“Evolution works in mysterious ways.” Elsie’s voice was accompanied by the sound of branches breaking. “Artie’s still out cold, but he’s breathing, and he, at least, has a good, steady pulse. I think he’ll be fine, once we get him home and patch up that cut on his cheek. It looks like Sarah bled on him before she got out of the car.”
“Good.” Annie let go of my wrist. “Let’s move Artie first, make sure we have anything he’ll miss, and torch the car.”
“Are you sure—”
“His blood is everywhere. A human finds the thing, they’re going to be in love with him for the rest of their life. And the frame is bent to shit. I don’t think there’s a mechanic in the world who can save it. I know Artie loves that car, but all good things come to an end.” Her thoughts roiled, turning oddly warm against my mind. “Besides, I’m freaked out and angry. I need to burn off a little flame.”
Something clicked. I opened my eyes, staring up at the dark canopy of the trees above me. “You’re a sorcerer,” I said.
“And you’re awake.” Annie bent down to offer her hand. “I’m surprised no one told you.”
“I’m not. People don’t tell me much these days.” Alex and Shelby were always worried they were going to upset me. Mom and Dad probably didn’t know. They were almost as out of the loop as I was, where family news was concerned, although in their case it was because they didn’t want to risk getting involved. “When did this happen?”
“A couple of years ago now.” Annie pulled me to my feet, let go, and stepped back, holding one hand out in front of her, palm toward the sky. She flexed her fingers and a small ball of lambent flame appeared above them, glittering orange and blue against the darkness. She closed her hand, and the fire disappeared. “I mostly just do elemental tricks so far—we haven’t exactly been able to find me a reliable teacher—but I’ve stopped setting my sheets on fire, so we’re calling it a win.”
“Huh.” A wave of weary sorrow washed over me. It was probably partially exhaustion and partially the result of the adrenaline crash I’d suffered after I collapsed, but that wasn’t all of it.
Five years. I’d lost five years with my family, and no matter how much they’d tried to keep me updated, I’d always known there would be things they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, explain to me until I was feeling well enough to come home. Things like Annie discovering she could pull fire out of the air. Big things. Things that changed everything around them, like any new variable introduced to a formerly stable equation.
“Yeah,” said Annie. “It’s been weird for me, too. I’ll shout if I need any help getting Artie out of the car.” Then she was gone, sliding down the incline on the sides of her feet, off to set Artie’s Camaro on fire.
Elsie moved to steady me as I watched Annie go. In a carefully light tone, she asked, “Why were you up by the road, Sarah? I don’t think you should have moved if you were already feeling dizzy.”
“I wasn’t. I . . .” I pulled away from her, grabbing my phone out of my pocket, and ran across the road to where I’d seen the deer. Elsie shouted behind me. I ignored her. There were no cars coming; I was perfectly safe.
The ground on the other side of the road was the usual welter of debris, fragments of leaf, bark, dirt, even bits of shattered glass from other accidents. I stopped, squinting at it. I couldn’t tell if the wind had been blowing recently. Maybe I’d been seeing things. There was a crust of dried blood on my upper lip; it broke and flaked away when I touched it with the tips of my fingers, falling into the darkness. It wasn’t a stretch to think that if I was still unwell enough to get nosebleeds at the slightest provocation, I was unwell enough to be seeing things.
But there were hoofprints in the dirt at the edge of the road, perfect and pristine. I knelt, placing a finger at the very edge of the nearest print. The gesture made an instant indentation in the soft, dry earth. Portland is a damp city in a damp state, but it can dry out sometimes, and when it does, the ground moves. If the wind had been blowing on this side of the road, the prints would have collapsed inward on themselves. They would have blown away. They hadn’t blown away.
“Sarah, what the hell?”
I looked over my shoulder. Elsie was beside me, radiating confusion and wary distress. She didn’t understand what I was doing, or why I was doing it, and she was worried. I wasn’t “Cousin Sarah, who does weird stuff sometimes” anymore. I was “Cousin Sarah, who got hurt, and might not be making good choices.” I was someone to worry about, not someone to accept.
The change stung. Elsie and I had never been particularly close—not like Artie and me, or Annie and me; the nerds of our generation, closing ranks against the people who didn’t understand—but she’d never looked at me like I was someone she needed to protect before.
It didn’t matter how much better I felt, or how much I had recovered from my actual injuries. The process of getting everyone else to see me as better was going to take so much longer than I wanted it to.
“The wind,” I said, standing and turning so that I was facing her properly. “It was blowing on the other side of the road, but it wasn’t blowing here. Do you know of any cryptid that can control the wind?”
“Sorcerers can,” said Elsie uncertainly. “Not Annie, not yet—she’s mostly all about the fire—but I know it’s a thing they can learn to do.”
Two sorcerers in one city when they weren’t working together was even less likely than two cuckoos in one city. It was still an explanation, and that made it better than nothing. “I’ll ask Evie about it. Maybe she can help.”
“Maybe,” agreed Elsie. She was still radiating wariness. I found myself suddenly glad I couldn’t read her expression as well as I could read her mind. At least her mind was honest. “For right now, how about we don’t run across dark roads at night with nothing but a cellphone, okay? I really don’t want to have to explain to Aunt Evelyn why you’re a smear on the pavement.”
“Right,” I said. “You want to go back?”
“Please,” said Elsie.
Whatever else she might have said was lost as Annie shouted, “A little help down here? This jerk’s heavy and bleeding, and I’m worried about getting an overdose of incubus juice.”
“I get to tell him she called it ‘incubus juice,’” I said. “Just me. No one else. I get to tell him, and then you get to tell me how ridiculous his face looks.”
“I will grant you this great boon because it means he’ll be awake for you to tell,” said Elsie, speeding up. Her concern for her brother was getting larger, sending jagged spikes through her thoughts. She was focusing on it hard enough for me to pick up the reason she’d allowed Annie to risk incubus overdose in the first place: she’d been afraid his injuries might be even worse than they were, and she couldn’t handle the idea of pulling her brother’s body out of the car. I followed her and didn’t say anything. She wasn’t the only one who was worried, but she was maybe the one who had the most right to her concerns.