Bleed Me Beautiful
A Prelude to Hell's Broker Season 1: Echoes of Ink and Fire
The streetcar clanged through New Orleans, metal on metal echoing off stone and iron. I rode it into the Garden District with the weight of blood money sitting quiet in my account. Twenty thousand wired from a fixer in Baltimore, an agent working on behalf of a client with very particular needs. They called it a simple glamour job. But simple work doesn't command that kind of fee. And it doesn't require three separate non-disclosure glyphs signed in virgin's blood and sealed by infernal proxy.
But I'd taken worse contracts for worse reasons, and New Orleans in October felt like the right kind of wrong for whatever fresh hell awaited me.
The address led me to a mansion that looked like it had been carved from shadows and abandoned hope. Wrought iron balconies sagged under the weight of Spanish moss, and the shutters hung at angles that suggested the house itself was slowly forgetting how to stand upright. Ivy choked the brick walls in patterns that almost looked like glyphs if you squinted and had the right kind of vision.
I pressed my thumb to the ash chain at the base of my spine and felt the familiar warmth as my wards recognized the threshold magic. This place was old, layered with decades of ritual work and the kind of power that seeped into the foundations like blood into wood.
The front door opened before I could knock.
"Mademoiselle Osborn?" The man in the doorway was pale as bone china, dressed in a perfectly tailored black suit that probably cost more than most people's cars. His voice carried the faint accent of old French aristocracy filtered through centuries of Louisiana heat. "I am Thierry. Madame Renoux is expecting you."
He led me through corridors lined with mirrors of every size and era. Ornate gilt frames from the nineteenth century, art deco panels that caught the light like trapped mercury, even a few pieces that looked Egyptian, their surfaces polished obsidian that reflected more than just your face. A woman in a charcoal servant's uniform passed down the hall, eyes low, arms full of folded linens. She didn't speak, but I caught the edge of her scent; rosewater and fear.
The house breathed with old magic, the kind that had been fed regularly for generations.
We stopped outside a salon where crystal chandeliers cast fractured rainbows across walls lined floor to ceiling with antique mirrors. Each reflection showed the same room from a slightly different angle, creating an infinite regression of light and shadow that made my eyes water.
"Wait here. Madame will join you momentarily," Thierry said, then vanished with the practiced silence of someone who'd spent a lifetime being invisible.
I moved into the salon and set my tool case down carefully before studying the room. The mirrors weren't just decoration, they were anchors, focal points for scrying magic and probably a dozen other forms of divination. Someone had spent serious money and time turning this salon into a supernatural monitoring station. The question was: monitoring what?
"Forgive the theatrical entrance, chère." The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, honey-smooth with just enough rasp to suggest cigarettes and whiskey. "But first impressions matter so much in our business, don't you think?"
She materialized from behind a mirror that had been reflecting empty space a moment before. Sybille Renoux was stunning in the way that made you forget to breathe, dark hair pinned in an elaborate chignon, skin like porcelain, wearing a black dress that probably cost more than my Jeep. But there was something wrong with the way the light fell on her, as if she existed slightly out of phase with reality.
"Madame Renoux." I kept my voice professional, but my eyes tracked the subtle wrongness in her appearance. "You said you needed specialty work."
"Indeed." She moved to an ornate vanity and gestured at her reflection. In the mirror, she looked exactly as beautiful as she did in person. Too exactly. No human being was that symmetrical, that flawless. "I require a modification to my... presentation."
"What kind of modification?"
"The kind that makes the heart remember what it chose to forget." Her reflection smiled, but I caught the flicker, for just a moment, the woman in the mirror looked different. Older. Tired. Hungry. "I need to be seen as I was when the glyph still held. Before it began to unravel. Before the mirrors turned cruel."
The persuasion glyph on my forearm thrummed as I nudged it awake, heat blooming beneath fabric and flesh. Sybille’s gaze drifted to the ripple of energy without needing explanation.
"Tsk. Subtle, but wasted on me," she said, smiling. "I am not so easily swayed, chère. But since we are being honest..."
She leaned forward just enough for her eyes to catch the light wrong, a hint of something old and cold behind the glamour.
"Vampire. Ancient. Powerful. And lately, a little too alone."
Her voice was too steady. She believed she was losing her beauty, but I saw the signs of something else, a rot beneath the reflection, not age but accumulation.
