3. BROKEN MIRRORS
When I turned on the light, my reality came into view one terrifying image at a time. Newspaper clippings, maps, crime scene photos, and pictures of missing girls wallpapered my room. Chalk outlines, surrounded by yellow and black police tape, were layered over weather charts and mug shots of people who had been arrested for bizarre or brutal acts of violence.
Every scrap represented an event that could potentially be traced back to Andras.
I started collecting the articles in the hospital. I found the first one while scanning the newspaper for any mention of Jared, Lukas, and Alara, and Priest. The headline read Lightning Kills Seven in Fire at Holy Marters Church.
What had started as an attempt to track the demon’s movements had developed into an obsession, self-inflicted penance. I had released Andras, which made his crimes my crimes.
Part of me wished there was a way to send all this information to Lukas. He would know how to find the pattern in the madness, a skill I’d underestimated until I tried doing it myself. Though I searched for their names in every newspaper, a bigger part of me was relieved I didn’t know how to find them.
They’re safer without me.
As I added the finished sketch of my nightmare to wall, an image that looked like a music stand caught my eye.
Andras’ seal.
It was the demon’s unique signature. Each Legion member’s wrist was marked with a different section of the symbol. If they rubbed salt on their wrists and held them together, the marks re-created the demon’s seal. I ran my fingers over the unmarked skin on the inside of my wrist, a permanent reminder I wasn’t one of them.
And the reason things would never have worked out with Jared and me.
I scanned the wall for the portrait of his profile, taped above a chart of weather anomalies. The curve of his lips and the long eyelashes that framed his pale blue eyes. For a second, I forgot to breathe. I remembered the way his lips felt against mine, the sound of his voice when he had whispered to me in the rain, refusing to leave me behind. I remembered the promise I made to myself that night. The one I hadn’t kept.
I’ll find you.
Did he think about that night?
Does he think about me?
Maybe Jared had already moved on, continuing the search for the missing fifth member of the Legion. One thing I would never be.
I peeled off the wool knee socks I wore every day, even though they itched like hell and made my room smell like wet dog. A web of white scars snaked across my legs like a tattoo, a permanent reminder of my mistakes. My fingers traced the ridges in my skin. I loathed them, but if there were a way to trade my mistakes for even more scars, I would’ve done it in a second.
I wrestled out of my wet clothes and into dry ones, before flipping open my laptop, skimming news sites for signs of paranormal activity, the evidence of Andras at work. The Legion taught me that sudden increases in the number of murders and violent crimes were red flags, with suicides a close second.
A photo of thousands of crows flocked on rooftops in downtown Pittsburg made me pause. I clicked on it, and a familiar message popped up on the screen: unauthorized portal. Winterhaven limited student Internet access to approved news sites and the National Archives. E-mail was non-existent, and phone use was restricted to calls home—or, in my case, to Aunt Diane. Not that I had called her.
My inbox was probably overflowing with messages from Elle by now. Even if I figured out a way to contact her, what would I say? I unleashed a vengeful demon on the world, and no one knows how to stop him? She would forgive me because that’s what best friends do. But this wasn’t a failed midterm I could forget about after a pint of ice cream. The next headline made sure of that: High School Track Star Disappears Without a Trace. A brunette with delicate features smiled back from the screen, her name printed under the photo. Catherine Nichols.
Number 15.
The commentary didn’t provide any new information: After the disappearance of fifteen teenage girls, the FBI has issued a statement, calling the disappearances ‘serial abductions,’ confirming what the public had suspected.
I found a clean page in my notepad and began the ritual that had become second nature. My pencil recreated the curves of Catherine Nichol’s face, her high cheekbones and brown doe eyes. As I lost myself in the gray charcoal lines, music blared from the room next door. My hand jerked, and a stray line dragged across her face.
Winterhaven never ceased to annoy me. I pounded on the wall, but the girls laughing on the other side ignored me.
I taped the drawing on the wall next to sketches of the other missing girls. The row of photos looked strikingly similar—dark-eyed girls with delicate features, wavy brown hair, and awkward smiles. Pretty in an understated way. There was one more thing—something impossible to ignore.
They all looked like me.
Another reminder the demon wasn’t finished with me, even if I didn’t understand why. Maybe he still believed I was the fifth member of the Legion, and I was first on his hit list.
Next door, the music cranked up another few notches, followed by scratching sounds. Were they moving furniture in there?
“Shut up.” I banged harder.
Someone finally turned off the music. The scratching intensified and my neighbor’s door slammed at the exact same moment. The laughter moved into the hallway, and my skin went cold.
The scratching wasn’t coming from next door.
I whipped around as a jagged line etched itself into the mirror above my dresser. When it hit the bottom of the frame, the line—and the scratching—stopped. Within seconds, another mark dragged its way down the glass.
There was something off about the sound. It lacked the nails-on-a-chalkboard intensity that would’ve made it impossible to mistake the location of the source. I inched closer and froze.
The lines were being cut from inside the mirror.
My eidetic memory snapped mental pictures as the row of lines hit the frame and changed direction, creating horizontal, diagonal, and curved slashes.
Letters.
Words formed, cut by cut, until the message stared back at me.
HE IS COMING FOR YOU.
The meaning registered slowly, one fragmented thought at a time.
Andras knows where I am.
After all the paranormal attacks I’d escaped, my dorm room was the place the demon finally found me? Had it really taken him this long to track me down?
Nineteen days of fear, anger, and guilt turned to rage in a single moment. This was my life now—vengeance sprits and nightmares, missing girls and demons, unanswered questions and paranormal threats. I was sick of waiting for something to happen. I wanted it to happen now.
“I’m right here!” I screamed, turning in a circle with my arms outstretched. “Come on!”
Silence echoed back at me, louder than a hundred screams.
“What are you waiting for?”
The consequences of my mi
stakes surrounded me—layers and layers of them taped to every surface like a prison of my own making. I hurled myself at the closest wall, tearing down the photos of dead birds and chalk outlines, electrical storms and flooded streets, mug shots and maps.
Slashes of pink and gray peeked out from beneath the bits of paper still stuck to the walls—a print of my favorite painting, Chris Berens’ Lady Day. A girl floating through the air under a glass dome.
I taped it to my wall the moment the boxes marked school had arrived—the ones I’d packed before my house turned Poltergeist, and I took off with Jared and Lukas. She was the last shred of my old room and my old life. It hurt too much to look at her everyday, so I buried her under the scraps of my new life.
I always believed the girl under the glass found way out in the end. But maybe I was wrong. I ripped the print off wall and tore it in half. The dome split down the center, tearing the girl apart along with it. The two halves fell to the floor, lost in a sea of articles about the tragedies my mistake had set in motion.
Someone knocked on the door. “Everything okay in there?”
The first print my mom had ever given me lay in pieces at my feet. I picked up the half with the girl’s face on it and folded it up, before slipping it into my notepad.
“Kennedy, I know you’re in there. Open up.”
I recognized the girl’s voice, but I couldn’t place it.
“I’m not leaving,” she said.
I cracked the door, and one of the Black Eyeliners stood on the other side looking bored.
She glanced over my shoulder at what was left of my dorm room. “Rough day?” Her tone dripped with mock sympathy.
“What do you want?” I asked, holding the notepad against my chest.
“If you’re gonna be a bitch, I’ll just tell the hot guy who’s looking for you that you weren’t interested in his message.”
“What are you talking about?”
The girl sighed and rolled her eyes. “I caught him wandering around Anderson Hall. He said he needed to find you. That it was an emergency or something. You’re lucky he ran into me and not one of the dorm mothers.” She held up a damp scrap of paper. “He said to give you this.”