“By offering me to the Gods?” I joked. He didn’t reciprocate, smile or laugh. I narrowed my eyes, feeling a weird vibe coming off of him.
“You can’t be serious,” I said. “I was joking.”
“There’s an off chance we may have to use you as bait,” he admitted, not looking at me.
“What?!”
“I said off chance,” he said defensively. “I don’t know what’s going to happen but after the lighthouse it’s pretty obvious you’re partly responsible for attracting the weirdos. You’re like a ghost magnet. Why do you think I like having you around?”
My mouth dropped momentarily. “Because I’m awesome.”
“Oh, well that too.”
And that was exactly why I didn’t ever want to give a single ounce of myself away to Dex. He lulls me into a false sense of security and then treads all over me. Damn him and his stupid mustache.
“Great,” I muttered and leaned against the window, the lights of Red Fox not getting any closer. How freaking far was this damn bar from the ranch, anyway? I didn’t remember the drive being so long.
We traveled in silence for a few more minutes. I had no interest in talking to him for the rest of the evening. But eventually I had to remark on the fact that we were nowhere near the bar.
“Did you take a wrong turn?” I asked.
He shook his head and peered at the instrument panel. The compass said we were headed southeast. “How could I have taken a wrong turn, we never got off the road.”
“Well, we’ve been driving for at least twenty minutes and I could have sworn the town was ten minutes away.” I looked out the window uneasily. The road curved to the left and the lights were becoming distant.
“I think we should turn around,” I said even though behind us looked just as lost and bleak.
Dex reached into the cup holder and handed me the phone.
“Call Maximus and explain we’re going to be late.”
I did just that as Dex kept driving forward. Now the lights of the town were completely gone, swallowed up by the nebulous night.
“How could you have taken a wrong turn?” Maximus said, voice crackling on the other line. “I’m already at the bar.”
“I don’t know, I’m not driving.”
“Well I’ll be…,” he trailed off as he thought it over, the muffled sounds of the bar jukebox coming through. At least it sounded a bit more bumping than it was the other day. “I don’t know what to say except to turn back the way you came and start all over again. I’ll go find Bird and let him know.”
“OK, I’ll call you in a bit,” I said and hung up as I heard him saying “be safe,” his tinny voice so small in the car.
“Turn around,” I said to Dex. “Now.”
He sighed looking mighty pissed off. It must have been hard for him to admit that he did something wrong. Though I really didn’t see how he could have screwed up driving down a road.
He brought us to a crawl and did a slow U-turn. As he brought the Jeep around, our headlights swirled through the dark and focused on the road heading the other way.
There was a large buck standing in the middle of the road.
We both gasped and Dex braked. Where the hell had that deer come from?
We were maybe four feet away from it. It was like it had been following us – stalking us – down the road and our turn had caught it off guard.
But that was impossible.
We sat there in silence, the only sound coming from my beating heart and Dex’s heavy breathing. The buck was huge, the biggest deer I’d ever seen, and its antlers seemed to reach forever into the sky, like dead branches. Huge puffs of air came out of its wide nostrils, warm mist on a cold night. It raised its head to the side like it was getting a better look at us.
“That’s not a deer,” Dex finally said, his voice barely above a whisper.
Of course it was a deer. It had a shiny coat, four strong legs and deep dark eyes. Actually, its eyes were a little too dark. The retinas didn’t reflect like an animal’s usually would when it had a light shining on it.
“What is it then?” I said through clenched teeth, as if I didn’t want it know that we were talking about it.
Perhaps it did, though. The deer took two steps forward, its head lowered, and grazed the front of our Jeep with its antlers.
“Jesus!” I swore, feeling for my seatbelt. “What do we do?”
“I have a theory,” Dex said. He suddenly slammed the gears into reverse and stepped on the gas. The wheels spun for a few seconds and we were hurtling backwards for a few yards. Dex braked, flipped the car back into drive, and we sat there. The deer hadn’t moved at all. Not a good sign.
“Are we going to have to run it over?” I asked with trepidation, not really wanting to be in a hit and run with a deer.
