Page 3 of What Is Dark Within Me

“I’m looking for Violet Timmons,” she said out loud, holding a photo of Violet to the glass. The scrying mirror grew so cold that her knuckles creaked as she readjusted her grip. She sucked in a breath filled with the scent of wet dirt and rotting flowers.

Aleja looked into the polished silver of the mirror, but instead of her reflection, a large pair of jet-black eyes stared back.

The mirror landed against the ground with a thud as she scrambled for a tarp thrown haphazardly over a lawn chair to cover the glass pane. Reflective surfaces could bind lesser Otherlanders, she remembered. There wassomethingin the mirror—Agnes Flanders had kept it covered for a reason.

Aleja stumbled down the fire escape, too nervous to peek under the tarp until she’d set the mirror on her kitchen counter. That was when she noticed a hairline crack. Barely visible even when the light shifted, it was like someone had drawn a thin lightning bolt across the reflection of her living room.

Aleja froze. There was no movement, aside from the pages of an open book fluttering next to her ill-fitted windowpane. Her refrigerator hummed; a background noise to accompany her loudly beating heart.

“Hello?” she called, feeling stupid. The Otherlanders were excellent at going unnoticed, but an observant witch could find the signs. Reaching for one of the kitchen knives, she scanned the room, trying to remember the sort of things her grandmother had taught her: look for a shadow that didn’t belong, an empty cushion that sagged as if someone was seated atop it. Don’t tell them your name, don’t ask for theirs, and never,everask for a favor.

Two black eyes watched her from the dark television screen. She gasped, nearly dropping the knife, and the eyes widened as if realizing they’d been spotted. They were gone a moment later, reappearing in her murky windowpane.

Then they disappeared altogether.

“No, no, no,” she muttered, reaching the glass in time to see the eyes flash in a window across the street before vanishing.

She threw her work bag over her shoulder, not bothering to lock her door as she raced toward the emergency stairwell. The creature was still trapped in reflections, she told herself, fumbling in her bag for her car keys and a small compact mirror, as she scanned the street for a set of dark eyes. If she could keep the creature in one place before it broke into the physical world, a simple binding spell might suffice.

And no one would ever know she’d stolen a priceless magical artifact from a dead woman, then let an Otherlander out to wreak havoc in the human world.

Do you really think you can catch an Otherlander because you’ve watched every season of Supernatural? said the little voice in her head.

Oh, shut up, it’s not as if you weren’t there, she answered.

The voice was something she’d never been able to explain to anyone, not even a fellow witch. She’d spent so much of her early life being told she would die young that it was hard to get excited about anything, considering she might not be around when it happened. For years, Aleja had taken every bit of hope, sadness, and joy, and tucked it into a special place in her mind—somewhere she thought of as her locked room, though maybe it was now more of a shuttered museum. A place to keep all those pesky emotions under glass. A curator lived in this museum. A woman who sometimes knocked at that door shouted, “You can’t starve us forever! We’ll find a way out someday!”

That Aleja sometimes answered, “Just watch me!” was probably even more evidence that she needed therapy.

Aleja’s car sputtered in protest as she slammed her foot against the gas, taking a sharp left when the eyes appeared in the window of a closed storefront, then on the side of a black van up the road.

Ahead was a large wooded park, taking up several city blocks. If she could chase the spirit in that direction, it would have only two options to find new reflections: north or south. Her bare foot dug into the gas pedal as the enormous eyes watched from the second-floor window of a hostel, then an oil-choked puddle, then from a shining obsidian sculpture in the lawn of a park-side home.

It disappeared, and Aleja jostled in her driver’s seat, searching for a place to park and then continue on foot.

Until she spotted it in her side-view mirror.

Her hands jerked the steering wheel. It was her good luck a car wasn’t in the other lane. It was her bad luck that the road was narrow and under maintenance.

The side-view mirror shattered against one of the construction site’s barriers before she could hit her brakes. A gas lamp at the edge of the park flickered as though the moths around it had grown violent and impatient—ready to take their prize by force. She dreaded the thought of what she might see when she stepped out to look at her sole means of transportation.

But there were more pressing issues. A huge figure with tremendously long arms shook itself off like a dog coming in from the rain and bounded deeper into the park.

“Really?” Aleja groaned. “I was hoping for something smaller.”

She looked down the dark path, trying to remember everything she knew about the Otherlanders. They were tricksters who asked riddles with no answer. They enjoyed flattery, yet took offense at even unintentional slights. Aleja wasn’t prepared to face one alone, but she was the one who had stolen the scrying mirror from Agnes Flanders’s home. She was the one who’d cracked it.

And if this Otherlander harmed anyone, it would be her fault.

The voice in her head began to speak.You need a plan.A simple binding spell isn’t going to do it anymore.

I know,Aleja wanted to snap back. She should call Paola. The binding would be easier with someone to keep the creature distracted. But it would mean admitting Aleja had stolen something from one of Paola’s clients. And that she’d done so after Paola had given her a job for which she had no relevant experience when Aleja had nowhere else to turn.

Stop moping, said the voice.The Otherlander isn’t going to hang out here while you wait for her to show up and people could die in the meantime. Think.

Aleja looked at the compact mirror in her hand. It might be enough to hold the Otherlander until she found help. The Otherlanders were vain, and there was little they enjoyed more than getting the upper hand on humans. Maybe if she could get it to talk…

There you go.

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