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From the book Souleiado

Later that night, after Dena had fallen into a restless sleep, Miriam tiptoed into her room and paused in front of an octagonal mirror with a delicate hand-painted gold-gilt frame.  It had been a wedding gift from some old family friends.  She ran her fingers along the frame's raised edging, as if she was feeling her way back .... To him?  To these restless souls who kept knocking on her psychic door, demanding entrance?  She didn't know.  Not for sure.  But somehow she knew that this was the mirror that Jared had meant.  The shape, identical to that of the Root House, had appealed to the architect in him.  She opened the blue-and-white incolay jewelry box on

Also from the book Souleiado

        She lifted her head and looked up into his eyes.  Suddenly, something in them called to mind Aaron Daniel.  The photographer's light-brown eyes had just the same shape and expression as those blue ones she'd dreamed of in what now seemed another lifetime.  Was it a dream? she wondered, as he pulled her closer. Who are you? she asked him silently now, just as she'd once asked the stranger looking out at her from Elizabeth's antique mirror.  Just as she'd asked the man whose face she'd drawn during that night-watch at her easel not so long ago.
        You know me -- I know you, the eyes answered her hungrily.  We been knowing each other practically forever.
        She reached up, touching a finger-tip to his lower lip.  And just as he was bending to kiss her again, she saw Jared.
        He moved – perhaps floated was a better word, even though it smacked of 19th-century table-rappings and levitation -- out of the shadows and knelt down beside the child, who was playing with something back over by the desk.  He was little more than an outline, some parts -- his face, shoulders, and chest -- more distinct than others; then, as his daughter stretched out her arms to him, he began to lose that milky-whiteness she'd spoken of and take on color and depth.  His clothes were different, Dena had been right on the money about that, as Miriam saw at once: they weren't his usual flannel-shirt-and-jeans ensemble or even what he used to facetiously call his "wedding-and-funeral suit" but, rather, a seaman's heavy jacket, rough trousers, and cap, all cut in a style she'd never seen outside of an old sepia-hued photograph.  Otherwise, it was Jared , right down to his glasses.  And even those weren't his but the round wire specs of a century ago.
        Miriam gasped, jerking her face away so that Dan's kiss missed her mouth this time.  She barely noticed, so transfixed was she by the tableau before her.  For Jared had put his thin but muscular arms around Dena and was cradling her to him, crooning one of his nonsense songs to her.  And as he did so, all sorts of details, from the cleft in his chin to the ornate brass buttons on his pea-coat, became more distinct, his eyes glowing green, then blue.  Yet Miriam knew that he wasn't "stealing energy" from Dena, as Kilah would've put it; rather, the child's love was making him visible.  The artist put her hand to her throat, as if to push the tears back, but it was too late: they broke free of her fumbling attempt to keep them in check and ran down her cheeks, leaving a muddied trail of mascara and eyeliner behind them.
        She was vaguely aware of Dan again -- of his hand sliding slowly off her shoulder.  She wished she could've thought of the right words -- something warm to take the chill off the moment -- but all the right words seemed to have gotten away from her like shimmery plastic beads rolling off a necklace a child had left untied.  And, really, there was room for no one else at that moment.  For Jared stood there, his changeling's eyes glowing blue-topaz and beckoning, a stray sunbeam from the small dusty, cracked window just above the foundation bringing out the golden tints in his hair and the copper ones in Dena's.  Even the white mist that still clung to his arms and haloed his head had taken on an opaline hue, turning both father and child into stained-glass figures.  Later -- tomorrow, next week, next month -- there would be time for Dan.  But now she could only stand there, her soul remembering and hungering for this other soul it knew inside-out.

----Souleiado