Page 1 of I Will Mend You

ONE

AMETHYST

My life flashes before my eyes like a kaleidoscope of fractured memories. The first ten years are black, the ones following are muted. When I meet Xero, the colors turn vivid, at first. Then red with his betrayal. And finally flames, when I set him on fire.

Now, I’m here, in Mom’s kitchen, staring at her corpse.

The monster in the mirror got to her first.

She also shot Uncle Clive in the chest.

How did that thing escape her glass prison? She isn’t real. She can’t be real. But her breath mists in the air, her eyes gleam with life, and her hands drip with blood. She’s too terrifying to be a nightmare.

I step backward through the kitchen, my feet slipping on Clive’s freshly spilled blood. My heart beats so hard that its vibrations reach my fingertips. That only excites the doppelgänger, who advances on me, her chest rising and falling with excited breaths.

The afternoon sun streams through the kitchen window, highlighting the golden flecks in her green eyes. She looks nothing like me, even though everything about us is identicalfrom the scars on our chins to the way only the left side of our curls is bleached. She even lightened her right eyebrow to match mine.

Which means she isn’t a mirror image.

Another sign that she hasn’t crawled out of the mirror is her clothes. While my hoodie, leggings, and tank top are covered in mausoleum dust, she’s clad in an over-bust corset and black miniskirt identical to what I wore for shooting videos for the fan club.

But that doesn’t mean anything I’m seeing is real.

This has to be an immersive hallucination brought on by overwhelming stress. I just watched Xero invite a bunch of men to rape me while I was unconscious. Then I burned him alive and escaped through the catacombs. My trauma doubled when I went to the vicarage for help and ended up fighting off Reverend Tom.

It’s no wonder my brain is glitching.

On the journey across town, I kept hallucinating smoke. Maybe my mind conjured up an empty road, and I crashed the car. Maybe the real me is lying in the wreckage, imagining this creature wearing my face has crawled out of a mirror dimension to murder my family.

“What’s wrong, Amy?” she asks, her grating voice forcing me back to the present. It’s melodic, mocking, menacing, like she’s merely a parody of a human. “Aren’t you happy to see me?”

Her green irises dance within the whites of her eyes. It’s like locking gazes with a predator that wants to eat my soul. Nausea clogs my throat, and my stomach twists the way it usually does when I look in the mirror too long.

This creature is nothing like me. She’s hateful. Murderous. Insane. She’s everything Mom and Dr. Saint feared I would become—a remorseless killer.

Blood roars between my ears, drowning out the frantic beat of my pulse. The kitchen spins, rooting me in the center of a carousel of delusions.

I swallow hard, forcing down a surge of panic, and my gaze bounces to the monster’s gun. When the kitchen timer chimes, something inside me snaps. This is too vivid to be a hallucination. Too visceral. This has to be a grand mal delusion.

“Tongue-tied?” she asks.

“What…” I gulp. “Who are you?”

Her laughter rings in my ears like alarm bells, warning me to turn around and run. Run now before I become her third victim.

“What kind of question is that?” she asks, her voice hardening. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten the sister whose life you stole.”

Ice fills my veins, making my breath catch. I glance at the floor where Mom lies unmoving in a puddle of congealed blood. She never mentioned any siblings. I would know if I had a sister, let alone a twin. And I sure as hell didn’t steal anyone’s life.

The creature flutters her lashes, tilts her head, and stares like I’m the curiosity. “You don’t remember?”

“Remember what?”

“Me,” she snarls and raises the gun to my head.

My heart flips. I still can’t believe this is real, yet she’s advancing on me, her fury mounting with each sticky, wet step.

Terror clogs my throat, and I swallow over and over, trying to dislodge the knot of paralysis keeping me rooted to the spot. She keeps coming, those uncanny features twisting into a rictus of rage.

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