It should have been an easy choice. I should have picked truth, and then lied like crazy. Fibbed my way through the dark secrets about Joshua’s Seer heritage and my undead status. Provided some vague answers, like “yeah, he’s a good kisser,” or “no, we haven’t talked about what will happen to us after graduation.”
Instead, I lowered my head and flashed my darkest smile.
“Dare, Kaylen. I choose dare.”
Chapter
FIVE
Obviously, Kaylen hadn’t anticipated my response. She sputtered a bit, floundering to think up an appropriate challenge for a girl she barely knew, and secretly envied. Finally, after exchanging a few pleading looks with her friends, she settled on an old staple.
“It’s almost midnight, so I guess . . . I dare you to summon Bloody Mary in the mirror.” She glanced around the theater, trying to find the right venue, and then pointed to the powder bath. “In there. So we can hear you chant her name.”
I had to choke back a laugh.
My dare is to summon a ghost? One that doesn’t even exist?
Instead of outright mocking the dare, I put on my most intimidated face. “I don’t know, Kaylen. That’s kind of a creepy game.”
Beside me, I could see Jillian roll her eyes; she knew as well as I did that a little spinning and chanting in the dark didn’t scare me. Kaylen, however, was fooled: she preened and smiled.
“That’s the dare, Amelia. Unless you want to take it back, and answer a few questions.”
This time, I didn’t have to fake my reaction. “No, that’s okay. Bloody Mary’s just fine by me.”
I paused in the doorway of the bath, locked eyes with Jillian, and tried not to grin. Then I ducked inside and pushed the door shut behind me.
I just stood there for almost a full minute, shaking my head at the idiocy of this task. Most of these girls probably hadn’t played Bloody Mary in years. I couldn’t remember, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t played it in several decades.
Still, when I heard someone call out, “The lights are still on,” I flipped the switch.
Even with the thin strip of light filtering in from under the door, the room was surprisingly dark. I could just barely see the outline of my face in the mirror.
I shouted to the girls outside, “How many times am I supposed to spin?”
After a pause, someone answered, “Thirteen.”
“Thirteen?” My eyes shot open. “I’ll get dizzy and throw up.”
“That’s the point,” someone else said, followed by a chorus of giggles.
I groaned loudly. I suppose this was the true torture of the dare: self-induced nausea in a stranger’s bathroom.
Hurray for girly bonding time.
With a heavy sigh, I brushed the lip of the sink with my fingertips and closed my eyes again. Then I began to turn slowly, using the smooth porcelain edge of the sink to guide my spins.
One, I counted in my head, while calling, “Bloody Mary,” loud enough for the other girls to hear.
That first chant incited another rash of laughter outside the door, but soon I was too occupied by the task of staying upright to listen. Spinning in tight, measured circles proved much harder than I’d thought. By the fourth repetition, my feet began to tangle; by the sixth, my head starting spinning in full force; by the eighth, I wasn’t even sure if I could keep myself vertical.
Nine, I counted, starting a new circle. As I spun, I fumbled for the sink’s edge but lost my grip before it could steady me.
Ten.
I tried to plant my palm against a wall for a moment’s support, but my hand slipped and bumped roughly against the next wall in my rotation.
Eleven.
Maybe I’d tried too hard to ignore the girls outside the door. Or maybe I’d grown too dizzy to hear them. Those were the only reasonable explanations for why they’d suddenly stopped talking. Why they’d stopped making any noise at all. But that wasn’t possible . . . was it?
Twelve.
Actually, it was possible. The other girls had definitely stopped giggling or talking. I couldn’t hear the droning background noise of the theater’s surround sound, either. It was as if the world outside had gone weirdly silent while I spun.
In my final, dizzy rotation, I felt the strangest sense that—even in the unnatural quiet—something waited. Something watched.
Thirteen.
“Bloody Mary,” I whispered, ending my last turn with a desperate grab at the sink.
My feet skidded to an awkward stop and I bent over the basin, sucking in deep breaths as I tried to suppress a sudden wave of nausea. Below me, the drain seemed to circle itself, spinning and spinning around the center of the bowl. The sight of it made me even dizzier, so I looked up instead.
The new view wasn’t much of an improvement. My face moved in the mirror, shifting from one corner to the other. Fractured pairs of eyes danced like bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope: green on the left side, green on the right; green above, green below.
Gray in the middle.
My vision abruptly corrected itself and I stumbled backward, away from the face in the mirror. Mostly because it wasn’t mine.
The pale skin and crew-cut hair; the cold, soulless gray eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses—that was Kade LaLaurie, smiling back at me from the place in the mirror where my face should have been.
Kade, the murderer; the crazy person; the dead guy who should have currently occupied a dark corner in hell instead of this bathroom mirror.
His nasty grin widened as he held one finger to his lips, soundlessly telling me to keep quiet.
As if I could even muster the will to scream right now.
I thought briefly about calling forth my glow. Even if I didn’t really understand how it worked, it hadn’t failed me before—especially when I’d needed it to incinerate demons. But a specter on the other side of a bathroom mirror? I had no idea how to fight such a thing.
Still, something about Kade’s continued, mocking smile helped me find my voice.
“What do you want?”
My whisper sounded harsher and stronger than I’d expected. Hearing it, Kade dropped his smile. With a cold glare, he cocked his head to one side and scrutinized me. I don’t know exactly what he saw, but his smile returned. He lifted one finger to the interior of the glass and tapped it ever so slightly.
Assuming that a fight would follow, I braced myself. But instead of attacking me, Kade suddenly vanished behind a pane of frost. The entire mirror iced over, hiding him from view until I couldn’t even see the obscured outline of his figure.
For a moment, nothing else happened.
Then slowly, letters began to appear in the frost, traced there by an invisible finger. As I watched, the letters scrawled backward to form words, starting with the bottom of some message and moving toward its beginning. Nothing about it made any sense until the last word completed itself.
At that point, I’m pretty sure I stopped breathing.
In even, flawlessly aligned block letters, the message read:
YOU
OR THEM.
ONE DIES PER WEEK UNTIL YOU JOIN US.
I understood its meaning perfectly: the message came from the darkness itself.
From hell.