"You want a glamour glyph."
"More than that. I want a reflection override—something that will show my true beauty in every mirror, every window, every surface that dares to judge me." She turned from the vanity, and for a moment I saw her as she really was: still beautiful, but with the weight of centuries in her eyes and something hungry prowling beneath her perfect skin. "I'm prepared to pay handsomely for such work."
She produced three items from a drawer: a leather pouch that clinked with the distinctive sound of old Broker coin, a crystal vial filled with blood so red it seemed to glow, and something wrapped in black velvet.
"Confederate gold pieces from my personal collection," she said, indicating the pouch. "Blood freely given by a virgin—quite difficult to source these days. And this..." She unwrapped the velvet carefully. "This was carved from the thigh bone of an imp elder who tried to break the Broker code. They erased his name, but not his marrow."
The stylus was pale and etched with pact script I barely recognized, older than anything from the Codex. It was warm in my hand, and I could feel it vibrate, as if it knew it was finally being used again.
I'd never seen anything like it, but I could feel the power radiating from it like heat from a forge. Tools like that didn't get made for simple jobs.
"This isn't just a glamour," I said. "You're talking about rewriting how reflective surfaces perceive you. That's deep magic. Dangerous magic."
"All the best kinds are, chère."
I studied her reflection again, noting the way it seemed to lag just slightly behind her movements. "What aren't you telling me?"
"Nothing that affects the work." Her smile could have cut glass. "I simply need to be beautiful again. For him. For love."
The persuasion glyph hadn't worked on her, which meant she was powerful enough to resist my influence. That wasn't particularly comforting.
But the payment was real, and I needed the money. More than that, I needed the challenge. I'd been inking simple enhancement glyphs and basic contract work for months. My skills were getting rusty from lack of proper use.
"Fine," I said. "But we do this my way. My circle, my timing, my rules. And if anything feels wrong during the ritual, I stop. No questions, no arguments."
"Naturellement." She gestured to the center of the salon. "Shall we begin?"
I spent the next hour preparing the ritual space. Rose salt mixed with obsidian dust formed the binding circle, while I lit candles made from virgin beeswax at the cardinal points. The bone stylus felt strange in my hand—heavier than it should have been, and warm to the touch like living flesh.
The ink I'd brought was my own blend: glamour essence from a defanged imp mixed with silver nitrate and my own blood. It would bind the glyph to both the subject's flesh and their spiritual reflection, creating a bridge between physical and metaphysical reality.
"Remove your dress and lie face down," I instructed. "The glyph goes at the base of the neck, where vanity meets memory."
Sybille complied without modesty, revealing skin so perfect it looked like it had been carved from moonlight. But as I prepared to begin the work, I noticed something that made my blood run cold.
Every mirror in the room was watching.
Not reflecting—watching. The angles were wrong, showing perspectives that shouldn't have been possible. And in some of them, I caught glimpses of other figures: shadows that moved independently, faces that appeared and vanished when I wasn't looking directly at them.
"Madame," I said carefully, "how long have you lived in this house?"
"Since before the Civil War, chère. It was built for me by a man who understood the value of proper... accommodations."
The stylus trembled in my hand as I lowered it toward her neck, humming with an eagerness that made my teeth ache. The glyph design was already forming in my mind: a fractured crescent orbiting a stylized eye, lines of power that would rewrite the fundamental relationship between subject and reflection. But as the point touched her skin, the mirrors around us began to hum.
It started low, almost below hearing, but grew stronger as I worked. The ink flowed like liquid starlight, carving channels of power through her supernatural flesh. The glyph took shape slowly, each line a negotiation between my will and her inhuman nature.
Sybille began to hum as well, an old aria that seemed to make the very air vibrate. Her voice was beautiful, haunting, and completely inappropriate for a tattooing session. But the melody helped synchronize the glyph's formation, creating harmonics between the ink and her spiritual essence.
That's when I noticed Thierry standing in the doorway, watching us work. His reflection in the nearest mirror showed him clearly, but there was something wrong with his eyes. They were too wide, too bright, and he was mouthing words along with Sybille's song.
The stylus completed the final curve of the glyph just as a sound like breaking glass echoed through the room. I looked up to see a spider web of cracks spreading across the mirror closest to Thierry, dark liquid seeping from the fractures like blood from a wound.
