I was watching Season One of Young Dracula earlier, and my gods they were such babies! I can't believe how tiny Vlad used to be!

-YD-

His skin prickled with something as Ingrid came in, but Vlad couldn't really be sure it wasn't that with nothing but dust in the air to compete, Ingrid's scent was more potent in the small, closed off room. Even so, he felt unsettled by something. Ingrid was wary, he could see in her face, standing to the side and staring up at the Mirror's frame. She circled the back of it first, as though checking Vlad hadn't hidden anything there.

"What's wrong?"

"I don't know. It feels... incomplete. I can't explain why."

Frowning, Vlad shrugged.

"It's definitely our Blood Mirror."

Ingrid straightened up, moving around to the front of the glass at last and eyeing herself with trepidation in the reflection.

"Huh. I guess I expected to see... something different."

"Like what? Bat wings and bigger teeth?"

"I don't know! Just something."

She hummed, eyes roving the entire thing as she took a step closer.

"So, why is it I can't use this one again?"

"Blood Mirrors are bound to their clan. It contains and cultivates our vampire energy, gives an anchor to it. It's why half-fangs are never as powerful as born biters. These things can support a clan of two hundred as easily as a clan of twenty, and nobody fully understands why. But this Mirror will only work with Dracula blood... it can recognise a half-fang turned by a Dracula too, but we're not really meant to use it for that because half-fangs are like second class citizens and don't deserve a Blood Mirror. That's politics."

He waved a dismissive hand - vampire politics were so boring - and Ingrid didn't pick at it. Instead she turned back to the Mirror, edging closer and taking it all in. Vlad frowned, almost certain he'd seen something move in the corner of his eye but the guardians wouldn't move except for a Dracula, or to protect the Mirror. Ingrid wasn't threatening, so they had no need to-

"Whoa!"

Ingrid raised a hand to touch the glass, the surface rippling like disturbed water at her fingertips. She backed up immediately, turning to Vlad for an explanation.

"What the hell was that?"

"I... I don't know. That's never happened before."

He cocked his head, thinking, watching. The Mirror settled as soon as she moved away, not even a finger smudge on the glass let alone the ripples. Vlad hesitated to step closer, seeing the guardian statues blink for certain that time. Watching him. The whispering, the not-quite-there noises crawled over his neck like invisible spiders, snaking around him and Vlad felt his legs twitch, feet urged forward...

He yanked himself away with violent backsteps, shaking his head and the statues stilled at last. Ingrid looked at him oddly.

"What are you doing?"

"The Mirror is basically sentient, and I don't really trust it. Lets get out of here, I'll look for some books on Blood Mirrors and see if there is any sense to be made."

Because Vlad really wanted to know what was going on. The Mirror shouldn't have even noticed Ingrid, let alone rippled at her touch. It should have behaved like any other mirror. Reluctantly, with furtive glances back at it, Ingrid followed him out. Both jumped as the doors slammed behind them, Ingrid raising an eyebrow. Vlad shrugged.

"Vampires."

Even so, he was feeling unsettled. He made a beeline straight for the bookshelves, coughing on dust as he dug out the older tomes, written when the Blood Mirrors were first mastered, when someone first learned how to anchor the previously wild, untamed brutality of vampire powers. His own father was young by vampiric standards at six hundred, but his father Count Drakos had been almost two thousand when he was staked. So a lot of the heirloom books - mostly given to the heir, his dad - went back so very long ago. They were also largely huge, written by vampires who underestimated how much there would be when they started, and ended up with mammoth blocks of knowledge that barely fit into their bindings. Some had been rebound, some had faded lettering and more still had questionable stains on the spines.

Hefting out the biggest and oldest, dust and dirt smudged down his front from how he had to hold it, Vlad dropped it on the table with an audible thunk! before flipping open the cover, flicking past the four pages of acknowledgements and the one page of death threats at the start, finding the chapter list of contents.

"What are you looking for?"

"Blood Mirrors haven't changed in the last twenty five hundred years. These books are as accurate now as they were then. The only thing thats changed is the opulent framing and using more glass than silver, since vampires can't handle silver easily... but the magic, the essence that created them in the first place? Those haven't changed. Even the guardian statues were commonplace at one time, but now you only get them if your clan has massacred enough other vampires that your Mirror needs guarding."

"Well, that tells me plenty about your dad."

Vlad snorted. The chapter he was looking for - What To Do When Your Mirror Is Acting Up - was toward the end, and rather than flip through every single page Vlad turned the book back-to-front, and went from the end backwards to find what he was looking for. The pages were heavy themselves, made of older materials that had to have every word, every letter almost painstakingly carved into it.

Finally, he found what he was looking for, scouring the pages and squinting - language had changed dramatically and Vlad's grasp of the old dialect was scant at best. They really needed translating. Several reams of treated leather told only of the burns and reactions associated with touching the old silver inpainted wooden frames, replaced now with lacquers containing human blood to negate the effects and give them a truly dark feel. A few more were comments on "if it doesn't work, it's not your kid" and how best to deal with an adulterous wife.

When he finally found what he was looking for, Vlad felt sick.

"Oh."

"What?"

Ingrid couldn't read a word of it, he knew, though she leant over anyway. Glancing around, Vlad located the nearest painted portrait.

"We need to see your mother."

-YD-

Uh-ohhhh