It wasn’t there.
A trail of destruction led from the back of the Camaro and up a slight incline, leading back to the road. There would have been more damage if the truck had followed us into the woods. Whoever had hit us, they’d slammed into the side of the Camaro hard enough to send us spinning off into the brush, but they hadn’t suffered enough damage to stop them. That seemed wrong. If they’d been okay after impact, why hadn’t they come to see if we were okay? Why hadn’t they called the authorities?
I glanced back at Artie’s motionless form, suddenly uneasy. If he woke up and found me gone, he’d probably panic. My blood was everywhere inside the cabin, and even though it looked more like mucus to the human eye, he understood cuckoo biology well enough to recognize it for what it was.
But if he woke up, his thoughts would spike enough that I could pick up on them, and I could tell him where I was. Staying here because he might wake up and be upset was silly. Finding out what had happened to the other driver was smart.
I’m not going far, Artie, I thought at him, and started walking.
None of my bones were broken, but the bruises from the impact were starting to make themselves known. I groaned as I pulled myself up the incline, using the broken branches of the trees we had crashed through for leverage. I paused when I reached the top, still holding onto a snapped-off limb for balance as I held up my phone and moved it in a slow arc, scanning the road. There was no truck. Only a little broken glass glittered on the pavement as a sign that anything had happened here at all. Whoever had hit us had kept on driving, out of shock or fear or concern about their insurance premiums. It didn’t matter. Whatever their reasons had been, we were alone. They had run us off the road and left us alone and injured in the woods to die.
The fact that having them gone was better for keeping our secrets didn’t matter. In that moment, my hate was like a bonfire, burning hot and fierce and borderline out of control. How dare they. How dare they just leave us here like this, when we needed help, when Artie wouldn’t wake up. How dare they.
Anger forced my thoughts out even farther, the small, non-intelligent minds of the woods lighting up like candles in the black field of my awareness. I found possums and snakes and coyotes. I found bears, three of them, larger and more ponderous than anything else around them. I found a chupacabra, too far away for me to ask for help—we had never met, much less touched, and my telepathy wouldn’t stretch that far. I found everything except a single human mind. Even Elsie and Annie were out of my range.
I took a shuddering breath, anger collapsing and taking my scan with it. I needed to calm down. I was going to strain myself again, and then we’d be in even deeper trouble. With Artie unconscious, I needed to stay on my feet so I could flag down help when it came, whatever form it took.
Something brushed against the edge of my consciousness.
It was a delicate touch, like the fluttering of a moth’s wing, soft and quick and almost imperceptible. If I hadn’t been so attuned to the minds around me, I wouldn’t even have noticed it. I snapped to attention, turning my thoughts in the direction of the contact, reaching out as broadly as I could.
Cuckoos aren’t the only telepaths in the world. True mind-readers are rare, but “rare” isn’t the same thing as “unique.” Succubi have limited telepathic abilities. Apraxis wasps are technically telepathic, although their abilities are mostly focused on devouring thoughts, not sharing them. Some human sorcerers figure out a way to project their thoughts. There are probably other psychics I haven’t had the opportunity to meet. It didn’t have to be another cuckoo in the woods with us. It didn’t have to be proof that this was my fault.
But it probably was. It seemed improbable to the point of impossibility that the thought should have been coming from anything but another cuckoo. Elsie’s telepathy was too weak to reach me from as far away as I knew she currently was, and she didn’t like to use it unless she absolutely had to; she’d be calling my phone, not my cerebral cortex. Nothing else in these woods had the capability to communicate like that.
A cuckoo would.
Cuckoos are rare, one in a million, thanks to the way we feed and fight and protect our territory. Cuckoos are rare, and I’d already encountered two of them—one directly, one through inference—since leaving home. Logically, I shouldn’t have been worried about seeing another one. Logically, we wouldn’t have been the victims of a hit and run in the middle of nowhere. Someone was hunting us.
I shoved my phone into my pocket and balled my hands into fists, reaching out in all directions as hard as I could. My eyes burned as the chemical changes in my vitreous humor caused them to glow a lambent white, and I felt a spreading dampness on my upper lip. I was bleeding again. This was too much; I couldn’t keep it up for very long, or I was going to hurt myself. A sudden wind whipped around me, stirring my hair off my shoulders, making the cut on my forehead sting even worse than it had before.
Don’t, I thought, slinging the word like a stone into the darkness. You won’t like what happens if you do.
Maybe I was being paranoid. Maybe the brush of another mind against my own had been fear or hope or some toxic combination of the two: I didn’t want to be alone, but I didn’t want to be found and so no matter what happened, I was going to lose. Maybe. But I didn’t think so. My injury, and the anti-telepathy charms my family had taken to wearing in its aftermath—the charms Alex and Shelby still wore, to keep me from slipping accidentally into their minds, even though I’d been mostly able to control myself for over a year now—had left me more sensitive to the presence of other telepaths than I’d ever realized I could be. They were gunshots in a silent field, so loud that they couldn’t possibly be overlooked. Not even when I wanted to.
The wind continued to whip around me. Something moved on the other side of the road, barely visible in the dimness. I snapped around to look at it. A deer was standing at the tree line, body outlined in the faint glow of the moonlight. I blinked.
The wind wasn’t blowing on the other side of the road. The leaves didn’t rustle; the dust didn’t stir. The deer was standing perfectly still, and so was the world around it. I blinked again and the wind around me died, my eyes burning as the light bled out of them. There was a warm gush as my nosebleed increased in both strength and severity, and then the ground was rushing up to meet me, and the darkness drew me down again, into a place where there was neither light nor motion, but only peaceful stillness.
* * *
“This would be a lot easier if she had a pulse,” Annie complained, her hand clamped around my wrist like she thought she could somehow force my anatomy to rearrange itself and provide her with a heart to monitor. “Who designs a biped that doesn’t have a pulse? That’s just inefficient. I call shenanigans.”
She sounded nervous. The thoughts rolling off her proved it. As usual, she was masking genuine fear under a veil of sarcasm and annoyance, like she could somehow bluff the universe into believing she was the badass she always pretended to be.