Chimera

04|Four

Venette was right—he was pretty.

Hemlock stared at himself in the mirror, unblinking, and almost felt a sense of horror that the person looking back at him followed his every twitch. The golden, sun-blonde hair was familiar, though the loose curls that normally fell to his hips in a tangled mess were now washed, combed, and tamed into an intricate updo containing braids and artfully sectioned out locks. It spilled over his shoulders and down his back and caught the flicker of a nearby hearth. His skin, too, was familiar in a sense, coated in freckles and sunspots and naturally tanned as if declaring itself a favorite of the solar rays—except it was all too clean, and those freckles scurried up to a face he couldn't look away from.

It was a stranger, surely, looking back at him. The man's wide-eyed gaze bore into him with shimmering green irises that had a mirrored slice of brown within them, almost like a cut of pie. He had a gentle face, but strong brows, and faint crow's feet around the corners of those eyes like he spent a long time grinning ear-to-ear. The sun had laid its claim around the man's nose and cheeks, smattering darkened spots wherever it could reach, including the downturned curve of his pointed ears. This was no vampire that stood before him; he was a child of the sun, who belonged far away from the dungeon of a mansion. And yet the man stared back at him, fear trembling in those mismatched eyes, and tilted his head when Hemlock did so.

Hemlock opened his mouth, and the stranger mirrored him. The sharp points of fangs sat where canines ought to be. Tucked away, and yet they still betrayed their existence. He watched as the man poked at them with his tongue before he stopped and turned away.

Venette grinned up at him through the mirror. "Never seen yourself before, eh?"

"No," Hemlock murmured, still unsure if the reflection truly was his. Had he really gone this whole time without walking past a mirror? How had he gone this entire time without realizing he never knew what he looked like? Obviously, he had at some point, but ever since that fateful bite that dragged him into the depths, he couldn't remember a thing of his past. It made sense, logically, for his memory of his reflection to go along with it, but it felt uncanny to stare at himself and not recognize himself.

Mora drifted around the room behind him, and he caught glimpses of her in the mirror as she gathered whatever she needed to get him ready. "It's always odd, to see yourself for the first time. Hell, I was in denial that Venette and I were twins for ages before I finally got used to it. I can't imagine not having a living reflection of your own to see every day."

Hemlock didn't know how to respond, so he didn't. Venette fluffed about and sat him down, still in front of the damned mirror, and he watched them move about behind him. They looked like proper vampires. Skin bleached from the darkness, almost translucent to the point of seeing the red and blue of their blood and veins, they held no evidence of a life out in the sun. Their sleek black hair had always been cut to just graze their shoulders, and their features were all sharp bones and triangles. Long and pointed ears that flared out at the end, forked tongues, and magically altered bright red eyes—Venette and Mora were every part vampire that he wasn't, except he had the height where they didn't.

As he silently gazed at his reflection, Hemlock wondered if he'd ever get used to it. Not just the discomfort of his unfamiliar self, but the not knowing. The empty space in his mind where his past should've been. His fucking name, even. Who had he been, before he had been made into Hemlock?

He didn't get time to dwell, though. With his hair done, Mora knocked his knees out of the way so she could stand over him and dust a bit of makeup over his face. "Not a lot," she told him, "since the mask will cover it." She ran a line of black along the bottoms of his eyes then dusted it out around the corners, taking care not to stab him in the process or get any of the powder into his eyes. Then she considered her work, glanced over at something behind him, and nodded her satisfaction and gestured to Venette.