Page 85 of Demon and the Raven

“Yessir, but more importantly, I don’t wanna kill one of God’s creatures if I can help it. That would be a shame.”

“Yes, it would,” I agreed, finally finding my voice, smiling at him.

“Can you drive with all the mud on your windshield?” Lorne asked, drawing the man’s attention back to him.

“Oh yeah. The rain’ll clear a lot of it, but I’ll stop in a couple of hours and wash it off.”

“Okay, then,” Lorne said with a nod. “Thank you for stopping and checking. I’ll call the state police, and they’ll get people out here to take care of whatever’s left on the road.”

“Thank you, Officer.” He studied Lorne a moment, glanced at me, then returned to his truck and climbed into the cab. He started up the rig, eased around us, gave a quick blast of the horn, then drove off.

Once we could see his lights in the distance, I realized how quiet it was.

“We should get back to Osprey and drop off Father Dennis and the kids,” I told him.

“Well, yeah, but what the fuck, Xander?”

It was strange to be standing there, out in the open, on the side of the highway, getting damp in the drizzling rain, while having an existential crisis.

“The hell was all that?” he yelled, and it was loud.

We were both quiet a moment after his outburst.

“Feel better?” I asked once I saw him visibly calm.

“Yeah, sort of,” he grumbled. “But what even were those things?”

“I have no idea.”

He looked around, then said, “I think your potion turned them into mud at the perfect time.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

“If it hadn’t,” he said, pointing down the road, “that poor trucker would have been a basket case, seeing all the blood and everything else.”

“Yeah.” I suddenly realized how wet I was getting. “We’re going to drown out here before we figure anything out,” I commented, as the rain had gone from a drizzle to a steadily increasing downpour.

“Good point.”

We ran to the car, and once in, we sat in silence for a good few minutes before Lorne started driving back toward Osprey. Strange to look outside and see everything as it was supposed to be, simply a dark, empty, rainwashed highway at night.

He took a deep breath, then exhaled. “So those reptile things, we can assume they haven’t come through that rift, right?”

“Absolutely not.”

“So then the demon conjured them?”

“That seems the most likely scenario.”

“Do we think that the demon is powerful enough to either conjure them or make us see them how it wanted us to see them?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, maybe your potion didn’t turn them into mud. Maybe they were mud the whole time, and what it did do was remove the illusion.”

“You think it was all an illusion?”

He shrugged. “I dunno. I’m just saying, it’s possible those things were never scary, towering creatures out of a horror movie. Because given how big that one in the cemetery was, and how fast, it should have been able to catch you.”