Kill Monsters, Get Rich Chapter 2

I frowned down at the blonde woman and wondered which one of us was crazy. Because one of us had to be. She’d asked the question so frankly, like it was a reasonable thing to ask.

“How--” I began but then stopped. “How am I able to see you? You’re standing right in front of me, that’s how.”

“So?” she asked me, and I stared at her.

“So… I have functioning eyes?” I suggested as I glanced at Carmen, who shrugged.

She was just as baffled as me.

“Look, your… brother?” I went on as I turned back to the woman. “He needs help. Can you freak out about me being able to see you on the way to a doctor or something?”

“No doctors!” Kegan snapped, and he slowly pushed himself upright by sliding himself up the wall. Then he leaned against it heavily and glowered at me. “No hospitals!”

“Well, you can’t just sit here and bleed to death,” I said as I tried to keep my cool. “We have to call an ambulance or something!”

“No ambulances,” Kegan ground out before he looked at his sister. “Do it.”

Whatever he was telling her to do, she clearly didn’t want to do, because her already-pale face went sheet-white, and she crouched down next to him, with her brow furrowed.

“Kegan--”

“I know,” he interrupted her, and for a moment it was like Carmen and I weren’t even there, like we were no longer a concern. “Just do it. Skin-deep. They can open me back up to fix it properly.”

The woman nodded, quick and frantic, and I watched as she shoved her brother’s jacket aside and lifted the hem of his t-shirt to show the sluggishly bleeding hole in his side. Beside me, I heard Carmen gag slightly. I, meanwhile, had never been very squeamish around blood, and after my tour, it was gonna take a lot more than seeing a stab wound to make me feel faint.

The blonde woman pressed her fingers over the wound and pinched it shut, and for a second, nothing happened. Then, out of nowhere, Kegan began to scream.

It was a strangled, harsh sound, one he tried to hold back through gritted teeth. Carmen leapt away as her hands flew to her mouth. Her eyes went wide and horrified.

I, too, couldn’t help but be caught off guard.

“Jesus!” I cried out, and I was caught between the urge to recoil and to lean forward and take the woman’s hand away from Kegan. “What the-- what are you doing?”

The blonde didn’t respond as she took her hand away, and when she did, I saw… I saw a burn mark. On Kegan’s skin. Exactly where her fingers had been pinching.

It looked cauterized.

Kegan’s breathing was more like shuddering, and his blond hair was now matted with sweat.

Just what the hell had Carmen and I walked into?

“What the fuck?” I rasped and looked between Kegan and his sister. “I-- you-- what the hell is going on?”

“I cauterized it,” the blonde woman said, and her green gaze was unwavering as she stared at me. “Just the surface level. It will stop him losing too much blood before I can get him somewhere safe.”

“Not a hospital?” I asked as every nerve in my body thrummed with restless energy. It was like the switch for my fight-or-flight reflexes was stuck in the ‘on’ position.

“No hospitals!” Kegan ground out again, for maybe the fourth time.

I just ignored him that time and kept my focus on his sister. “Who the hell are you? And why is it so strange we can see you? We saw you in the bar.”

“That’s not possible,” she said as her nose scrunched up. “I put up a glamour before I even walked in there.”

“I don’t know what that means, but it doesn’t change the fact we saw you,” I said and looked to Carmen, who nodded.

“We did see you,” my sister added before she waved a hand toward the three unconscious bodies still on the floor.. “And those three creeps. You’re welcome, by the way.”

“Thank you for that,” the woman said, and ducked her head slightly. “Genuinely. But if you are able to see us, and we don’t know your names… that’s a problem.”

“What kind of problem?” Carmen asked as she cocked her head, and I could see the glitter in her eyes, the curiosity. She always got that look when she was presented with a new engine to take apart.

“Can we discuss this somewhere that isn’t a breeding ground for infection?” I asked tightly, and then I leaned toward Kegan and offered an arm for him to brace himself against. He eyed me warily for a moment, but he eventually took one hand away from the wound in his side to sling it over my shoulders.

He was almost exactly my height, maybe an inch taller, but narrower in the shoulders. I could tell from his posture he was leaning almost all of his weight on me, but he didn’t feel very heavy. That probably said more about me than him, since I’d just come home from spending a year on tour, and neither of us were small.

Kegan was already pale, paler than Carmen and I, but his skin looked downright sallow next to mine. I wondered if he had some kind of clotting disorder or something, because even for someone who’d just been stabbed, he looked really bad.