"It is done," Sybille whispered, her voice layered with harmonics that shouldn't have been possible from a single throat.
She stood and walked to the ornate vanity, studying her reflection with the intensity of a scholar reading scripture. What I saw in the mirror made my breath catch. She was radiant, luminous, beautiful beyond any earthly standard. Her reflection showed a woman who could inspire wars and topple kingdoms with a smile.
"He'll love me again," she said, and tears of blood traced perfect lines down her cheeks. "At last, he'll see me as I truly am."
But in the peripheral mirrors, the broken one continued to bleed, and somewhere in the depths of the house, something that sounded like laughter echoed through empty halls.
I packed my tools quickly, pocketed the coin pouch and blood vial, and left specific instructions about aftercare: keep the glyph clean, avoid excessive stress, and call me if anything unusual happened.
I should have known better than to believe it would be that simple.
Two days later, my phone rang at three in the morning. Unknown number, but the area code was New Orleans.
"Mademoiselle Osborn?" Thierry's voice was strained, urgent. "Please, you must return. Something has gone wrong."
"What kind of wrong?"
"The mirrors," he whispered. "They're showing things that aren't there. And Madame... Madame is not herself."
I caught the next flight south.
The house looked different in daylight—smaller somehow, as if it had pulled its shadows closer. Most of the windows were covered with black cloth, and the few that remained uncovered reflected nothing at all, their surfaces dark and empty as dead eyes.
Thierry met me at the door, and I immediately saw what he meant. His reflection in the hallway mirrors was off by several seconds, showing him moving and speaking before he actually did either. When he raised his hand to knock on Sybille's door, his reflection knocked first.
"When did this start?" I asked.
"The morning after you left. First it was just the mirror in the salon, the one that cracked. Then it spread to the others." He led me deeper into the house, past mirrors that showed empty rooms where we should have been standing. "And Madame... she speaks with voices that are not her own."
We found Sybille in the salon, standing perfectly still before the cracked mirror. She was even more radiant than before, but the beauty had an artificial quality now, like a photograph touched up beyond recognition. When she turned to greet us, I saw that her movements were slightly out of sync with her reflection, or perhaps her reflection was out of sync with her.
Her movements were smooth, too smooth. Like someone reading a script from behind her eyes.
"Larissa, chère," she said, but the voice that emerged was layered with harmonics that definitely weren't coming from a single throat. "How good of you to return. I was just admiring your work."
I studied the glyph at the base of her neck. It should have been a simple crescent-and-eye design, but now it pulsed with its own internal light, and the lines had grown more complex, extending in fractal patterns across her shoulders and down her spine.
"The glyph is evolving," I said. "That's not supposed to happen."
"Evolution is such an ugly word," Sybille replied, but her reflection spoke a moment before her lips moved. "I prefer to think of it as... awakening."
I pulled a sample vial from my kit and touched it to the glyph's edge. The ink that came away wasn't the silver-and-crimson blend I'd used. It was darker, shot through with veins of something that pulsed like it remembered being alive."
"Where's your maid?" I asked.
"Marie-Claire? Oh, she left us. Quite suddenly. Something about being unable to look at herself anymore." Sybille's laugh was like breaking crystal. "People can be so vain, don't you think?"
Thierry caught my eye and shook his head slightly. Whatever had happened to Marie-Claire, she hadn't left voluntarily.
I tested the ink sample with a spirit-detection charm and nearly dropped the vial. The reading was off the charts. Not just supernatural energy, but something specifically designed to feed on self-perception and vanity. The glyph wasn't just overriding Sybille's reflection anymore. It was consuming the concept of reflection itself, growing stronger with each mirror it touched.
"I need to examine the rest of the house," I said. "Alone."
"Of course, chère. Thierry will show you whatever you need to see." Sybille turned back to the mirror, and I noticed that her reflection was now moving independently, brushing its hair while she stood perfectly still. "I'll just be here, admiring the view."
Thierry led me through corridors I hadn't seen during my first visit, down a spiral staircase that descended into the house's foundation. The basement was a maze of storage rooms and wine cellars, but at its heart was something I hadn't expected: a ritual chamber carved from black stone, its walls lined with mirrors that reflected absolutely nothing.
