Alle Kapitel von The Figure in The Mirror: Kapitel 1 – Kapitel 9

The first thing I felt was the cold.It seeped through my clothes and into my bones, an unfamiliar kind of cold that made me wonder if I had been lying there for hours. Days, perhaps. My body felt heavy, my limbs reluctant to obey me, and there was a dull ache behind my eyes that sharpened the moment I tried to remember how I had gotten there.I opened my eyes.Darkness stared back.For a moment, I did nothing. I listened.Water dripped somewhere in the distance. Wind slipped through a narrow opening above me, carrying the faint smell of rain and something metallic.Blood.I sat up too quickly.Pain split through my skull, and I pressed a hand to my forehead, squeezing my eyes shut until the room stopped spinning.Where am I?The question came easily enough.The answer did not.I looked around. Stone walls. A broken wooden chair. A narrow window through which a sliver of moonlight spilled onto the floor. There was no furniture besides the chair, no door that I could immediately see, a

CHAPTER THREEEvery Time I Die, He RemembersApparently, dying was not enough to make them leave me alone.I woke with my teeth clenched, my fingernails digging into my palms, and the unmistakable feeling that someone had just finished screaming inside my head.For several seconds, I couldn’t move.I knew the room before I opened my eyes.The cold stone beneath me. The narrow window. The broken chair. The metallic smell of blood.I knew all of it.And that was the problem.I rolled onto my side and retched.Nothing came out.My body was empty, but my mind was full of things that had never happened and memories that felt too real to be lies. White walls. Glass breaking in the wrong direction. Girls with my face. A man with black gloves marking something on a clipboard.Another failed iteration.I pressed both hands over my mouth.“No more,” I whispered.The room offered no answer.I forced myself upright, half expecting to find another dead girl waiting at the bottom of the stairs.Ins

CHAPTER FIVEThe Thing Beneath the MirrorThe laughter came from beneath the floor.Not from the passage. Not from the room behind me.Beneath us.It was a woman’s laughter, soft and breathless, the kind that belonged to someone hearing a private joke. There was something terribly familiar about it, though I couldn’t have explained why.The hooded man heard it too.His expression changed.“Whatever you do,” he said, “don’t answer her.”I tightened my fingers around the dagger. “Answer who?”The laughter stopped.A voice rose through the stone beneath my feet.“Adrian?”The name struck me like a hand closing around my throat.Adrian.I knew that name.I knew the shape of it in my mouth, the way it felt against my tongue, the way my heart seemed to recognize it before my mind could.The man in front of me went deathly still.Then the voice beneath the floor spoke again.“Adrian, darling. You promised you wouldn’t leave me down here.”I looked at him.“Who is she?”“Don’t listen.”“You k

CHAPTER SEVENThe Woman Who Wore My Face“Welcome back, Doctor Vale.”The words continued to echo in my head long after the machine went silent.Doctor.Vale.Me.I stared at my hands, waiting for them to become someone else’s. Waiting for the blood I remembered to appear beneath my fingernails. Waiting for the woman I had been before I woke in that stone room to crawl out of my skin and explain what kind of monster I had become.Nothing happened.My hands remained clean.That somehow made everything worse.“Don’t touch me.”Adrian had been reaching for my shoulder. He stopped immediately, his fingers hovering between us before he slowly lowered his hand.“Elena—”“I told you not to call me that.”Pain crossed his face.“Your name is Elena.”“No.” I swallowed. “That was the name of the woman who built a machine to bring the dead back to life. The woman who chose you over Silas. The woman who apparently decided that death was a problem she could solve by making everyone suffer forever.

CHAPTER NINEThe Child Who Remembered Me“Mummy?”The voice came from somewhere behind me.Small. Fragile. Familiar in a way that made my chest ache before my mind could explain why.I turned so quickly that the photograph slipped from my fingers and landed face down on the floor.Nobody stood in the doorway.Nobody stood behind the woman in black.Yet I could still hear it.Mummy.My throat tightened. I pressed a hand against my mouth, fighting the sudden, ridiculous urge to cry.“Who said that?”Neither Adrian nor the woman answered.I looked at them again. The woman had gone pale, her eyes fixed on Adrian with an expression that looked dangerously close to hatred. Adrian, meanwhile, had moved between us. He wasn’t looking at me anymore.He was staring at the empty doorway.“Get out,” he told the woman.She laughed once, without humour.“You still think you can give orders and make the past disappear?”“Not now.”“When would be convenient, Adrian? After you’ve made her forget anothe