Page 70 of When the Night Comes Knocking

Hot tears leak down Jane’s face as she listens to the words—for months, they are all she has told herself, like a bitter daily dose of medicine.

It’s your fault.

You shouldn’t have gotten so drunk.

You should have fought back.

You should have helped yourself.

You should have cried.

You should have, you should have, you should have.

She feels it all imprinted on her bones, lancing around her heart. And yet watching and hearing herself say the words now, they sound entirely wrong.

The Mimic presses against her skin, inhaling at her neck in a way she is all too familiar with. The copy of herself shifts down toward her chest. “You said it yourself,” her voice continues softly. “It was all your fault.”

Jane searches her reflection in the monster’s eyes as it stares at where her heart resides, mouth dripping with hunger. The rows of sharp teeth begin to sprout.

She notices then that the raised scar above her eyebrow is missing from the Mimic’s depiction of her—the small, imperfect reminder she’s forced to live with of all the pain she’s endured.

All the pain she’s survived.

“You’re a monster, Jane,” it tells her. “Your heart must restore the balance.”

The Mimic places its hand over the left side of her chest, sprouting claws as the chocolate brown of its eyes go fully black. “Your bones belong to the mountain,” it says, in a voice no longer of this world.

Then it unhinges its jaw, ready to devour.

Jane waits for her body to freeze up with fear, to fail her as it has done so often before. But her fingers finally close around the Zippo lighter, and her other hand grips the fire poker tighter.

“It was never my fault,” she says, and in her chest something gives way like a dam breaking. “And you can’t have my heart.”

She drives the iron upward, clean through the Mimic’s own.

She flicks open the lighter.

Twenty-seven

toward the sky.

As Thomas bursts from the store’s entrance, he watches in horror as the replica of his sister hovers in the air for only a moment, the fire poker piercing through her back as the skin and bones begin to change.

Limbs crack and twist as the Mimic’s true form curls upright and pulls at the iron deep in its chest. With its mouth open and head tilted toward the sky, it takes a second for Thomas to realize the scream bellowing through the air is coming from himself.

He charges toward the monster with the baseball bat raised. It seems impossibly bigger, but he swings at the contorted body again and again, shoving it back toward Jim’s truck and away from Jane. When the bat finally snaps in two, Thomas feels certain his arm has rebroken along with it. But he shoves forward with the jagged wood of the bat, letting the monster’s screech shatter through the parking lot as it finally yanks out the fire poker from its chest.

“Tommy!” Jane shouts before flinging something toward him. The bit of silver clatters across the ground, and Thomas scrambles to grab the Zippo lighter from the dirt and dead leaves.

He backs up a few steps before flipping the lid. The Mimic looks at him then—looks at him like it sees and knows every part of him, all the way down to where the bones meet.

Thomas flicks on the lighter and throws it.

The Mimic goes up in flames, fire racing across the bony torso and long, crooked limbs until its whole body is set ablaze and the smell of burning flesh sizzles through the air. The brutal cries echo through the surrounding forest, as shrill and mournful as the song of a whippoorwill, while it slashes its talons around wildly, barely missing Thomas’s face.

“Thomas, move! Move, you idiot!” Kimi shouts from the rooftop.

He stumbles backward toward his sister. Jane is sitting half up on the ground, staring wide eyed at the open flame that is the Mimic.