Page 7 of Silk Skullduggery (Haven Hollow #40)

I slammed on the brakes so hard that I was surprised I didn’t leave an inch thick streak of rubber from my tires.

My car rocked to a stop, and I sat there for a second, my heart slamming up in my throat and my hands shaking, as I realized just how close I’d come to running a person over.

What the spell were they doing—was this some sort of prank? Were they even still alive? And if they were still alive, why in the Goddess’s name would someone lie down like that in the road, in the middle of a subdivision? Maybe she was hurt?

I stepped out of the car and walked over to the woman who was lying on her back, arms at her side. Her eyes were open, but that didn’t mean anything. Conscious or not, she was staring blankly at the sky, totally oblivious to the car still idling a few feet away.

Was she hurt? Sick? Had she just collapsed here? It was a strange way to fall—that much was sure. It was more like she’d been left like this—arranged for someone to find her. A horrible thought then slithered through my mind. I couldn’t shake the memory of Maverick describing the victim he’d been investigating, the one who’d just fallen down… dead. Was this woman also deceased? But she didn’t look like it—dead bodies most times looked like discarded marionettes, all splayed limbs and mussed hair—not like they were waiting for someone to come along and tuck them in for the night.

Well, I needed to check for a pulse. And I was going to. Right after my legs stopped feeling like badly set jelly. This was so stupid. I’d been in fights before. I’d been in wars. I’d defended the town from truly vicious creatures, demons and vindictive faeries. But that had all been deliberate. I’d planned it out and followed through. The idea that I could have hurt someone by accident? The thought left my limbs trembling and my chest so tight that it was difficult to breathe. I only barely managed to get it together enough to walk back to my car to hit the button for my hazard lights. The last thing I needed was my car to get rear ended in the dark.

I then grabbed my phone out of my purse. If this was another victim of whatever might have killed the first two people, then there might have been some sign on them that Maverick missed, and I was way better at protecting myself from magic than a half-trained Taliyah would be.

So, yeah, that was my plan: check that everything was safe, or if there were any clues, and then call Taliyah to come and… deal with the situation. Oh, yeah, and the pulse.

I swallowed, then squared my shoulders and forced myself to walk forward.

I’d been bracing myself for a corpse. So, to say I was surprised when the woman who was lying unmoving in the middle of the road glanced at me and then away like she was totally disinterested with what was going on… well, it would have been an almost criminal understatement.

“You’re awake,” I blurted out. The last word had almost come out as ‘alive’ but I’d managed to change it at the last second.

The woman gave me another reluctant look, like she couldn’t be bothered with the situation. Concern and irritation were a combination bubbling up within me that, while I was very, very used to both, still didn’t sit well in my chest. What in the world was going on? Why would anyone do something like this?

I figured I might as well ask the only person who might actually be able to tell me a reason.

“What in the world are you doing?” I crossed my arms over my chest, cellphone dangling from my hand as I glared at her. “Are you trying to get run over, because you know there are much easier ways to off yourself than involving unsuspecting and innocent bystanders?”

It was dark, and while there were houses nearby, the streetlights didn’t do much to light the situation. The woman just kept lying there, totally limp against the pavement. Every once in a while, she would shift slightly, like the normal fidgeting of a person lying on what had to be a very uncomfortable surface. So that ruled out my worry that she actually couldn’t move. She just seemed like she didn’t want to get up.

The woman wasn’t very old, maybe a few years older than my cousin, Astrid. Her hair was brown, but in the low lights, bits of it were auburn. There weren’t any visible wounds on her either, nothing out of the ordinary that I could see anyway, but I also didn’t want to start and in-depth magical assessment while the person, who was human to all my senses, was awake and watching me. I had enough going on without having to get into complex memory charms.

I took a look around, but no, there was still no one else in sight. Just me, my car, and an unresponsive awake person, lying in the road. What the spell was I supposed to do about this?

“Hey.” Still no reaction. “You need to get up. Move off the road. Seriously, it’s only dumb luck that I saw you in time not to drive over you.”

Nothing.

I strangled back my mounting annoyance and tried to coax a little bit of the empathy that Poppy had infected me with to the surface.

“Are you okay?”

