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.
FOUR
THIA FELL THROUGH THE SKY,PLUMMETING TOWARD THE LUSHincline. Sharp wind tore at her braid, whipping it into her face. She was spiraling, unable to tell which way was up and which was down. A hard object cracked against her ribs, and a screech split the air. She ricocheted in the other direction, something warm and damp splattering her face. The substance stung; she hastily wiped it away, blinking.
Her fingers came away black. It smelled like blood, but it was thicker and sticky, staying put as she attempted to clear her cheek with the sleeve of her hoodie.
An expanse of green loomed before her. The ground. Her stomach rolled. She was going to die. She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to watch the end approach.
Then she was yanked from behind, like someone had grabbed hold of the back of her shirt and halted her descent. The air was knocked from her lungs, and she let out a guttural bray as her chest compressed. She hung like that, no longer falling, but in pain.
When she could breathe again, she opened her eyes. She was barely twenty feet above the ground, floating along as though the wind itself was carrying her. A large forest covered the earth to her left, and that same green hill sloped below her. A woman in a pink velvet dress emitted a rainbow of sparks from her hands—sparks that were, in that moment, hovering under Thia and carrying her safely to the ground. When her feet finally touched grass, they disappeared. She stumbled with relief, her hands falling to her knees, and she took a giant, heaving breath, running her tongue over parched lips. “I’m alive.I’m alive.”
A laugh tinkled behind her. Thia managed to push herself upright and turned as the woman approached, gliding gracefully over the uneven ground. She was beautiful, with long, sleek blonde hair and plump pink lips the same shade as her bodice. Her irises were a metallic silver that glinted in the bright sunlight, matched by pale skin that also seemed to shimmer as she moved.
She inclined her head graciously. “Hello, dear.” Then she paused, head tilted slightly as if she was unsure how to continue politely. “Are you—are you quite alright?”
“I—I…” Thia had no idea what she was. She opened her mouth, then shut it again. Had she just…fallen through amirror?
More likely, she was suffering from a sudden case of psychosis.
