Teeth in the Mirror

Nova woke choking on air.

For one hard second she had no idea where she was. Just the dark. Sheets twisted around her legs. Her own breath stuck too high in her chest. Then the room assembled itself around her piece by piece, and she did what she had been trained to do years ago and could now do with humiliating efficiency: inhaled through her nose, held it, counted, let it out. Again. Again.

The nightmare released its grip in stages, the way they always did. The fear was bad enough. The familiarity of it was worse; the understanding that this would keep happening, that her sleeping mind had places it went whether she wanted to follow or not.

Her bedroom settled back into itself. Stacks of second-hand novels along every wall, shelved by a system only she understood. Thrift-store finds that looked accidental until you realised none of them were. A room built by a girl who liked old things, safe things, things that had already survived somebody else and might, therefore, be trusted.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stumbled into the bathroom.

The light snapped on.

A silver cross. Glinting.

A wooden arrow in flight.

A caduceus; twin snakes, staff, wings; splattered with blood.

Nova caught the sink with both hands. Cold porcelain. Chlorine in the tap water. Her own pulse, too fast, in her throat. She splashed water onto her face, blinked hard, pressed her palms together under the stream, and brought the water to her mouth.

Blood pooled in her cupped hands.

She jerked back. “What the—”

Something hard struck porcelain. A small, sharp sound.

A tooth.

Her tooth.

For a second her mind refused it outright. Then there was another clink. Then another. Her fingers went to her mouth and came away red. Her gums felt swollen, splitting under pressure she couldn’t see. Crack. Pop. More teeth plinking down onto the porcelain like dropped coins. Panic filled her body all at once, too big to fit, and through the panic she felt something sharp pressing up through the ruin of her own mouth.

“No, no, no—”

She looked up.

Nothing looked back.

The mirror held the bathroom. The light. The narrow doorway behind her. The towel on its hook, the toothbrush in its cup. Every detail except Nova.

Her whole body went cold.

And then there was a figure in the glass behind her. Dark. Still. Wearing her shape but none of her softness. This other Nova stood with a wooden stake in her hand and a face stripped of fear, hesitation, doubt.

Nova spun around.

The stake drove into her chest.

She came apart, a scream and then dust, just dust, a rush of ash that had been a girl a fraction of a second ago,

and she bolted upright in bed with daylight in her eyes and her heart trying to crack her sternum from the inside.

Morning. Her room. No blood. No dust. Teeth intact. She checked, tongue moving frantically across every surface.

She dropped back onto the pillow and stared at the ceiling, furious at her own nervous system for doing all of that before school.

“Nova! Breakfast!”

“Be right there—”

She moved on reflex after that. Stepped out of pyjamas and into an outfit that, if she was being honest, also looked like pyjamas. Hair back. Lip gloss, because there were apparently still standards. Next to a stack of fantasy novels, her laptop sat waiting. She opened it with the wariness of someone defusing a small, expensive bomb.

“Hello, demon machine.”

The Cambridge summer program was still on the screen.

She hadn’t submitted it.

The application sat there in crisp boxes and hopeful serif type, all that want condensed into fields for personal details and transcript uploads. On the right side, photographs of stone courtyards, ancient quads, and a library so beautiful it crossed cleanly over from architecture into fantasy. Students in scarves reading under trees. Books in towers. A life that looked quiet in the expensive way: the kind of quiet you could spend an entire summer inside of, thousands of miles from Sunnydale, from Abe, from any of this. A place where nobody knew her already, or expected her to stay the same.

Send or Save for later.

“Nova!”

She jumped so hard she nearly pitched the laptop off the desk. In a burst of guilt she hit save, slammed the lid, shoved it into her bag, and only then saw the programme’s printed catalogue still spread open on the bed like evidence.

“Oh, come on—”

She jammed the catalogue into the bag. The bag tipped under the weight. A stack of books shifted. And her thrifted-but-beloved bust of William Shakespeare launched itself off the edge of the desk toward certain destruction.

Nova’s hand flashed out behind her. Back, blind, impossibly fast. She caught him by the head.

She stood there a moment, holding a rescued William Shakespeare one-handed.

“Bill.” She brought him slowly around to face her. “You saw that, right?”

He gave nothing.

She set him carefully back on the desk and stared at her own hand as if it had just done something without asking permission.

Downstairs, Abe was at the stove, barefoot and whistling, as if mornings had personally apologised to him years ago and been forgiven. He had the easy physical confidence of someone who could belong almost anywhere and usually did. When he looked over his shoulder, his face softened the way it always did when he saw her.

“Want some eggs?”

“Nah. Just a cuppa mud.”

“You got it, mudbug.” He slid the mug across the counter, then watched her for a beat, catching more than she wanted him to. “You sleep okay?”

“Not really. Weird dreams.”

His face did something careful. “It wasn’t the one about the scary—”

“No.” She took the mug. Met his eyes so he’d believe her. “It wasn’t that.”

He held on a moment longer, the concern not quite leaving, and she gave him something else before he could dig.

“I swear. It was about vampires, if you can believe it.”

He looked toward the window, where a banner for Vampire Weekend was visible two streets over.

“Vampires.” He turned back to his eggs. “I can’t imagine why.”