“Getting arrested for possession of a stolen gun will only slow us down.” We’ve got bigger things to run from.
“Relax.” Julio leans around my headrest. His breath reeks of Amber and booze, and his knee’s jabbing the back of my seat. “We can outrun the cops. If we drive through the night, we’ll be in Texas by morning.”
“It’s not the cops I’m worried about.”
“I didn’t smell anything.” Julio’s drunk and reckless, still riding the adrenaline of the fight and the high of that kiss. He doesn’t know what’s coming for us.
“Jack?” Fleur reaches for me. “What’s wrong?”
I move my hand before she can take it. It’s too hot in here. Too close. I need to think.
I crack the window. Julio slumps back in his seat, away from the cold air rushing in. Fleur presses me in spite of it.
“Jack, what’s going on? What did you see back there?”
I clench my teeth to keep from biting her head off. “A smaze. In the parking lot.”
“Are you sure?” Amber asks, a hint of worry underlying her skepticism. For all we know, the damn thing could be in here with us. Smazes aren’t like the other creatures Gaia employs as spies. They can pass under doors and through cracks in windows. They can hide in the chassis of a moving car. Amber’s spent most of her life watching shadows for smazes. Like a bad omen, their arrival means her time is nearly up. She’s as attuned to them as any Winter would be, maybe more so. “I didn’t see anything.”
“No?” I ask sharply. “Guess it’s hard to smell the enemy when your tongue’s down someone’s throat.”
“It’s one smaze,” Julio says. “There’s no a reason to freak out. We don’t even know that it was looking for us.”
“Of course it was looking for us!” I shout. “Same as the crow at Croatan Beach. Why else would it be here?” Fleur reaches for my arm and I shake her off. I can’t breathe. My blood pressure’s rising with every inch Amber encroaches between the front seats. “Would someone open another fucking window, please?”
“You talked to him again,” Fleur says. It’s not a question, so I don’t answer. “You had the same meltdown after you talked Lyon at the cabin. What did he say?”
A flurry of dry snow flashes white in the headlights. It drifts over the road, pushed by a chaotic northern wind. “The kid who shot me filed a police report. He gave them our descriptions. It’s only a matter of time before Chronos knows we were at that bar. It won’t be hard to track us. We’ll probably be into it thick by morning.”
I should calm down. Ineedto calm down. A storm will only make it easier for Chronos to find us. Fleur lowers her window, letting in a frigid cross breeze that must make her miserable. I drink it in, focusing on the lines of the highway to clear my head. Amber’s hunched back in her seat under Julio’s arm, watching me in the rearview mirror with the same distrustful look she wore last night by the fire.
“I’m sorry,” I tell them, dragging my fingers through the frost in my hair. “I just want to get rid of the gun and find a place to think.”
Fleur studies the map. “The highway crosses a creek in a few miles. There’s a turnoff to an old railroad bridge up ahead. We can stop there.”
By the time we reach the exit, the flurry’s over. I park the sedan under a cluster of trees at the end of a gravel road. Ahead of us, the swollen creek rushes over the concrete footings under the bridge.
Julio walks ahead, making sure we’re alone. Amber keeps her distance, still wary of me.
I sit on the edge of the open trunk. Fleur corners me against it. She wraps her arms around my waist and lowers her voice so the others won’t hear.
“What aren’t you telling us?” It feels wrong to look her in the eyesafter all the things I haven’t said. She takes me gently by the chin. Turns my face up to hers. “You can tell me.”
I draw her into me and press my lips into the crown of her head, breathing the scent of her deep into my lungs, suppressing instincts that feel like they belong to someone else. I don’t know who I am anymore. Not if Lyon isn’t who I thought he was.
“It’s Lyon. What if Julio was right? What if we can’t trust him?”
“But Lyon was the one who made sure we got out of the Observatory.”
“Exactly. What if he’s been engineering this whole thing all along? The battles, the escape routes, our decision to go...” My throat thickens at the possibility that Lyon’s plan goes back even further. To the very beginning. To the day I first told him my name. The year before I first met Fleur.
She pulls back, studying my face. “What are you saying?”
I slide my hands down her arms and lace our fingers together. “It all makes sense now, how we fit.” Each stage of our journey has been turning over in my mind since we left the bar, the pieces coming together in ways that feel too perfect to be chance. “Amber was a runaway. And Julio had a reputation for bucking authority. Anyone who saw that video of their kiss could see they had a spark. Then I came along, a miserable kid who’d died trying to break out of a place like the Observatory. And then you...” I touch her cheek. Fleur’s beautiful and strong, gentle and smart. I’d have been a fool not to fall for her, and Gaia knew it. She dumped Fleur right into my lap, assigning both of us to the same region where we grew up, in defiance of her own rules, throwing all four of us together in some crazy experiment, hoping the chemistry between us was right. That we’d bond rather than break under the pressure.
Suddenly, Chronos’s criticism of Gaia’s leadership feels like a prism held to a light.
Your choices of late have been questionable, he told her.
