It was like being thrown out of a pleasant dream and into a nightmare, the wonderful, certain calm replaced by a wave of sickness and a lancing pain behind her eyes.

What had she just done?

What had she almost done?

Kate forced herself backward—away from the counter, away from the stunned line and the man who’d now begun to shout—tore the apron over her head, and fled.

She dropped her bag beside the door.

Riley and Malcolm were no longer there—thank God for small mercies.

Her pulse was still a raging beat inside her skull, but whatever had come over her back in the coffee shop was gone, leaving only a headache and a pressure behind her eyes.

A migraine? But Kate had never gotten migraines, and she was pretty sure their side effects didn’t include the sudden desire for violence.

Violence—her mind snagged on that word, and the night before came back again: the man and the shadow, both so steady, so calm. The emptiness in the man’s face as the monster’s own seemed to fill out. And then—the alley. Kate standing face-to-face with the monster, the nothing of it, all cold and hollow hunger and those silver discs, like mirrors—

Her vision doubled and she had to close her eyes for a second to keep from losing her balance. She went to the bathroom and ran the tap, splashing handful after handful of cool water on her face and neck. She dragged her gaze to the mirror, surveying her pallid complexion, the scar that traced her jaw, the flat blue of her—

Kate froze.

There was something in her left eye. When she raised her chin, it caught the light, shining like a lens flare, the kind of thing that belonged in a photograph, not a human face. It was a trick of the light, it had to be, but no matter how she turned her head, it stayed. She leaned in, close enough to fog the mirror with her breath, close enough to see the interruption in the dark blue circle of her iris.

It looked like a silver crack. A sliver of light.

A mirror shard.

It was so small and yet the longer she stared, the more it seemed to stretch across her vision, blotting out the room and swallowing her sight. Kate squeezed her eyes shut, trying to pull her mind free, to hold herself in the here and now, but she was already falling forward into—

A memory— the window is open the fields outside waving in the breeze she sits on the floor with a pile of necklaces trying to pick apart the tangled chains while her mother hums by the window her small fingers dance over the metal links but the harder she tries the more

tangled

everything gets annoyance rises like a tide turning to anger with

each

failed

attempt

every

worsening knot

the anger spreads from the tangled chains to her mother at the window— her mother who doesn’t seem to care what a mess she made her mother who isn’t even there to make it right her mother who left her alone with monsters—

“Get out of my head,” snarled Kate, slamming a soap dish into the mirror.

It struck the glass with a splintering crash as she lurched back to her senses, to herself.

She dropped the dish and retreated a few steps, sinking onto the edge of the tub. Her hands were shaking. A cobweb crack fractured the image in the glass. She’d broken the monster’s hold.

But it was still there, inside her head.

And she remembered now, its face from the alley, seeing herself in its eyes and falling down into that dark, violent place, remembered Riley’s voice calling her name, pulling her back. But she’d left something behind, or it had, this sliver of itself, this crack in her head.

How was she supposed to get it out?

How did you hunt something that had no shape, a shadow that made puppets out of people?

How could you destroy a void?

Kate’s head spun, but as her pulse steadied and the panic and confusion cooled, her focus sharpened, the way it always did at the beginning of a hunt.

It was a monster. No matter what form it took. And monsters could always be hunted. Killed. You just had to find them first.

Kate’s head came up. They were connected, somehow, she and this thing. And connections usually went two ways. She cut a look at the mirror. From this angle she couldn’t see her reflection, couldn’t see anything but the cracks running down the mirror’s surface.

But if the monster could get into her head, could she do the same?

Kate rose to her feet and approached the mirror. She curled her fingers around the sink’s edge, anchoring herself, and tried to steady her breathing. She’d never been one for meditation—she would rather hit something than try to find stillness—but she went looking for it now as her gaze drifted up.

The instant the shard caught her eye, she felt the pull, but Kate resisted, charting a course from her chin, along the line of her scar up her jaw, before shifting over lips, up nose—

Show me, she thought, as her gaze finally reached the shard.

The silver blossomed, and then she was falling forward, but not as fast as before—it was more like a slow and steady slide, the ground tipping away beneath her. She gripped the counter hard as the silver spread across her senses, tangled through her head, and something that wasn’t a voice whispered a humming cloud of want and hurt and change and fight and make and kill and the ground began to fall away faster and faster until—