“You make less sense with every word you say,” Ricky said.
Amber laughed.
“Maybe we should all talk about getting some rest,” Amber said. “That was the whole point in delaying a day, right? Ricky, you can stay upstairs. I’m just as comfortable in the day bed down here.”
“And I’ll take the couch,” George said.
“The bed’s big,” Ricky said to his brother. “We can share.”
“Ricky, you kick like a Rockette, and any space you don’t use is taken up by Tucker. I’ll be fine on the couch.”
“I’ll get the blankets,” Amber said. She went to the hall closet, leaving behind the bickering brothers. Her great uncle had suffered from poor circulation and apparently he had been stingy with this heat. There was a huge pile of blankets in the closet on both floors. Amber had meant to box them up when she cleaned out the house, but she was glad that it had slipped her mind. She carried the stack back to the living room and Ricky had already gone upstairs.
“You sure?” Amber asked. “I’ll flip you for the day bed.”
“Seriously,” George said. “I’m fine.”
Amber left some of the blankets and turned to go to the side room. The realtor had called it the dining room, but there was no table to legitimize that designation. Amber had put the day bed in there just so it wouldn’t look empty.
She paused in front of the mirror.
“The mirrors try to eat my eyes,” she said.
“Graffiti?” George asked from the doorway. Amber nearly jumped out of her skin at the sound of his voice.
“Sorry. You said you read that in the mill?”
“What?”
“The mirrors try to eat my eyes. It sounds like the beginning of a poem,” George said.
“I think one of them wrote it,” Amber said. “They found mirrors in the cellar of my neighbor’s house. I think he knew something about mirrors. Maybe it was something important.”
“The cellar?”
“Yeah. Did I show you the letter?”
George shook his head. He lowered himself into the chair near the door. Amber pulled out her phone and found the picture of the letter. She had marked it as a favorite so she wouldn’t lose it. Sometimes she had a dream that there was some information in there that she had missed. When she woke up and grabbed her phone, she liked to look at the picture of the letter to try to puzzle out the meaning. She almost had it memorized.
“My eyes are hypnotic. Glancing at them can cause paralysis. That’s how the infection traps its next victim. Light is the antidote—it can diminish the mesmerizing effect. I killed thirteen, most with a wooden stake—through the eyes, not the heart,” she quoted.
“Where?” George asked.
“Through the eyes, not the heart,” she said again.
“No, I mean where did he kill the thirteen?”
“Oh. I assume in his house.”
“Like, down in the cellar with the mirrors?” George asked.
Amber turned up her hands and shrugged. She unfurled one of the blankets and stretched it over the day bed. George moved to the other corner so he could help.
“Why do you ask?”
“Glancing at them can cause paralysis,” George said. “He said that glancing at his own eyes could cause paralysis. Did he live alone before everything happened?”
“Yeah,” Amber said.
“Then how did he know? Maybe he knew that glancing in his own eyes caused paralysis because he had glanced at his own eyes. Like in a mirror. Maybe that’s why he moved the mirrors to the cellar. Imagine this—you’ve got monsters in your cellar and you know that a mirror will paralyze them. Why not put a bunch of mirrors around, wait for them to get paralyzed, and then you can kill them without much danger to yourself.”
“Timing,” Amber said.
“Huh?”
Amber tossed George a pillowcase to go with the pillow that he was holding.
“He figured out the mirrors because his own eyes were paralyzing, right? So why was he hunting them after he figured out the mirror trick? Seems like he must have hunted them first, got bitten, and then figured out the mirrors.”
“Yeah, but he wrote you the warning letter,” George said. “That happened after he was infected, so clearly he went through a transition period where he was turning into a monster but he was still fighting them. So maybe he figured out the mirrors and used that knowledge against his fellow monsters.”
“Come on,” Amber said. “I’ll help you make up the couch.”
# # #
While they made up the couch for George’s bed, they talked about nothing in particular. His classes were going well—maybe better than they had any right to. George said that he didn’t feel challenged in his schoolwork. He wished he had picked a subject that wasn’t something he was already adept at. Amber couldn’t figure out that sentiment. She couldn’t imagine why he wouldn’t want to succeed.
She took the stool behind the bar and George sat down in front, like he was the only patron.
“It’s not that I don’t want to be good at it,” George said. “It just sometimes feels like a copout. I took classes that didn’t stretch me. I learned different ways to look at the world, but nothing that I wouldn’t have eventually come up with on my own.”
“It must be a burden to be so smart and capable,” Amber said.
George laughed.
“If you only knew. Seriously, though, when I hear about the crazy stuff you’ve been through in the past year, it makes my whole life seem…”
“Wait a second,” Amber said. “From what I’ve heard, weren’t you eaten and regurgitated by an otherworldly demon who was trying to take over the earth?”
George waved a hand. “That was my brother’s fight years ago. I was a bystander.”
She started to ask him something else, but his eyes were unfocused. His attention had wandered far away.
“What?” she asked.
“So, he killed thirteen of them. That
