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be fun. The locals couldn’t be worse than the super-rich fake-tan junkies he usually found himself surrounded by, and maybe he’d meet someone interesting to talk to. That girl Faye—Flash—for example. She seemed smart. She was cute, too.
    “Hello?” he said again, pushing open the door. Two lamps were lit, casting a shallow glow over the living room, but there was no sign of his mother.
    Lucas looked around the room. He hadn’t been in it before—yet another corner of the house he’d not bothered to explore. Now, though, he noticed the huge, ornate mirror that hung over the disused fireplace. All the furniture was arranged around it, as if it were a TV or a particularly beautiful painting.
    “Ah,” he said, “so that’s where she put you. Thought I hadn’t seen your ugly face for a while.”
    Lucas moved until he stood in front of the mirror, studying its ancient, intricately carved wooden frame. This mirror featured in so many of his memories. No matter where they went, no matter how far they traveled, this thing always came with them. It must cost his mother a small fortune to transport it, and yet she did it, every time. He’d never asked why, though he assumed it was a valuable family heirloom. On the other hand, his mother never got tired of looking at her own reflection. Maybe she just liked the way this mirror made her look.
    Lucas stared into the glass. He realized that although the mirror had been around for as long as he could remember, he had rarely looked at himself in it. It colored everything in a bluish tint, as if each reflection contained within it were farther away than it really was. He regarded himself and wondered if, as everyone was fondof telling him, his face really was similar to his mother’s. He had her eyes, he knew that, but everything else—his nose, his mouth, his chin … they held nothing of her.
    He put his fingers to his face, wondering what his father looked like. Mercy never spoke about him, had never offered Lucas even a hint of who he might be. Maybe she didn’t know—she certainly didn’t want to talk about it. But the older he got, the more Lucas wondered. Was his father out there, somewhere? Did he even know he had a son? There were pictures of Lucas everywhere in the media. Perhaps his father looked at them and wondered too? Perhaps he recognized part of himself in his long-lost son somehow?
    The whole of Lucas’s life, it had just been him and his mom. Well, the two of them plus whatever dumb bodyguards were following his mother around like trained animals. Ballard was just the latest. Lucas couldn’t stand them. He’d never felt as if he really knew his mother: not properly, not like other children seemed to know their parents. He put this down, largely, to the constant attention of one idiot employee after another. And even if they hadn’t been there, there was nothing to say that—
    Something suddenly skittered at the edge of his vision. It was barely there, a movement deep within the mirror, something scuttling, insectlike, beneath its surface. Lucas stepped back, spooked, and knocked into the occasional table behind him, nearly sending the lamp crashing to the floor.
    “Honestly, Lucas,” came his mother’s bored voice. “You really are as clumsy as an ox. At least
try
to be more careful, can’t you?”
    Lucas turned to see Mercy Morrow standing in the doorway, one slim and perfectly manicured hand grasping the antique door handle. It was no wonder, he thought, that the rest of the world thought her so beautiful. She
was
beautiful. Her tall figure was a perfect hourglass shape. Her thick blond hair was swept up as usual ina complicated arrangement of twists and curls that must have taken hours to complete, framing her delicate, pale oval face. Her almond-shaped eyes, bluer even than Lucas’s own, shone in the lamplight, her lashes so long that they cast shadows on her high cheekbones. Her full lips were curved in a smile that Lucas wasn’t