Chapter 12
Jess
By the time we made it back to my street, my pulse was still skittering from what we’d just seen; the shimmer in the gym windows and that feeling of being watched.
Bianca glanced back at me, then at Raven. “I’ll go on ahead with him. You coming?”
I shook my head. “I need a minute. Fresh air.”
They traded a look I pretended not to see and kept walking toward my house, their voices fading into the hum of cicadas.
The quiet was a relief. For about ten seconds.
A shadow detached itself from the fence across the street.
Etan.
“You’re jumpy,” he said, stepping into my path like he’d been waiting for me.
“Gee, I wonder why,” I muttered, trying to sidestep him.
He moved with me. Not stopping me exactly, but close enough that I had to tilt my chin up to keep eye contact.
“You can keep fighting me, Jess, but it’s pointless.” His voice was low, almost conversational.
I narrowed my eyes. “You don’t get to tell me what’s pointless.”
A small smile tugged at his mouth, but something predatory. “You’re going to fall in love with me. You know that, right?”
I laughed, but it sounded thin, even to me. “Not happening.”
“Oh, it will.” His gaze didn’t waver. “Nate was already in love with you. Every second he spent wanting you and being too afraid to act. Every private moment in his bed, keeping his hand busy all whilst thinking of you… I remember it. I feel it. That’s why I can’t stop thinking about you. Why I don’t want anyone else.”
My chest tightened not from belief, but from the rush of heat in my pulse, traitorous and sharp. “You’re not him.”
“I’m the better version,” he said softly.
“All of Nate’s love for you, but none of his hesitation.
I’m the one who will actually take you, instead of wasting years pining, alone in my room, jerking off.
So, stop wasting your time on the shy boy and go with the one who knows what he wants and knows how to pleasure you. ”
Something hot twisted in my chest. Anger, maybe, or something worse.
My legs moved before my brain caught up, but his voice followed, twisting around my ribs, hot and insistent.
Every word played on a loop in my head, sharper than I wanted, truer than I’d admit.
By the time my hand hit his chest to push past, my pulse was a drumbeat I couldn’t outrun.
I shoved past him before I could figure out which.
I told myself I’d shake it off, but every step was just more space for my brain to replay what he’d said in his low, confident voice. The sound which was too much like Nate’s and not enough all at once. The heat it left coiling low in my stomach was impossible to ignore.
Want. Need. Guilt.
They tangled together until I couldn’t tell them apart.
The worst part wasn’t that my body had responded before my brain could shut it down. For one dizzy moment, I’d wanted to go with him. Back to his room. Back to where that sharp-edged confidence would close the space between us and make me forget everything except the way his hands felt on my body.
And I hated myself for it.
Because it’s Nate I wanted in my bed. Nate’s hands. Nate’s kiss. Nate’s quiet way of looking at me like I was the only person in the world.
Not Etan’s smug certainty and dangerous smirk.
Etan may feel like Nate. Look like him. Move like him. That’s the trap, the one I kept telling myself I could see, even while my feet were inching toward it.
By the time I made it to my porch, my pulse was still hammering. Not from fear. Not entirely.
By the time I got back to my room, I’d buried it under a thin layer of normal. Bianca and Raven didn’t need to know.
The flamingo mirror sat on my desk, its faint crack pulsing like a heartbeat.
Bianca flopped onto my bed, arms spread. “Okay. We’ve got five creepy magical seams in town, one squirrel that might be a demon, and an increasing urge to burn every mirror I own. What’s step two?”
Raven hopped to the edge of my desk like a tiny, judgmental professor. “Step two is figuring out how to shove Etan back into the Mirror Realm and slam the door behind him.”
“Sounds simple when you say it like that,” I muttered.
“It’s not,” he said. “We need a seam strong enough to hold while we force him through. And we have to do it before Nate fades completely.”
Bianca sat up. “Strong seam. Where’s the biggest one?”
Raven’s beady eyes fixed on me. “The school auditorium. Big antique mirror near the stage. That thing’s been part of the building since before electricity.
It’s practically begging for something to crawl out of it.
Every other seam you found tonight is either too weak to hold once we open it, or would rip wider and let something nastier than Etan through.
The smaller ones won’t pull hard enough to drag him back, and if we try to catch him at random, he’ll just slip away into the nearest reflective surface.
We need a seam with muscle and the auditorium’s mirror is one of the only ones in town that’s strong enough to work before Nate fades completely. ”
Bianca tapped her chin. “The school play’s over, right? So, it’ll be empty?”
“Mostly,” Raven said. “Which means fewer witnesses… assuming you don’t set anything on fire.”
“That’s a big assumption,” Bianca said under her breath.
“Okay, fine,” I said. “Let’s say we use the auditorium. How do we get him there? Etan’s not exactly the type to accept an invitation to his own magical deportation.”
Raven’s beak clicked. “We bait him. Mirror creatures are drawn to things that connect them to their anchor.”
“Anchor?” Bianca asked.
“In this case, Nate. And by extension…” He looked straight at me before he said, “…you.”
My stomach did a nervous flip. “Oh, good. I get to be live bait.”
“Not just you,” Raven said. “Something irresistible. Something tied to the original summoning.”
It took me a second. “The lip gloss.”
Bianca perked up. “You mean the demon-kissing, boyfriend-stealing, realm-breaking lip gloss?”
I crossed to my vanity, pulling open the drawer where my entire glittery arsenal lived. Tubes and pots clinked together — cherry red, midnight plum, coral with gold flecks, and at the very back… the peach-gold tube that had started this entire mess.
I picked it up carefully, like it might bite me. The shimmer inside caught the lamplight, the gold and rose dust swirling like a tiny storm.
Raven tilted his head. “That one, plus a few others for extra punch. You make a little altar of temptation. He’ll come sniffing.”
Bianca’s grin was pure mischief. “We honey-trap the magical parasite with a cosmetics display?”
“Call it what you want,” Raven said. “When he’s close enough, we use the seam’s pull and push. Hard.”
I looked down at the tube in my hand. My pulse was loud in my ears. This thing had been meant to make Nate notice me. Now, it was my best shot at saving him.
“Fine,” I said, shoving it in my pocket. “Auditorium it is.”
Raven fluffed his wings. “You’d better be ready. Once we open that seam, there’s no going back.”
The crack in the flamingo mirror gave one slow pulse and somewhere deep in the glass, something laughed.
I lay on my bed thinking of Nate, time was running out. It was already Monday night. There were three days until Baba Yaga’s deadline hit, and somehow that felt shorter than it had yesterday. Maybe because I could hear the clock ticking in my own bones.