This was it. This was how she would die.
Without warning, they stopped. She could still hear their screeching, but it was muffled. She felt a weight on top of her, like a body shielding her from attack.
“Hello?” Josie said.
“Quiet!” a voice barked. Harsh and raspy, barely discernible above the chaos surrounding her. “They’ll follow your sound.” She felt an arm around her, then a hand on her wrist.
Suddenly she was being pulled to her feet and practically carried down the trail. She stumbled and tripped, but the strong arm around her waist kept her moving.
Light flooded her eyes and Josie felt the hard concrete of Round Tree Lane. She half expected to be bombarded again, but the screeching and fluttering was gone. Whatever attacked her in the darkness had vanished.
She turned, looking for the person who had saved her life, but all she saw was a pair of car headlights bearing down on her.
“Jo!” a voice yelled. A voice she knew. “Jo, what the hell are you doing? Get in the goddamn car!”
Nick.
Josie shielded her eyes as another set of lights illuminated the street. Floodlights mounted on the roof of Nick’s SUV. They cut a swath through the dark expanse to where Josie stood under the streetlamp. She stumbled forward, feeling like all the strength had been drained out of her.
Blood poured down her arms and she could feel a sharp pain at the back of her neck. She reached the SUV, steadying herself against the hood as the engine idled.
“Hurry up,” Nick barked. “We’ve got to get you out of here.”
Right. Out of here. Yes, back to the mirror. She had to get back through the mirror.
Nick reached over and opened the passenger door, and Josie whipped around it, careful to keep her body in the safety of the light as she climbed into Nick’s car.
She slumped in the worn leather seat, panting. Interior lights of the car illuminated every inch of the cabin. And for the first time, Josie was thankful for them.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Nick asked. His voice was gruff but laced with concern and panic.
“Th-thank you,” Josie stuttered. Her teeth were chattering, her body wracked with shivering. “You . . . you saved my life.”
“You’re lucky I followed you.” Nick pulled his sweatshirt over his head and draped it over her shoulders. “What you were thinking walking home at dusk? And the path through the woods? You were practically asking for the Nox to attack.”
Nox. Is that what they were? It seemed like such an innocuous word for what lurked in the dark.
Nick ran a hand through his thick, dark hair. “You’re lucky you made it through the woods to the street. Most people don’t make it five feet once the Nox catch them.”
“Someone,” Josie panted. “Someone carried me out.”
“Carried you out of the dark woods?” Nick shook his head. “No one’s alive in there, Jo. Not once the sun goes down.”
No one was alive in the woods. That was impossible. She’d felt an arm. She’d heard a voice.
“What is with you today?” Nick continued. “It’s like you’re a totally different person.”
“You have no idea.”
“Huh?”
Josie kept quiet. It was no good trying to explain anything to Nick, since she’d be gone in a few hours and then the old Jo would bring things back to normal. Nick would just write it off as “lady problems” or temporary insanity, and Josie would pretend this sojourn into Jo’s world never happened.
After a moment, Nick sighed. “Fine. Don’t talk to me. I’ll take you back to my house and get you cleaned up.”
“No,” Josie said. Her teeth were still chattering. “Take me home.”
“Jo, you’re covered in blood.”
“Take me home,” she repeated. She couldn’t risk not being there for the next window. She had to get home.
“Suit yourself. But if your dad gets pissed off, it’s your problem.”
3:55 A.M.
Despite a half dozen Advil in the last few hours, Josie’s head still pounded. Her body felt like it had been poisoned—sluggish, heavy, and aching all over.
Her ripped-up forearms didn’t help matters. While the Nox, as Nick had called them, had only inflicted a few wounds on the back of her neck before she made it out of the woods, her arms looked as if she’d gone three rounds with a Weedwacker. Most of the cuts were shallow, with a few exceptions, and after a painful hour in the bathroom cleansing the deeper gashes and taping them up with gauze and butterfly bandages, she figured they’d heal okay.
But what the hell were those things? She knew now what Jo had been trying to tell her when they switched places:
At five minutes to the appointed time, Josie was ready to go. She’d changed back into her own clothes, shoving the blood-covered yellow dress and Nick’s sweatshirt deep into the bottom of the hamper, and left Jo’s room exactly as she’d found it. Everything would look better now: her parents’ divorce, her mom’s weirdness, even Nick and her social standing at school. All of it seemed bearable when weighed against the homicidal monsters that lived in the darkness just outside the bright lights of Jo’s room.
She thought she’d be sad to have to go back to her own life, but as the surface of the mirror rippled, Josie smiled. She was ready to go home.
She wanted to feel her own bedsheets; smell the musty air of her dilapidated, water-damaged house. Before the image on the other side was even fully in view Josie reached her hand into the undulating surface of the mirror.
Josie felt the thick, spongy interior of the portal as she pushed her arm through. She was about to duck into the portal and go through to her own bedroom, when her fingertips grazed something solid and rough.
Huh?
She leaned into the gooey substance of the portal until her shoulders rested against a hard surface. It was solid and heavy, and it wouldn’t budge. She pulled away, and slowly, the image on the other side of the mirror came into focus. A gray concrete wall.
The wall of the basement in Josie’s house.
In an instant, Josie realized what had happened. Jo had conned her. She’d conveniently left out several details about her life—a life that kind of sucked, apparently—and now that she was in Josie’s life, she had no intention of coming back.
Panic. Josie reached up as far as she could, trying to find an edge, something she could wedge her fingers between and maybe force the mirror off the wall. She submerged herself in the portal, and tried to push the back side of the frame away. But it wouldn’t budge. Jo must have secured the mirror with something, sandwiching it tight against the concrete.
The mirror began to ripple again and Josie pulled her body out of the portal. As her own reflection rematerialized, cold reality slapped her in the face.
Josie was trapped.
TWENTY-FIVE
6:55 A.M.
JOSIE DIDN’T REALIZE SHE’D FALLEN ASLEEP until a knock at the door woke her up.
“Are you awake?”
