34
The Calm
JACK
I wake sometime after dark, cramped in the back seat of the sedan. Julio’s got the driver’s seat pushed back as far as it’ll go, reclined about fifteen degrees into the tiny bubble of space he’s left me. I’m propped sideways in my seat, my back against the door and my head against the window, my legs stretched across the length of the bench seat. Fleur lies between them, her body flush with mine, her cheek warm against my chest. The buttons of a strange shirt—one of Julio’s madras ones—are unfastened to my waist, the collar spread wide, revealing a bloody square of gauze.
I try to shift without waking her, peeling back the edges of the tape to find a puckered pink scar.
“Hey, the Iceman’s awake,” Julio says, catching my awkward stretch in the rearview mirror.
Amber turns in her seat. “It’s about time.”
My throat’s sore. My tongue feels like sandpaper. “What happened?”
“You got shot.”
“I gathered that much. What did I miss?” Last thing I remember is a searing pain as Julio and Amber jogged on either side of me. Then Julio saying, “This is going to hurt,” right before he stuck his finger through the bleeding hole in my shoulder.
“We had to haul ass out of Tennessee,” Julio says. “Been driving all day.”
“Where are we?”
“A couple of hours west of Little Rock.”
I do the math in my head against the time on the dashboard clock. The speedometer’s tickling eighty, the radio’s tuned to a local news station, and there’s a bag of empty granola bar and jerky wrappers on the floorboards beside me.
“What aren’t you telling me?” I ask quietly, so I won’t wake Fleur.
Julio lowers the volume on the radio. “The kid who shot you was human. Fleur left him alive.”
“So?”
“So the last thing we need is to end up on a wanted poster if he made it down that mountain and his parents decide to squeal to the cops.”
“Hewas the one who pulled the trigger.”
“But we’re the ones who look guilty. That scar on your shoulder’s not exactly Exhibit A in our defense. It just makes you look like a punk with a rap sheet, and blows a big fucking hole in our story.” I rub the smooth dip in the skin. Julio’s right. It looks like it happened months ago, not hours ago. No one would ever believe us. “And then there’s the small problem that Amber beat the crap out of him, and Fleur tied him up and took his gun.”
“And she didn’t use her hands to do it,” Amber adds.
So there’s the rub. Not only does it look like the kid was muggedby four teenagers, but he saw Fleur’s magic in action. If he does make it down that mountain, we’ll be lucky not to end up in the headlines of some crappy sensational grocery-store tabloid.
“The good news is we made it out of the state.” Julio changes lanes to pass a slow-moving car. “And we haven’t heard any news reports about it yet. Either the kid was eaten by a bear or he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut.”
“Any signs of Chronos’s goons?” I ask.
“None so far. But we’ve only made two pit stops since we broke camp this morning. Unless Lyon knows exactly where we’re headed, it won’t be easy for Chronos to find us.” His eyes find mine in the rearview mirror.
“Thanks,” I tell him. “For getting us this far. I owe you one.”
“One? You owe me a lot more than that. Fleur made me spend three hours in the back seat with you, holding your frigid-ass hand.”
I try not to picture Julio back here with me. It’s bad enough that I woke up wearing his shirt. I grimace at the smell of it, shea butter and some tropical-breeze deodorant. “Why couldn’t Amber do it?” I ask, though I can’t exactly blame her for not wanting to touch me after the knife incident at the cabin.
“I offered,” she says, batting her lashes. “But Julio wouldn’t let me.”
Julio’s knuckles are tight on the wheel and he sinks deeper in his seat.