"This is where it was bound," Thierry said, his voice barely above a whisper. "The thing that lived in the mirrors before Madame Renoux came to this house. The previous owner was a Broker who tried to traffic in reflection-spirits. A ritual went wrong, and the entity was trapped in the mirror chamber."
I studied the empty mirrors, noting the elaborate containment glyphs carved into their frames. Most were still intact, but several showed signs of recent damage. These weren’t physical breaks, but spiritual fractures where the binding magic had been overwhelmed.
“She lied,” I said bitterly. “She told me the house was built for her. She didn’t mention the Broker or his dealings. Things always go wrong when people lie to me.”
"The Wither Reflection," Thierry said. "It feeds on vanity. On the space between how we see ourselves and how we truly are. For over a century, it has been dormant, contained. But your glyph gave it a doorway back into the world."
A sound echoed through the chamber. Footsteps on stone. Too light, too fast. We turned to see Sybille descending the stairs. Her movements were wrong, loose and unnatural, as if she was being pulled by invisible strings. Her beauty had turned brittle, glasslike. Her eyes reflected light that didn’t exist.
"Found my little secret, have you?" she said. But the voice that followed came from the mirrors around us, not from her throat. "Such clever children. The Broker and his faithful servant. Though I suspect faithful isn't quite the right word, is it, Thierry?"
Thierry flinched but stood his ground. "I was never a Broker," he said quietly. "Just a servant. A steward of the house. I stayed because someone had to watch the seals."
Sybille's gaze narrowed, and her lips parted with effort. When she spoke, her voice was ragged, stripped of the entity’s echo. "You mean you stayed to watch me," she said, each word trembling like it had to be torn free from something choking her from the inside.
"I stayed because I knew what had been done to you," Thierry said. "And I didn’t know how to undo it."
Sybille blinked, slow and uncertain. Her hands twitched at her sides.
I stepped forward. “Tell her the whole truth,” I said. My voice came out flatter than I expected. “You owe her that much.”
"You were never just a vampire," Thierry continued. His voice cracked. "The Broker who owned this house before you came here tried to bind a reflection-spirit. One too powerful, too cunning. When the ritual failed, he found another way. He offered you a gift—a way to see beauty in your reflection, not the monster most vampires see. You accepted, not knowing the cost. He anchored the spirit to you. It used your vanity as a lens and your image as its veil. You became its cage, and it fed on what you wanted to believe was still yours."
A tear of blood slid down Sybille’s cheek. Her lips trembled, but her voice remained distant and doubled, as if the mirrors were still speaking through her.
"You tricked me," she said softly. "All of you."
The revelation dropped into the silence like a stone. She hadn’t just lied to me. She had been lied to herself.
"The glyph I carved," I said. "It didn’t just change her reflection. It fractured the containment."
"And now," said the Wither Reflection, rising through her voice again, "I am free to feed again. Do you know what it's like to starve for a century, little witch? To watch beautiful things through glass and never taste them?"
The mirrors began to pulse with cold fire. Shapes stirred in their depths. Faces that weren’t ours. Eyes filled with longing and hatred.
Sybille stepped in close to Thierry, close enough that the silk of her dress whispered against his jacket. The entity kept talking, its voice curling through the mirrors, too smooth, too smug. But her body was shaking. Not from fear, from something deeper. Contained. Fighting.
Then her fingers brushed his sleeve. Not a tremble. A drag of knuckles, like someone drowning reaching for air. A silent plea carved into motion.
"She’s letting you do this," I said. It hit low, gut-level. Not logic. Instinct.
The entity scoffed, but Sybille’s hand tightened in the fabric of Thierry’s coat.
"She wants to be free," he whispered, and this time, his voice broke.
"I can fix this," I said, reaching into my kit and drawing the bone stylus. "I can carve a severance glyph. It will break the link between her and the spirit."
"You could try," the entity replied. Its smile moved across Sybille’s face like a shadow. "But you would have to destroy the glyph that is keeping me stable. And destroying that much active magic comes at a cost. Let's just say the result would be spectacular."
