Ink Stained

29: with him without him*

彼と彼なし

With a puzzled frown painted on her brows, she looked back at the door again, and again, saw no one there. She was sure she heard someone call her name, though.

Maybe she was just imagining it. Maybe the stress and frustration really was getting to her. She knew she could be entirely blind to that when it came to herself; she knew when other people were stressed just by looking at them, but she could never see it for herself when she was the one who was stretched thin, not until someone else pointed it out to her and she realized it like a light bulb that, Oh, I'm stressed. That's why I feel like shit.

It would have been nice if she could use that excuse to explain away the horrible reality of what that dream meant, if it really was something that happened during her three-year disappearance.

She shook her head – she didn't want to think about it. Not yet. There were more pressing matters at hand, with people's lives on the line.

People's lives, she thought, as the gravity of that thought hit her again, for the millionth time. People's lives depend on me.

It was a horrible feeling, and she hated it. She didn't want this level of responsibility.

She turned back to the window, and shrieked when she saw not only her own reflection looking back at her from the glass, but the faint and hazy image of a girl – her, that was her but not her at all – with eyes blacker than midnight and a sly smiling curling her crimson lips staring back. Her face was right next to Pai, an almost perfect twin rendition. She tipped her chin up, and Pai swallowed a choked inhale at the bloody red line cutting across the pale expanse of her throat, a mirror to the girl's smile.

She whirled around. There was no one beside her.

Her heart thundered in her chest as she slowly brought her gaze back to the window, but saw nothing there. There was no second face. She focused all her attention on listening hard to everything around her, but all she heard was the creaking wooden boards of the floors as people in the house started waking up, moving through rooms as the cold day began.

But when the voice called again, she knew she wasn't imagining things.

How come it's taking you so long? It called out petulantly.

With her heart somewhere down in her stomach and her breath shooting out in shivering gasps, she scrambled to her feet as she stared at the eyes of her frightened reflection. She took a hesitant step toward the window, eyes growing unfocused as she watched herself move warily closer, and closer. She scrambled her brains trying to think of any kind of Yori Chiisai that could possibly cross over the magic boundary of Ayashi House and somehow cause her hallucinations.

Or maybe it wasn't that – maybe it was the Amanojaku, come to knock the final nail in the coffin of all her failures that night at the warehouse. They were known for being able to influence people, especially humans, into doing things they never would. Maybe it was making her imagine things, hallucinate impossibilities where she was seeing faces in window reflections.

She stifled another shriek when her reflection warped into a nightmare.

Her face dissolved into screaming agony, black seeping into the white of her hair like oil spilling over snow, her hands raising up to scratch and claw at her eyes as her head snapped back. She could almost – not quite – hear the nerve-shattering scream that had her lifting her own hands to her ears as she stared at the reflection with her eyes wide.