Marcy fainting pretty much put an end to Chemistry class. The nurse came straightaway, Marcy’s parents were called, and the class watched anxiously as one of their peers was wheeled out on a stretcher fifteen minutes after she first passed out. She was still unconscious. At least she wasn’t dead.
Even though the shadows had yet to drain a living person of their soul-energy completely, that horrifying vision of the future left me with little doubt that they could—and would—eventually kill. But I wasn’t about to let that happen. Not now that I knew how to cleanse them. I just needed to figure out a way to do it away from prying eyes.
As Nina and I headed out of the main building for her third-period class—P.E.—I wondered if creating a holding cell for the shadow souls out of sight of the masses was the true meaning behind the locker room echo. Was that why I was supposedly going to charm the mirror, transforming it into a portal to Dom’s private afterlife?
“So, I don’t know what you want to do about that,” Nina was saying as she led me toward a string of cement stairs winding down to a set of doors leading into the gymnasium.
“Do about what?” I asked, only half listening. The more I thought about the mirror plan, the more it sounded like a genuinely good idea. Gosh, I was chock-full of spontaneous light bulb moments these days.
“About gym class,” Nina said. “I mean, I’ve never seen anyone bring, like, a friend or whatever to school before, so I don’t really know what happens at gym class.” She reached for the door handle, pulling the door open.
“Thanks,” I said, passing through the doorway ahead of her and stepping into the gym.
I was surprised by Nina’s resiliency—she’d just watched one of her classmates fall prey to a soul-sucking spirit. Even if she hadn’t actually been able to see the shadow, knowing what had caused Marcy to pass out should’ve been enough to leave her shaken to the core. That is, if it hadn’t already happened a handful of times.
Apparently, Nina had found one of the girls who’d been drained to unconsciousness in the girls’ bathroom last week. She was an old pro at this.
The kids at this school were amazing at turning a blind eye to these overt displays of paranormal activity. From what I’d seen, they were less afraid than the adults.
“Like, do you participate?” Nina continued, prattling on about our gym class dilemma. “Or do you just sit there on the floor watching us and, like, looking sad?”
We crossed the corner of the gym, heading for another set of double doors on the other side.
“I’m perfectly happy just to sit and watch,” I told her.
High school dodgeball—what it looked like Nina’s class was about to play, based on the rolling racks of red and yellow rubber balls lined up haphazardly against one wall—hardly sparked bouts of nostalgia within me. More like shuddering revulsion and possibly a slight case of PTSD.
“No FOMO,” I added. “I promise.” I was planning on ducking out of class near the beginning anyway. The locker room would be empty, making it the perfect time to test out the mirror shadow trap.
Nina shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
We passed through the doors on the other side of the gym and entered a hallway lined with brick walls, the top half painted a glossy white. A thick crimson and yellow band divided the whitewashed brick from the natural red.
I froze, recognizing this particular hallway. It was the one from the locker room vision. The one where I’d first seen my altered appearance in the mirror.
I glanced over my shoulder. I could almost hear a ghostly echo of the laughter of the girls I’d seen running down the hallway in the dream. If I’d had any doubt that the locker room dream was yet another true echo, this moment would’ve vanquished it.
Nina stopped and turned partway to look at me. “Something wrong?”
I returned her stare and shook my head. “Just déjà vu.” Or would that be pre-jà vu if the thing I was reexperiencing had yet to happen?
I shook myself out of that eerie, dreamlike state and followed Nina into the locker room. While she changed into her gym clothes, I sat on a bench nearby, staring at the mirror in the back corner and rubbing the back of my neck in a useless attempt to ease the ache in my skull.
Girls were using the mirror to fix their ponytails and touch up their makeup. My half-brother’s ghostly silver figure was nowhere in sight. Not surprising, considering I’d yet to etch his name anywhere around that mirror. Right now, it was just a plain old mirror. Soon, it would be a whole lot more.
One of the girls touching up her powder—why she was doing this before heading out to sweat and dodge balls being thrown at her for an hour was beyond me—made eye contact with me in the mirror. I averted my stare to the floor and fiddled with my fingers.
It took Nina a couple minutes to change, another minute or two to gossip with her friends about the Marcy incident, and then our little gaggle of girls left the locker room. We made our way into the gymnasium, where the group split up to sit in what appeared to be a predetermined order along the wall. I figured this was probably some form of a seating chart and sat down on the floor beside Nina, propping my elbows on my upraised knees and leaning back against the wall as we waited for the gym teacher.
