Henriette’s eyes snap wide, trying to listen over the violence of her own heartbeat, and a new wind comes howling, shadows rising from the ground into an animal that stands on its hind legs, eyes like dust clouds. The terrible creature lets out a shrill scream of warning.
Legend of the Black Bear Witch,
Zelda Tempest
“You better getoutta here,” Joan advises.
Morgan and I bolt. Just before he reaches for the door handle of his car, he grinds to a halt. “Wait a minute. Did you see the curio cabinet? I think it disappeared again.”
“Does it matter right now?”
He nods once. “Right. I’ll check another time.”
We pile in.
I turn off his camera and stow it back in his bag. “Do you know any other roads out of here?”
“This is the only one that connects to Piedmont.” And then, to my horror, he steers the vehicle around and begins driving in reverse.
“Not again!” I scrabble for purchase in the car as branches of three-hundred-year-old trees scrape at our windows, sucking us into a black, clawing tunnel. “This is not how I want todie! There’s supposed to be”—we rocket over a pothole, and I clutch my door handle with a scream—“two wineglasses, one body. Missing jewels. A luxuriously decorated sitting room with a half-burned envelope in the fireplace.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve done this a thousand times.” But even as he says it, one of the tires slips off the edge of the road, dragging us toward a steep slope, and he corrects so forcibly that I’m swung forward, seat belt strangling me.
“The backwards-on-Wiley-Palmer thing is an urban legend,” I manage to rasp. “Nobody actually does it.”
“I do. If the witch sees us, she might magic up a bunch of different dead-end roads and we’ll end up lost.”
I tilt my head back, pulse racing. We’re barreling in reverse through a forest, after sundown, on a narrow road that curves like a sidewinder. “Let me out.”
“Zelda. I promise, you will live long enough to be murdered for your jewels someday. I’ve got this.”
“You’re going to get arrested or worse. You cannot DRIVE BACKWARDS!”
“I don’t have a choice! You should know better than anyone that if you drive forwards down Wiley Palmer, the Black Bear Witch will climb into your head and crack it open like a nut.”
“Please turn around.” My eyes squeeze shut.
“Zelda, listen. I respect you and I hear what you’re saying and all, but I amnotabout to be cursed by a five-hundred-year-old shape-shifting witch. There are scarier things in this world than Ross Baumgartner, who is barely even a cop. All he does is lurk in Moonshine’s parking lot, hoping to catch people carrying open containers of alcohol. Wait till we make it toPiedmont, and then I’ll drive the regular way and you can stop digging your nails into my arm.”
“There’s no such thing as curses,” I seethe, digging my nails in harder. “Pull over pull over pull over.”
“But the Black Bear Witch—”
“The Black Bear Witch isn’t real,” I snap.
He accidentally presses the gas, sending us careening for a terrifying moment. When I wake up tomorrow, all of my beautiful red hair will have turned gray overnight. “What do you mean? Youwroteabout it.”
“In a book!” I cry. “A fictional book. None of it’s real. How can you think it’s real? There is no witch. There are no ghosts. Thereis. No. Magic.”
I think I would almost find the dumbfounded look on his face funny, were it not for the fact that he keeps looking at me instead of the road, risking untethering my fragile little life from this mortal plane.
“But you’re a witch.”
“Witches aren’t real.”
“You cannot possibly mean that—”
“I do,” I cut in vehemently. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Morgan, but that is the truth. Anyone who claims otherwise is either duped or lying, and I am neither of those.”