It came out a little grudgingly, granted, but it was still the thought that counted, or so Poppy always said.

The young woman still didn’t say anything. Her blank expression didn’t change, and she didn’t move a muscle other than to tip her face a little away from me. But, as I watched, tears welled up in her eyes and spilled down over her temples to patter against the pavement like little rain drops.

“Oh, spell.”

Curses I could deal with. Demons I could deal with. Hexes and charms? Child’s play. Other people’s emotions, though? I was out of my depth. I’d been thinking that it was all a magical situation, but what if it was a mental health situation instead? I was very much out of my depth here.

I could still have called Taliyah. The police had to have some kind of resource for this type of situation. I wasn’t sure that was the best thing to do, though. If there was danger, sure. If some creature was swooping down out of the night to eat someone, you’d better believe that Taliyah would be my first call (or maybe Lorcan would be). But I wasn’t sure an officer was what this woman needed.

I could have called an ambulance, but she didn’t appear to be injured, and she hadn’t indicated otherwise. She just seemed like she’d given up. Like she’d laid down without even a care about whether she was in danger or not, and that didn’t seem like something a police intervention could help with. Or an ambulance.

I stood there for a long, annoyingly indecisive moment, bouncing my cell phone in my hand. What was the best option? I didn’t have a spell that could fix this. But standing in the road wasn’t safe, even in a quiet subdivision. Yes, I could have tried to move the woman but I was fairly sure paramedics frowned on that sort of thing. So, finally, I shook my head and made a call.

It wasn’t a fighting situation, or a magic situation. It looked like an emotion situation, so I called the only person I knew that was good with feelings. Poppy answered on the second ring, her voice a little muffled, like she was eating something.

“Hello?”

“I need your help with a… well, you kind of situation.”

There was a rustle on the line, and when Poppy came back on, her voice was clearer. “Is it a potion situation?”

“No.” I hesitated, not sure how to articulate what I was asking for without sounding like an idiot. Finally, I just rolled my eyes and embraced it. “It’s a person kind of problem.”

There was a long pause. “I don’t even know what that means.”

“Because it’s not exactly easy to explain,” I almost barked back.

“Where are you?”

I gave Poppy the address of the closest house I could see. “I’m in the road. My car is blocking things, so keep an eye out for that.”

“In the road?” Poppy took a deep breath, audibly calming herself. “Wanda, that doesn’t sound safe…”

“I’m fine. I’m a witch—er vampire,” I corrected myself, glancing around to make sure no one had heard me. Well, the woman in the street had, so it looked like I would have to do a memory altering charm on her, after all. “I’m fine.”

“I’ll be there in five minutes.”

It was closer to seven minutes when Poppy’s white jeep pulled up across from me, blocking the other direction of the road, just in case we got traffic. Her headlights sent a stab of pain through my eyes, and I had to squint and turn away, but I didn’t complain. The less chance of being run over, the better.

“What happened?” Poppy didn’t even bother closing her car door, already hurrying forward. “Is she okay? Are you okay?”

“I don’t know, and no idea but I’m fine.” I gestured to the woman laying sprawled out on the road, completely listless and oblivious or ambivalent about the amount of danger she was in. “She was like this when I found her, but she won’t answer questions.”

“Can she talk?”

“Don’t know.” I yawned.

“Is she hurt?”

I shrugged. “I can’t see any blood or anything on her, but there are ways to be hurt without bleeding.”

The situation was still bad, but I actually felt a little better with Poppy there.

She crouched down next to our mystery woman, who at least had stopped crying, thank the Goddess. Poppy looked her over, double checking that there were no visible injuries, and I saw the moment she noticed that the woman’s eyes flicked towards her before turning back to the sky.

I couldn’t see anything up there worth staring at. It was overcast, dense gray clouds. Not even the pretty kind.

“Miss? Are you alright? Are you hurt?” Poppy asked.

No answer. I tried not to shift around too much so I didn’t look impatient, but really, I could have told Poppy what the response was going to be.

Poppy bit her lower lip, worrying the skin there. “Miss, it isn’t safe to lay out here on the road. It’s dark, and you could get hurt. Are you okay to get up so we can get you off the road?”

