Glad to be home, he pulled off his boots and socks, yet more calm when his feet touched the wooden floor he and Mike had put there themselves a few years back, when Gray had decided he hated carpets. The walls remained bare since he’d taken down all the photos, but the urn containing Mike’s ashes was in its place on the bedside table, and Gray was glad knowing that he would be sleeping with it later tonight, once the job was done.
He spared his king-size bed a longing glance, but instead of lying down, he opened his wardrobe and faced the full-length mirror on the inside of the door, recoiling slightly. The sight of the stump still hit him every time his reflection stared back at him. He desperately tried to avoid dealing with this new reality, but there was no way around it. This was his life now.
He couldn’t do the things he was used to, and his role within the club, the only family he’d ever known, would irreversibly change. And just like following Mike’s death, he was powerless.
Gray shut his eyes, trying to relax. He needed to face the demon eventually, so he might as well deal with that right away. He blindly reached out to the mirror when something in the air changed, and not because of the open window. It was like being watched—intensely and with purpose—to the point where Gray’s skin became overly sensitive and even made him aware of the clothing on his back.
He wasn’t alone.
Gray took a deep inhale and opened his eyes, ready to face the demon in the mirror, but the surface showed only his reflection. His chest compressed, releasing the held-back air, but a hint of movement made Gray freeze in place again. His brain helplessly tried to come up with an explanation for what he was seeing, but there wasn’t one.
In the mirror, he watched his own shadow shifting up the wall, its surface animated as if it were crawling with thousands of cockroaches dipped in tar.
His limbs felt like logs when he made himself turn around, still clinging to the possibility that it had only been an illusion present on the other side of the dim mirror, that Baal was just fucking with him. But no. Seen with bare eyes, the boiling surface of the shadow appeared even more turbulent. Struck with shock, Gray lowered his gaze, tracing the black form all the way to the tips of his toes, and the hair at the back of his neck bristled in alarm.
A bubble of the black goo filling his shadow broke all too close to his feet, and he stepped to the side, gasping in panic. The dark figure moved with him.
His mind split. One part of it was screaming in terror and telling him to run, but the other—the logical part of his brain that knew he’d traded his shadow on the night of the fire—kept him where he was.
But when a trembling hand emerged from his shadow like a limb reaching for help out of a hole in the ice, holding on to logic was no longer possible. Gray backed away, staring at fingers that looked as if they’d been dipped in liquid latex.
This time, the shadow stayed where it was instead of following Gray’s movement, its toes no longer attached to Gray’s feet and twitching on their own as if they were the work of a master puppeteer. Gray only stopped when the back of his thigh hit his desk, and he rested his hand on it, watching the flat image on the wall swell until it reached a three-dimensional form resembling a man. Resembling him.
His height.
His shape.
Even to the point of lacking one arm.
When Gray took a deep breath, the creature’s chest moved too, even though it had no mouth. It looked as if it was wearing a gimp suit from hell.
Gray squeezed the edge of the desktop and allowed himself an exhale, staring back at the creature whose gaze he could feel yet not see.
“What now, Baal?” he asked, his body stiff, as if it were instinctually bracing itself for a fight. He wanted to brush hair out of his face with his other hand and hissed when he remembered it was no longer there.
The demon wouldn’t answer him, but the solid-black shadow stilled. Dark liquid drizzled from the stump, followed by a rapid build-up of the same mass it was made of. At first, Gray wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but once the creature grew an arm where it so far only had a stump, he finally understood. The shadow brushed back hair it didn’t have with the new arm, mirroring the gesture Gray had wanted to make.
‘Creepy’ didn’t even cut it anymore. The thing was vile in its attempts at reflecting Gray. The sooner Baal took it with him, the better.