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If I wasn’t scared shitless, I’d be touched.
Late twilight fog drifted over the road.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his brain still coming to grips with our situation. “Genie, are you okay?” Wilder touched my shoulder, but my attention was still rapt on the road ahead of me.
“You see her, right?” I asked. He obviously had, otherwise he wouldn’t have stopped the car so abruptly, but this was my first time seeing her with someone else present, and I needed an assurance I wasn’t losing my mind.
Wilder’s focus moved from me out onto the road, and he nodded stiffly, giving me the only answer I needed. I wasn’t crazy. There really was someone there.
And not just anyone. Not Mercy either.
This was an altogether different apparition, one that had been following me for over a year now.
While her form was obviously that of a woman, her skin was a charred, burned black, crackled all over like the surface of a riverbed baked in the sun. She didn’t stand straight up, but rather her body was all crooked, broken angles, like a doll who had been reassembled with parts in all the wrong places.
Hair clung to her scalp, but it was impossible to know what color it had been. All of her looked like she had been tossed in a fire at some point, roasted alive.
“Do you see her?” I asked again. His expression told me yes, but I needed to hear the words. Needed confirmation.
“Yes. What the fuck is that?”
Yet another question I didn’t have the answer to. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get out and confront her, or tell him to drive around her. Neither seemed like the right thing to do, and I wasn’t in the right headspace to be confronting yet another monster so soon after Mercy’s return.
“Stay here.” I opened the passenger door before he could protest, the shocking chill of evening air slipping in and raising goose bumps all over my arms.
“Genie what are you—?” He threw the car into park.
I closed the door behind me before he had a chance to talk any common sense into me. This might seem like an idiotic idea, and it probably was, but I’d seen this woman before, and she hadn’t done anything to hurt me. Maybe she had no intention of doing me any harm.
Ha. Yeah, right.
“What do you want?” I called out, lingering next to the car door. The wind swirled around me and I shivered. So much for not showing how scared I was. The cold itself had given me away.
She took a faltering, jerky step forward. I felt like I had just walked into a horror movie and the creepy Japanese ghost from The Ring was coming for me out of a television set. This creature moved much the same, each move a twitch, each step a stop-motion video.
From the base of her throat came a rasping sound like leaves over concrete. If she was making words, I couldn’t understand them.
After advancing a few feet—during which time my brain demanded over and over that I just get back in the car and tell Wilder to drive away—she stopped moving again. She went so still I could have sworn time had frozen and we were going to be stuck here for eternity staring at each other.
The soft click of the driver side door opening distracted both of us, and her attention and mine shifted to Wilder.
Then something new happened.
In all the times I had seen her before, as spooky as they’d been, her attention had just been for me, I’d been her sole focus. This time, she looked at Wilder, and he stared back at her, and she seemed surprised.
The skeletal rustling sound I understood to be her voice came out in a long wheeze, loud and unsettling, and she took two jerky steps in his direction, her whole focus now locked on him.
Wilder froze, but aside from his lack of movement he didn’t show any signs of fear. Hell, I couldn’t even smell his adrenaline kicking up. Now that was a solid poker face. There was no way he wasn’t scared as hell right now.
She stopped moving about ten feet away from him—much too close for my liking—and they gawked at each other across the distance. It was as if I was no longer there.
Again she made the loud rasping noise.
“Is she trying to say something?” he asked me, never taking his eyes off her.
“I don’t know.”
Now her focus slipped back in my direction, and she made a sound that was, no word of a lie, a sigh. An exasperated, annoyed sigh. Done with me once again, she continued to move towards Wilder, her expression—what there was to read of it on her ruined face—was desperate, hungry.
