was a charred skull, and most of its upper body had been burned away or shot to pieces. Daniel sauntered up to the body and pumped one more round into it for good measure. As I watched in stunned silence, the corpse vanished.
The ghosts of the two young men turned to me with sad smiles and disappeared as well.
Daniel bent down and picked up something from the asphalt, and I realized he was gathering spent shells. I collapsed against the side of my wrecked car. Now that the crisis was over, I felt drained and light-headed. And I didn’t even want to think about the Mini Cooper.
After a few minutes, Daniel loped over. “You all right?” he asked, giving me a once-over from head to toe. He frowned as he saw the blood on my face, and stepped closer. I wasn’t in the mood to fight about it as he checked my scalp.
“Looks worse than it is,” he said. “You can move everything?” I nodded. “Seeing double?” I shook my head gingerly. “Headache?” My nod was imperceptible. “Neck hurts?” I had the feeling from his questions that Daniel had been in enough fights and wrecks to have some experience with the subject.
In the distance, sirens wailed. “Look, I’ve got to get out of here,” he said. I moved to argue, but he shook his head. “No buts. You’ve got a reason to be here. I don’t. Tell them a deer jumped out of the woods. If they ask you about the charred mark on the road, play dumb. Tell them you didn’t see it. Don’t worry – that thing isn’t coming back soon.”
Maybe not, but it’s likely to have friends.
Daniel sprinted away and drove off. I dug my cell phone out of my purse and called Teag. He nearly had a conniption when I told him what happened.
“No, don’t come out here,” I said. “I’ll have them take me to St. Francis. But I’ll need a ride home from there. And someone’s going to have to tow the car.” Despite the headache and the sore neck, I was with it enough to bemoan my poor mangled Mini Cooper. I was sure it had given its all for me.
Teag reluctantly agreed to meet me at the hospital. I shifted in my seat, and saw the broken bits of the memorial by my foot. A pang of guilt shot through me for ruining the shrine.
I bent down and picked up the pieces. Someone had gone to a lot of effort to create the memorial for two young men who died before their time. I had already felt the initial images from the memorial when the ghosts appeared, so handling the wooden pieces now didn’t send me into a swoon. Still, the longing and loss was clear, as was the love that went into the homemade marker. I resolved to replace it. That’s when I looked up and saw the ghosts of the two young men standing by my car, waiting with me until help arrived.
The police sirens were so loud that I thought my head would explode. A police car, an ambulance and a fire truck roared down the road and stopped when they saw my car.
“What happened?” the officer asked, taking in my disheveled condition and the ruined car.
“Deer,” I said. “Came out of nowhere. Wrecked my car,” I said ruefully.
The rest of the questions were a blur, and since I felt woozy, I mostly concentrated on not passing out. I must have looked pretty bad, because the cop never even tried to ask me about the scorch mark on the pavement.
Two very nice EMTs loaded me onto a gurney. “A precaution,” one said as I tried to object.
“My car –” I protested.
One of the EMTs, a big man who looked more like a linebacker than an emergency medical technician shook his head. “Honey,” he said, “that car’s not going anywhere. They’re gonna have to haul it out.”
I blinked back tears. Then I got mad. It didn’t matter that the monster who wrecked my Mini Cooper had been run over, shot, and incinerated. Someone had sent him, and he, she or it was going to answer to me before this was over.
I don’t remember much about the time at the hospital. I was poked and prodded and asked the same questions over and over again. They made me take a Breathalyzer test and took blood to make sure I wasn’t on something. Huh. If I’d have told them what really happened,