They got a few hundred feet away before they realized that the pervasive darkness made running away difficult. Jeremy could see the asphalt beneath his feet but not his next step. Caleb stumbled over a curb and fell to his knees, hands scraping against the ground. He hissed and clutched his palms to his chest. Jeremy slowed to a stop and glanced over his shoulder.
The Kelpie also slowed to a stop. It stood beside the car in the soft light from the wide-open doors. The inside of the car looked so safe compared to the yawning blackness around them. Jeremy lifted a foot, drawn back toward that safety, the familiarity of the inside of a car. Finally sitting in the driver’s seat to drive home after a long day. Road trips with his parents. Driving around in circles while they tried to get him to go to sleep.
A hand wrapped around his wrist, and he jerked his head down to look.
Caleb pulled on his arm, using it as leverage to haul himself back to his feet, “Sure, don’t help me up off the ground after I trip. Just leave me here. What is it you said…you only have to run faster than the person you are with. I see how it is now.”
Jeremy stared at him as he grumbled and brushed himself off. He glanced back at the Kelpie. It turned its head and looked back. He shuddered.
One of the goons walked past him, face blank and eyes on the car. Jeremy grabbed his arm, “Don’t.”
The man looked at him in surprise, then shook his head like he was trying to get water out of his ears. Jeremy glanced around at everyone else, “Don’t look over there. It is trying to lure us back.”
“Maybe it can’t follow us,” Sean said. Atticus chose that moment to start up her horrible yowling again. Jeremy patted the carrier and shushed her, but she could not be consoled. Against his better judgment, he glanced back over at the Kelpie. It had started moving toward them again.
“I don’t think so.” He turned and started walking as quickly into the darkness as he thought was safe, “But maybe if we get far enough away from the water.”
One of the streetlights popped on. It was behind them, which was the opposite of helpful. Jeremy had a dreadful, heavy feeling in his gut that if he looked back, it would illuminate only the Kelpie in a circle of welcoming light. He kept his eyes forward. Caleb, on the other hand, glanced over his shoulder.
“Jesus, that’s creepy.”
“Don’t look back.” Jeremy grabbed his arm and pulled him along. The light went out, and another popped on. This continued as the Kelpie followed them another few hundred feet. Jeremy started to get the déjà vu feeling he had back in the car when they were still driving but did not seem to move forward.
He was beginning to think they had fallen into some trap where the only way out was to go to the creature. If that was the case, there was no way they could break out of it. The Kelpie had seven of those rings and an entirely different colored overlay. Jeremy still was not sure exactly what the shades of color meant, and he had not seen the rings on any other creatures besides that deer on the very first day. But if he had to guess, it meant that the Kelpie was more powerful than their entire group combined.
“Maybe I should just transform and bite its head off,” Moira suggested.
“No," Jeremy told her immediately. “I’m not sure exactly what the overlays mean, but I can at least tell we are no match for that thing.”
Moira glanced over her shoulder, then grumbled and kept moving forward. Sean listened to them with a furrowed brow. Jeremy wondered what his special skill, or ‘gift’ as they called it, was. He watched the man check his phone, grimace, and look around at the darkness. They did not get any cell signal inside whatever reality-morphing effect the creature had.
Putting one foot in front of the other became more difficult. As he began to despair, light burst forth before them. Jeremy stumbled back, thinking the Kelpie had gotten in front of them.
Instead, they had reached an intersection now dominated by a massive tree. Its roots broke apart the asphalt, tilting huge chunks into the air. The stoplights tangled amongst its branches, blinking yellow. Around it swirled a light blue overlay, almost the same color as the Kelpie’s, and nine glowing white rings encircled its trunk. The streetlights around it remained on. The streets beyond were visible in the ambient light.
“Holy shit.” Moira breathed, craning her neck to look up through the branches. Jeremy glanced over his shoulder at the Kelpie. It stood below a lone streetlight, surrounded by darkness. It looked much smaller than before. Jeremy looked back at the tree. The extra two rings apparently allowed it to overpower the spell or effect that was trying to draw them back toward the Kelpie.
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“Hey!” Sean said into his phone, “Yeah, sorry we lost you there. The Kelpie had some weird effect... You are already at the car?” He stretched his arm over his head and lowered it to check his watch, “Has it been that long? My watch only says five minutes…I guess so. Alright, well, we are at Washington and Grand now, grab our stuff and come get us, but don’t come down Washington. Go around.”
He lowered the phone and looked at the Kelpie. It still stood frozen beneath the streetlight. This part of the city was more deserted than the other side of the river, even once they were out of the blank blackness. But there were people around. Cars had passed them on route 54 and windows glowed in the residential buildings. Jeremy frowned up at them. “We should call the police and have them close down that portion of the road.”
