Page 70 of The Midnight Knock

It is I who shall have audience once more.

Kyla awoke a little after seven fifteen to the sound of a toilet flushing. Her heart was hammering, the pressure driving her headache to new heights. The pain was so bad she hardly noticed the way the toilet, after its flush, failed to refill its tank.

“I do not mean to worry you,” Fernanda said, stepping into the main room. “But I believe the motel might be running low on water.”

Without thinking, Kyla said, “He wants to control it.”

“Who? Frank? Control what?”

“Frank O’Shea is the least of our problems.”

Fernanda tilted her head, blinked like she, too, was coming out of a daze. “What are you talking about?”

Kyla had no idea what she meant. No idea why she’d said it either. No idea why she would have sworn she heard a tight smile echoing through the silent air of their room: those teeth, grinding together like stones.

Are you ready to play again, Miss Hewitt?

Kyla gave her whole body a jerk. She was forgetting something, something hugely important, but she had no idea what.

Get your head in the game, she thought. Kyla rose and pushed back the mattress of her bed. The green backpack was still there, exactly where she’d left it before she dozed off. Unzipping the backpack, digging through the wads of money, she found the prize inside.

Fernanda hurried to the front window to make sure the curtains were closed. “Careful. The cartel won’t raise a finger to help us without that film.”

Kyla only nodded. In her hand was a roll of Kodak Gold camera film, thirty-six exposures, stolen this afternoon from the Fort Stockton safe house where Fernanda had been taken to die. The girls had killed a man for this film. Granted, Lance had been sent to the safe house to kill Fernanda, so Kyla supposed it was fair game. You live by the sword, you die by the sword.

Lance hadn’t seemed like such a bad guy, despite his line of work. And it wasn’t like Kyla could talk. She’d spent the better part of the last six months serving steaks to men who’d made a small fortune shuffling all sorts of contraband back and forth across the border. Guns. Drugs. People. Kyla could have gone to the FBI ages ago with what she knew. She could have probably saved lives.

But why think about the past? Time didn’t go backward. Kyla turned the film canister in the light, marveling that with all the blood that had been spilled for it, all the violence it contained, the yellow of its casing could still look so pristine.

If Kyla could help Fernanda get this film across the border and into the right hands, she could ensure that at least two lives had been saved: Fernanda’s, and Fernanda’s brother’s.

She dropped the yellow canister back into the bag and tugged up the zipper and did her best to drag the mattress back into place. She stepped into the bathroom and closed the door, hoping to wash her face, but when she turned the tap, only a thin trickle ran from the sink’s faucet. Fernanda had been right. The motel really was running out of water.

A soft breath of air brushed her cheek. A warm draft.

Kyla looked up. Call her crazy, but it almost felt like the draft had come from the crack in the mirror.

The moment the thought occurred to her, the crack expanded an inch, right before her eyes, with a soft tinkling chime like a wash of bells. A great black gulf loomed within the seam, and even with the light burning directly above her head, Kyla saw nothing inside the mirror but darkness.

Another draft touched her cheek. The air of the draft was warm and dry. It seemed to tingle on her skin with a latent power.

Where had Kyla felt air like that before?

A man whispered in her ear, just behind her shoulder.

“Touch it.”

Kyla whipped around, her heart hammering, vision dilating, certain she would see the man from her dream standing right behind her, but there was no one. She exhaled a long breath. She scratched her neck.

She turned back to the mirror, to the great black crack. It had grown again.

The man whispered in her ear again. “Touch it, Kyla. Hurry.”

She’d been wrong: that wasn’t the voice of the man in her dream. This man was someone else. She hadn’t met this man before, she was certain of it, yet he felt oddly familiar. When this new man spoke, a strange itch writhed along the back of her neck, but her headache seemed to abate. A strange trade. A porous seam in the weave.

Call her crazy, but this new man sounded almost—but not quite—like her father.

Kyla raised a finger to the crack in the mirror. Brought her hand close. Shivered.