“It looks like it’s staying still,” Morgan says, “but also kind of receding?”
I move faster, not caring if it makes my splashing louder. Soon I outstrip Morgan. Still, we don’t get any closer to the light; it’s the same distance away as it was when we stood on dry land. “Strange.”
“Magic,” he counters.
With an unearthly glow like that, one has no choice but to allow for the possibility of unearthly answers.
A massive, dark shape lumbers into my periphery, and I immediately shoot out a hand to seize Morgan’s sleeve. He falls still beside me just as a bear slaps its heavy paw into the water, head down, and roots around by the light.
How is it that an animal can get near to it, but we can’t?
I’ve never been this close to a bear before. It’s smaller than I would have expected, but clearly an adult, black all over except for its light brown muzzle.
And then Morgan moves.
My muscles tense, thinking he’s going to bolt, that the bear will give chase—but no. Morgan sidesteps behind me, hands capping my shoulders.
I turn to stare up at him, aghast. “Are you hiding behind me?” I whisper.
Morgan swallows, then returns to my side. “Of course not, gorgeous.”
“Call me ‘gorgeous’ again and I’ll punch you.” I don’t like that I still like it. I want to put a bag over his pretty head—it’d make it easier to keep my thoughts organized.
“Sorry, bad habit. Let’s move on.”
“You were totally hiding behind me! You want to sprinkle me with salt and pepper so that I’ll be more appetizing for the bear!”
“If anything, I’d decorate you with fish guts,” he hisses back, as we both shuffle away slowly. “Bears would appreciate that more than seasoning.”
The bear stalks closer to the light, head bobbing as it sniffs around. For the first time, the light visibly spasms.
“It moved!” I whisper.
“So should we.”
Right.
The light swerves, sharply enough to elicit a gasp from both of us. The bear makes a frustrated snuffling noise, batting at it, mouth open. And then…
Well, there is no way to describe this except that the bear appears to beeatingthe light while the light hops frantically, trying to get away. Its glow flutters and dims, becoming a half moon, then a crescent, as bites are taken out of it.
“I wish I had my phone so that I could record this,” Morgan utters quietly.
Not quietly enough. The bear looks up.
Goose bumps erupt. Its eyes reflect the last wisp of light streaking the fur of its muzzle like ghost blood, and it freezesjust as I do. There is something so wrong about the bear that my body doesn’t do the human-reflex thing and run for my life. Rather, I take a stepcloser. Morgan snatches me back, I hear a series of loud splashes, and once the mist resettles on the water, the bear is gone.
The spell breaks.
Land, which took several minutes to wade away from, takes mere seconds to reach again. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I feel as though I’m being watched. The sensation is inexplicable. It isn’t terror. It’s curiosity and compulsion. Sixth sense. I know something, but at the same time, I don’t have it figured out yet.
“Did that bear look weird to you?” I ask as we empty marsh water from our shoes. Lily pads cling to my boots.
“Besides the fact that it might have eaten a ball of energy left behind by a dead witch?”
“No. It didn’t look…completely like a bear.”
Morgan’s brow furrows. “How so?”