Again, there wasn’t a response, but from the lax way the woman was sprawled out, the idea of being hurt didn’t seem to be causing her much concern. Poppy glanced up at me, her face twisted up in concern, but I didn’t know why she was looking to me. She was the expert in people, not me. That was why I’d called her over in the first place.

Poppy squared her shoulders with new determination. “My friend and I are going to help you over to the sidewalk, okay? It isn’t far, and we’ll help you get there, but we need to get you to a safer place. You just have to let us know if anything hurts, okay? Do you mind if we get you up?”

“I thought we weren’t supposed to move her? Isn’t that what all those first aid people say?”

Poppy looked up at me and shrugged. “As far as I can tell, I don’t think she’s hurt but she could be if she gets hit by a car.”

“Okay, good point.”

For the first time, the woman responded, if you could call it that. She did an odd, lopsided wriggle, and it took me a moment to realize she was shrugging. Poppy gave me an expectant look, and I realized that she’d meant for me to help her haul the stranger off the pavement with her. I winced, thinking about the fact that I was wearing heels and my favorite cashmere sweater that felt like I was dressed in a downy soft cloud. I just hoped the woman didn’t puke or drool on me, because so help me, it would be my very last act as a good samaritan.

The woman didn’t fight us when we peeled her up and off the road, but she didn’t exactly go out of her way to help, either. As Poppy started trying to leverage the woman up, it became pretty clear that the woman was apathetic about where she ended up, and it felt more like she was allowing herself to be moved in hopes that we might leave her alone rather than with any sense of self preservation.

After watching Poppy grunt and shift around for better leverage, I heaved an extremely put upon sigh and moved to help. The instant I grabbed the woman’s arm, I almost dropped her.

What I hadn’t been able to sense from looking at her, became extremely apparent at the first contact between us. She was encased in horrible, clinging bits of dark magic. Whatever this spell was, it stuck to her in sticky strands, like spider webs, completely encasing her body. No wonder she didn’t care about anything, no wonder she wasn’t worried about her own safety. The magic was horrific, it must have felt smothering, like she was slowly having the life choked out of her and never knowing why.

Poppy caught sight of my face, at the horror I didn’t even think about hiding. Her eyes went wide. “What, what is it?”

I could barely think around the waves of malevolence rolling off the poor woman. I didn’t want to touch her. I wanted to drop her, to get as far away from her as it was possible to be. I couldn’t even comprehend how it would feel to be on the inside of that mess. Bile burned at the back of my throat, the sour edge coating my tongue, and I absolutely refused to be the one to throw up, so I grit my teeth against it and focused on hauling the woman over to the side of the road, because the faster I got her sitting down, the faster I could let go of her.

Poppy was looking more and more alarmed though, so I managed to squeeze a few words out through my teeth without mortifying myself. “Dark magic. She’s covered in it.”

Poppy, thankfully, took the hint and helped me shuffle faster.

I couldn’t take my hands back fast enough, and I only just managed to resist scrubbing my palms against the legs of my pants because I knew it wouldn’t actually help. The strands tried to cling to me, and I summoned a bit of magic into my hands to burn it away.

The magic was awful. The more I looked her over, the worse I realized it was. The magic wasn’t just engulfing the woman, it was doing something to her emotions. I hated the thought of touching her again, but I needed to know what was going on, mostly because Taliyah might freeze my butt if I let the opportunity slide because it was well, simply put: gross.

Poppy knew enough about magic to not bother me when I lifted the woman’s hand again. I shuddered at the contact, as the stinging little barbs sank into me, trying to creep up my arm like a crude oil spill.

As I teased the strands apart, feeling them with my magic, I realized they were enhancing whatever the woman felt. Wait, no, that wasn’t right. Not everything she felt, only the negative emotions. Anger, pain, fear, they all got the megaphone treatment. But the one the spell seemed to have latched onto like an engorged tick, was despair.

Goddess, no wonder she’d just laid down in the road and given up. The feeling I was getting was like being sucked under quicksand. So deep in that you couldn’t even hope for a way out. I was shocked she could even function as much as she could. I didn’t know if this was a curse, or a haunting, or if she’d just brushed up against the wrong thing, but if it was anything like what had happened to the other victims, it was no wonder they’d just dropped dead on the spot.

