“Hurry up,” Nick barked. “We’ve got to get you out of here.”
Right. Out of here. Yes, back to the mirror. She had to get back through the mirror.
Nick reached over and opened the passenger door, and Josie whipped around it, careful to keep her body in the safety of the light as she climbed into Nick’s car.
She slumped in the worn leather seat, panting. Interior lights of the car illuminated every inch of the cabin. And for the first time, Josie was thankful for them.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Nick asked. His voice was gruff but laced with concern and panic.
“Th-thank you,” Josie stuttered. Her teeth were chattering, her body wracked with shivering. “You . . . you saved my life.”
“You’re lucky I followed you.” Nick pulled his sweatshirt over his head and draped it over her shoulders. “What you were thinking walking home at dusk? And the path through the woods? You were practically asking for the Nox to attack.”
Nox. Is that what they were? It seemed like such an innocuous word for what lurked in the dark.
Nick ran a hand through his thick, dark hair. “You’re lucky you made it through the woods to the street. Most people don’t make it five feet once the Nox catch them.”
“Someone,” Josie panted. “Someone carried me out.”
“Carried you out of the dark woods?” Nick shook his head. “No one’s alive in there, Jo. Not once the sun goes down.”
No one was alive in the woods. That was impossible. She’d felt an arm. She’d heard a voice.
“What is with you today?” Nick continued. “It’s like you’re a totally different person.”
“You have no idea.”
“Huh?”
Josie kept quiet. It was no good trying to explain anything to Nick, since she’d be gone in a few hours and then the old Jo would bring things back to normal. Nick would just write it off as “lady problems” or temporary insanity, and Josie would pretend this sojourn into Jo’s world never happened.
After a moment, Nick sighed. “Fine. Don’t talk to me. I’ll take you back to my house and get you cleaned up.”
“No,” Josie said. Her teeth were still chattering. “Take me home.”
“Jo, you’re covered in blood.”
“Take me home,” she repeated. She couldn’t risk not being there for the next window. She had to get home.
“Suit yourself. But if your dad gets pissed off, it’s your problem.”
3:55 A.M.
Despite a half dozen Advil in the last few hours, Josie’s head still pounded. Her body felt like it had been poisoned—sluggish, heavy, and aching all over.
Her ripped-up forearms didn’t help matters. While the Nox, as Nick had called them, had only inflicted a few wounds on the back of her neck before she made it out of the woods, her arms looked as if she’d gone three rounds with a Weedwacker. Most of the cuts were shallow, with a few exceptions, and after a painful hour in the bathroom cleansing the deeper gashes and taping them up with gauze and butterfly bandages, she figured they’d heal okay.
But what the hell were those things? She knew now what Jo had been trying to tell her when they switched places: Don’t go out after dark.
Yeah, thanks for the heads-up.
At five minutes to the appointed time, Josie was ready to go. She’d changed back into her own clothes, shoving the blood-covered yellow dress and Nick’s sweatshirt deep into the bottom of the hamper, and left Jo’s room exactly as she’d found it. Everything would look better now: her parents’ divorce, her mom’s weirdness, even Nick and her social standing at school. All of it seemed bearable when weighed against the homicidal monsters that lived in the darkness just outside the bright lights of Jo’s room.
She thought she’d be sad to have to go back to her own life, but as the surface of the mirror rippled, Josie smiled. She was ready to go home.
She wanted to feel her own bedsheets; smell the musty air of her dilapidated, water-damaged house. Before the image on the other side was even fully in view Josie reached her hand into the undulating surface of the mirror.
Josie felt the thick, spongy interior of the portal as she pushed her arm through. She was about to duck into the portal and go through to her own bedroom, when her fingertips grazed something solid and rough.
Huh?
She leaned into the gooey substance of the portal until her shoulders rested against a hard surface. It was solid and heavy, and it wouldn’t budge. She pulled away, and slowly, the image on the other side of the mirror came into focus. A gray concrete wall.
The wall of the basement in Josie’s house.