T he harsh white light of a particularly bright street lamp penetrated my windshield and left me squinting. I rolled my stiff shoulders and turned the wheel. My car carried me down another uncomfortably quiet road.
I hunted for the perfect parking spot—safe, secluded, off-street. Nothing here would do. I kept looking.
Two days had passed since the pet fair, since dinner upstairs at Albert’s house with too much lemon crusted to Carol’s dry chicken.
To say Carol was excited about Albert’s surprise cat adoption was an understatement.
She fawned so much over the hairless creature that she almost forgot to badger me into a date with her brother.
Almost.
I spent those two days outside the city, recording a piece on a new space science camp for underprivileged kids, with no logical explanation for what had happened at the adoption event and no chance to investigate.
During our extended time together, and extensive probing, I eventually came to accept that Albert truly had zero memory of the chaos we’d witnessed.
Neither did the internet.
I found this bit particularly hard to swallow. One dude could mentally block anything. But dozens of people doing the same?
Whenever anything even mildly exciting happened, people’s first reaction was to pull out their phone and record it. Even if somehow no one had captured the dogs gone wild or the rodent zombie apocalypse, there’s no way people wouldn’t talk about it.
But they hadn’t.
Not a single whisper.
This meant one of two things—either the blond woman who’d told us to forget had some crazy level of influence I didn’t understand, or I was just crazy.
I really hoped it was option one.
The first thing I wanted to do when I returned to Piccadilly was hug my boys. Unfortunately, they were staying at their dad’s, busy with summer camp and “too old for snuggles”—as if it was possible to outgrow affection.
The second thing I wanted to do was take a bath to soothe my sore muscles from sleeping on a cheap motel mattress. I wouldn’t do that yet, either. There were more pressing matters to attend to first.
I had to know what exactly had happened at the adoption fair.
Finally I found an okay-ish location to park my car.
I shut the door behind me, and hit the locks three times.
Then I locked it again for good measure.
I left my car behind the long-dead Burger Ruler with its drive-thru window permanently jammed open and waiting for one last order of fries. The smell of old grease and indigestion lingered, a ghost of fast-food past.
Sure, this wasn’t the best part of the city to walk alone in at night. It wasn’t the worst, either. It lingered between visiting builds character and definitely don’t make eye contact.
No one seemed to be around. But to be safe, pepper spray waited in my purse, my thumb on the trigger.
And for after I reached the park, I’d worn my steel-toed boots just in case.
In case something skittered.
In case something bit.
In case reality was exactly as unhinged as it had appeared that day.
Each of my footsteps felt louder than the last. I could swear I wasn’t stomping. It was the kind of night where sound got swallowed but somehow still echoed, where it felt like hidden eyeballs watched from the shadows.
A cicada buzzed somewhere above my head, then went abruptly silent. The silence was worse than the noise.
After a three-block walk, I reached the park.
Technically, the park had closed at sunset. But I couldn’t let a little thing like operating hours keep me from my answers. Work had kept me away long enough. Plus, the more time that passed, the greater the likelihood that what I was looking for would be gone.
Tangible proof meant I hadn’t imagined everything.
Holes in the ground, chaotic footprints, a witness who hadn’t somehow forgotten the entire event—anything would do.
I ignored the locked gates that blocked the driveway and slipped through the bushes beside them. Grass swayed gently in the breeze. Branches rustled. The moon lit up the tips of the trees. Through the lens of any other experience, it looked like a great place to relax.
Boots at the ready and pepper spray on standby, I clicked on my phone’s flashlight. I passed a playground with its creaking swings and twisting plastic tubes and headed toward the area where the adoption fair had imploded.
The scene of the crime was now eerily serene. Not a single chew toy left behind. Not even a sad balloon.
I started my sweep, light flicking over the soft grass in slow, investigative arcs. I was a woman on a mission: prove the undead were real. Snag my first Daytime Emmy in the process.
I snorted at the thought.
I scanned for movement, for patchy-furred, little horrors.
But I found nothing. Not a whisker, not a twitch. I found no glowing eyes between the blades of grass. I found no evidence of any creature, living or dead.
Okay. Fine.
Zombie rats had legs to carry them off. But there had to be holes and mounds of dirt that they’d burst out of like nightmare party favors.
