is ‘actually’ like?”

  “Generally not, if he’s hosting the Heart; definitely not, if he’s the person-i-fied Heart.”

  “Then the principle is the same,” Lawrence said, approving but not surprised. “The victim enters on the first level, where everything is nearly normal. The Heart is sleepy and can drive away or injure but seldom kill. The victim fulfills certain criteria—of time, location, or information—and progresses to the next layer. On each deeper layer, the Heart awakens further, gaining awareness, power, and malice. On the deepest layer, it is fully awake and potent—but it is also fully exposed and therefore vulnera-ble.”

  “Which means,” Daisy concluded, “that it can kill us in any level from the second on—and we can’t even fight back until it’s at its most deadly?”

  “Exactly,” said Lawrence.

  Constance Jones was eighty-four years old when she purchased the Lebens-ford Mirror. She was what she considered an adventurous soul and what the Agency labeled a repeat offender.

  As a child, Constance didn’t realize the world treated her differ-ently than other people. During summer vacation, she and her friends sailed out to a small island and invented a magical kingdom. During the school year, she and her appointed Watson solved the minor mysteries and occasional murders of their boarding school. As a teen-ager, she met a rude boy at a party. She was rude back, and they vowed to despise each other forever until the day he saved her from a biker gang. Then, amid expla-nations and apologies, they discovered they’d been in love the whole time.

  On a glorious evening, in the golden hour, beneath a weeping willow and beside a creek, the rude man proposed. Heart fluttering, Constance opened her mouth to accept, only to be interrupted by a pair of strange women. The women strode out of a nearby grove to stand barely ten feet away, where they stared at her dearest Harry and took turns describing him in the most unflatter-ing and coldly clinical terms imaginable. Constance planted her hands on her hips and braced herself to give them a piece of her mind—only to halt, confused, when she realized that she agreed wholeheartedly with everything they’d said. What had she been thinking, dating such a philan-dering prick?

  Constance remembered that pair of women five years later, after a much different but equally strange occurrence: The firm for which she worked, design-ing ads for crispy snack foods, mutated overnight from its ordinary over-cast mood into a mess of pranks and pratfalls. No one spoke without quipping, and for every quip there was an uncon-cerned background party to laugh. Dramatic improbabilities conspired to make humiliating messes that no one took too seri-ously, and hardly anyone got much work done. Under the circum-stances, it was hardly surprising that Corporate sent in a pair of inspectors.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  They were men this time, though still young and still fit and still with that something in their faces that she’d noticed last time. They visited every corner of the build-ing and asked nosy questions; and when they left, every-thing was ordinary again. Sobered, perhaps, by the threat of unemployment.

  A totally unrelated series of events, and yet its resolution felt familiar, and Constance wondered.

  She wondered again when crows started attacking people. Animal Control couldn’t cope; the militia couldn’t aim. Dozens died before a pair of strangers showed up with bows and arrows and shot until the streets were black with avian corpses.

  That bows and arrows should work when guns did not, Constance thought, was awfully suspicious—and as for the attacks, she didn’t think anyone bought the government’s explanation of migration patterns, windmills, and electri-cal lines.

  Constance became certain there was something special about these pairs of strangers when she got swept into another romance. She had never forgot-ten the faces of the two women who’d made her realize about Harry. She would’ve recognized them these fifteen years later even if they had aged at an ordinary rate; but, in fact, they looked exactly the same. They came out around the side of the grand mansion as her beloved Don was clasping her hand, gazing deep into her eyes, and telling her how he’d fallen in love with her. His words were very pretty and exactly what she wanted to hear—but the moment she saw those two women, she dropped his hand, marched right up to them, and thrust her finger in their faces. “I know you!”

  They tried to bluster and Don tried to intervene, but Constance wasn’t having any of it.

  “You were there when Harry proposed! You called him a ‘classic exam-ple of a bad boy who only likes the girl after she’s gotten a make-over’! You called him an ‘irredeemable wastrel with a bad mullet’!”

  The women blinked at her in astonishment, and then one said to the other, “You know, Clarice, I think you did say that.”

  Clarice went rather pale, directed a furious look at the other woman, and snapped, “Excuse us,” at Constance before dragging her friend away. She didn’t drag her far, or Constance would have followed. Don took Constance’s hand as they waited.