His sister evidently thought the same, and her hand came up to touch his face while her own expression was tight with concern.

“We need to get you help,” she said, and as one hand went to his side, her fingers brushed over the hand I had around his waist.

Something bright exploded across my vision, and I jerked back. Since I still had a solid grip on Kegan, I yanked him back with me, and he cried out in both pain and indignation.

“Leo!” Carmen yelped.

“Kegan!” the woman cried at exactly the same moment.

The bright flash was gone as soon as it had arrived, and I righted myself. Then I blinked and looked over at Kegan and the woman, and an apology was already halfway to my mouth when I stopped.

“What the hell was that?” Kegan scowled at me, and the blonde woman eyed me with a mixture of concern and trepidation.

“Leo?” Carmen took a step forward. “What’s wrong?”

I turned to her so suddenly she flinched a little. I felt my mouth move, but for a moment the sounds didn’t come, like something in my brain had bugged and needed a second to reboot.

Finally, I swallowed hard and pried my suddenly dry tongue off the roof of my mouth.

“Lines,” was all I managed to say.

My sister stiffened, and I watched her dark eyes go wide, saw in real-time as it clicked. What had been hovering on the edge of her perception was suddenly shoved into the center of her focus.

I watched as Carmen’s eyes darted around and almost hungrily drank in the sight-- the real sight-- of what surrounded us.

Finally, she looked back at me.

“Lines.”

When Carmen and I had been eight, our parents died in a house fire, so we’d been put into foster care and had ultimately been housed by Maria and Theo. Within a few weeks, we’d both learned that if we wanted to get put into a good home, if we wanted to stay out of a psychiatric institution, if we wanted to stay together, we’d have to stop talking about the silver, glowing lines we sometimes saw.

They were like pathways, little trails of mist and whispers floating just above the ground. We’d given them a hundred names. Carmen had called them fairy paths, spirit lines, and I’d called them ghost spiderwebs, angel blood. We hadn’t known what they were, only that we could see them, and no one else could.

Not that we’d asked everyone. We’d learned to stop asking.

I couldn’t remember the exact point at which we’d stopped seeing the lines altogether, but we had. One day, I’d looked up and realized I hadn’t seen them for a while, and we’d simply begun to believe they’d been made up, like an imaginary friend.

But now, as Carmen and I stared at the three unconscious men, Kegan, and his sister, I realized something else: when we’d been kids, the lines had never been attached to anything. But here, now, they were. They pooled over the unconscious men like shimmering spiderwebs and wound around Kegan and the blonde woman’s ankles like they were tethering them to… something.

Or… maybe… the people were the tethers.

I looked at how four of the lines trailed back toward the door that led to the bar. The fifth, Kegan’s, led out of the alleyway.

“It’s just aura,” the blonde woman said, and when I turned back to her, she was watching me with a curious expression.

“It’s what?” My gaze snapped up to her face.

“Aura,” she repeated as she frowned again.

“Wait,” Carmen said, and she stared at the blonde woman. “So, we’re not going crazy? Those lines we used to see-- these lines here-- they’re… real?”

“They are,” the blonde woman said as she frowned even deeper. “But you should know what they are. The fact that you don’t is… concerning.”

“Agreed,” Kegan grunted. He was still leaning on me, though not as much as before, but this was probably because I’d almost dragged him to the ground a moment ago.

“You two should probably come with us,” the woman said as she wound a blonde curl around her finger. The gesture was both thoughtful and nervous. “We… need to figure this out. Somewhere private.”

Carmen looked at me with one eyebrow raised. When it came to mischief, I’d always been the one to follow her lead, but when it came to tactical shit, she’d always been the one to follow mine.

I weighed our options. I’d managed to take out one of those men by myself, and Carmen had managed the second with a bit of help from the woman, who’d also taken out one of the men either by herself or with Kegan’s help. So we were probably evenly matched against the blonds, except Kegan was injured, and I reckoned he weighed less than I did.

If the pair of them were planning to jump us in some way, or to rob us, I didn’t like their chances. And I doubted petty thieves would go to the trouble of hiring decoys and stabbing themselves just to get their hands on the twenty-two dollars and sixty cents I had in my wallet.

“Alright,” I said to the woman. “I wouldn’t oppose getting some answers about what the hell’s going on.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Kegan asked his sister, as if I hadn’t said anything. His expression was doubtful underneath the pain.