I tried to be delicate, I really did. I feathered my magic through the gaps in whatever curse this was, prying it loose strand by strand. I was trying for a surgeon’s touch, instead of going at it like someone with a weed whacker. The magic fought me, writhing, unwilling to give up its prey.

My temper frayed. Who would have done something like this? Who had snared this woman, and left her to suffer, a slow, painful decline, while she didn’t even understand what was happening to her? The anger fed my magic, strands of bloody light snaking down my arms, burning away the miasma of despair where it clung. The curse’s grip loosened, losing strength, and I threw myself into the fight with a mix of stubbornness and spite.

And it was working. With every new clump of clinging, toxic magic I cleared away, the woman became more lucid. She blinked, looking around with more awareness, and understanding slowly crept across her face, followed quickly by shock and horror.

When the last few desperate pieces went up in a blaze of scarlet light, the woman stared at the spot on the road where she’d been lying, at the two cars blocking the space in, and she started to shake.

“Oh my... what happened? Why would I… Oh my God.”

Poppy gave the woman’s shoulder a squeeze, and whispered a quick murmur of comfort, and then she stepped away to call for an ambulance.

It wasn’t a bad idea, after all. Sometimes curses, dark magic in general, could harm the immune system. And that nasty piece of work had depressed the woman’s body. She was probably going to be drained and exhausted for a few days, barely able to sit up. Even as it was, she needed me to prop her up, keeping her upright. The curse had really taken it out of her.

Drained .

That was the word Maverick had said, talking about the man who’d died in the street. Had this been what happened to him? Had he been cursed too? Only the curse had been on him longer or maybe it had come on faster? I was pretty sure the two incidences were related. And then I had the horrible thought that maybe the man, like the woman, hadn’t been dead, but more comatose. And no one around him had known what to do to help him?

Horrible. I shook my head, not wanting to think about it.

I jumped when the woman latched onto my hand with a desperate grip. Her eyes were wide, haunted, and I saw that she’d also grabbed onto Poppy, who was patting her shoulder.

“Thank you for helping me. I don’t know why I did that. I don’t understand what’s wrong with me.”

I had no idea what to say to her, but shaking her grip off seemed a little callous, even for me. Fortunately, I’d called in an expert.

“It’s okay,” Poppy said, in that soothing voice people usually used for children and small frightened animals. “We were happy to help. We’re just glad you’re okay. I called an ambulance. They’ll be here soon, just so you can get checked out and make sure everything is alright.”

Whatever mother magic Poppy was weaving, it was working. The woman was relaxing by inches, backing away from the edge of what had looked like a panic attack waiting to happen. I didn’t have to do anything but stand here and tolerate being used as a handhold by a stranger, and in the grand scheme of things, it could have been a lot worse.

At least with the attention off me, I could focus on what the spell had just happened. I had no idea what that awful, sticky magic had been, and I hoped I’d never see anything like it again. Just remembering the feel of it had my stomach rolling around in protest. I double checked, just to make sure none of those awful, sticky spider web strands weren’t still stuck to me.

It didn’t take long for the ambulance to arrive, and after a brief chat with the paramedics, Poppy and I waited until our mystery woman was loaded up in the back and on her way to the hospital to get checked out by some mundane doctors, just in case the curse had caused any physical damage.

After they were gone, we stood in silence for a long moment before I turned to Poppy.

“Thank you. I’m sorry I dragged you out so late.”

But just like I knew she would, Poppy shook her head and smiled. “I’m always happy to help. You know that.”

The yawn seemed to take her by surprise at the end of her sentence, and she hastily threw a hand up in front of her mouth, like I might be offended by a glimpse of her molars.

“Sorry. It’s been a long day.”

I rolled my eyes. “Go home. Get some rest. Finish your dinner or whatever the hell you were doing.”

Poppy looked vaguely guilty, but did start drifting towards her Jeep. “What are you going to do?”

A headache threatened behind my left eye, and I rubbed at the socket with a knuckle, hoping I might be able to stave it off before it really got started. “I’m going to have to figure out how to explain this all to Taliyah, because something is definitely up.”