Watching the vampiric Marquis stride past her with two automatic weapons was one of the most surreal moments of Josephine’s life, and her heart began to pound as she feared what would happen next. Then suddenly, the world was awash in the echoing sounds of gunfire and breaking glass. But even that riot of sensation was not enough to block out the eyes.

The instant the first mirror broke, a psychic scream made every muscle in her body tense, freezing her in place as she tried and failed to block it out. In the moments that followed, all of the intact mirrors filled with thousands of red, glowing eyes looking this way and that for the source of the pain. They fixed on Josephine for a moment but then turned away as they saw quite rightly that she could never hope to be a threat to whatever those eyes were attached to. In the vast ocean of darkness just beyond those thin layers of glass, she was a minnow at most, and tonight she had come eye to eye with a Kraken.

Josephine could not quite make out what the eyes were attached to and whether they were on stalks, or whether tentacles were wavering in the background behind them. Either way it made for a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of liquid flesh. She wasn’t sure if they all belonged to a single Stygian behemoth or if a whole school of piranha-like horrors was just waiting to catch the scent of her blood. It didn’t matter, though, because she couldn’t hope to defend herself in either case. She could only stand there in a mix of terror and awe as her mind began to creak under the strain of it all.

She might have stood there forever, slowly crumbling to nothing, if Hugo had not finally succeeded in breaking enough mirrors to distract the thing. Her only clue that she was free to move was when she watched Ezekiel suddenly collapse to the floor as the puppet master that had held his strings for the last several hours suddenly turned its attention to the stinging fly that was annoying it.

Josephine rushed forward, pulling at the man to help him to his feet. “Come on,” she answered. “We have to fly. Now.”

Ezekiel staggered to his feet with painful slowness, and the entire time Josephine was cognizant of the fact that if they lingered too long, they could be caught in the monster’s thrall once more. On their way out into the hall, Josephine took one final look back now that the gunfire had ceased, and the silence was broken only by the tinkling of glass. Her final view of Hugo was watching him stare defiantly at the mirrors, daring them to do something. What he didn’t notice was that they already had. A mirror just above him had dislodged from the ceiling and was falling straight toward the vampire.

She tried to warn him, of course, but it was too late. Such a blow, even from a heavy full-sized mirror that weighed at least fifty pounds, should have been little more than a scratch to the evil creature. Yet, it seemed to swallow him up, and when it shattered on the floor, there was no trace that the flamboyant Marquis had ever been standing there. She hoped he’d simply moved too fast for her eyes to see, but somehow she didn’t feel like that was what had happened, and that made her move even more quickly towards the front door as the house began to rumble and shake from the sound of distant violence.

“Where are we,” Ezekiel asked. “Wha-whats’s happening?”

“Our faker is the real deal,” she said. “That’s what’s happening. He caught the attention of something bad, and I had to go get the help of someone even worse.”

“The Marquis de Monmoreant?!” he asked, immediately guessing what she meant. “Are you mad! You can’t make a pact with a demon in human skin!” He tried to stop there to lecture her about her grave mistake, but he was too weak from his time as a statue, and she pulled him forward to the front door even as she felt a tremor go through the very foundations of the giant manor.

“I couldn’t exactly leave you there either,” she said, “but a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”

Ezekiel asked other questions about what was happening and why the house was shaking, but when a tremor almost knocked her off her feet, she broke into a run where the long, sleek Duesenberg waited with the engine running. No sooner were they crammed into the back seat than the driver gunned it, sending the two of them sprawling.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Hey, give us a minute!” Josephine yelled, picking herself up off the floor. “I thought that Hugo said you knew how to drive!”

“That ain’t the plan, ma’am,” Johnny said, flexing his fingers to show off his leather driving gloves, “and there ain’t a better driver on the south side than Fingerless Johnny, so if you got a complaint with my driving you take it up with Mickey Two-Tone, because I ain’t been caught yet!”

“I just don’t think we’re in that much of a hurry.” As she spoke, Josephine looked out the window and almost instantly changed her mind. The house, which was shrinking into the distance behind, was already collapsing, and a rift was growing in the tree-lined driveway they were racing down.

And it was gaining on them.

“Hugo said not to wait for him,” Johnny said, talking down to her. “He said you get in the car, and I go like the devil his self is—”

“Can this thing go any faster?” she interrupted.

“Jeez, lady - make up your mind. Slow down. Speed up,” he mocked her. “Of course, this thing can go faster. It’s a GD Duesenberg! It’s the fastest thing on four wheels!”

Johnny barely tapped the brakes as he swung the big car onto the pavement in a wide skid that left her feeling like the heavy vehicle would topple over on its slender wheels, but after a long moment of skidding on the gravel that it carried in its wake, it finally gripped the road properly and shot forward as her crazed driver moved the vehicle into the next gear.

“This thing can get up to 90 on a long straight road, sister,” he bragged, “Just you wait and see!”

Josephine breathed a sigh of relief when the crack in the driveway didn’t follow them onto the asphalt, but her sixth sense still tingled in a way that made her believe they were not yet out of the woods. She quickly discovered why that was when they passed underneath a streetlight. For the moment that the glare turned the windshield into a mirror, and she could see three of those red glowing eyes searching for them.

“Duck down,” she told Ezekiel. He opened his mouth to ask what she was talking about, but she pulled him down on top of her as she lay down in the seat so that none of the car’s many reflective surfaces could see her.

“You know, if I wasn’t a holy man, a man might take advantage of a situation like this,” the pastor teased, though he kept his hands to himself.

“Now isn’t the time for hanky-panky Zeek,” she sighed. “We gotta get you far away from this thing, and you’re probably going to have to live in a mirror-free world for a good long time when this is all done.”

“Well, I’m not any less tired of looking at this old face than the rest of you,” he laughed. It was only a good forgery, of good humor, but his smile didn’t reach his eyes. Her heart went out to the man. She couldn’t imagine what he’d been through.

“Can you tell me what happened?” she asked sympathetically, trying to ignore the vibrations of the car that were her only indication of how dangerously fast they were going. She hoped that in the middle of the night, the road to Baltimore was as empty as it had been on the way out, but the fact that she couldn’t see anything that was happening around her as the speedometer continued to climb just made everything that much more frightening.

“I-I can’t,” he confessed. “It was like there was something trying to look through me, like I was nothing but the pages of a book, and whatever words it read just vanished, leaving behind nothing but a blank page.”

“What was it?” she asked, not daring to speak the name she’d heard Hugo use for The Watcher Between. “I got an impression…” Josephine’s words trailed off as she realized she lacked the vocabulary to do the things she’d seen justice.

“It was… It was like a whale bigger than the whole city of Baltimore, I think. Maybe even bigger than the whole island of Manhattan, and it was like it was trying to squeeze all of that bulk into my thimble of a mind to get a closer look,” he answered falteringly after a moment of thought. “But it was also like one of those angler fish they discovered off Greenland a few years ago. Instead of having just one strange eye on a tentacle, though, it had about a million of them.”

Ezekiel went on to describe the thing at length. It was like once the man started talking, he couldn’t stop. Eventually, she had to shut him up because she felt like the more vividly he described the psychic monster, the closer it swam to the surface of her imagination, and that was the last thing that she wanted.

They were almost back to the city proper before their crazed driver slowed down, but when she popped up from the back seat, she couldn’t feel that thing’s dread presence any longer. Whether it was they had outrun it or they had hidden the person it was looking for in a sea of tens of thousands, she couldn’t say, but either way, she knew that they’d won. She only hoped that Hugo had fared half so well.