Kenneth Peterson could smell the tang of blood through the pouring rain. The water threw it up into the air, and the scent smacked right into his face as he opened the door to his cruiser, causing him to scowl.

Nothing good ever associated with that smell.

He radioed in as he got out of his car, approaching the driver’s side of the mangled sedan, irritated about stepping out into the deluge. He was unsurprised to find a teen behind the wheel.

Another kid who didn’t know how to drive in the rain, the cop thought, pulling out his flashlight and scanning the car. Typical teen car. Cluttered with junk, but he didn’t see any other passengers…

“Unh.” The girl groaned, bleeding from her eyes and nose as she reached toward the backseat, ignoring Kenneth entirely.

“Ma’am, you’re gonna be alright. There’s an ambulance on the way. Was there anyone in the car with you?” Ken asked, scanning the burst-out windshield. It sure as hell looked like there’d been another passenger, and they’d gone straight out the front.

She gave another groan, her body twisting around the seat as she reached for… There wasn’t anything but trash and a bunch of Wiccan-looking brass baubles scattered across the back.

“Ma’am, I’m going to need you to stay still.” Don’t make my job any harder than it has to be, alright? Ken left the second half unspoken. “Moving can aggravate injuries. Stay still until the paramedics get here.”

Her energy seemed to leave her as she paused, panting.

Good enough. He turned around and scanned the street with his high-powered flashlight. There was no sign of another passenger. No blood smeared over the pavement, no body, no debris aside from bits of windshield glass.

Did a bowling ball pass through or something? Ken thought with a scowl, walking forward and scanning the oil-sheened asphalt while he started cracking a few flares. In the distance, the woods were simply too thick. There were a million ways to miss someone in the dark while it was raining, and Ken just hoped he wasn’t leaving someone to die in the cold.

After a moment of fruitless searching, Ken hustled back to the car.

Damn, I hope I didn’t miss someone; Paul would chew me out for a week. Either it had been an inanimate object, or the passenger had…walked off without a scratch.

Pfft.

“Ma’am, I need you to answer me. Was there someone else in the…shit.” The woman’s jaw was relaxed, her eyes open and staring. That didn’t necessarily mean she was dead, but it was a bad, bad sign.

Ken leaned forward and reached through the window to press his fingers against the woman’s ‘juggler’, as Norm liked to call it.

Despite the cold rain gradually stealing the heat from his fingertips, Ken was able to make out a faint pulse…until it stopped.

“Fuck!” Ken unlocked the door and leaned in, unhooking the seatbelt before he grabbed the chick by her armpits and began hauling her out of the car, onto the sidewalk. Normally you don’t move someone until the experts show up, and you definitely don’t put them in the rain to lose body heat.

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But there were only thirty seconds or so until the ambulance arrived. He could hear the sirens approaching already. If he could keep her heart beating, and her blood oxygenated until they arrived, he could save her life. For those thirty seconds, he would have someone’s life in his hands.

For those thirty seconds, he would be a god.

FWOOSH!

A blinding flash of light from the sedan knocked him on his ass as he was hauling her out of the car. Blinking the afterimage out of his eyes, he scrambled to his feet, peering into the car.

One of the little brass tchotchkes he’d dismissed earlier was…floating in the center of the backseat, emitting a rapidly dwindling glow.

The fuck is that? Ken thought, reaching in and snatching up the little thing. It was surprisingly heavy for brass. Never seen brass float, neither. Is this thing what caused the crash? I’ll ask later. More important shit to do.

Ken tucked it into his vest pocket and turned back to the girl, dragging her the rest of the way to the sidewalk before beginning CPR.

Aside from the rush of saving a life, there was also much less paperwork he’d have to do if the girl lived to fill it out on her own. He could file the weird thing in his report at the end of the day, or give it back to her if it wasn’t dangerous.

Ken winced as he put his lips over her bloodied ones and began forcing air into her unmoving lungs.

SCREEECH!

Ken looked up into the headlights of an oncoming car, hydroplaning and totally out of control. He couldn’t make out the driver's face past the brilliant light, but Ken thought he could see the grinning skull of death itself.

Not like this, Ken thought, his body turning cold as he tried to move. Not a fucking Tesla. His legs were frozen, his knees refused to unfold fast enough to get out of the way.

The sedan slipped through him. Ken got a brief flash of the inside of an electric engine, followed by a cab and a trunk.

The car crashed into the guard rail behind him before coming to a stop some thirty feet beyond him.

Ken took a shuddering breath.

What the…hell?

***Later***

“The gold,” Paul said, flipping through the report.

“Gold?” Kenneth asked.

“The gold in the backseat?” Paul said, frowning.

“I thought it was brass knickknacks,” Kenneth muttered, suddenly hyper-aware of the lump in his vest pocket. He hadn’t thought about it since he’d pocketed the thing. Was all of that gold? That’s a fucking fortune. Who on earth would think a teen would have millions in gold in the backseat?

Paul lifted an eyebrow, giving Ken that infuriatingly smug ‘I’m better than you’ look.

“Anyway, the gold is going to stay in evidence until we can figure out whether or not it was stolen. If we can confirm it wasn’t, it’ll go to the girl’s next of kin.”

Kenneth knew how this actually worked. The top brass were going to sit on the gold for a time, to see if anyone actually knew it existed. The girl’s only next of kin was six months old, and the baby-daddy lived separately in a run-down suburb for the desperate. The chances were decent no one knew how rich the girl actually was.

Once a few months went by without anyone stepping forward to claim it, the record would be altered, the gold would ‘cease to exist’, and everyone involved would get a fat bonus, if not an outright promotion to keep their mouths shut.

Which would be chump change compared to the sheer volume of gold in the backseat. The brass were the ones going home with the lion’s share, buying their boats and vacation houses as usual, and Kenneth was expected to bend over and take it.

Ken tolerated it because that was just life. Making a stink about it would get him punished for the rest of his career or just plain fired. Same if they found out he contacted Baby-daddy.

He resisted the urge to touch the gold in his pocket. Not until he was out of his captain’s field of vision.