Code Red

Chapter Twenty-One: The Mirror Between Us

Darkness wasn’t empty.
It breathed. It pulsed. It remembered.

Lucian stumbled through it, bare feet slapping against a floor that wasn’t solid—something between water and glass. His reflection rippled beneath him, sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, sometimes both.

He didn’t know where he was—hell, he wasn’t even sure what he was.

A voice echoed through the dark, smooth and steady.

> “You don’t belong to either side anymore.”

He turned. The voice came from everywhere, from nowhere. The Collector.

“Get the hell out of my head,” Lucian growled, but his voice cracked—raw, young, familiar.

The darkness shifted.
And from it, she stepped forward.

Claire.

Barefoot. Pale. Eyes soft and uncertain. The same face he’d once seen in mirrors before the world had bled it out of him.

Lucian froze.

She looked at him like she was seeing a ghost. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Neither should you,” he shot back, tone sharp but faltering. “I thought you were gone.”

Claire tilted her head, that same small movement he’d never managed to unlearn. “You tried to bury me, remember?”

Lucian’s jaw tightened. “You were the one who broke.”

“No,” she said quietly, stepping closer. “You did. They just built what was left.”

Her voice wasn’t cruel—it was gentle, and that somehow hurt worse.

He turned away, fists clenching. “You think I wanted this? You think I asked to be carved up, rewritten, turned into something that can’t even die right?”

Claire’s reflection shimmered across the black water beneath them. “No. But you wanted to disappear. And you got your wish.”

Lucian’s laugh was sharp, bitter. “Yeah, well, turns out the afterlife comes with a badge and a fucking thirst problem.”

The sound of her footsteps followed him as he started walking. “Why do you hate me so much?”

He stopped. Didn’t turn around. “Because you’re everything I couldn’t keep. Everything I had to kill to survive.”

She was suddenly in front of him, faster than he could blink. “And yet here I am.”

“Yeah,” he said through gritted teeth. “Here you are. A ghost I can’t exorcise.”

“Maybe I’m not the ghost,” she said softly. “Maybe you are.”

The words hit him like a blade. He flinched, the veins in his arms glowing faint blue through the dream’s darkness.

“You were supposed to protect her,” Claire whispered. “Not become this.”

“I did protect her!” he shouted, voice shaking. “You don’t get it—I left so she’d live!”

“And look what it made you.”

“Alive!” he roared, stepping closer, eyes blazing silver. “It made me fucking alive!”

The silence afterward cracked open around them.

Claire’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Then why does it still hurt?”

Lucian’s breath hitched. He looked down, realizing the ground under his feet was no longer dark—it was rippling blood. His reflection stared back up at him, split in two. Half Lucian, half Claire.

“I can’t be both,” he muttered.

“Then stop trying to choose,” she said, eyes shimmering with tears. “You were always both.”

He shook his head, stepping back. “That’s not how this works. You can’t exist in my world.”

Claire smiled faintly, sad and knowing. “Then maybe it’s time you stopped pretending it’s your world.”

The darkness shuddered—like the dream itself was fracturing. The Collector’s voice crawled through the cracks.

> “You see now? You were never whole. I simply made the pieces fit.”

Lucian dropped to his knees, clutching his head. “Shut up. Shut the fuck up.”

> “You can’t kill what you are, Detective. You can only feed it.”

Claire knelt in front of him, hands on his face. “Don’t listen. You’re not him. You never were.”

Her touch burned—not pain, but memory. Every feeling he’d locked away surged back: Max’s laugh, the warmth of sunlight on skin he no longer had, the way love used to feel before it started bleeding.

He whispered, “What if I don’t know who I am anymore?”

Claire smiled softly. “Then start by remembering who you were.”

The light around her began to fade, her form dissolving.

“Wait—no!” He grabbed her wrist, but his hand passed through like smoke. “Don’t—”

> “Wake up,” she whispered. “She needs you.”

Lucian gasped and jolted upright.

The warehouse ceiling swam into focus above him. The poison still burned under his skin, but he was breathing again—really breathing.

And Max was there, slumped beside him, head resting against the wall, her hand still wrapped around his.

He stared at her for a long time, heart pounding like he’d just clawed his way out of a grave.

Then he whispered, almost to himself, “Guess I’m still both after all.”