“They need to speak to Renée,” the blonde woman insisted. “Or, Renée needs to speak to them. And we need to go back anyway.”

Her brow furrowed in concern as she gestured to his bloody side, and Kegan sighed laboriously. His breath shuddered a little, and I felt him put more of his weight on me.

“Fine,” he relented after a long, silent moment.

The woman nodded smartly and walked out of the alleyway, and she was clearly intending for us to follow. I hesitated for a moment as I looked back at the three unconscious men, but the idea of sticking around until they woke up didn’t really appeal. They’d probably just try to stab me again, so I readjusted my grip on Kegan and followed the blonde woman as Carmen trailed behind us.

As we walked out of the alleyway and into the street, I braced myself for the odd looks that would come with walking down the road half-carrying a guy who’d obviously been stabbed, but no one looked at us. No one even seemed to notice us.

“Why isn’t anyone looking at us?” Carmen asked as she had the same realization. “We’re with a stab victim.”

“The same reason no one noticed me in the bar,” the blonde woman replied with a shrug. “As long as we don’t draw attention to ourselves, no one will pay any attention to us. We look normal.”

Carmen shot me a look that made it clear she was just as confused as she’d been before asking her question, but I just shrugged.

“By the way,” I then said as I looked at the blond siblings, “we told you our names, but you never told us yours.”

The blonde woman turned to look back at me, as if somewhat surprised, but then she smiled. It was a little strained, probably because her brother was bleeding all over me, but it seemed genuine.

“I’m Kylah,” she told me. “Campbell. He’s Kegan. We’re--”

“Twins?” Carmen finished wryly. “We’d noticed.”

She gestured between herself and me, and I felt Kegan chuckle slightly against me and then groan as something inside him protested that action.

“You all right?” I asked, out of habit, because he obviously wasn’t, but Kegan just cocked his head.

“I’ve been better,” he admitted. “You were… surprisingly competent back there. Considering you had no idea what was going on. Did you train with someone?”

“Uh… yeah?” I blinked at him. “The US Army?”

Kegan frowned. Clearly, that wasn’t the sort of answer he’d been looking for.

We lapsed into silence as we continued down the road, and I soon realized Kylah was leading us to a small motel downtown. I’d never had cause to stay there myself, but sometimes when Carmen and I had friends visiting, we’d recommended it to them because it was cheap and fairly close to our apartment.

Kylah led us to room eight and cast a glance around before she unlocked it, opened the door, and ushered us inside. I deposited Kegan on the bed nearest the door, and he sank onto it with a half-pained, half-relieved groan as both hands went to his side again. As I stood and rolled my shoulders, I heard my joints pop, and I noticed there was a considerable blood stain smeared over my jacket sleeve and my hand where I’d gripped Kegan’s waist.

I then frowned and raised my hand to my nose. I sniffed my fingers, and there it was, I hadn’t imagined it. There was the metallic scent of blood, obviously, but also something… sweet. Almost floral. It was an unusual scent for a guy to wear, but right now probably wasn’t the best time to critique a guy on his choice of cologne.

“What the fuck?”

Carmen’s deadpan question drew me out of my thoughts, and I looked up.

Only then did I really take stock of the room we were standing in.

It was a normal motel room, for the most part. There was a suitcase thrown onto one of the beds with clothes haphazardly spilling out of it, and on the tiny table by the window were the remnants of some drive-thru dinner, overlarge milkshakes and oversalted burgers.

But tacked to the opposite wall was a collage of newspaper clippings, photos, and post-it notes.

I half expected there to be red string linking pieces together, like the murder-board for a cop in a serial-killer movie who’d just been thrown off the case for going too far. Carmen had loved those movies, and as far as I knew, she still did. She loved anything with a mystery, with a puzzle to be solved, like the bits of an engine to be assembled. I’d always preferred action flicks. Warzones and terrorist plots and maybe a little James-Bond-style espionage with women poured into dresses and martinis poured into glasses.

Cliché, maybe, but very entertaining-- even if I knew they weren’t remotely accurate.

I turned to Kylah and briefly thought she’d make a pretty good Bond girl. There was an edge in her eyes that said ‘do not fuck with me,’ but I shook the thought off for now.

“I agree with Carmen,” I said instead. “What the fuck?”

“It’s just research,” Kylah said, except she was not looking at me but at her brother.

Kegan had gingerly shrugged off his jacket and edged up the hem of his t-shirt to inspect the damage to his side, and he frowned at it like he was disappointed more than anything else.

