Page 98 of Succubus

I did this. This is all my fault. Obviously. “Where did you go?” I whisper.

“Ella!” Dee yells, practically in my ear. “Ella! Can you hear me?”

Our neighbor’s dog starts barking.

“She went to Joel’s,” I say to myself. I leap over the steps, rocket back into the house, snatch my phone from the kitchen counter, where it has been patiently waiting for me. My fingers slide as I pull up his name. I call him, already outside again, jogging down the hill. Dee is going the other way. Mom is outside now, too, also yelling for Ella.

She was mad at me. For some reason, my power doesn’t work on her, or maybe I didn’t try. She wasn’t fooled. She must be devastated, furious, a snarl of confusion. Dee was busy and not acting like herself. Mom was probably checking Facebook. She got her skateboard and went to see the adult who always listens to her.

“Pick up, pick up,” I tell the phone, looking from side to side as I go. She wasn’t even close to confident enough on the board to go down this very slight hill. She must’ve carried it.

“Why are you calling me?” says Joel’s warm voice in my ear. My brain stumbles, his voice and the words at odds, negating each other, a tiny space-time rupture. He should know why I’m calling.

No, she might not be there yet.

“Ella isn’t there?”

“Here? With me? No. Why would she be?”

“Because she took her skateboard and she’s gone!” I hear that I sound panicked.

“Oh no,” he says. “Wait, I’ll come. Where are you?”

“I’m just on our block, but she might have cut through the park. Or maybe she went up— ” I’m suddenly forgetting the names of streets.

Why am I so afraid? Ella can find her way to Joel’s. She will probably show up there in a minute. But it’s almost full night now. A little girl, alone in the November dark. Even at 6:00 pm in a safe town, it’s a risk.

“I’m outside,” he says, and I hear the door shutting behind him. “I don’t see her here. I’m going to go toward the park.”

“Okay,” I say, and then I see it.

The skateboard, abandoned on the grate of a storm drain. It’s far away, hardly visible, at the bottom of the hill across the street from here. Near the yard of the white house that Ella and I sometimes say a friendly witch might live in, with the orange door and the front garden full of twig skeletons that were recently lush, fanning ferns.

I almost didn’t see the skateboard, but now that I do it seems unmissable. It’s like a tropical fish flung by a wave onto the beach where it lies dead, sleek yellow-and-purplestriped sides shocking, even when grayed by the dark.

“Joel,” I hear myself say into the phone, which I am still pressing to my ear. “I see her skateboard.”

“What do you mean?” he says instantly.

“Did someone take her?” I ask him.

Then I’m running, and I don’t hear his response if he says anything. I’m no longer even aware of myself holding up the phone. I tear down the hill.

I hear someone behind me. “Do you see her?” Dee is yelling. She must have seen me launch into a sprint.

Someone took her. Someone drove by—the car that was following us that day, it is catapulting back into my mind. Is it connected to me? Is it my fault? But how? My brain is frantic with stammering, demented explanations that evaporate even as they form.

I hear Dee see the skateboard. She cries out, anguished. “Oh my God! T, is that—is that hers?”

I don’t answer.

“T, where is she?” There is something guttural, something animal in her voice, something that will gnaw off its own leg if trapped.

I swing around the boxwood bush at the bottom of the hill. Across the street from the skateboard. And I almost trip over something. A fallen, wrong thing with a bright smooth top: a pink helmet. I slow way down. In fact, I feel like I’m in slow motion—the air has turned to sludge and I push through it as I bend down, lift the helmet into my jellyfish hands. There is something inside it. A piece of paper, folded neatly.

Now Dee is beside me. She takes the folded paper out of the helmet, snaps it open. I see the words.

Just the succubus. 7:00 at the battlefield monument.