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Somehow the office looks even smaller, even more the color of a bruise. Jane closes her eyes. She knows Aiden’s mother could never realize how unfair and cruel it was to come asking such questions. She knows her anger is not really toward his mother at all.
“Your guilt doesn’t make you a monster,” Jane says quietly, glancing up to meet Ashley’s confused face.
She pictures her own mother or Cassie sitting across from her in the rolling chair—perhaps even Thomas, if she could be brave enough. She hears herself saying the words, watching the truth seep like poison into their hearts.
“Jane, are you sure you’re alright?” Ashley asks, wiping the tissue beneath her nose with pinched eyebrows.
Jane picks up the iron fire poker that Kimi left for her and steps back through the door’s threshold, out beneath the bright overheads once more—out where the Mimic can have her on full display.
Get a good look while you can, she thinks, tightening her grip on the thin piece of iron.
“I will be,” she tells Ashley. “Just stay put, okay? We’ll come get you when it’s over.”
Jane shuts the door before heading toward the store’s entrance. She doesn’t look away from the darkness outside.
Twenty-three
she followed the moon’s light.
From the rooftop of the store, everything looks strangely ordinary. Kimi guesses that they are around twenty feet above the dirt parking lot below, lit up only by the orange glow of a streetlamp and the faint wash of fluorescent lighting coming from inside the store. She can see the branches of the oak trees dance at this height like tall skeletons waving at her.
She used to come up here all the time when Grandma Ama ran the store. They’d bring blankets and candies that had just expired and could no longer be sold, then sprawl out under the evening sky and point out the stars. Ama used to tell her that’s where people at peace go once they pass on; they join a constellation, helping to fight off even the darkest nights for those they leave behind.
The wind that picks up rustles through the trees violently, scattering dead leaves in a tumbling free fall. It carries with it the smell of burning wood that always seems to singe the air this time of year, a smell that has always comforted Kimi with memories of bonfires and s’mores and sharing secrets.
It’s a beautiful night, she thinks. The sky is clear, the stars are endless—yet somewhere in the shadows, Death waits.
Kimi fights against the chill settling into her bones as Thomas walks the perimeter of the roof, the baseball bat clutched in one hand and a pair of binoculars in the other. He raises them to his face, observing the edges of the forest in dragging sweeps. He hasn’t looked at her the same since the Jackson incident. There’s a slight disgust in his eyes anytime they drift over her face, an icy contempt that’s marred his original indifference.
She can’t blame him really. It’s the same way she’s looked at herself for years.
Thomas walks back across the roof with long, delicate strides, a worsening limp working against his left leg where the Mimic earlier grabbed hold of him. She pulls the exterior steel door shut as he rejoins her inside the stairwell landing.
“I don’t see it out there,” he says in a low voice. “Now seems as good a time as any.”
In the cold lighting of the stairwell, his eyes are red, from exhaustion or unshed tears or both. When Kimi saw him for the first time in the store earlier that evening, she thought he was too pretty—almost laughably so, compared to the usual woodsy types that come through the store.
Hours later he looks practically shell-like, a boy with an old man’s face.
“Here goes nothing,” she says, stepping over to the far wall. She opens the small metal cover to the store’s breaker switchboard, eyeing the various black and red knobs that line it like they might spell out a death wish.
Thomas tugs out his walkie-talkie, holding it against his lips. “Jane, we’re about to hit the lights, alright?”
The receiver beeps. “Sounds good—or should I say copy? Yeah, that sounds more official. Copy,” Jane replies through the speaker, far more calmly than Kimi feels.
She saw something slightly concerning in Jane’s eyes when they were parting ways downstairs—an odd resoluteness that made Kimi wonder if the young girl should really be left to monitor the storefront alone. After all, Jane’s just a kid, really. No older than Grace was when she died.
No older than you when—
Kimi closes her eyes, digging her nails into her palms.
She knows what Ama would say: After blood, it’s every man for himself.
But Kimi has no more blood in these mountains, and being on her own has been a slow death. She might be trapped with a group of people now, but she knows the reality: Thomas has his sister to keep safe, and Ashley has the baby. The only person who might have put up a fight for her is now downstairs with his brains leaking out.
Her hand hovers over the switch third from the bottom of the board, trembling. The fingers on her other hand grasp Ama’s gold medallion, heavy where it hangs from her neck. Of all the bedtime stories her grandmother had told, the woman never rightly captured the length of the Mimic’s claws, never told of the creature’s speed on all fours or towering height on two legs. Never spoke of its vindictive bloodlust.
The legend Ama had painted was far more spiritual, something Nature had churned out as a plea for the pure of heart to remain so. Something for a child’s ears.
