Ill Met by Moonlight
(alternate ending)

"Sophia."

She'd come off stage with spotlights and the premonition of death blurring her vision, and put her hand into the first one that was offered, allowing someone to help her down. Now her name was spoken in a voice that was at once familiar and utterly strange. Sophia blinked away the shimmering remains of her gift of magic and looked up, eyebrows drawn down in a deep enough line to mar her skin.

The man holding her hand was gaunt, ancient, white-haired and hawk-visaged, but his eyes were clear and dark and unmistakably those of a man she'd known six decades earlier. "Jeremy?" She barely breathed the name, staring wide-eyed up at the old man before shooting a disbelieving glance over her shoulder, where his grandson played to an adoring throng. "Alan said you never came here!"

"He called me." Age had added a rougher edge to Jeremy Claussens's once-smooth director's voice, but the sonorous tones were still his to command. "He told me you were here. I could not...believe it. After so long, Sophia. After so long. You haven't changed at all." The briefest smile quirked his mouth, and he allowed, "Except your fashion sense, it seems."

Sophie wet her lips and looked back at Alan once more before tilting her head toward the nearest door. "It's quieter out there."

* * *

The comparative silence of the mansion patio was broken by Jeremy's immediate comment. "I saw you disappear into the mirror. "I never understood. I was angry. Frightened," he admitted.

"And then you met Lorena Quinn." Sophia walked to the patio railing, placing her fingertips on it and lifting her chin, utterly forgetting for a moment that she'd foregone her sweeping gown in favor of modern clothing. Then she relaxed the overbearing pose with a quick laugh. "An old-fashioned woman who soothed the confusion of my disappearance."

Jeremy came forward to meet her, leaning a hip against the railing and folding his arms across his chest as if he were a much younger man. "How do you know about Lorena? She insisted we leave this place. She wanted me to destroy the mirror. She said she thought it was bad luck."

Sophia shivered. "Alan mentioned her. Why didn't you destroy it?"

Jeremy hesitated, then spread the fingers of one hand, long fluid movement. "I convinced myself I'd drunk too much, too early. It was the only explanation I could find for your disappearance. But as hard as I tried to forget, the memory of you...stepping through it...seemed so vivid. Destroying it...felt like doing murder."

"It would have been." Sophia wrapped her arms around herself, shivering again. The moonlight made blue-edged shadows of herself and Jeremy against the railing, and she tilted her chin up, looking toward the half-disc as it slid toward the horizon. "I was inside the mirror. You were so angry--shouting. I thought you'd cast a spell to keep me inside it because--"

"Because you refused me?" Jeremy smiled, hatchet-sharp in the moonlight. "How very dramatic, Sophia."

Sophie put her fingertips back on the railing and smiled a little. "It is," she confessed, "a failing of mine."

Jeremy, dryly, said, "It always was. You would have outgrown it," he added. "You had the makings of a star."

"And Lorena became one instead," Sophia said quietly. There was no bitterness in her voice, to her own surprise. Jeremy dropped his chin in a nod.

"She became my leading lady. She...came from the mirror, didn't she? She would never talk about her past. I indulged her," he said. "It was so very movie star of her."

"She came from the mirror," Sophia agreed. "By trapping me there instead. And now I'm caught, with no way out unless I catch someone else there."

"The guitarist is a pretty girl," Jeremy said with utter neutrality. Sophia thought of the shocked, high laugh she should give, and shrugged it off instead.

"I decided I wasn't that much of the big B."

Starlight cascaded through her, the strength of a thousand suns buoying her up with an irrevocable sense of rightness. The chorus Alan had written for her sang through her veins, making her feel as though his lyrics might carry her to millions. She tightened her fingers around the railing, tethering herself before she turned to look back into the ballroom.

No chasm of choices lay before Alan any longer, no desperate struggle for recognition on one side wrestling for dominance against a world where his music and his band made him the world's most popular rock star. There was only one clear path lying before him now, a road of glory and life well-lived. Quick snatches of a future even further down the road showed Sophia that Terry walked hand in hand with Alan on that path, the two of them each other's anchor in a slightly mad life.

Sophia laughed, soft sound, and turned her gaze back out over the city. "Besides," she said lightly, "I like Alan, and he needs Teresa, not me. They're going to be somebodies."

"You sound sure of that." Jeremy's voice was curious. Sophia gave him a quick smile, no longer caring whether it delved lines into her cheeks.

"Being stuck in a mirror has some benefits," she said. "Sometimes I can see very clearly."

"And you're still young," Jeremy murmured. "And beautiful."

Sophia put her hand against her cheek, then reached up to put it against Jeremy's instead. "But think of all the things I've missed. No children, no grandchildren." Her eyebrows rose. "No career. All the things that really make for immortality are things I haven't got." She glanced up at the moon again, then smiled. "Will you walk me up to the roof? The mirror's up there."

Jeremy inclined his head, but looked toward the ballroom. "Don't you want to say goodbye?"

Sophia pursed her lips, then shook her head. "Alan wouldn't understand."

"As you will." Jeremy offered his arm, and together they left the party to find Sophia's mirror.

* * *

She barely recognized her own reflection, hair back in a ponytail and makeup subtle in the manner of the day's youth. Tendrils of curls stuck around her forehead as she and Jeremy lifted the mirror, letting moonlight barely reflect off it. "I'll disappear inside once the moon's not shining on it," Sophia said. "Would you ask them to put it somewhere that I'll be able to talk to people on moonlit nights, at least?"

"I'll make sure of it," Jeremy promised. Sophia smiled, then nodded at the mirror.

"Tilt it forward, then."

He did, and Sophia caught her breath, waiting for the familiar plainscape, all grays and gloom, inside the mirror.

Nothing changed. She and Jeremy exchanged startled glances and Sophia glanced at the roof, half expecting to see moonlight reflecting back at the mirror, preventing her from entering it. There was nothing, and slow astonishment turned into a laugh. "It doesn't want me anymore."

Relief and delight leaped into Jeremy's expression. "Then you'll stay."

Thunderbolts cracked through her vision of Alan's future, darkening it with rain and danger, and Sophia shook her head. "No. Fickle thing," she murmured to the mirror. "You only want the very vain and very beautiful, don't you? The entirely self-centered." She shook her head again, touching the frame with its spell written into the sworls. "Which means you can't hold me unless I want you to. But if I stay here, it'll hurt Alan's career, and I won't do that."

Smiling, she stepped back and stood on her toes to kiss Jeremy's cheek. "Tilt it to the moonlight," she said. "I'll see you someday again, Jeremy."

Even after sixty years, the words came easily, chanted out to the moon and the mirror. Faint red fire flared in the frame's crevasses, and a path shimmered, drawing Sophia Robinson in.

* * *

I'm the thing you think is watching you in the mirror.

I can see you all the time. When you brush your hair, when you change your clothes, when you climb into bed with a lover.

When moonlight falls on the mirror, I can whisper secrets from the future into your ear.

And someday, when the time is right, I'll step through and rejoin the world again for...

...ever.