Elegy - Tara Hudson

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      I tried to plant my palm against a wall for a moment’s support, but my hand slipped and bumped roughly against the next wall in my rotation.

      Eleven.

      Maybe I’d tried too hard to ignore the girls outside the door. Or maybe I’d grown too dizzy to hear them. Those were the only reasonable explanations for why they’d suddenly stopped talking. Why they’d stopped making any noise at all. But that wasn’t possible . . . was it?

      Twelve.

      Actually, it was possible. The other girls had definitely stopped giggling or talking. I couldn’t hear the droning background noise of the theater’s surround sound, either. It was as if the world outside had gone weirdly silent while I spun.

      In my final, dizzy rotation, I felt the strangest sense that—even in the unnatural quiet—something waited. Something watched.

      Thirteen.

      “Bloody Mary,” I whispered, ending my last turn with a desperate grab at the sink.

      My feet skidded to an awkward stop and I bent over the basin, sucking in deep breaths as I tried to suppress a sudden wave of nausea. Below me, the drain seemed to circle itself, spinning and spinning around the center of the bowl. The sight of it made me even dizzier, so I looked up instead.

      The new view wasn’t much of an improvement. My face moved in the mirror, shifting from one corner to the other. Fractured pairs of eyes danced like bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope: green on the left side, green on the right; green above, green below.

      Gray in the middle.

      My vision abruptly corrected itself and I stumbled backward, away from the face in the mirror. Mostly because it wasn’t mine.

      The pale skin and crew-cut hair; the cold, soulless gray eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses—that was Kade LaLaurie, smiling back at me from the place in the mirror where my face should have been.

      Kade, the murderer; the crazy person; the dead guy who should have currently occupied a dark corner in hell instead of this bathroom mirror.

      His nasty grin widened as he held one finger to his lips, soundlessly telling me to keep quiet.

      As if I could even muster the will to scream right now.

      I thought briefly about calling forth my glow. Even if I didn’t really understand how it worked, it hadn’t failed me before—especially when I’d needed it to incinerate demons. But a specter on the other side of a bathroom mirror? I had no idea how to fight such a thing.

      Still, something about Kade’s continued, mocking smile helped me find my voice.

      “What do you want?”

      My whisper sounded harsher and stronger than I’d expected. Hearing it, Kade dropped his smile. With a cold glare, he cocked his head to one side and scrutinized me. I don’t know exactly what he saw, but his smile returned. He lifted one finger to the interior of the glass and tapped it ever so slightly.

      Assuming that a fight would follow, I braced myself. But instead of attacking me, Kade suddenly vanished behind a pane of frost. The entire mirror iced over, hiding him from view until I couldn’t even see the obscured outline of his figure.

      For a moment, nothing else happened.

      Then slowly, letters began to appear in the frost, traced there by an invisible finger. As I watched, the letters scrawled backward to form words, starting with the bottom of some message and moving toward its beginning. Nothing about it made any sense until the last word completed itself.

      At that point, I’m pretty sure I stopped breathing.

      In even, flawlessly aligned block letters, the message read:

      YOU

      OR THEM.

      ONE DIES PER WEEK UNTIL YOU JOIN US.

      I understood its meaning perfectly: the message came from the darkness itself.

      From hell.

      Before my mind could process this fully—before I even had a chance to breathe—the ice melted, crashing onto the sink and floor in one noisy wave.

      My feet were soaked, my hands were shaking, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the mirror. Kade had vanished, leaving nothing but the image of a pale, terrified girl in his place.

      I must have figured out a way to black out but stay conscious. That was my only explanation for why I suddenly found myself sitting in a theater chair, staring blankly up at Kaylen.

      A very angry version of Kaylen.

      “What do you mean, a pipe burst?” she demanded, crossing her arms and giving me a glare that bordered on murderous.

      I shrugged. In my semidelirious state, I must have dragged myself out of the hellish bathroom and conjured up an excuse for the sopping mess. Excellent work on my part, all things considered.

      “I don’t know, Kaylen,” I heard myself saying. “It’s your plumbing.”

      Most of Kaylen’s guests snickered. But from the corner of my eye, I saw Jillian shift forward ever so slightly. Judging by her clenched fists, she knew something had gone wrong. At the very least, she knew a pipe hadn’t burst.

      “I’ve got to go,” I said abruptly, pushing myself up from the chair. Without looking at the other girls, I moved toward the pile of overnight bags at the back of the room. “Jillian, can you take me home?”

      “What?” Kaylen nearly shrieked. “You destroyed the bath mat, and now you’re making my best friend leave my party?”

      I hesitated, glancing at Jillian. Thankfully, she looked more than ready to leave, too. I let my shoulders slump and put on my fakest, most embarrassed frown.

      “I . . . I didn’t want to admit it, but I did get sick playing Bloody Mary. I tried to wash up in the sink, but I kind of overfilled it. I’m so, so sorry, Kaylen. This is just so embarrassing.”

      The apology worked . . . a little. Kaylen still looked frustrated, but the rigid line of her mouth softened and she uncrossed her arms.

      “Well, after all the wine and the spinning, I figured that could happen,” she conceded.

      In a last-ditch maneuver, I decided to ham it up to the fullest. For Jillian’s sake, since she still had to see these people at school on Monday.

      “I don’t want to ruin the party. And it was so important for me to make a good impression. But I feel kind of awful now. Like, I might get sick again.” I wiped the back of my hand across my forehead, as if the gesture would prove . . . something. Clamminess, maybe?

      “So how about I mop up all the water,” I finished. “And then just go home?”

      Kaylen’s eyes widened and she waved her hands frantically. “No! God no. I don’t want you puking on the floor, too.”

      “Okay,” I said, hanging my head in fake dejection. “I’ll just go then.”

      Evidently my pathetic but determined charade had thoroughly spooked Jillian. “I’ll get our stuff,” she chimed in, a little too eagerly. She practically dove for our bags, digging them out of the pile and then using them to usher me toward the door. Like I needed any additional prodding to get out of there, and soon.

      After a perfunctory good-bye to Kaylen and her guests—all of whom looked a little dazed by the scene I’d just made—Jillian and I raced out of the room, down the stairs, and through the front door.

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