indeed soothing, and I relaxed a bit.
I rinsed my face and looked up into the mirror. Emmett Smith looked back at me.
My scream took me off my feet. I jumped from the mirror and hit the wall behind me, a towel rod jamming into my back.
Emmett was no longer the suave businessman in an elegant suit with designer glasses. His face was gaunt and skeletal, his gray eyes reduced to points of light in sockets.
Threads of his brown hair clung to his head, and his lips were drawn and dry, like a mummy’s. His tailor-made suit hung on his bones, his hands shrunken and leathery.
“Janet,” he said in a voice that was a throaty hiss. “You did this to me.”
I whipped my head around and looked behind me, all over the bathroom, but Emmett wasn’t there. He was only in the mirror.
Before I could speak, Mick was next to me, wide awake, not wearing a stitch. He stared at Emmett then gingerly reached out and touched the mirror with his broad finger.
His fingertip met glass, nothing else.
“Why does he look like that?” I demanded of Mick.
Mick studied Emmett before answering. “It’s his true guise. What he covers with a glam.”
Yes, I’d always felt something dark and gruesome in his aura, but I hadn’t realized he was death walking. I shuddered.
Emmett’s black lips curled in rage. “Get me out of here—now.”
I reached a tentative finger forward but, like Mick, felt nothing but cool glass. “I don’t know how you got in there. Are you saying you didn’t do this?”
“It was me, sweet cheeks,” the mirror said. It sounded both triumphant and terrified. “He came near the hotel when you weren’t looking, so I grabbed him.”
“Hold it, you told me Emmett hadn’t been here. Or did he come after that?” I knew in my heart he hadn’t. The shadow Mick and I had seen on the hotel must have been the mirror sucking him in.
“I said he hadn’t come into the hotel,” the mirror answered in a small voice. “He was in the shed, trying to take the mirror I’m part of off your bike. He had another shard with him, and I used both pieces to encircle and trap him.”
“Wait—he had a mirror shard?” I asked in alarm. “Where did he get that?”
Emmett only smiled, his teeth brown and rotted. “Ask your sister.”
“What?” I pounded on the glass. Emmett’s eyes flared, a scary sight. “What did you do with Gabrielle?”
Mick had his hand on the mirror again, fire seeping from his fingers as though he sought to melt his way in.
I yelled at the mirror. “If Gabrielle had a shard—if Emmett took it from her, why weren’t you screaming about it?”
“I didn’t know,” the mirror said, voice tight with shame. “She must have stolen it when they moved me out to the sunlight. I was so distracted by that and by Flora making me hot and swirling that I didn’t know it had been taken, or that Emmett had it until he went to the bike shed. I was afraid you’d be mad at me, or try to come in after him, so I didn’t tell you. I didn’t know about Gabrielle either.”
I remembered hearing a discordant clank when the mirror had become whole—was it the missing shard throwing it off balance? Or Emmett taking it away from Gabrielle—I had little doubt he’d wrested it from her.
“I wouldn’t know how to come in,” I told the mirror. I demanded of Emmett, “Where is Gabrielle?”
Emmett slammed himself into the glass. It was weird to see him do that, as though he stood on the other side of a clear window, yet Mick and I were transposed on him. Emmett’s gnarled hands flattened against the glass, and his mouth moved with the beginning of a spell. The glass started to smoke.
“Go back into the dreaming, Janet,” the mirror shouted at me, rattling in terror. “Stay safe from him. Go there—hurry!”
My eyes widened, even as I kept beating at Emmett’s image. “You mean you sent me dreamwalking?” I asked the mirror. “Why?”
“To keep you safe!” the mirror yelled. “Micky could watch over you while you stayed safe from Emmett and learned how to fight him. Dream, Janet. Please.”
I opened my mouth to command it to explain everything, but a spark sailed from the mirror to smack me in the middle of my forehead. The bathroom wavered, colors running like wet paint in the rain to become puddles of nothing.
I collapsed into sleep as Mick