Page 5 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

The woods are thick now, deep enough that the sunset is just a memory filtering through the branches. I’m close. I can feel it in my chest, that particular pressure that means I’m about to have to actually do the thing I came here to do.

You can turn around. You can always turn around. No one’s going to know if you don’t actually…

“Shut up,” I tell my brain. “We’re doing this.”

You’re almost there. You’re so close. You’ve never been this close. You can do this.

I can do this.

I’m doing this.

And then I’m…

***

Headlights.

Wrong lane.

That’s not right, that car is in my lane, that car is coming right at me and it’s in my lane and I can’t…

A horn blares, but it’s not mine, my hand isn’t on the horn, my hands are frozen on the wheel as the world spins into glass and metal and a sound that isn’t like anything I’ve ever heard before, a crunch that goes on forever, a shriek that might be brakes or might be me or might be the universe tearing itself in half.

My forehead hits something. The steering wheel, I think, or maybe the window, I can’t tell because everything is sideways and there’s warmth sliding down my temple and the windshield is a spiderweb of cracks, lit up by the last of the sunset like something almost beautiful.

The sky is where the ground should be.

Or maybe the ground is where the sky should be.

I can’t tell. I can’t tell anything. I can just lie here, held in place by the seatbelt that definitely engaged after all, and think:

I was almost there. I was so close. I was finally going to do it and now I’m…

Voices. Hands on the door. Someone is saying don’t move, don’t move, help is coming, but I can’t see who because my eyes won’t focus, won’t cooperate, keep sliding off everything, the whole world gone to water.

Am I dying? Is this what dying feels like? It’s very confusing. I thought there would be more clarity.

“Stay with me.”

A face appears in the shattered window, materialized there, it feels like, just appeared from the chaos outside, and my concussed brain, my ridiculous unreliable probably-bleeding brain, decides with absolute certainty that I am looking at an angel.

Sharp jaw, the kind that could cut glass or break hearts or both. Black hair pushed back from a face that belongs in a museum or a dream or one of those books I sell to women who sigh over the covers. Eyes the color of a storm that just learned how to grieve, gray, impossibly gray, focused on me with an intensity that makes me want to cry.

That’s not a person. That’s a hallucination. That’s my dying brain being nice to me, giving me something pretty to look at while I bleed out in my sad beige Subaru.

“You’re going to be fine,” the angel says, and his voice is so steady, so impossibly calm, like he’s never panicked about anything in his entire life. “Help is almost here. I need you to stay awake for me.”

“You’re very pretty,” I mumble, “for a hallucination.”

Surprise crosses that storm-cloud gaze. Or maybe amusement. It’s hard to tell when the world keeps tilting and my head keeps throbbing and my blood keeps sliding down my face in warm, lazy trails.

“I’m real.” A hand cups my cheek, broad and warm and impossibly gentle against my blood-streaked skin. “And you’re going to be fine. Can you tell me your name?”

“Fable.” The word comes out slurred, soft. “Like the stories. My parents were…” I stop, because thinking about my parents right now seems like a bad idea, seems like a fast way to start crying, and I’m already bleeding, I don’t need to add crying to the list of fluids I’m losing. “I own a bookstore. I sell romance novels. I was going somewhere brave.”

“That’s good. That’s really good. Keep talking to me.”

His other hand is doing something to my door, I realize, pulling at it, or pushing at it, making the crumpled metal groan in protest. He shouldn’t be able to move it. It looks crushed, jammed, the frame bent in ways that metal isn’t supposed to bend. But he’s pulling at it like it’s nothing, like it’s a minor inconvenience, and the door is…