We’d been waiting for a few minutes and the class was starting to get a little antsy when the teacher, if you could even call him that—even “substitute” was being too generous—walked in through the doors on the opposite side of the gym.
My heart rate sped up as soon as I saw him, and I couldn’t help but sit up straighter. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” I said just a little bit louder than I’d intended. Plenty loud for the quote-unquote teacher’s sensitive Nejeret ears to pick up my words.
A few of the girls nearest me giggled and I could feel Nina looking from me to the “teacher” and back. “You know him?”
“Of course I do,” I whispered. “Don’t you recognize him?”
She shook her head. “Should I?” she asked, then shrugged. “He’s not a sub I’ve ever seen before.”
“Because he’s not a sub,” I muttered.
It was Nik, dressed in tennis shoes, athletic shorts, and a gray T-shirt. He wore a baseball cap—Washington Huskies—and a whistle on a cord around his neck. He’d removed all of his piercings, and somehow, it looked as though he had removed his tattoos as well, though I had no idea how that was possible. He’d claimed he couldn’t alter his appearance magically. I narrowed my eyes. Had that been a lie?
It seemed so obvious to me that this man waltzing into the gym like he belonged there was Nekure the Nejeret, but I could see why the rest of the class didn’t see what I did. When most people looked at Nik, they saw the modifications he’d made to his body. They didn’t see him, not like I did. I saw him. I always had.
Just because the kids didn’t recognize Nik didn’t mean they were unaffected by him. I could hear girls all the way down the line whispering and tittering.
“Have you seen him before?” one asked.
“No, I would definitely remember him. He’s so hot.”
“I’d dodge his balls all day long,” another girl said.
Her friend responded with a hushed, “I don’t want to dodge his balls.”
The girls burst into a bout of giggles. They cut off when Nik looked their way. I imagined how embarrassed they’d be if they knew he could hear everything they were saying about him.
“I’m Coach Nicholas,” Nik said, taking up a wide stance on the basketball court’s boundary line. “I’m going to be your sub for today, and since Ms. Bartel didn’t leave any sub plans, I figured we’d stick to an old classic.” He placed his hands on his hips. “Dodgeball.”
He looked at me, gotcha flashing across his not-so-pale eyes. He must’ve put in contacts in an effort to make his striking appearance just a little bit less other. It warmed my heart a bit to know that he’d come after me, going so far as to find his own way into the school. And by “a bit,” I meant that it caused a heat wave to roll over my body. I could feel myself flushing and looked down at the glossy floor in an attempt to hide the reaction.
“Alright,” Nik said, “who wants to be a captain?” His attention left me, moving down the line of students seated against the wall. He selected two from the bunch who raised their hands, and the classic, cruel schoolyard pick began. I slipped away about halfway through.
I snuck back into the hallway outside the gym and stopped to stand before the door to the girls’ locker room, just as I had done in the echo. I waited, expecting the giggling trio of girls to pass me. I waited there for nearly a minute, but the girls never came.
I scrunched my eyebrows together. Had something changed? Was the echo now null and void? Had reality taken another, similar but not-quite-the-same path? Did that mean the mirror-trap plan wouldn’t work?
A moment later, I shook my head. Dom wasn’t in the mirror yet, but he had been in the echo. That vision of the future wasn’t being disproven; I was just a little too soon.
I opened the door to the locker room and stepped inside, letting the door swing shut and pausing to listen for other people. No voices. No footsteps. No heartbeats.
Satisfied that the locker room was empty, I made my way to the bathroom area in the back corner and stopped to stand at the sinks, looking into the mirror. In the echo, I’d clearly been luring the shadow to this mirror.
Nodding to myself, I patted the pockets of my sweatshirt, searching for something I could use to etch Dom’s name into the glass. In the echo, Dominic l’Aragne had been etched into each corner, the letters small and unobtrusive, but there. It would be the most minimalistic Dom mirror I’d made yet. But, according to the echo, those four iterations of his name would be enough to link this mirror to his already growing network of mirrors.
Finding nothing in my pockets, I searched my jeans, lips pressed together. Again, I found nothing that would be of use.
“Way to come prepared,” I muttered as I turned away from the mirror, scanning the rows of basket lockers. They pretty much all had locks on them, keeping the students’ clothing secure.
