The broken, starving thing beneath the monster. An image of utter desolation and vulnerability that seared itself into my?—
A force that seemed to blast out from the mirror itself jerked me three full inches off the floor and flung me backward across the room as an enraged roar exploded in my brain, loud enough to make my ears bleed. The bed caught me in the back of the thighs, and I flipped straight over it, smashing into the wall and crumbling into a heap on the floor, a discarded doll.
But I wasn’t a fucking doll.
Not anymore.
“I saw you!” I seethed as I lurched to my feet, scrambling back up on the bed again as I glared at the mirror across the room. I didn’t know what I expected to see staring back at me. The unholy nightmare trapped behind my eyeballs had been more shadow than form, and if it leaped out of the mirror at me right then I’d probably die on the spot.
I didn’t care, though. In this particular moment, I didn’t care about anything other than that I had won—won! I’d lured the creature out because it wanted me, needed me, and at the very last second, I’d looked up and I hadseenit.
And seeing these fuckers was the first step to booting them straight back to hell.
I stared at the mirror for another long moment, the pain of my impromptu body slam against the bedroom wall beginning to break through my euphoria. But nothing flickered in the mirror, nothing murmured in the back of my brain.
My demon, for the moment, had nothing to say.
But I could still feel him. Coiled tight in the deepest part of me. Not angry anymore.
Hiding.
And for the first time ever…I wondered if he was afraid ofme.
The thought should have felt like victory.
It didn’t.
Moving slowly, never taking my eyes off the mirror, I gathered up my clothes and backed toward the hallway.
Thirty seconds later, I closed the door to my mother’s room behind me and sagged against it. Then, fatigue and pain finally catching up to me, I stumbled back to my own bed.
Chapter
Twenty
Steve left on Saturday morning, three days after the Descent attack.
He’d mumbled something about his folks needing him, but he still wouldn’t meet my eyes when he took his keys. His car had bloodstains in the backseat we both pretended not to see.
Either way, I let him go. We didn’t need to see each other, I supposed, not anytime soon. Maybe never again. Some shared experiences were hard to come back from, and this certainly qualified.
I texted him a couple times over the weekend—explaining where I’d taken his car earlier in the week, how I’d tried to help the Grahams. Asking if he was okay.
He never responded.
Sunday, I slept until 2 p.m. When I woke up, my body felt like it had been beaten with hammers—delayed reaction from being thrown across Mom’s bedroom, probably, or the cumulative toll of the past week catching up. I shuffled downstairs, made coffee, and found myself standing in the kitchen staring at the spot where the knives had been lined up.
The demon inside me remained silent. Completely, eerily silent.
Again, I should have felt relieved. Instead, I felt hollow. Like I’d found myself but lost something I didn’t know I needed.
I hadn’t been back to my mother’s room since that night. Hadn’t looked in a mirror, either. Couldn’t bring myself to.
Sunday afternoon, I texted Max. He responded quickly—thrilled a new rabbi knew about the problem, even more thrilled that Wednesday night had been completely quiet. No ghost horses, no screaming. Everything settled.
I didn’t tell him about the Sharpie attack or Steve. What was the point?
On Monday, I couldn’t stand the silence anymore. I needed to do something, learn something,besomething other than stuck in an empty apartment haunted by a quiet demon.
