The SUV skidded a long arc from left to right across three lanes of highway, still traveling at over eighty miles per hour when it smashed into Jersey barriers made of concrete and stitched together with rebar. Obediah’s human vehicle died upon impact, and the entity was forcibly sprung loose like a spectacular firework exploded from a shell. It was ecstasy.

After the other vehicles skidded to a stop, the silence was pure, smoke rising from the crumpled engines. Obediah felt fulfilled, moved, as from the final movements of a great symphony—only instead of applause, all he heard were car doors opening and anguished voices of witnesses unable to accept the carnage before them.

Obediah wasted no time. It entered the body of a young woman in her twenties, a Good Samaritan standing out of her sporty Jeep. It took her back into the vehicle, starting up the engine, knowing from experience that if it didn’t leave soon, it might be stuck in a terrifically anticlimactic traffic jam for some time.

The Good Samaritan’s boyfriend, caught by surprise, barely made it back into the passenger seat before the Jeep sped away. Obediah’s first inclination was to repeat the event, to experience another spectacular crash. But it became first distracted, then annoyed by the boyfriend’s protestations, his questions, his concern.

Why are you driving so fast? What’s wrong? Why do you look that way?

He reached for her arm, and Obediah lashed out, smacking him across the face, cracking his eyeglasses in two and opening a gash over his left eyebrow. As he was holding his forehead and crying out in pain, Obediah had the Good Samaritan reach over and unlatch his seat belt, then open his door and swing the car violently right, then left.

The irritating boyfriend rolled out of the car and bumped along the highway asphalt until his body, viewed in the rearview mirror, lay still between two lanes, only to be run over by the left tires of an Amazon Prime delivery van.

The sight was oddly satisfying, and for a moment, Obediah considered the same fate for the Good Samaritan, rolling out of the speeding vehicle.

But another impulse commanded the entity’s attention. An awareness, a sudden cognizance. It felt it the way animals perceive changes in barometric pressure presaging a change in the weather.

The foe.

He was near.

Obediah was incapable of fear, of anything other than hunger, than the hunt for pleasure. But here was a source of potential pain. Here was the end of the Hollow One’s raucous joyride of gluttonous annihilation.

There were four Hollow Ones. There had always been four Hollow Ones. But Obediah was the only entity still free.

It pushed down heavily on the gas pedal, driving the Jeep west toward the city of New York.

Toward Hugo Blackwood.

Chapter