I walked in widening circles, scanning for disturbed soil, patches of torn-up earth, any shred of evidence that something had burrowed up from below with murder in its tiny heart.
My knees cracked in protest as I crouched for a closer look.
Being closer didn’t help. The grass looked freshly mowed. Trees whispered peacefully in the breeze.
There was nothing.
Just a park.
The longer I searched and found nothing, the more foolish I felt.
Had I imagined the whole thing? It was the most reasonable explanation.
It had felt so real.
I turned my attention skyward. “What am I missing?”
I stared, unblinking, until the stars blurred together.
There’d been a thunderstorm. The ground wasn’t even a little damp from the rain anymore. But the softened earth could have covered any trace of what had happened.
Too bad it couldn’t make me forget.
“You don’t give me the tingles,” a soft voice said from somewhere in the darkness.
It came from nowhere.
Every muscle in my body clenched at once—shoulders locked, jaw tight enough to crack a walnut. My legs and spine contracted into a straight line and shot me to my feet. My flashlight whipped around before I even processed what I was doing.
The tingles?
Captured in my spotlight was the least physically threatening woman I’d ever seen. She was five feet tall at most, with short black hair that framed a soft-featured face.
There was something familiar about her.
She wasn’t hiding, or passing by. She must have followed me. I slowly slid my free hand into my bag and grabbed hold of my pepper spray.
Her leggings were glittery and pink, her shirt tie-dyed with a rainbow of color. If she’d wanted to catch me off guard, why not wear black?
“You’re not a witch, but you’re something,” she said.
A witch? Like the nature-loving religion?
“You must have me confused with someone else,” I said. “I was just leaving.”
“Wait.” An unnatural smile curled over her lips, revealing a small gap between her front teeth.
Cold bloomed in my gut, slow and heavy, a warning.
“Why did you come to Wendy’s Adoptaganza?” she asked. “What are your intentions with my coven?”
Coven? Was it still possible she was talking about her religious beliefs?
I’d witnessed the rise of plagued creatures, something that defied explanation. One of my best friends was a werebunny, the other worked a mysterious job that eliminated werebunnies. Life had hit me with multiple reality-altering revelations in recent times.
There was definitely more weird out there than I knew.
Maybe there were witches who flew around on broomsticks and commanded hordes of flying monkeys.
Or hordes of zombie rats.
Another word she’d said clicked into place—Adoptaganza. This is where I’d seen her before. She’d been here during the adoption fair, hiding behind a tree, summoning chaos.
I took a step back slowly, then another. “I was at the event to extend the animal shelter’s reach. I don’t know anything about any covens.”
The blond woman must have been working with her. They were witches with mind control powers. I was in so much trouble. I should have brought more than pepper spray. Why hadn’t I thought to bring a tinfoil hat? Would that protect my brain? The guys on Erika’s podcast seemed to think so.
“Hmm.” She narrowed her eyes, her smile still in place. “I’ll choose to believe you for now. But if you hurt my coven, I will ruin your life.”
I’d already botched my life well enough on my own. “Noted. I’m going to leave now, okay?”
“Okay. Nice to meet you, Erika Campbell who works at WNCR and lives in her camera man’s basement.”
Her first threat was explicit, but the second was the one that scared me.
She wanted it clear that she knew exactly where to find me, which meant she knew where to find my boys.
I raised my phone, lifting the flashlight from her feet up into her eyes.
And I snapped a picture.
Then, I ran.
Threats weren’t new for me. Neither were stalkers. It’s why I chose to work on puff pieces as often as possible. It’s why I owned pepper spray and steel-toed boots.
It’s why WNCR had a shared folder for all of its employees to submit photos to the police—photos like the one I’d just snapped.
When I got home, I locked the deadbolt, stripped my boots, and poured myself a glass of wine. My hands were still shaky and my mind raced.
Beyond memory erasure, what kind of powers did the witches have? Did I play it cool enough, or would the rainbow witch follow me home to make sure I could never remember anything again?
She could kill me. Maybe she could snap my spine with the twitch of her nose. Better to go quick than be eaten alive by the rodent zombie horde.
Was it too much to hope that we’d all lost our minds and none of this was real?
My phone rang.
The sound startled me so hard I nearly peed myself. I was also grateful for the distraction, and hoped it was one of the boys needing something, like a ride, or just to chat.