When he’d discarded the pieces, he took out his phone and placed a call.
“I had a feeling I’d be hearing from you sooner rather than later,” said Colton, answering on the very first ring. “Did you learn anything?”
“Kind of. That girl you mentioned on the call—”
“Vivienne Farrow?”
“Yeah.” Thomas swallowed around a lump in his throat. “You were right. About the House of Hades, I mean. Her stepfather knows something. He didn’t say a whole lot, but I could tell. And Vivienne—well, she’s missing. I think she’s in trouble. She’s not—”
The words rattled in his head.Not human. Not human.
He didn’t say them aloud. Instead, he said, “I need help.”
“We’re more than halfway to Connecticut,” said Colton.
“You’re— Really?”
“Sure,” said Colton. “What’s the point of a fraternity if you can’t call in a favor every now and again? Text me the address; we’ll be there within the hour.”
The looking glass in the cathedral’s quiet room was not overly big. It was thin and rectangular and cracked in one corner, spiderweb fractures silvering the surface. The frame was wood, termite bitten. It still loomed large in the low-ceilinged room.
A girl stared out at her. Dark hair. Amber eyes. A pale, shadowed face. Her own, and yet it was as unrecognizable as a stranger’s.
One of the pledges had brought her clean clothes to change into. She wore someone else’s oversize T-shirt, the name of a band she’d never heard of screen-printed along the front. Someone else’s tattered jeans, the belt looped tight enough to cinch. Someone else’s sandals, one size too big.
Inside her beat something else’s heart.
Something else’s will.
This time tomorrow, she’d cut it out.
“I hate you,” she whispered. The voice that slipped out of her was spectral. Tattered. As though all that remained of the girl she’d once been was a ghost—left to haunt the empty corridors between her bones.“I hate you.”
In the glass, her reflection’s mouth began to sharpen at the corners. She bit into her cheek to try to stop its spread, digging her nails into her forearm until shallow red crescents appeared.
It wasn’t enough.
It never was.
She wanted to leave, but Jesse had given her explicit instructions to wait for him here, and so wait she did—forcing herself to stare down the sharp-toothed creature that wore her bones like an exoskeleton.
“You are not as brave as you pretend,” said the Vivienne in the glass. “You are a coward. And if you try to carve me out, you will die a coward’s death.”
Nauseous, she pulled her eyes shut. There was a pit in her stomach that wouldn’t abate. A splintering of her resolve she didn’t quite trust. She could feel it building in her belly. Wriggling up out of her like an earthworm through the mud.
“Look at us,” whispered the mirror Vivienne. “Look at us and see.”
A sour taste hit the back of her tongue and she gagged, toppling forward until she caught herself on her hands and knees. Her stomach turned itself inside out, its contents crawling up her throat—pushing against the backs of her teeth. Opening her mouth, she pried loose a wet, hot snarl of ribbon. It coiled on the floor beneath her in a sick, satin spew.
The last of it slid through her hands and she coughed, her nose packed with stink and her eyes watering. In the glass, her reflection hadn’t moved at all. She remained perfectly framed in the mirror, her eyes sepulchre black.
“I am knotted all around you,” it whispered. “I am tangled so tightly in your bones, I have become all that holds you together. I claimed you for myself, all those years ago. You were so small. So afraid. He would have broken you, but I made you whole. You keep on forgetting what I did for you. What horrible fate I saved you from enduring. You are mine, sweet girl. You will never, ever cut me free.”
“Vivienne.”
She blinked, and there was Jesse. He was standing in the open door, looking wary, a rolled bit of paper tucked under one arm. She knelt before the mirror, shoulders rounded and hands pressed to the ground, on all fours like an animal, her breath coming in great heaves.
And in the mirror—