I lowered my gaze to the floor. The kids might’ve been good about locking their clothes up, but they didn’t seem to care a lick about their schoolbags. Most were trusting enough—or stupid enough—to leave their backpacks and messenger bags unsecured under the benches.
I crouched down onto one knee and unzipped the front pouch of the nearest backpack. Bingo—a set of keys.
Prize in hand, I stood and made my way back to the mirror. I started working in the bottom right corner, wedging myself between the end sink and the wall of a bathroom stall.
D-O-M-I-
I scratched Dom’s full name into the mirror, the screech of metal on glass reminding me of parts of the warped song of ma’at. I squinted, the sound paining my ears. Nails on a chalkboard had nothing on keys on a mirror.
When I finished with that first corner, I crawled up onto the sink and stood to etch Dom’s name in the top right corner of the mirror, then did the same on the top left, finally cutting into the glass with the keys on the bottom left corner of the mirror. As I scratched that final letter into the mirror—E—the surface seemed to shimmer and shudder like water, rippling from the corners inward.
Its shivery movement stilled a moment later. Dom stood on the other side of the glass, silvered expression severe. I probably deserved that for going MIA for the past few days.
I pressed my hands to the mirror so I would be able to hear him but blurted out, “I’m sorry!” before he could bite my head off. “I know you’re pissed off, and you totally have every right to be. I shouldn’t have disappeared like that, and I promise I won’t do it again, but I swear to you, Dom—I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t super important.”
He narrowed his eyes to slits.
“I need your help?” I said, semi-asking.
“Is that really you, Kat?”
My focus shifted from Dom to my own reflection. I’d grown so used to seeing the blonde, blue-eyed girl looking back at me that I’d forgotten all about the disguise. “Yeah,” I said. “It’s me . . . and it’s a long story that I don’t have time to tell you right now, but I promise I will when this is all over.”
Dom’s stern expression softened minutely. He nodded, momentarily satisfied by my promise. “When what is over?” he asked, focus shifting past me. “Where are we?”
“I’m at the school,” I said, then added, “You can’t tell anyone—not yet.”
Dom was quiet for a moment. “Very well,” he said with a nod. “I will give you one day of silence. Now, why am I here?”
“Aw, Dom . . . because I missed you,” I said, hiding a smile.
He gave me his trademark pointed stare, made all the more effective by his dark, silvery eyes.
“No,” I said, “but really—I need your help.”
“I’m listening.”
I nodded. “I need to come up with a way to keep the shadows from draining the energy from my soul while I cleanse them. Every time I try, everything goes great until they touch me—then, it’s game over.”
“I see,” Dom said. “And what does that have to do with me?”
“I had another echo-dream,” I told him, “and it made it pretty clear that you and your mirror land would play a part in this.” I paused for a moment. “I was thinking I could try to trap one of the shadows in the mirror. Do you think that might work?”
The corners of Dom’s mouth turned down. “I honestly do not know.”
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s what I thought you’d say.” I couldn’t think of any other reason I would have gone through the effort of leading the shadow to the mirror in the dream. It had to be about using the mirror as a trap. I frowned, thinking of another possible outcome. “Do you think the shadows could hurt you the way they hurt me?”
“You forget, little sister,” Dom said, smile sly, “I cannot be hurt. In this form, I am truly immortal.”
I chewed on the inside of my lip. “Alright. We’ll give it a try.” I pulled my hand away and started back toward the door to the hallway. “Hang tight,” I told him. “I’ll be back in a sec.” Hopefully with an extra shadow in tow.
I pushed the locker room door open and jogged out into the hallway, heading for the doors to the gym. I could hear the squeak of tennis shoes on the gym floor and the thunk of rubber balls hitting bodies. There were bound to be some heightened emotions in the gym right about now. Dodgeball tended to bring out some people’s inner predator, separating the weak from the strong and generally pissing everyone off. I figured that should get the shadow souls riled up.
I silently thanked Nik, wondering if that had been his plan all along.
A girl pushed through the gym doors, nearly smacking me in the face. I stopped the door with the toe of my boot, and the girl shouldered past me, running toward the locker room, her hand covering the lower half of her face. She was crying. Perfect.
I waited for her to go into the locker room, then followed. I paused at the door, fingers curled around the handle. At first, I thought I was imagining the faint sound of girls giggling: another trick of the mind, like before. An echo of the echo.