“Research?” Carmen echoed as she walked over to the collage. “For what? These are-- shit. These must be copies from the city archives or something. Are you writing some kind of history report?”

“Not intentionally, but we have had to dig pretty far back,” Kegan told her while still looking at his side. I watched as he carefully pushed himself to his feet and shuffled toward the bathroom but didn’t shut the door, and I fought the urge to roll my eyes when I saw Carmen staring at Kegan’s back as he lifted his once-white t-shirt over his head and tossed it into the sink. His entire left side was smeared scarlet. “So, which Sanctuary are you two assigned to?”

“Sanctuary?” I repeated. “What, like, social support?”

“Not exactly,” Kylah said carefully, like she was trying not to wince.

I wasn’t sure if that was because I’d clearly said something she thought was ridiculous, or because Kegan kept hissing through his teeth every time he touched his side.

“You’re right,” Kegan said when he finally noticed Kylah was watching him. “We need to take them to Renée.”

“Hey, whoa, wait a second,” I said as I raised my hands. “We followed you here, sure, but we’re not just gonna let you guys drag us all over until you can jump us and-- I dunno, harvest our organs or something.”

“It’d be a waste of time, anyway,” Carmen said unhelpfully. She’d sat down not on one of the chairs next to the table by the window, but on top of the table itself, and was swinging her legs. “We’re both AB-positive. Not many people you can donate to with that blood type.”

“Carmen,” I warned and shot her a look, but she just stuck out her tongue at me, so I rolled my eyes and turned my attention back to Kylah. “What do you mean by Sanctuary, then?”

Kylah walked up to me. As in, she walked right up to me, so close we were almost nose to nose. I leaned back a little on instinct, since I wasn’t used to having anyone in my personal space, except maybe Carmen, but I didn’t let myself take a step back.

The floral scent… what I’d thought was Kegan… Kylah smelled like that, too. It was a lighter, fresher smell on her. Or maybe that was just because there wasn’t blood on top of it.

“You… really don’t know?” she asked in a fascinated tone as she tucked a blonde curl behind her right ear that I realized was rather pointed. “Do you?”

“Know what?” I asked. No matter how pretty she was, I was starting to get kind of annoyed. “You haven’t told us anything! Now, can you explain why my sister and I can see these weird lines or not?”

Kylah took a step back, and her expression was thoughtful. Then she tipped up her chin, like she was offering me a challenge of some kind.

“Do you believe in magic?”

I stared for a long moment before I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out, so I closed it again.

Finally, it was Carmen who spoke.

“What?”

“Magic,” Kylah repeated, with her eyes still trained on me. “Spells, enchantments, curses, that sort of thing.”

“Yes, I know what magic is,” I told her. “I… of course I don’t believe in it. That’s… kid stuff. A game. A story.”

Kylah smiled. It was a faintly chilling smile, and I felt something thrill down my spine, like an excited, anticipatory jolt. There was the sensation of being almost… drawn to her. Or not even to her specifically, but something around her.

“You can feel it, can’t you?” she asked while looking excited and intrigued. “I wonder… when was the last time either of you were around someone like me and Kegan?”

“What? Twins?” I asked, and I knew even as the words left my mouth that it wasn’t what she meant.

And, sure enough, Kylah’s smile was indulgent.

“Magicals,” she corrected me. “People who can do-- people who are-- magic. Supernatural.”

“Is that what the lines are?” I heard Carmen ask from behind me, but I was still looking at Kylah. “Some kind of magic?”

“Every magical creature has an aura,” Kylah explained. “Like a… fingerprint. Or a scent. You can’t see your own, but it’s still there. And, like a scent, you can use it to track people.”

“So… you’re magic?” I asked as I looked Kylah up and down and then glanced at Kegan, who was still wiping blood off himself. He seemed largely disinterested in the conversation, probably because he was so obviously drained. He’d gone from standing to sitting on the edge of the bathtub, and the line of his shoulders was, in a word, exhausted.

“I am,” Kylah confirmed. “And so are the two of you. I can see your auras, just like you can see mine.”

Carmen slid off the table and got to her feet. She folded her arms, shook her head, and then unfolded her arms again.

“I don’t believe this,” she said, and she shook her head again. “This is too crazy. Magic isn’t-- isn’t real. It’s magic! It’s a fairytale!”

An amused smile slid its way up Kylah’s face, and she walked over to Carmen.

