Perfect Reflection excerpt from Darker Than Black, Tales of Horror.

Perfect Reflection

Darker Than Black, Tales of Horror

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Despondent, she sat in front of her mirror one night and cried her eyes out while begging the mirror to talk to her once more. Again, the mirror stayed silent. She fell asleep in front of it and soon found herself in a strange new world where she felt beautiful, wanted, and above all, loved. It was possibly the best dream she’d ever had. But it was short lived.

She woke from the dream when her mother banged on her bedroom door, yelling at her to get ready for school. She lifted her dizzy head from the floor, told her mom she would get right on it and then looked in the mirror.

Her hair was messed up and her makeup smeared from weeping. She was horrified at what she had become. She thought she was the ugliest girl alive, triggering tears to run down her face once again.

She cursed at the mirror for abandoning her, but received no satisfaction from her outburst. She needed an outlet for her frustrations, but had none, so she balled up her fist as tight as she could and punched the mirror, shattering it.

Still sullen, she slammed her fist into the pieces of broken mirror over and over again until the flesh of her knuckles was shredded. By that time, most of the mirror lay on the floor in shards.

As the pain from her wounds finally broke through her intense anger and registered in her brain, she grabbed her throbbing hand and started sobbing. Blood poured from the multitude of cuts and dripped onto the shattered pieces of mirror, empowering them with the unsought magic of her rage.

Slowly the shards of mirror came to life. As she moaned in pain, they screamed at her in a thousand contradicting voices before gathering to speak in one voice. “Broken mirror, shards and all. Anna, now, must kill them all!”

“I cannot kill,” she bawled, not believing what she was hearing.

“Broken mirror, shards and all. Anna, now, must kill them all!” the mirror wailed at her.

Anna put her hands over her ears to block the unholy voice that was encoding her with violent commands more powerful than any force she’d ever felt. A pacifist at heart, violence was against the very grain of her soul, but the vulgar voice and its diabolical demands tore through her soul, as if replenishing the blood that poured from her hands with a new, hateful indulgence.