The glass fills with something white and sparkly and thick and formless as fog that swirls and ripples—and knits together to form a face. But not Dad’s face, oh no. Whatever lies beyond the glass is still becoming: oozy and indefinite, there and then not, as if the face is pulling together the way hot glass slumps and folds and becomes something else. Even as she watches, the face solidifies into a nightmare of raw meat, bristly teeth, a snaky black tongue—
And eyes. Eyes. Two are black. They are a crow’s eyes, a cobra’s eyes—dead eyes with no pupils and no eyelids either.
But the third is different. Instead of the blue-black cyclops eye that is her monster-doll’s, this third eye is a silver storm, both mirror and ocean—and her father is there, his reflection pulling together from the swirling, smoky whirlpool to eel like a serpent, and oh, his face, her dad’s real face!
Maybe she makes a sound. Or maybe, like a snake, the whisper-man tastes her with his tongue, because all three eyes cut sideways and then—
He sees me. Her hand catches the ball of a shriek. He sees me, he sees me, he sees me!
And then.
Her father.
Turns—
EMMA
Blink
1
“EMMA. EMMA?”
“What?” Emma snapped back, awareness flooding her mind in an icy gush, an arrow of sudden bright pain stabbing right between her eyes. Blinking past tears, her gaze sharpened on a pair of windshield wipers thumping back and forth, pushing rills of thick snow.
Driving. I’m in a car. Her hands fisted the steering wheel. But where am I going? How did I get here?
“Emma, are you okay? You look kind of out of it.”
“I-I’m fine. Sorry, Li … Lily.” She stumbled over the name, but Lily felt right in her mouth and Emma did recognize her, sort of: leggy, blonde, a touch of the valley girl.
“Have you figured out where we are yet?” Lily asked.
Oh man. They were lost? Jesus, how long had she been gone this time? “Not yet, but I bet we’ll be up … up …”
“Emma?”
“Jasper’s,” she blurted, the word catapulting from her mouth like a rock from a slingshot. “I bet we’ll be up at Jasper’s in no time.”
“Are you—” Lily let out a shriek as a fork of lightning stuttered. “Is that normal?”
“For Wisconsin,” Emma said as thunder bellowed and the lumbering Dodge Caravan—a rental; yes, I remember complaining about the bad shocks, the mushy steering—jumped. “Happens all the time, Lily.” She tried to keep it light, but her voice didn’t feel as if it belonged to her at all. God, leave it to her to vacate at the worst possible time. The blink had been so different, too: not just a blackout or snapshot flash but a whole sequence, fading fast. What had she seen? A little girl and a … a cat? Yes, but what was its name? Something to eat … Jelly? No, no, that wasn’t right.
Come on, Emma, you can do this. Just relax and let it come.
But she couldn’t relax. Her head killed. Her vision fuzzed and then blistered as her headache pillowed and swelled. The space before her eyes opened in a spiky, purple-black maw, violent as a bruise. The doctors had always dismissed it as a variant of a scintillating scotoma, a visual symptom of a migraine. But hers wasn’t anything like a normal person’s, which figured. No bright firefly flashes for her, no shimmering arc or fuzzy spiral. Hers began as a rip in thin air, like a hole being munched right out of the backside of this world. The doctors made reassuring noises about petit mal seizures and an Alice in Wonderland syndrome, but all their talk boiled down to the same thing: Honey, so sucks to be you.
Can’t afford to blink away again, not while I’m driving. Although she’d clearly been away already, hadn’t she? But why now? Come on. Emma put a finger to her forehead, right above her nose, pressing the hard circle of a lacy titanium skull plate beneath muscle and skin. Think. When had she taken her last dose? This morning? Last night? Two days before? She couldn’t remember. The docs were always on her about that, too: Emma, you need to be more compliant. Easy for them to say. It wasn’t like she was trying to be a pain in the ass, but let them choke back pills for a week or two, see how much they liked it. The anti-spaz meds completely messed with her mind. The headaches might evaporate, but reality also misted to a blur until she felt as flat and lifeless as fading words on a tattered page. She didn’t know what was worse: no headaches, seizures, and blinks, or wandering around all hollow and zombied-out, like an extra from The Walking Dead.
Well, just muscle through it. Gripping the wheel harder, she squinted through tears. The world beyond the windshield was shimmery and nearly colorless, that relentless curtain of snow going to gray, about to fade to black as the day died. But what she saw around the edges of that purple maw was wrong: craggy mountains on the right, the drop-off of a valley on the left.
What? Her eyebrows pulled into a frown. That wasn’t right. Sure, Wisconsin has plenty of valleys, but the mountains were pimples. They were zits. Nice zits but still zits.
God, where are we? Her eyes slid to her driver’s side window, frosted with a rime of thin ice. And right then she had the strangest, weirdest impulse: to press her hand to the glass, feel the burn as the ice bled. One push, where the barrier’s thinnest. That’s all it would take. Push hard enough and the glass would open to swallow her up and then she would fall …
Another crash of lightning broke the spell, made her heart flop in her chest. Beside her, Lily let out a yelp and clutched the dash. “How can it do that in snow? Come on, Emma, you’re the science brain. Is it supposed to do that?”
“Sure, if cold air passes over warm water,” she said, relieved her voice didn’t shake. Temples throbbing, she forced her eyes forward again. The metal plate above her nose seemed to be burning its way through the bony vault of her skull. What had that been about? Bleeding ice? Pushing through melting glass, a thinning barrier, to some other world? You nut, who do you think you are—Neo? Stop this. Come on, get a grip. “It just means we’ve got to be close to Lake Superior. That’s why the thunder’s so loud. If we were further away …” She bit off the rest. Lily probably didn’t need a lecture on acoustic suppression and the reflective properties of ice crystals—and she did know Lily, right? Sure, they were both juniors at Holten Prep; Lily was in her … her … What class was it? English? History? Basket-weaving for the mentally deranged?
What’s wrong with me? Her tongue skimmed her lips, tasting fear and salt. Coming back from the blink this time was much worse than ever before, her mind pulling itself together like molten chewing gum pried from the underside of an old shoe. But why? Usually, it was blink-blink and, whoa, when had she decided to take up skydiving? All right, the fugues—pockets of time for which she had no memory—weren’t quite as bad as that, but if she ever needed a go- to for why eighteen pairs of shoes suddenly appeared in her closet, she was set.