“What’s that line?” she asked, more to herself than to my sister. “‘All stories have a grain of truth.’ Myths and legends all had to start somewhere. It’s just another kind of history.”

Carmen stared at her, then at me, and she flailed an arm as if to say ‘do you really believe this shit?’

“It’s… not the weirdest explanation,” I said carefully and shrugged. “I mean… unless our beers were spiked with acid or something… how else would we be seeing the lines?”

I was still seeing them now, tangled around Kegan and Kylah’s ankles. It was kind of impossible not to notice them, and I was surprised I hadn’t noticed them the moment I’d first seen Kylah, to be honest.

“You can see those lines-- aura-- because you have the second sight,” Kylah told us. “Magic isn’t… it’s not very common in humans. Most humans aren’t born magic, but become magical, through being turned into something like a werewolf or a vampire--”

“Whoa, wait, hold up,” Carmen interrupted. “Werewolves and vampires are real, too?”

“Pretty much everything is, in some form or another,” Kylah replied. “Werewolves, vampires, ghosts, faeries, and so on. All magical creatures have the second sight, which is just the ability to perceive magic. Think of it like… everyone else in the world is colorblind. It’s something they have no scope of perception for, so they can’t comprehend even if it’s described to them. It’s an extra sense.”

“Colorblind,” I repeated with a nod. “All right. I… I guess that makes sense.”

About as much as anything could make sense right now.

“So because Carmen and I can… because we have this second sight, we weren’t affected by your… what did you call it… your glamour?” I continued.

“Exactly.” Kylah grinned at me and was evidently pleased I was catching on. “A glamour is an illusion spell. Some glamours only work on non-seers-- those without the second sight. They’re the simplest to cast. More sophisticated spells can also obscure magical sight. But nothing can hide an aura.”

“Which is what threw you off when we could see yours,” Carmen said. Apparently she, too, had managed to wrap her head around it. “Because we could see it, but we didn’t know what it was.”

“This still doesn’t explain how you didn’t know all of this already,” Kegan said from the bathroom. He wasn’t even cleaning the wound anymore, just slumped forward on the edge of the tub with his hand pressing a facecloth to his side. “The magical world is secret for a reason. If there are seers running around who have no context for what they’re seeing, it could risk exposing everything.”

He ended this sentence with a groan through clenched teeth.

“Seriously, dude,” Carmen said as she took a step toward the bathroom, but then she awkwardly halted, and I could see the conflict in her face. She wanted to help, but she had no idea how. She was a mechanic, not a doctor. “You need to go to a hospital or something.”

“No,” Kylah answered for her brother. “He’s right, we can’t. We have our own people.”

“Then go to them,” I said. “This discussion can wait until you’re not at risk of internal bleeding.”

Kylah’s quickie cauterization may have stopped him from losing too much blood, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t still at risk. He shouldn’t even have been standing up.

I only now realized that… she’d cauterized the wound with her bare hand. That… must have been magic. How else? Her hand wasn’t burned, and she hadn’t had a flame or a metal conductor. She’d used magic, she’d used her bare hand, and she’d cauterized a wound.

“You should come with us,” Kylah said, even as she went to the bathroom and crouched in front of her brother. Seeing them right next to one another, it was that much more obvious just how bad Kegan was doing. They were both fair-skinned, lighter than myself and Carmen by a margin, but where Kylah was just pale, Kegan was practically a ghost.

“You need to be properly informed,” Kylah continued, still with her attention on her brother. “And we need to figure out what to do with you.”

“‘What to do’ with us?” Carmen narrowed her eyes. “You’re not ‘doing’ anything with us.”

“Okay, I phrased that poorly,” Kylah admitted. “We need to figure out how to help you two. Because if you’re seers, you should have been told about the magical world years ago. You should at least know the basics. But you don’t. Which is a problem.”

“Not the biggest problem we’re looking at, but yeah,” I said. It took me a moment to tear my gaze from the burn on Kegan’s side, but I did do it, and I met his gaze, then Kylah’s. “Take us to this Renée person.”

Kegan nodded and pushed himself to his feet. I didn’t miss how his face twisted with pain, but he stood tall and sure. I could respect that. He probably would have made a decent soldier. He left his bloody shirt in the sink, which was fair enough because there was no amount of lemon and detergent that would save it from the state it was in. Then, with Kylah’s help, he shrugged on his jacket again, but they didn’t head to the door of the room. Instead, they walked over to the tall mirror on the wall.

