Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity #2)(29)
Her vision doubled and she had to close her eyes for a second to keep from losing her balance. She went to the bathroom and ran the tap, splashing handful after handful of cool water on her face and neck. She dragged her gaze to the mirror, surveying her pallid complexion, the scar that traced her jaw, the flat blue of her—
Kate froze.
There was something in her left eye. When she raised her chin, it caught the light, shining like a lens flare, the kind of thing that belonged in a photograph, not a human face. It was a trick of the light, it had to be, but no matter how she turned her head, it stayed. She leaned in, close enough to fog the mirror with her breath, close enough to see the interruption in the dark blue circle of her iris.
It looked like a silver crack. A sliver of light.
A mirror shard.
It was so small and yet the longer she stared, the more it seemed to stretch across her vision, blotting out the room and swallowing her sight. Kate squeezed her eyes shut, trying to pull her mind free, to hold herself in the here and now, but she was already falling forward into—
A memory— the window is open the fields outside waving in the breeze she sits on the floor with a pile of necklaces trying to pick apart the tangled chains while her mother hums by the window her small fingers dance over the metal links but the harder she tries the more
tangled
everything gets annoyance rises like a tide turning to anger with
each
failed
attempt
every
worsening knot
the anger spreads from the tangled chains to her mother at the window— her mother who doesn’t seem to care what a mess she made her mother who isn’t even there to make it right her mother who left her alone with monsters—
“Get out of my head,” snarled Kate, slamming a soap dish into the mirror.
It struck the glass with a splintering crash as she lurched back to her senses, to herself.
She dropped the dish and retreated a few steps, sinking onto the edge of the tub. Her hands were shaking. A cobweb crack fractured the image in the glass. She’d broken the monster’s hold.
But it was still there, inside her head.
And she remembered now, its face from the alley, seeing herself in its eyes and falling down into that dark, violent place, remembered Riley’s voice calling her name, pulling her back. But she’d left something behind, or it had, this sliver of itself, this crack in her head.
How was she supposed to get it out?
How did you hunt something that had no shape, a shadow that made puppets out of people?
How could you destroy a void?
Kate’s head spun, but as her pulse steadied and the panic and confusion cooled, her focus sharpened, the way it always did at the beginning of a hunt.
It was a monster. No matter what form it took. And monsters could always be hunted. Killed. You just had to find them first.
Kate’s head came up. They were connected, somehow, she and this thing. And connections usually went two ways. She cut a look at the mirror. From this angle she couldn’t see her reflection, couldn’t see anything but the cracks running down the mirror’s surface.
But if the monster could get into her head, could she do the same?
Kate rose to her feet and approached the mirror. She curled her fingers around the sink’s edge, anchoring herself, and tried to steady her breathing. She’d never been one for meditation—she would rather hit something than try to find stillness—but she went looking for it now as her gaze drifted up.
The instant the shard caught her eye, she felt the pull, but Kate resisted, charting a course from her chin, along the line of her scar up her jaw, before shifting over lips, up nose—
Show me, she thought, as her gaze finally reached the shard.
The silver blossomed, and then she was falling forward, but not as fast as before—it was more like a slow and steady slide, the ground tipping away beneath her. She gripped the counter hard as the silver spread across her senses, tangled through her head, and something that wasn’t a voice whispered a humming cloud of want and hurt and change and fight and make and kill and the ground began to fall away faster and faster until—
She is trapped
in another memory the night is black and she is in her mother’s car white noise blaring
through her head her mother’s cheek against the wheel Where are you?
she wonders as red eyes multiply beyond
the broken glass and there again
is the anger the pain the burning need to—
Stop, she thought, dragging her mind, not back, not out, but through.
Pressure in her head, against her palms as—
—back in the car
her mother’s eyes
open wide
marred
by a single
silver
crack
—Where are you?—
she asks
and the car
the night
the vision
shudder
and give way
to cold
to nothing
and—
It moves
in and out
of shape
of shadows
through a place
singing
with promise
a city
carved in two