Total pages in book: 254
Estimated words: 240032 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1200(@200wpm)___ 960(@250wpm)___ 800(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 240032 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1200(@200wpm)___ 960(@250wpm)___ 800(@300wpm)
When I’d been outside earlier that day, I’d overheard a couple two spots down talking to another couple about how they were pretty sure they’d seen a wolf the night before, the night I’d gotten there.
It hadn’t been a wolf, but they wouldn’t have believed me if I’d told them the truth. My nose might not be anything spectacular, but my night vision was. The chupacabra had slunk around in the dark, keeping its distance from my van before eventually finding its way back into the fifth wheel where it had come from. The trailer with New Mexico plates had been gone by the time I’d woken up the next morning.
I didn’t take it personally. I had been busy replacing the elastic thread that held the beads of my bracelet together when I’d spotted it. I hadn’t intended on running it off.
So honestly, when the rustling started on that bright night, I hadn’t thought much of it. I wasn’t sure what kind of predators lived in the area, but I’d figured chances were a coyote was poking around. It hadn’t been until I’d heard creaking on the steps, followed by something nudging at my camper door, that I’d sat up in bed, which was wedged into the open space at the front of the trailer, and listened. The stairs only creaked when something human-sized or bigger was on them.
The hairs on my arms had gone straight up.
An awareness of magic like I had only felt around one other being before—my neighbor—had filled my chest in the next instant. That was the best way to describe what sensing other beings felt like. An invisible nudge hello—pressure, even. A sensation that said, This person is a little like you, with most beings, but with this one, it had been a shout across a room, a HELLO, HELLO, HELLO.
The most startling thing of all was that I’d been able to smell its magic. Sweet and potent, it had triggered something in me that left me itchy. I had driven through areas with it sprinkled into the leaves of its trees. Diluted in the water that filled its rivers and creeks. Invisible to most, but not to those that kept its secrets.
But I had never felt it the way I did then, maybe because it was so close. I’d never been within ten feet of my neighbor when he let the full spectrum of his power out for the whole neighborhood to feel. The magic at that moment had made me lightheaded. My heart had pounded faster than ever.
And just as every single instinct in my body shivered in reaction to what was outside, I’d heard it.
“Child,” the soft voice had whispered, a stranger talking directly into my head.
And I hadn’t known as I got to my feet—my own magic boiling to life in my sternum in reaction, awakened, tickling my nose, my throat, my spine, and every nerve branching out from it—what I was going to find as I’d crept to the door that led outside.
“Hello?” I’d whispered, fully aware that I hadn’t imagined hearing something in my head. The only voice that had ever sounded like that, felt like that, had been in my dreams, and that one had been different.
But I knew I hadn’t been dreaming. Even if the voice had gone quiet, the magic had still been present.
Somewhere between scared and concerned for the first time in at least a decade, I went for the latch and opened the door, knowing dang well that whatever was outside wouldn’t be stopped by some aluminum framing and fiberglass siding.
And as I swung the door wide, I braced myself.
I’d seen a lot. Bogeymen and sirens. Gray men and harpies.
I had known a man who could turn into a gryphon when he wanted to, and a woman who had told me once at a bar that she’d pulled a man into a part of the ocean that was so deep, his body hadn’t known what to do with the pressure.
My parents had never held back from sharing stories about the beings they had grown up wary of and those their parents had revered, like Kukulcan and Hunab Ku… among others.
There wasn’t a whole lot I genuinely feared, but the magnitude of the magic that had snuck into the campground undetected until then was right on the cusp. And it wouldn’t be until months later that I realized she had done that on purpose. The magical being had let me feel what she was capable of to draw me outside, like a curious moron who would die at the beginning of a horror movie.
And at a little after midnight on that full moon in May, with a power so great making me second-guess why I would even be outside in the first place, trying to find where the magic was coming from, my senses still managed to pick up on a tiny trickle of something.