The Tangled Woods (Dark Corners Collection, #5)

by Emily Raboteau

Burn marks on the asphalt. Flashing lights. A fleet of emergency vehicles, and a semi parked diagonally across two lanes. Reginald couldn’t help rubbernecking. He saw that the front end of a Prius was completely crumpled against the highway divider. The windshield was spiderwebbed. The engine was smoking. The driver’s-side door was a mangled, pried-open maw. Making no moves to resuscitate, two EMTs soberly guarded a body on a stretcher beneath a yellow tarp. They must have been waiting on the coroner. Whoever lay beneath the tarp was clearly dead. Reginald thought, I wish I could trade places with the poor sucker.

“My spell must have worked,” Thurgood reasoned. Reginald glanced at his wife, expecting her to be relieved. Instead she stared intently at the screen of his phone, looking even more combative than before. “You okay back there, Thurgood?” Reginald stalled. He felt lucky his phone was password protected but regretted not disabling the notifications. “Yes, Daddy. I want to play Wizard World.”