“I don’t know if that will help.” Sean said, “If it is a Kelpie, it is tied to the body of water. Anywhere along the river is probably vulnerable.”
“Then they can shut down the entire road.” Caleb pulled out his phone.
“Don’t bother with the police.” Sean stopped him, “I’ll inform the National Guard.”
He scrolled through his contacts, which included a general who picked up on one of the first few rings. In the middle of explaining, his voice dropped away because another voice echoed through the square. It was not particularly loud but sounded projected, as though coming from somewhere far away. It bounced between the surrounding walls into a growing reverberation.
“What are you still doing on my land?”
The group slowly turned to look up at the tree. The leaves rustled. From one of the branches dropped a woman. Wood fibers made up her body. Moss grew all over her figure. Verdant vines and leaves cascaded down her back. Her feet left green footsteps of plants that busted through the concrete.
“Holy shit.” One of the lackeys sputtered.
The dryad walked past as if they did not exist. She stood several feet taller than any of them. A faint echo of the overlay on the tree itself played around her figure. Jeremy looked up at the tree and the lists of runes it displayed. He wished he could take a picture of them. His fingers itched for his pen and notebook, but the dryad’s echoing voice drew his attention back to the more pressing matters.
“You have lost your prey.” The dryad said. Her voice was like a breeze, rustling through the boughs of a forest, growing in volume and intensity the more trees it disturbed. She stopped about a hundred feet from the Kelpie, driving back the darkness. “You are not allowed to hunt on my land. Crawl back to your waters.”
The Kelpie had also transformed into the visage of a woman. It appeared much more human than the dryad, completely naked. The streetlight’s glow reflected off the wetness of its skin. As the horse’s mane had stuck to its long neck, the woman’s inky black hair clung to her arms and chest. She smiled, eerie and too wide. Her mouth was a shadow, teeth the color of silver tarnish. When She spoke, her voice hissed and rattled.
“It has been so long that you kept me off these lands, and look how rich they have become.” She raised her arms and looked up at the buildings, “Surely you can spare these humans that I tracked into your territory. They were first on my shores.”
The dryad remained unmoved, “Your failure to lure them does not allow you to hunt onto the land. Go back.”
The tinny voice of the general came from Sean’s phone. It had dropped away from Sean’s ears as he watched the dryad walk by with a dumbfounded expression. If there was anything good to come out of this situation, it was that Jeremy got to see that expression on the smug bastard’s face. He returned the phone to his ear and spoke while still staring at the dryad. “The situation has changed. I’m not sure about the nature of it, but I will get back to you.”
“Look,” Moira grabbed Sean by the collar of his jacket and yanked him down to her level to be heard above the vibrating voices. Then she shouted at such a volume right into his ear that even Jeremy, standing several feet away, could hear. “This seems like the perfect distraction for us to get out of here. Let’s go in the direction you think your backup will come.”
Sean shoved her hand away and rubbed his ear. “But this is an interesting opportunity to watch two powerful creatures interact! How can we leave?”
“I second that.” Jeremy tugged out his notebook with a cautious glance toward the dryad and kelpie. They were silent, eyeing each other up or communicating telepathically or something. Jeremy did not know. He was not an expert in nature spirits.
Caleb rolled his eyes and joined him. Moira stood there with her hands splayed and jaw dropped.
“You are all stupid.” She told them, “Stupid. This is why men’s car insurance is higher. You all are like, ‘oh, nothing is ever going to happen to me lol.’ Well, I’m not staying here with you to die.”
She turned on her heel and stomped off.
At the same moment, the standoff ended. The kelpie let out a horrific sound. It was somewhere between a high-pitched whinny and a woman’s scream, with a little bit of that bone-chilling rattle from its voice for flavor. Sean grimaced and rubbed his ear some more.
Caleb crossed his arms. “She might have a point.”
Jeremy gnawed on his lip and looked up at the tree’s overlay. He could come back and look at it sometime. Given the difference in their number of rings, he doubted the Kelpie would actually be able to defeat the dryad. And it wasn’t like trees picked up and moved. So the runes would be here for him to find later. He slipped his notebook into his pocket again.
“Yeah,” Jeremy agreed with Caleb, then looked at Moira, “Let’s get out of here.”
In the next moment, the kelpie lunged out of the streetlight’s pool of light toward the dryad. All the blackness surrounding her disappeared in an instant, sucked into a swirling void in the kelpie’s hand. She lifted this above her head as she lunged, then brought it down on the dryad.