“Are you sure this is where it was?” Mick growled.
“Yes, that’s the mirror. Or was the mirror.”
“Then the mage has already been here.”
Shit. “Looks like it,” was all I could say.
Drake had come in behind me. “This is grievous news.”
“You think?” I sat down, folding my legs under me, the floor cold. “But what can he do? This is my dream, isn’t it? And yours,” I said to Drake. “Must be Emmett’s too,” I finished glumly.
Mick wrapped warm fingers around my wrist. “This is no dream. This is real.”
“It can’t be.”
Mick frowned down at me. “What I want you to do, Janet, is tell me everything—why you think this is a dream, how you learned about Drake and the Dragon Council, who this mage is that did this to me … Everything.”
I sighed. “You won’t believe me.”
Mick’s grip tightened. “I’ve lived more than two hundred and fifty years and seen many things. You didn’t believe in dragons before you met me, did you? So try me.”
I had to concede his point. I wanted to retreat someplace safer, somewhere not close to the vortexes, but Mick held me there, his hand strong, his gaze firmly on mine. He wouldn’t budge until he was satisfied.
I let out a breath. “All right,” I said and settled my legs under me. “Once upon a time, there was a bad, bad mage called Emmett Smith, who coveted a magic mirror.”
I was interrupted by shrill screaming. Not inside, but outside, in the parking lot. A woman was crying out, her panic true.
Mick made it first out the door, even though he’d been furthest from it. Drake held back to let me precede him, as though he felt the need to continue his duty as rearguard.
We spaced ourselves around the gallery so it wouldn’t fall under our collected weight, moving as a fighting team even as we responded to the crisis. We made it down the front stairs without anything dire happening and across the rubble-strewn expanse of the lobby.
Mick wrenched open the locked front door and stopped. I peered around him and blinked in astonishment.
Maya Medina stood in front of the hotel, her fists balled, eyes wide, tears on her lovely face. She was in her white work coveralls, her black hair pulled into a ponytail, which hung down her back as she stared up at the hotel with a look of horror.
When she saw Mick, me behind him, and Drake behind me, her screams cut off and she let out a long, relieved breath.
“Dios, Janet, I thought I was crazy.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and glared at the hotel again. “But I must still be crazy. What the hell happened to this place?”
Mick didn’t want to let me past him, but I ducked around him and went toward Maya, my hands out as though I calmed a scared child or panicked animal. “You know me?” I asked.
Maya gave me an impatient look. “Of course I know you. And him, and him.” She pointed at Mick and Drake in turn. “But everyone else has gone insane.”
I hesitated, not knowing what to tell her. Any reassurance would be a lie. There was too much magic in this situation for it not to be dangerous.
“It’s a spell,” I began. “It’s making us dream of the past. Emmett cast it on us.”
Maya stared at me then looked exasperated. “You mean that son of a bitch who locked us all in your hotel? Why doesn’t he go away?”
“He didn’t …” The situation when we’d been hexed last winter had been more complicated than that, but I didn’t have time to go into it.
Maya wasn’t listening to me. She’d glanced at Mick in sudden concern. “Mick, you okay? You don’t look so good.”
“He doesn’t know you,” I said quickly. “He’s Mick from my past.”
“There’s still something wrong. Are you sick?” Maya asked him.
“In a manner of speaking,” Mick said.
Maya looked puzzled, but she knew Mick well enough to grasp when he didn’t want to talk about something. She turned her gaze back to me.
“So, I woke up this morning back in my own house,” she said. “Everything normal there, except I’ve been staying at Nash’s. Trying to fix his place up so a human being can live in it. I stepped outside in time to see Nash drive past in a deputy’s car, heading to McGuire’s old house. When I walked down there to see what was going on, Nash comes out with Amy McGuire and starts kissing her. What the hell?” Maya pointed a shaking finger at me. “You tell me how that happened.”
“He’s with Amy?” I asked in alarm.
“I just said that. I thought she was gone forever. You cleared that up. You told me.”