  The women whispered together furiously for a minute and then returned, one sheepish, the other resigned. “We don’t usually tell people this,” Clarice admit-ted, “but since you’ve encountered us before, you prob-ably will again—and who knows, the knowledge might help you defend yourself. We can’t go into too much detail, but the short version is that we’re members of a special psychic agency that investi-gates and solves supernatural incur-sions.”

  Constance frowned sternly as she clutched Don’s hand, hiding her aston-ish-ment that they were willing to explain at all—and her greater aston-ishment that she’d been right. “And your job includes making rude comments about one’s beaux?”

  “Well, no,” said Clarice. “But it seemed to us that you hadn’t realized you were free (or that you’d ever been caught in the first place), and that you were about to make an unfortunate decision. You wouldn’t want to stay with your lover because a supernatural force was controlling you, would you? If he’s a decent sort, you can fall in love with him for real.”

  “Humph,” Constance said. Whatever these two had come to do on this occasion, they had done it already, she realized; the insane attraction control-ling her had evaporated. Now that she thought about it, things had been the same with Harry. She’d thought that was just what love felt like? It always looked that way in the movies.

  Constance sniffed. “I don’t think much of you messing with people’s minds, no matter what the reason. And I do love Don anyway. So there!”

  “Good luck with that,” said Clarice, and her partner waved as they ran off.

  Don’s fingers had gone cold in hers, curling stiffly against her palm. “Do you really love me?” he asked, against the background of his imposing ancestral home.

  Constance looked at him with clear eyes. Without the fog of artificial attraction, she saw that the man before her was less romanti-cally ideal than she had fooled herself into believing—and far more of an actual person. Flawed, eccentric, kind, brilliant . . . and, if not perfectly, then at least reasonably suited to the real her. “Of course I do,” she said.

  Marriage dampened but did not extinguish the supernatural excitement of Constance’s life. Several times, she spotted pairs she thought were agents; and twice, she had positive proof: once when a swirling purple portal appeared in her son’s bedroom closet, and once when a black-fedoraed serial killer terror-ized the village.

  The decades passed, as decades do. Her boys grew up, their child-hoods as full of adventures as hers had been, for they had inherited her super-natural appeal. They all three died together, in a war drama far from home, best friends until the end. Don, who remained upright and brilliant three decades longer, succumbed at last to ordinary sickness and age. He held Constance’s fingers gently, as he always had, in his hospice bed. Then his muscles relaxed, the mor-tician rolled him away, and Constance was left alone to wander about her empty mansion and ponder how soon her body would be found if she died in the night.

  “I am an old woman,” she told her reflection, seeing the lingering hand-some-ness of her youth. She had that, if not a husband or sons or any other family. Or any other purpose.

  Constance shook herself and ordered, “Enough!” She straight-ened and pressed her lips together, the model of noble deter-mination. “Instead of wait-ing for an adventure to find me, I’d better find one for myself.” She considered this before adding, “And this time, I’ll make it work by my rules.”

  If anyone else had attempted to track down the supernatural by trotting about and being nosy, they would certainly have failed. As for Constance—it took her six months of looking before she learned of the Lebensford Mirror and another two weeks to decide upon it. Its owners conveniently passed away shortly there-after, and the mirror went up for auction.

  Money was no object. Constance put on a fashionable teal hat and gloves and trotted on down to the auction house, where she, with demur viciousness, outbid her competitors one by one. The auction house manager told her she could pick up the mirror any time that day or the next. Constance smiled, nodded, and told him she’d like him to store the mirror for her until she was ready for it. She would, of course, pay. She said this with such finality, already writing a check, that the manager couldn’t quite bring out his objections until she was sailing out the door; and by that time, it was too late.

  “I must do this properly, or there’s no point,” she told herself, chuckling, as she drove her long, smooth green car back from the auction house. She had already collected a list of people with connections to the Lebensford Mirror. That evening, she sent them letters inviting them to her grand coun-try home for the summer to investigate the mirror. They would have, she promised, excellent food and a generous per diem.

  Some of the recipients had moved and did not get her letter. Others dismissed her as a scammer, madwoman, or publicity seeker. A few were too afraid to come. Four promised they would.

  The Agency sent Daisy and Lawrence.