“Holy shit,” I said, when I regained the ability to breathe and talk. “Shit, shit, shit.”
Besides the hissing radiator, the only other sound was the patter of rain on the car itself. The area the car had come to rest was dark as the naked night. Without the headlights, I couldn’t see a thing in front of me. What had I hit? Had I hit it at all? I couldn’t remember hearing any bumps or knocks before I hit the barrier.
I turned around and checked over my shoulder. The mist had rolled back in, hiding the road from my eyes, but also hiding me from the road and concealing me behind a curtain of swirling gray. I saw it when I turned around to face the front of the car, and my breathing stopped again. There was someone there in the darkness, staring at me from beyond the hood.
I swallowed hard. I wanted to reach for my knife, or my phone—reach for anything that could give me comfort. But I couldn’t move. Whoever it was standing there was looking right at me, and I couldn’t move. I thought maybe this had been the figure I had seen in the road. It hadn’t been an animal; of that I was sure. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I thought the figure had been human in shape… just like this one.
It cocked its head to the side and made a move toward the car, toward me. My body loosened. I reached down toward my ankle and drew my knife, which had been strapped to my boot, readying myself to attack this person. But when I turned my eyes up, it was gone. I looked around—the sides, the back—and saw nothing. The entire area was empty and black as pitch.
In my mind, I tried to conjure an image of what I had seen. It was human—two arms, two legs, a head. I couldn’t determine any distinguishing features on its face or what it was wearing, but it had long, black hair, and its eyes shone like pearls in the depth of a deep, dark ocean. Everything about it screamed danger, and it could be anywhere right now.
I searched around blindly for my phone, which had dropped from the dashboard holster into the gearshift crook in the center of the car, until I found it. Phone or magick, I thought, shit—phone or magick! Once I had my phone, I struggled to remove my seatbelt, and then I opened the driver side door.
Stepping out into the darkness, I felt my way around the car. Dangling fingers of moss, or spider webs for all I knew, caressed my hair and face, causing me to jump whenever one touched me.
“Who are you?” I asked, my voice loud and commanding. “Show yourself.”
The woods around me swallowed my voice and robbed me of even an echo. My heart was pounding now. If something came at me out here, if I died out here tonight, no one would find me. They wouldn’t hear my screams, and gators would probably eat what was left of my corpse.
“Come out!” I yelled, but again, nothing came back. I could feel eyes on the back of my head, causing my entire body to shudder, but I couldn’t find the source. It—whatever it was—didn’t seem to want to talk. Judging by the way the car was facing, I determined the direction the road was in. I couldn’t have gone more than a few feet.
A twig snapped somewhere off to my right, and I jumped and turned around. There was a chance this was not a supernatural being. If I used magick in front of them, I would be breaking the witch’s oath of secrecy and would have to deal with that later. If it was supernatural, all bets were off. But regardless of which, one thought made itself clear in my mind.
It was playing with me.
“Fine,” I said, “let’s do it your way.”
I clenched my right hand into a fist, drew a sliver of magick out of myself, and then opened my palm sharply. When my fingers stretched, a shining ball of light burst into existence, sending a pulse of bright, silver light in all directions. Instead of waiting to see if I could spot the thing I had seen moments ago, I ran, pushing my legs as hard as they would go in the direction of the road. As I heard the second set of footsteps, I knew it was behind me.
Again, I clenched my hand into a ball and let a trickle of magick to gather inside. Sparing only an instant to glance over my shoulder as my feet kept pounding the wet earth, I threw the ball of light into the darkness and watched it explode like a soundless bomb. But there was no one there. The light touched the trees and car, but no person.
No madman with an ax. No monster with three heads. Nothing at all.
I stopped running now and backed away slowly, breathing heavily to match the pounding of my own heart. My eyes moved wildly from side to side, taking every possible inch of this swamp in. I thought of throwing another bright pulse into the darkness, but a car hissed along the road behind my back. Civilization—and humans—were close, and I didn’t want to risk being seen.
Humans couldn’t see magick, but a ball of light was a ball of light.
I picked my way up the embankment and back onto the road, feeling the semi-solid gravely sand beneath my feet and exulting in the sensation. I grabbed my phone now and, finding a signal, decided in the moment to call Remy. He would know what to do.
When he found me, I was sitting next to the broken barrier, keeping my eyes wide open for any sign of the thing I was almost sure I had just seen. Before he arrived, I’d been completely sure there had been something on the road and in the woods. Now, the memories were a little blurry; the details were sketchy and ephemeral, like a half-remembered dream.
Remy pulled up alongside me, the wheels crunching to a halt on the gravel. He stepped out of the car and circled around the hood with his hands in his pockets. “You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “I think so.”
“And the car?”
I threw my thumb over my shoulder. “In there somewhere. I called the emergency services. They’ll be here soon.”
Remy pulled his hands out of his pockets and crossed them in front of his chest. “How the hell did you wind up out here?”
I looked up at him. Thanks to the mist, encasing us in a gray cocoon, it looked as if we were the only two people on the planet—completely separate from the rest of the world. “Is it possible something followed me from your house?” I asked.
“Followed? How?”
“I don’t know. But is it?”
“There was no one else there but us. Who could have followed you?”
“I don’t know. A spirit, maybe?”
“Spirit?”
I sighed. “You know more about blood magick than I do, Remy. I did something in that house I’ve never done before, and now I’m sitting here, having been run off the road I didn’t know I was driving on, by something I don’t even remember being there.”
Remy cocked his head. “You don’t remember?”
“No. I mean, I know I was driving, but then I got lost and turned around somewhere, then I was on this road and something caused me to drive my car into the barrier. I think I saw it again in there. But now I’m not even sure I know what it looked like.”
“You don’t know if it was human or animal?”