The wooden floorboards were cold, rigid, and blessedly solid beneath my knuckles.
I lay there for a long time, listening to the aggressive crunch of Kori chewing on his popcorn and the quiet, metallic hum of the refrigerator. The horrific stench of copper and burnt flesh was gone, replaced by the faint scent of butter and dust. My fingers clawed at the floor, reassuring myself that the wood wasn't dissolving into black ink, that my boots weren't sliding off a slate cliff into the Deep.
"Get up, man," Kori said around a mouthful of popcorn. He hovered over me, his dark sunglasses reflecting my disheveled, sweat-soaked frame. "You're blocking the path to the hot sauce. Priority management, Garfield."
I pushed myself up onto my knees, my breath still coming in shallow, ragged hitches. "Steve... what was that place?" I rasped, my voice feeling like broken glass. "That wasn't... we didn't walk there. It wasn't like... My usual transportion. How did I end up in an abandoned cathedral?"
Steve stood near the sink, towering, motionless, and shadowed even under the harsh fluorescent kitchen bulb. He slowly turned his skeletal head toward me, his hollow sockets fixing me with an unreadable, weightless gaze.
"You didn't walk anywhere, Garfield," Steve said flatly. "Your body never left this apartment. You were trapped in a Dreamscape."
I blinked, processing the words. "A... dream?"
"A realm of subconscious convergence," Steve corrected, his gravelly voice dropping the temperature in the kitchen by a noticeable margin. "The Echoes of Death. The creatures you saw. They do not hunt in the physical world. They are parasites of the mind and spirit. They breach the thin places where a mortal's focus slips, drag the soul-frame into a pocket of decay, and consume it. Had you died in that cathedral, your body on this floor would have simply stopped breathing. Sudden cardiac failure to the coroner. A feast to them."
The terror didn't fade, it just changed shape. I looked down at my hands. The blister on my thumb from the vintage lighter was still there, red, raw, and stinging but real.
"If it was a dream," I murmured, memory slowly piecing itself together through the trauma, "how did I get pulled in, how am I injured?"
Then it hit me. A sharp, icy memory cut through the haze.
Kori and I were working on the case. Then the feeling, that feeling of my soul, my consciousness begin pulled out. Grief had made my mind heavy, my defenses weak.
And then the reflection in the glass hadn't mirrored my movement. The fog on the mirror had turned to frost.
"The mirror," I whispered, shivering. "It came through the mirror. The injury itself came from your unique Ability."
"Silvered glass is a dangerous boundary," Steve noted, his bony fingers tapping against his forearm with a dry clack-clack-clack. "A mirror reflects not just light, but intention. When your grief spiked, your soul anchored to the past. The Echoes felt the crack in your mind and pulled you straight through the reflection."
I rubbed my face with trembling hands, trying to shake the lingering feeling of jagged mandibles scraping against my soul. "Wait... if I was trapped inside my own head, inside a mirror realm... how the hell did you two get in?"
Kori let out a loud, obnoxious snort, tossing a handful of popcorn into his mouth. "Bro, your mind is basically open-source. Plus, I don't sleep like normal folks. Perks of being a [???] my soul's already got one foot in the dirt and the other in your pantry. Sinking into a shadow realm is just a brisk walk on a Tuesday for me."
He leaned against the counter, tapping his chest. Being a [???] meant Kori existed on the razor-thin line between the living and the dead. Physical walls, spatial distances, spiritual thresholds, they were more like strong suggestions to him than actual rules.
"And Steve?" I looked over at the looming skeletal figure. "What about you?"
Steve didn't crack a smile. He didn't offer a lighthearted explanation. "I am merely a constant where boundaries fail," he said, his tone flat, empty, and devoid of any human cadence. "A collapsing dream is no different to me than an unsealed grave. Where souls gather to decay, I can tread."
He didn't elaborate further. He never did. What Steve actually was remained a dark, unspoken secret, a force of nature wrapped in bone and old cloth, bound to Kori by some obscure debt that I was frankly too terrified to ask about.
"Right. Spooky magic logic. Got it," I muttered, slowly pulling myself to my feet. My legs felt like lead, but the necessity of physical reality drove me forward.
I pushed past Kori and walked down the short hallway toward the bathroom. The door was half-open, casting a narrow strip of shadow across the floorboards. Taking a deep breath, clutching the unopened vial of salt still in my pocket, I kicked the door open.
The bathroom was cold.
The air smelled faintly of damp stone and dead flowers. Above the sink, the medicine cabinet mirror was utterly destroyed. It hadn't just cracked, the glass was charred black around the edges, spider-webbing outward from a central point as if an invisible fist had punched it from the inside out. Tiny shards of black-stained glass lay scattered across the porcelain basin.
I stared at the ruined mirror, my stomach dropping.
"It's sealed for now," Steve's voice echoed from down the hallway. "The threshold broke when we forced the iron door back to your reality. But they know your soul's scent now, Garfield. The Echoes will return if you let your mind wander into the dark again."
I stood in the doorway, staring at the shattered, blackened glass. The silence of the apartment felt temporary now, a thin sheet of paper stretched over an infinite, hungry darkness.
Kori walked up behind me, crunching on another popcorn, totally oblivious to the profound dread settling into my bones. He slapped me hard on the shoulder, nearly knocking me into the doorframe.
"Look on the bright side, Gar," Kori grinned, his dark shades catching the dim light of the hall. "You don't have to look at your ugly mug in the morning anymore. Now, how do we explain to the authority's about this case?"