She got to her feet, steadied herself a moment, and turned toward the hall.
“Is that such a good idea?” asked Riley.
Her temper flared. “I said I’m fine.”
“And I’m just supposed to believe you?”
Kate spun. “I don’t care if you believe me. You’re not my parent and I’m not your pet project.”
“That’s uncalled for!”
“Hey, hey,” cut in Malcolm. “Everyone calm down.”
Kate scrubbed at her face. “Look,” she said slowly, “you’re right, I don’t feel great. But I’ve got to go to work. I’ll bail if I have to. Promise.”
Riley opened his mouth, but in the end said nothing.
If there was one sound Kate hated, it was the bell above the café door.
What was the point, when the counter faced the door and she could see the people coming in? At this time of day, the line stretched all the way back to the door itself, the constant open and close eliciting a near-continuous chime.
“Next!” she called impatiently.
To take her mind off the bell, she tried to focus on the customers themselves and play a game called “guess the secret.” The woman in the purple dress two sizes too small? Sleeping with her handyman. The man on the cell? Embezzling. The one in front of her right now? Addicted to sleeping pills. That was the only thing that explained how long it was taking for him to order.
A vein in Kate’s temple twitched.
“Next.”
A man shuffled forward without looking up from his phone.
“Sir?”
He was talking softly, and she realized he was taking a call.
“Sir?”
He held up a finger and kept talking.
“Sir.”
Annoyance rose inside her, taking a sudden sharp turn into anger, and before Kate realized what she was doing, her hand shot across the counter.
She snatched the cell phone and hurled it against the exposed brick wall installed to give the Coffee Bean that extra homey charm. It smashed, and when the man’s head finally came up, veins bulging as he stared, not at her, but at the pieces of his cell raining down the wall, Kate’s first thought was of reaching out and snapping his neck. Of how nice that would feel.
The urge stole through her, so simple and quick, she almost didn’t notice.
She could see it, clear as glass, could feel his flesh beneath her hands, hear the clean snap of bone. And the very idea was like a cold compress on a fevered head, a balm on a burn, so sudden and soothing that her fingers actually started curling—that little voice in her head, the one that said don’t, suddenly replaced by one that said do—before she thought no, stop, and came jarringly back to her senses.
It was like being thrown out of a pleasant dream and into a nightmare, the wonderful, certain calm replaced by a wave of sickness and a lancing pain behind her eyes.
What had she just done?
What had she almost done?
Kate forced herself backward—away from the counter, away from the stunned line and the man who’d now begun to shout—tore the apron over her head, and fled.
She dropped her bag beside the door.
Riley and Malcolm were no longer there—thank God for small mercies.
Her pulse was still a raging beat inside her skull, but whatever had come over her back in the coffee shop was gone, leaving only a headache and a pressure behind her eyes.
A migraine? But Kate had never gotten migraines, and she was pretty sure their side effects didn’t include the sudden desire for violence.
Violence—her mind snagged on that word, and the night before came back again: the man and the shadow, both so steady, so calm. The emptiness in the man’s face as the monster’s own seemed to fill out. And then—the alley. Kate standing face-to-face with the monster, the nothing of it, all cold and hollow hunger and those silver discs, like mirrors—
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.