I catch myself tapping on the door frame and snatch my hand down, disgusted with myself. Anxiety crashes through me, overwhelming. I need to finish tapping the door frame. Otherwise I won’t be safe in the garage. And I know it won’t actually make a difference, that tapping a door can’t make me safe, but that doesn’t stop the all-consuming urgency of the compulsion or the desperate need for even the few seconds of relief that the tapping will bring.

“You coming or what?” Elliott calls in a low voice, still scanning for Beings.

“Hold on,” I say, setting my jaw. I will not give in to my OCD. I’ve worked too hard to backslide like this. I need to put it in its place right now, once and for all, in order to stop the anxiety. I will turn around and go back through both these sets of double doors again—three times apiece, five times apiece, just to make sure—until the urges and the anxiety are gone.

I turn around. I take one step. I glance up, and see the mirror.

It’s high on the wall above the waiting area, one of those mirrored half-domes that help people see around corners. It takes me a second to register what it is. In that second, something ripples across the surface of the mirror: a rainbow sheen, like an oil slick on water. A low buzz of electricity crackles across my skin. And then comes the weird sensation in my ribs—as if there’s a string connecting my smallest rib to something inside the mirror, and it wants to reel me in.

My body understands what’s happening before my brain does. Horror washes through me like a storm surge. I freeze.

The oil slick on the mirror’s surface darkens to a gray curl of fog. Something carved from night reaches up through it. A paw—its joints too long, too close to being fingers—curls through the mirror. Scythe-like claws scrape trenches in the wall below.

Another paw joins it on the other side. A terrible face rises up: pointed ears made of darkness, a foxlike muzzle that spreads into a panting smile. In one push it’s out of the mirror and on the ground, shadows rising from its back like tendrils of mist.

It unfolds itself.

It stands up on two legs, its joints crooked and horrible.

It turns—and looks at me.

CHAPTER SIX

MY MUSCLES UNLOCK. I STUMBLE BACKWARDS. Terror is an egg in my chest, cracking itself open, beating its wings like a second heartbeat.

I turn and run.