Until three girls came hurrying down the hallway, passing the alcove where I was standing. The same three girls from the dream. This was it.
“I hope you’re ready, Dom,” I whispered. Then I yanked the door open and hurried into the locker room.
The girl who’d fled into the locker room was sitting on the bench, exactly where she was supposed to be, hunched over and crying into her hands. I snuck past her to the mirror. According to the echo, the shadow would turn up any second now.
“Dom?” I tapped on the mirror. He was nowhere in sight. “Where are you?”
“I am here,” he said, appearing beside my reflection in the mirror. He flexed his fingers, his old prefight ritual. “And I am ready.”
“Good,” I said with a nod and glanced at the girl hunched over on the bench.
A shadow lurked just behind her, its arms curling around her in a ghastly embrace. The lockers nearest her started to shake and shudder, the metal baskets rattling on their rails. The girl looked up, tear-streaked cheeks draining of color and eyes opened wide in terror. She knew one of the “ghosts” was nearby. She had no idea how close it really was.
The girl stood stiffly, intending to flee, but she was too late. The shadow already had her. Its arms encased her, holding her immobile despite having no real substance in this reality, as though its grip on her soul was enough to keep her there. She couldn’t move. All she could do was stare at me. And scream.
I stood there, frozen by the memory of what it was like to fall victim to a shadow. I knew, firsthand, what it was like to feel this girl’s fear. I’d been in her shoes. I would have died, if not for Nik stepping in and fighting the shadows off. But this girl didn’t have Nik and his slashing At blades. All she had was me.
That snapped me the hell out of my fear-triggered paralysis.
I stalked across the locker room toward them, eyes only for the shadow. “Leave her alone, dickwad,” I said as I drew my foot back.
I soccer-kicked the thing right where its face should’ve been. The contact sent a shudder through me, and I skittered back several steps.
The shadow lost its grip on the girl, and she slumped onto the floor and started to crawl away. The shadow’s head righted, its eyeless gaze locked on me.
“Oh, I’m sorry . . . did I disturb your snack?” I said as I skipped backward a few steps. I turned to race the shadow back to the mirror. And ran straight into a solid wall of cold.
A second shadow had joined the party. It wrapped its arms around me before I could duck away, already feeding off my energy. Stealing my fight. I struggled, but my arms and legs were weakening by the second.
Not that it stopped me from trying. Maybe I couldn’t fight the shadow the old-fashioned way, but there was something else I could do.
Calling out to the collective soul-energy, I gripped the thing’s arms with both of my suddenly glowing hands. The multitude of voices exploded through my mind, the soul-energy bolstering my waning life-force and lending me strength.
Strands of At and anti-At burst out of me, writhing all around me. They latched onto the shadow holding me captive even as they reached out for the one closing in from behind. Everywhere those vines of At and anti-At touched the shadows, brilliant streaks of color appeared, shining through the putrid darkness suffocating their souls.
It was working. I could feel the shadow’s taint siphoning into me through those otherworldly strands. I could feel it losing its potency, becoming nothing more than inert matter, then flowing out into Duat, harmless debris floating along in the river of soul-energy.
It was working, until the second shadow reached me. Until a third joined in on the fun.
The balance shifted, no longer in my favor. The moment when I’d held victory in my sights passed in a wave of nausea and dizziness. My knees gave out, and my head slumped forward. I was weakening far faster than that unrelenting darkness was draining from their souls. I couldn’t beat them. I couldn’t win.
Which meant I was going to die.
I could see Dom on the other side of the mirror, slamming his hands against the surface. He was shouting, but I couldn’t hear him because I wasn’t touching the glass. And he couldn’t help me. He was right there, but he might as well have been on the other side of the universe for all the good it would do me.
Using every ounce of energy that I had left, I raised my head a few inches and looked past the shadow standing in front of me to the girl sitting in the far corner of the locker room, hugging her knees to her chest and watching on in horror. Her eyes weren’t focused on me. She was staring at the shadows. She could see them.
“Get Nik,” I said, voice guttural. “The sub—go get him, now.”
My tunnel vision narrowed, until there was only darkness. My lungs struggled for breath, my heart straining to beat. I couldn’t hold out much longer. But I wouldn’t let these mindless, starving creatures render me into nothing. They wouldn’t destroy me. I wouldn’t let them.
I managed to suck in one last, shuddering breath, and on my exhale, I clamped down on the final spark of energy left in my ba and fled my dying body.