Kent hated to lose. Fury contorted his face, his mind likely grasping for another option. But Jeremiah was limp now, and given a few more seconds, I’d squeeze even harder and crush his windpipe.
“You’re dismissed, demon,” Kent ground out the words. “Leave my presence. Leave this house. Go back to Hell.”
God, it felt good to win. Jeremiah dropped to the floor in a limp heap, and I vanished with a grin and two middle fingers up.
Something was off that day, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
Maybe it was the feeling of being watched as I walked across campus, the bizarre prickling on the back of my neck that told me eyes were on me, but I couldn’t figure out from where. Maybe it was the weird experience of having my Screenwriting Professor, Mr. Crouse, remind me — and only me — that I could come to his office after class if I needed any help. Maybe it was the fact that Jeremiah hadn’t come to school that day, and Victoria couldn’t seem to put her vape down during our entire lunch break. I could smell alcohol on her breath again.
“Family problems,” Inaya said, with a heavy sigh before we parted for our last classes of the day. “I’ve known Victoria for a few years and she struggles when her parents don’t get along. No family is perfect. We just have to try to be there for her.”
Inaya was a better friend than I was. She planned to take Victoria out for coffee after class, but the day’s weird feelings had formed a solid knot of anxiety in my stomach. Once it started, there was no reasoning with anxiety. I just wanted to get home.
I just needed to walk home.
I’d figured those walks home in the dusk would get easier, but no. The sun had sunk beyond the trees, twilight’s dusky golden light filtering through the branches. It was beautiful, but the dark was coming. The clouds had been sparse that day, but on the horizon, a mass of dark, purple-gray storm clouds were brewing, moving ever closer. It would probably rain through the night. The thought of curling up in bed with a glass of wine, watching Scream for the umpteenth time as the rain pattered outside, made me walk faster.
Since delving into investigating the paranormal, I’d trained myself to consider strange feelings and emotions to be a key part of my investigation process. It was pretty common to encounter feelings of dread, cold chills, and panic in haunted locations. So I tried to give my feeling of anxious discomfort the same consideration I would if I was investigating a haunting; I wasn’t going to push the feeling away. It was there for a reason.
I just didn’t know what that reason was.
My boots crunched on the gravel as I crossed the road to walk along the dirt near the trees.
“Ugh, gross.” I pulled up my shirt to cover my nose. The wind had shifted, carrying with it the awful stench of a dead animal, sour and rotten. I looked into the trees, expecting to see a dead racoon or maybe a deer.
But there was something else standing between the trees.
In the dim light, I thought I was just looking at some bleached, gnarled branches between the maze of trees. The bone-gray limbs were patched with moss and spread out, some high and some low, reminding me of a spider’s web. But it was not a web, not a spider. At the conjunction of those strange, branch-like appendages was a rib-cage with taut, graying flesh stretched over the bones. There was a spindly, spine-like neck, and a canid skull with the jaw hanging open and a long black tongue lolling out.
I blinked rapidly, my heart pounding. Were my eyes tricking me? It was at least fifty yards away. I pushed up my glasses, leaning down in an attempt to get a clearer view through the branches. It looked like a mutated, rotting dead animal. It wasn’t moving. It was even more still than the trees themselves.
It was probably some kind of creepy art installation.
In fact, it had to be an art installation. Those long spindly limbs were just wood. The “ribs” were covered with some kind of goopy, painted cloth, or maybe silicone. I shook myself, shuddering as I began to walk away. The Art Festival had only been a few days ago — maybe it was common for sculptures to be set