“You might want to, uh, put on another glamour if you’re gonna head out,” I told him. “I mean. You can pull off the jacket-only, covered-in-blood look if you want, but you’re gonna draw attention.”

“It’s very ‘nineties vampire movie’,” Carmen agreed, though from the way she was looking at him, that probably wasn’t a complaint.

I threw her a look, and she just shrugged shamelessly.

“I’m not walking down the street like this,” Kegan told us, and he raised his still-bloody hand to the glass of the mirror.

I watched as he began streaking his own blood across the glass. He was dabbing out some kind of sigil.

Panic shot through me. Maybe it was just the ‘nineties vampire’ aesthetic, but the sight of a dude drawing some kind of blood sigil onto a mirror had me thinking of ways to get the hell out of here before someone got ritualistically murdered.

But the sharp warnings shuddering through me calmed when Kegan stepped away from the mirror, and a whole new kind of wariness took its place.

The mirror was… rippling.

Like it was liquid. Silver and sort of gelatinous, shifting and moving but not falling out of the frame, apparently not beholden to the laws of gravity or physics of any kind.

“I know I’ve said this a lot already tonight,” I said while staring at the mirror. “But seriously. What the fuck?”

“It’s perfectly safe,” Kylah assured me. “Mirrors are… peculiar. Magically speaking. With the right spell, they can become doorways.”

I looked over at Carmen and expected her to be backing away, to cuss the blonds out or something, but instead she stared at the mirror with nothing short of fascination.

“Holy shit,” she said softly. “That’s actual magic. Actual magic!”

“Carmen--” I started, but I stopped when she turned that blazing grin on me.

“Come on,” she said in a familar goading voice that usually ended up with us drunk and injured and laughing our asses off. The sort of voice that always preceded a really badly-thought-out dare. “If it kills us, it’s at least a cool way to die!”

“It looks like liquid mercury,” I told her. “It might just do that!”

My sister shrugged and took two confident strides towards the mirror, and it had never been more obvious that she was the younger of the two of us, that she wasn’t the one who’d signed up to the army. She had no sense of discipline.

“Carmen!” I said sharply. “Just-- wait a sec!”

“We both saw the lines,” she said and pointed at me with her eyes firm. “If this gets us answers besides ‘you’re crazy,’ I’m open to listening.”

She took another step toward the mirror and was almost close enough to touch it when she stopped again and pointed at Kegan.

“Ghosts are real, right?” she asked him.

“Um… yes?” he replied as he blinked at her, and she nodded smartly.

“If this does actually kill me, I’m gonna haunt your ass,” she warned, then before I could stop her, before I could even cry out to her, she stepped up to, into, through the mirror and--

She was gone.

She was completely and utterly gone. Like she’d never even been there. I gaped, open-mouthed, at the… the thing that was a mirror and yet not. The thing that had taken my twin sister.

“What the hell is that thing?” I demanded and glared at Kegan.

“Exactly what my sister said it is,” he told me. “A doorway.”

And with that, he stepped through it and vanished, too.

It was just Kylah and I left in the motel room now. I figured that, at least, if this non-mirror was dangerous, she wouldn’t have let her brother go into it. But… still. Magic? Mirror-doorways? Seeing things most people couldn’t?

Kylah smiled at me, and the gesture was soft and encouraging.

“Are you a religious man, Leo?”

“Not really,” I muttered and shrugged. “My parents were Catholic, but… I never really believed.”

“But you understand the concept of faith?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “I have faith.”

Not in a god, as such. But I had faith in smaller things. Carmen, for one. My friends. The idea that, fundamentally, humanity was good and kind. Or maybe those were bigger things.

“Then,” Kylah said, and she took my hand and led me over to the mirror. “Have faith in yourself. You wouldn’t have come here if you didn’t believe me and my brother. You certainly wouldn’t have brought your sister. And I reckon you’re strong and fast enough to have stopped her from walking into the mirror if you’d really wanted to.”

She… wasn’t wrong.

“You promise this is safe?” I asked, like that would change my mind, even as I raised a hand to touch the not-glass. It was cool, and definitely liquid, but when I pulled my fingers back, they weren’t wet. And I still had fingers, which was a good thing.

“Safer than most things in life,” Kylah promised me. Then she dropped my arm and stepped back, so the decision was entirely mine.

But the decision was already made. Carmen was in there. Or on the other side. Even if it was dangerous, I wasn’t just going to leave her there alone.

I stepped through the mirror.