I ignored the voice and pulled a vial of ink from my kit. The glass was etched with warding glyphs, warm to the touch despite the chill in the air. Inside swirled a thick, copper-black essence—harvested from a Kharzhan whisper-demon I had bled beneath the obsidian arches of Avar Krul. It had taken three days, two near-deaths, and a pact I still hadn’t broken. The thing had tried to convince me to spare it right up until the final cut, murmuring truths I didn’t want to hear.
I popped the wax seal and dipped the tip of the stylus into the ink. It hissed faintly, reacting to the air, or maybe to me. The scent hit like hot metal and burnt sugar. My skin prickled as the essence recognized my blood, remembered our fight.
Then I carved the glyph into my palm, careful and steady. Not too deep. Just enough to open the channel. The lines pulsed as the ink soaked in, crawling under the skin like it had a purpose of its own.
The mark wasn’t something I had invented. It was older than anything I’d taught myself, something I’d seen once, etched into a skull altar in the bone sanctums beneath Pandemonium. A severance glyph. Not made to destroy.
Made to choose.
"The glyph I carved into her days ago is bound to her nervous system," I said as blood welled around the ink in my palm. "But the entity is tethered to that glyph. If we open a channel strong enough, it will follow the transfer and anchor to something new."
I gripped the stylus, the bone warm and humming in my fingers. The design in my palm pulsed, already pulling at the threads of spirit bound inside her.
Thierry was already beside her, his hand resting on her back. They were close enough that no movement was needed, just intention.
The entity stirred in Sybille's throat. Her lips parted, but what came out wasn't hers.
"Stop them," it snarled, voice fractured through the mirror behind her.
Sybille flinched. Her body convulsed once, but she didn’t move away. Her fingers tightened around Thierry’s sleeve, knuckles white with effort.
"She’s fighting it," I said.
Thierry met my eyes. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. He took the stylus from my hand and drew a single clean cut through the glyph at the base of her neck.
The mark in my palm ignited.
A blast of heat surged through the room. The mirrors screamed as their surfaces cracked, silver veins rupturing under the strain. The entity tore free from Sybille’s body, not into Thierry as I had feared, but straight into the hungry glyph carved into my palm.
I felt it all. Its starvation. Its bitterness. Its hatred of all things seen clearly.
I turned without hesitation and pressed my hand to the broken mirror nearest me. The command word fell from my lips like hot metal. The one I had learned beneath the bone sanctums of Pandemonium. The one that ends.
The mirror lit with silver fire and exploded.
When I could see again, Sybille was on the floor in Thierry’s arms. Her beauty had lost its impossible edge. Her face was pale, her eyes hollow and wet. But they were hers.
"Is it over?" she whispered.
I looked at my palm, at the glyph burned into my skin like a brand no ink could ever hide.
"It's over," I said.
Thierry helped Sybille to her feet, and they walked together toward the stairs. As they climbed, I heard him whisper something about starting over, about finding beauty in truth rather than illusion.
I stayed behind long enough to ensure that every mirror in the chamber was indeed broken. I retrieved my new bone stylus from the floor where Thierry had dropped it, carefully wiped it clean and wrapped it in silk. I tucked it back into its case with my other tools.
I climbed back to the main house. The salon was dark now, its mirrors reduced to empty frames and scattered glass. The magic that had permeated the building was gone, leaving behind just an old house with too many rooms and not enough light.
An hour later, I was sitting in a streetcar, watching my reflection in the metal window as we rolled through the Garden District. For just a moment, my reflection flickered, not into someone else, but into someone I might have been. Someone who'd made different choices, carved different glyphs, paid different prices.
I touched the fresh glyph carved into my palm. The ink had already begun to fade, and in a few days it would vanish completely, leaving only a thin scar to remember it by. But the echo remained. The whisper of something vast and hungry that had pressed against my mind for just an instant. The entity was gone, but the memory of its feeding lingered. I still knew what it felt like to starve for beauty so deeply that you would consume anything that dared to reflect it.
"Next time," I muttered to my reflection, "no mirrors."
But even as I said it, I knew there would be a next time. There was always a next time. Beauty and vanity were constants, and there would always be someone willing to pay any price to see themselves as they wished to be rather than as they were.
The streetcar clanged through the gathering dusk, carrying me away from the Garden District and back toward the airport. Behind me, in the windows of the houses we passed, mirrors reflected the ordinary world in all its flawed, honest, beautifully imperfect glory.
And for once, that was enough.