Witch's Wrath (Blood And Magick #3)(7)

The pattern was mesmerizing—beautiful, curly lines that seemed to have been drawn into my skin with glowing ink. The sigils radiated with tiny bursts of intensity which almost mimicked a heartbeat. When I turned my eyes up at the road again, the magick had started to work. A breath of air had pushed up ahead of the car, causing the mist to part in wispy flourishes and allowing me to see the road more clearly.

But something was wrong. This wasn’t Magazine Street. It wasn’t a street at all. I was… on the freeway?

That didn’t make sense. I couldn’t have hooked onto the freeway from where I was, not unless I had taken a series of wrong turns and not even noticed I had taken them. But I was here, on the freeway with trees all around me, about half an hour out of the city by my estimation, and I had no idea how the hell I had gotten here.

I decided to look for an exit and start on my way back, accepting what had happened as one of those things that would go away with time, once I started getting used to the roads out here a little more. Just then, a dull pain hit me behind my eyes. Wincing, I brought my hand up to my right temple, and when I caught myself in the rearview, I noticed a spot of blood trickling out of my nose.

“What the hell?” I asked. A figure suddenly came darting into the road from the left. I screamed and turned the wheel as hard as I could, hitting the brakes to try and slow myself down. But the car whirled out of control and veered off to the right too much. I watched, eyes wide, as the barrier on the side of the road seemed to come hurtling toward me too fast.

The front of the car hit the guard rail hard, sending a shower of sparks in all directions. The airbag popped and hit me in the face with enough force to make me see stars, but the car kept going and slipped into the natural ditch, bumping over the difficult terrain for what seemed like forever until it finally stopped. I was still holding the wheel, my head pushed back into the headrest, jaw clenched tightly. The windshield was cracked and covered in moss and fallen leaves, the radiator was steaming, and the car had died out.

“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.”