PEN let them through the roadblock. Dona didn’t make eye contact as they waved her through. They didn’t bash down the door. They probably didn’t even look twice at her really even with the clearly weird car choice. People had this ability to ignore most things, even the really weird things.

There was always that niggling worry back in her brain about being caught, but, hey, as long as she never seemed suspicious she could keep going until her body couldn’t keep going (for whatever that was worth).

The car in front of her inched forward until it completely crossed into nothing right under the arch. Dona let the tail lights disappear before tapping the gas to follow it.

Dona kept precisely at the 25 mph speed limit because, one, common courtesy. But, two, you never knew when something could appear in front of you. The car that had barely finished disappearing was nowhere to be seen once she finally crossed over, but that didn’t mean that it was far. It could literally be two inches away and Dona wouldn’t be able to tell. Time, size, location, everything was messed up in Avalon until the only thing in a straight line were the actual ley lines. Half the time, the billboards looming in the edges of the darkness and the occasional state funded signs were the only way to even tell you were moving.

California flashed into Nevada. Literally flashed. Reno was so bright that it bled into this realm too. A few Fae’s silhouettes floated in the corner of her eyes, tempting her to stop, talk, make some sort of deal for something she didn’t realize she needed, but she kept staring straight until all the flashiness was behind her.

The line quality immediately dropped. The world became smaller until she practically drove down a tunnel of darkness, but that last bit might have been her eyes adjusting after staring at such bright lights before.

Radios didn’t play here, so the only sound was the quiet static from the speaker and a weirdly wet squelch from under the wheels. Someone’s cheery face smiled down from the darkness, only their white teeth showing at first. Something about dental stuff, probably, but it would be dangerous to look too hard. Not with the roads thinning.

God, why did she ever take the lines anyway?

But it wasn’t like she could stop at the next port seeing as it was Salt Lake and it was dangerous territory to leave the lines without a port. You never knew when you were halfway through a building or underwater or somehow across the globe. And Salt Lake was, like, the most likely place to being outed seeing as she was killed there. And revived there. So yeah, she was all the wrong type of popular there, so no stopping in Salt Lake.

Did the person who get lost not want to actually go where they were going either? Did they try to turn around? It didn’t look like PEN ever found them, so that mystery was probably going to disappear with that person. It would be easy enough to do the same. She would just be another click on the counter that never went off.

Salt Lake passed like a funhouse mirror reflecting herself in a rearview mirror. It (herself, her old self, the mirror reflecting history, who knows) followed her down the path. It settled into her bones too deep to be a lie.

Something was following her. A shadow in the backseat.

She’d experienced death one too many times not to realize what exactly it was.

Reapers didn’t exactly exist anywhere which meant that their intent, that feeling of death, seeped into everything. Death came from hurt, from pain, and from a whole bunch of other stuff she didn’t want to name. Once if formed, it liked to follow other things that it deemed similar. Once it latched on, it was hard to shake. It must have sensed her somewhere in Salt Lake, but, it should be fine. Sioux Fall’s port was coming up. Getting out of Avalon might be enough to throw it off course.

The closer she got to the port, though, the more the thing became solid. A little less like death and a little more like something serious.

She flipped on the blinker but she didn’t know for who exactly. She could feel the mistake right away. The thing following her tightened its hold on her, keeping her from the port.

The car spun and it took a second to realize it was her. She was the one who spun the wheel. Another path, something unpaved and gravelly, came out of the shadow. She gunned the Camry down it.

The fingers rubbing her cheeks scratched at her jawbone as it scrabbled to keep a hold of her. It dug deep into her shoulders, a bony finger slotting into the bullet wound right near her heart.