“It won’t let itself be run over,” he said determinedly. He stepped on the gas and we were off, hurtling down the road, the deer in our sights. Even at the speed we were going, if we hit that thing, we’d be involved in a horrific crash. I could foresee the deer’s body crunching up against our front and come flying through the front windshield at us. We’d be crushed.
“Dex!” I screamed, grabbing the Oh Shit handle.
He kept on the gas. The deer was so close I could have counted the hairs on its coat. But it didn’t budge. It was an immovable object and we were going to collide in three, two –
SCREEEECH!
Dex suddenly twisted the wheel and the Jeep careened off the road. I watched out the window in a horrified daze as we passed the deer by mere inches. Only it wasn’t just a deer anymore.
It was a woman standing upright in a long flowing dress, a deer’s head for a face. I could see it all in slow-motion detail. Clasped hands at her front, the purple flowers on her black dress, the prim posture, the high collar that led up to the massive, blank head of that deer. This time its eyes glowed and followed my stare as we zoomed past it.
When the realization of what I had seen overtook the realization of what had happened, I let out a scream.
Dex wrestled with the Jeep as it went bouncing along the shoulder, heading for the unending desert beyond it. The thought of the car stopping on the road with that…thing out there, was beyond terrifying.
But with a final yank of the wheel and some maneuvering, the Jeep’s wheels found their way back onto the smooth pavement and we were bolting down the road again. I looked behind me. I could barely see it in the fading night but the figure of the woman was still there.
“Did you see that?” I exclaimed.
Dex looked in the rearview mirror. “Yeah,” he said grimly. “I really thought it was going to move.”
“No,” I said hitting him on the shoulder. “I mean, did you see that. It. The woman.”
His eyes widened and gleamed in the low light. “No…what woman?”
I told him what I saw and how I saw it in so much detail.
“Do you believe me?” I asked, as if it mattered.
He nodded. “I believe you. And this just proves one thing. We better get to Bird and fast. He’s got a lot of explaining to do about these skinwalkers.”
We ended up driving all the way back to the ranch. I kept my eyes vigilantly focused for any other ornery creatures or half-human beasts ready to run us off the road. I didn’t see any. Nor did I see any side roads or detours that could have led us astray. Instead, we did a U-turn right in front of the Lancaster’s gate and drove onwards again, slowly this time, making extra sure we weren’t losing our path.
After ten minutes of holding our breath and creeping along at a pedestrian speed, the lights of Red Fox got closer and closer, the landmarks of broken fences, mobile homes and sprawling acreages looked familiar once again and soon we were pulling right up into the dusty, packed parking lot of Rudy’s bar.
Dex put the vehicle in park, flicked off the engine and rested his head on the steering wheel with a thump.
I patted him gently on the back. My contact made him jump slightly.
“At least we made it this time,” I said meekly.
He turned his head on the wheel to look at me. The pale light that emanated from the bar and filtered in through the windscreen made him look tired and washed out. I suppose he probably was, though. I know I probably lost a few pints of blood due to fright. I still wasn’t feeling all there. I felt like I was one step away from a panic attack but now that we were at the bar, where people were, I needed to hold it together.
“How the fuck did that happen?” he mumbled, face smushed against the wheel. “Are we on The Outer Limits?”
“I don’t know…”
“Seriously, though. Am I going crazy?” he actually looked worried.
I almost had to think before I shook my head. Sure, he might be going kind of crazy from the lack of medication but I was in the car with him. I was there too.
“If you’re going crazy, then I’m going crazy too.”
“That’s a possibility.”
We had discussed that before. How two people could share a conscience and imagine the same things. But as unlikely as it had been back in Oregon, it was just as unlikely now.
“Well, whatever the hell is going on…we’re one step closer to finding out what it is.” I gestured to the bar which had drunken cowboys spilling out of it already.
We got out of the car and walked up to the door. I figured I might look a bit out of place thanks to my bandaged hands and cut-up appearance but apparently I didn’t. As we walked up the stairs, three young cowboys (well, guys in cowboy hats. I just call everyone in cowboy hats cowboys) broke into wide grins at the sight of me and fired a range of greetings.
“My, aren’t you a pretty young thing?”
“How you doing good looking?”
“S’up?”