Introducing Nova from Blacktop & Bone

On a dark highway, the dead watch her hunt what feeds on souls.

by K.K. Schmidt

The rain tasted like rust and gasoline, drumming against Nova's leather jacket in a rhythm she had long since stopped counting. She sat on the cracked concrete lip of the abandoned station at Mile Marker 17, her motorcycle parked in the shadow of the collapsed awning. The station squatted at the edge of the empty highway like something that had given up mid-sentence. Above her, a broken sign read GO, flickering in slow, stuttering pulses of sick yellow light—a rhythm like a dying heartbeat. Nova had learned to find comfort in such things as the predictable pulse of decay and the knowledge that everything eventually stopped moving. Time moved differently when you existed between the living and the dead.

Most people would have called the place lonely. Nova preferred loneliness. Lonely didn't ask questions. It didn't make her relive the moment she'd realized what she was, what she could do, and how that knowledge had fractured everything. But her quiet was cut short when headlights cut through the downpour, swaying badly as a rusted sedan pulled into the lot with a sound like tearing metal.

A woman stumbled out, her flannel shirt black with blood under her ribs. Even from yards away, Nova saw the wound wasn't natural. It pulsed with a cold, sickly green luminescence—a corruption that had nothing to do with shadow. "Please," the woman gasped, her knuckles white against the car door. "I can see you looking at it. You can see what other people can't. That means you can help her."

"You should be in a hospital," Nova said, standing up.

"There's no time," the woman shook her head, rain streaming down her face. "It's been three days. The doctors said she was just sleeping. Her name is Emma. She's sixteen, and something is eating the life out of her. Please. She's in the back seat."

Nova already knew what she'd see. She had spent years training herself not to get involved, building walls high enough that nothing could touch her. However, something in the woman's desperation cracked those walls. She crossed the lot and looked through the rear window.

The girl, Emma, lay across the seat. Her lips had a grayish tint, and the skin beneath her eyes was darkened to purple-black. Something was actively pulling the life out of her. It was the face of someone starving, except she'd been starving for only three days.

A dark shape clung to the girl's chest like a second skin. It wasn't a ghost as ghosts were translucent, gentle in their wrongness. This was solid, cold, and hungry. It was a liquid shadow with a mouth full of needle-like teeth sunk into the girl's chest, right where her heart was. The creature's form pulsed, and with each pulse, some faint quality of light left Emma's face.

"I see it," Nova said, pulling open the door. The cold radiating from the creature was immediate and overwhelming. It was the cold of the absence of something that had never lived, never breathed, and never felt the warmth of sunlight. It made her teeth ache, and her skin crawl with the primal knowledge that she was in the presence of something fundamentally wrong.

The creature turned its head, needle-teeth flexing, and lunged. Nova threw herself back as the creature came through the opening in a surge of cold shadow. One of its dark points grazed her arm, scalding her with intense cold. She hit the wet asphalt, rolled, and came up on one knee as the monster landed between her and the car. She reached between worlds, and the spectral scythe materialized in her grip. The handle was worn smooth; the blade was the gray of old steel, humming at a frequency she felt in her chest. The creature recoiled, then made a sound like tearing metal and launched itself toward the gas station. It was drawing her away from the girl. Nova pursued, her boots splashing through puddles that had turned black with the creature's blood. She chased it through the abandoned station, weaving between rusted pumps and collapsed shelves with an intelligence that made Nova's skin crawl. This wasn't mindless hunger; this was a calculation. A predator that knew it was being hunted.

She caught it in the dark interior and swung. The blade hit with the dense resistance of wet sand. The creature screamed, spraying black fluid that smelled of sulfur. Its left arm severed, dissolving into vapor, and it fled upward, scaling the wall and escaping through a gap in the collapsed ceiling. Nova pulled herself onto the slick, wet roof. Thunder cracked overhead as the storm responded to the violence. The creature crouched at the far edge, waiting for her. Its stillness had a mocking, predatory quality. She crossed the roof, scythe held loose. The creature lunged low and fast. Nova dropped to one knee and brought the blade up in a two-handed arc, cleaving the monster in two.

Darkness poured from the wound like oil. For a moment, the darkness cleared, and Nova saw a boy inside who was maybe twelve. Pale and frightened, his eyes met hers. He'd been trapped inside the creature for days, conscious and screaming silently while the monster wore his body like a suit. Then the illusion vanished, and the monster disintegrated into ash. The boy's spirit stood alone in the rain. He looked down at himself, then up at her. "Am I dead?" he asked, his voice soft and curious.

"Yeah," she said, keeping her voice level. "I'm sorry, but you are free of it now."

He nodded. Behind him, a warm, steady light appeared in the midnight storm. "Thank you," the boy said simply. He turned and walked into the luminescence, leaving Nova alone in the rain with the smell of sulfur fading.

Nova made her way back down. She found Martha sitting against the car bumper. The green light in her wound was gone, leaving only a dark, final injury. Nova sat beside her on the wet asphalt and waited. Through the open door, Emma's breathing had steadied.

"She's stabilizing," Nova said. "The thing is gone."

Martha exhaled, a long, tired sound. "It wasn't random. The thing knew her. It came to her specifically, waiting for the right moment." Her hand trembled as she pulled a creased photograph from her pocket. "Give this to Emma. She'll need to know I wasn't afraid at the end."

Nova took the photograph of Martha and Emma laughing together in the sunshine. "She'll know," Nova promised. Martha nodded, her breathing slowing as she stopped fighting the current. Within moments, her chest stilled.

Martha's spirit rose without drama, looking down at her body with tired recognition. She turned to Nova, her eyes clear. "Thank you," she said. She looked toward her daughter one last time, then walked into the same patient warmth that had taken the boy, disappearing into the light.

Nova slid the photograph into Emma's jacket pocket. She knew what would happen when Emma woke. The girl would reach for her mother instinctively, seeking the one person who was supposed to protect her from the dark. She wouldn't find her. Nova had watched that specific realization too many times, and she'd never found a way to make it less true. She couldn't stay to explain why her mother was gone.

She closed the door gently and mounted her motorcycle. The GO sign pulsed yellow, then dark behind her—a small, broken thing trying to do its job in the absence of anyone who needed it. She started the engine and pulled onto the highway, accelerating into the black, endless ribbon of road.

She had been riding for ten minutes when she saw the figure. It stood at the shoulder of the road, just at the edge of her headlight's reach. Still and patient. She passed it at speed, catching only a glimpse of a deliberate, chilling attention directed precisely at her. She didn't slow down, but Martha's words echoed in her mind: It wasn't random. It knew her. It waited for the right moment. The creature hadn't chosen Emma by chance. It had been placed near Mile Marker 17 because someone knew Nova would pass by. Someone had set the trap and waited to see what she would do.

Nova pulled her jacket tighter against the cold and kept her eyes locked on the road ahead. The highway stretched endlessly in both directions, black and empty, but she was no longer alone on it. Someone was watching, and they were waiting for her next move.