Three
THIA BACKED OUT OF THE DRIVEWAY, brEATH FALLING IN RAPID bursts. Her heart hammered so loud she could hear it over the hurried screech of her windshield wipers. She turned onto the street, setting a course for Riley’s house.
What the hell had just happened? Her grammy had hit her. And lied. For years. Over what? Her mother’s college major? It made no sense.
Wind careened into the flimsy doors of her vehicle, nearly driving her off the road.
Thia swerved, hands aching where they clutched the wheel, and managed to correct the course as the mirror bumped across her knees.
Keeping her attention on the road, she released the wheel with one hand and tossed the cursed thing into the passenger seat.
She wished she had her phone—it was still dead in her room where she’d left it.
Riley never minded a spontaneous visitor, but the storm was worse than she’d thought.
Rain pounded her windshield, and she could barely see a few yards in front of her.
She forced air through dry lips, urging her car to keep steady in the onslaught.
When lightning flashed again, a new pit settled in her stomach.
Her parents had died in a storm just like this one. They’d gone for an anniversary holiday, leaving Thia with Grandma Winnie for the weekend—well, forever, but they hadn’t known that at the time.
Never walk away angry. Thia had done just that.
What if something happened to her? Grandma Winnie would never recover.
For all that Thia was pissed, her grammy didn’t deserve that.
She pictured her car on its head in a ditch, her body unconscious and dangling from a seatbelt.
The highway was empty. No one would find her for hours.
Her eyes prickled, threatening tears. She wished she could just teleport to Riley’s. Or maybe the library, since she didn’t think she had it in her to explain things to him right now. Anywhere but in this car, knuckles white over the wheel, arm still smarting from her grammy’s strike.
You’re so much like her. If her grammy had lied about Melina’s vocation, what else had she lied about? Did Thia know her mother at all? Did she even know her grammy?
Light flashed again, red this time. She scanned the road, thinking it must have come from another car. But no, she was the lone fool who’d decided to trek through a goddamned thunderstorm, and the red light was still shining.
It was coming from the passenger seat.
Thia’s gaze slipped sideways. The mirror. The glass was gone. In its place was a moving picture, two small figures on a blue backdrop that shot beams of colorful light at one another.
She slammed on the brakes. Instead of screeching to a halt, the car coasted left.
Shit. A rookie mistake. She was hydroplaning. It rained so rarely in Topeka, she wasn’t used it. She forced down the building panic and tried to remember what her old driving instructor had said.
Steer in the direction she wanted to go. Brake lightly. Or was it don’t brake?
Her car kept sliding, right off the road and onto the grassy shoulder where it screeched to a halt in the muck, smoking.
Thia sat for a moment, just breathing. Rain continued to batter her windshield, too swiftly for her wipers to clear. She was fully off the road now, so there was no danger of getting hit, but she was going to have a nightmare of a time getting her tiny tin can of a vehicle out of this mud.
She set that problem aside for the moment and scooped the mirror off the seat, holding it up to her face.
The image was still there. She flipped it over, searching for a button or a plug—something to tell her it was a video player or picture frame she’d accidentally turned on when she’d thrown it at the seat.
There was nothing. She examined the image again. One of the figures had descended onto what appeared to be a grassy slope, the other still flying above.
Flying. On a broom. What in the world?
The metal began to vibrate, and a blinding gold light flared from its edges.
“Argh.” She clutched it tighter as her retinas burned. She blinked, trying to clear her vision, to pull her gaze away, to make out the car in the dark beyond.
She couldn’t. She was trapped, transfixed by the image against her will. The figures were still firing those strange lights, blues and greens mixing with the red now too. It might have been pretty under other circumstances, a firework display from human hands.
The mirror began to shake in earnest, growing hotter by the second. Thia’s arms ached holding it up, her palms on fire. “Let. Go.”
She tried to hurl it away, tried to open her door to toss the wretched thing out into the storm, even if it had been her mother’s. Instead, her chest pitched forward, and her head broke glass.
Then she was falling.