Chapter 4 #2
The wipers were useless. They slapped frantically against the windshield, fighting a losing battle against the deluge. The world was reduced to shapes and values, high contrast, low visibility. The erratic strobe of lightning, the black looming mass of the forest, the grey wash of the road.
I leaned forward, gripping the wheel until my knuckles turned white. My eyes, trained to notice the smallest details in a composition, dissected the chaos.
Tree leaning left, roots compromised by saturation. Avoid the shoulder. Water pooling in the dip, hydroplane risk. Downshift. Keep the revs high.
"Slow down," Anders warned as the back end of the SUV fishtailed near a sheer drop-off, the tires flirting with the void. "Simon, seriously!"
"She doesn't have time for slow," I shot back, correcting the skid with a sharp, instinctual twist of the wheel.
A grim sense of déjà vu washed over me, heavier than the rain, darker than the sky. It wasn't a storm. It was the feeling of watching a disaster unfold in slow motion while being powerless to stop it.
Ten years ago. The gymnasium. I had been sitting in the top row of the bleachers, the "nosebleed section" where the outcasts, the smokers, and the stoners congregated to be invisible.
I had my sketchbook on my knees, ignoring the Valedictorian's speech, trying to capture the way the stage lights hit the dust motes in the stagnant air.
I had been drawing her. Tessa Kane.
Not because I knew her, she was the untouchable genius, the girl who walked through the halls hugging her binders like a shield, but because she possessed a tragic kind of symmetry.
The way she stood at the podium, white-knuckling the microphone stand, she looked like a solitary figure in a vast, empty landscape.
I saw the shake start before anyone else did. I saw the way her knees knocked together. I saw the tension line in her neck snap.
And I did nothing.
I kept drawing. My hand had moved across the paper, capturing the curve of her collapsing spine, the terror in her eyes, the way the crowd shifted from bored respectful silence to predatory, mocking laughter.
I documented her destruction like it was a still-life bowl of fruit.
I was the Observer. The Spectator. The Artist who watched the world burn so he could get the shading right.
I hated that boy. I hated him with a bitterness that tasted like bile and old graphite.
"Right! Go right!" Daniel barked from the back seat, his voice booming close to my ear, snapping me back to the wet asphalt.
I wrenched the wheel. We drifted around a blind corner, the headlights cutting through the gloom to reveal a massive fallen hemlock blocking half the road.
I mounted the muddy embankment, the SUV tilting precariously, suspension groaning under the torture, before slamming back down onto the pavement with a bone-jarring thud.
"Jesus Christ," Anders breathed, bracing himself against the dashboard. The smell of his fear like sour bourbon filled the cabin, mixing with the metallic scent of the heating vents.
"We're close," I said, my voice tight, my eyes locked on the road. "The GPS says one mile."
"The bridge," Anders said, his voice flat, detached. "The alert said the bridge was compromised."
"We'll find a way," I said. "We aren't watching from the bleachers this time."
"What are you talking about?" Anders snapped, looking at me like I’d finally cracked.
"Nothing," I lied.
But it was everything. It was the only thing.
I pushed the accelerator down. The speedometer climbed. 60. 70.
The windshield was a blur of violence. The trees whipped past like dark ghosts trying to snatch us off the road.
Every instinct I had screamed that this was insane, that we were going to slide off the cliff and join the sea-battered rocks below.
But the image of that red pulsing dot on the tablet burned in my mind like a brand.
Critical.
Someone was alone in the dark. Someone was breaking apart, just like Tessa had. And this mysterious T.L. Rose, this voice that had haunted my sketchbook for months, was not going to be another tragedy I archived for my portfolio. I wouldn't let her become another sketch of a girl falling.
I saw the structure looming ahead through the rain, a shadow darker than the angry sky. The Fortress. It looked less like a house and more like a tombstone made of glass and steel, perched on the very edge of the world.
And between us and it, a narrow suspended bridge that was swaying violently in the gale, looking like a spiderweb about to snap under the weight of a raindrop.
I didn't lift my foot from the gas.
"Simon," Anders warned, his voice rising an octave, stripping away the agent and leaving only the terrified man. "The cables."
"Hold on," I gritted out.
I wasn't an Alpha who commanded rooms like Anders. I wasn't an Alpha who soothed hurts like Daniel. I was the Alpha who saw the angles, the trajectory, the inevitable crash before impact.
And this time, I was going to be the one who caught the falling object.
I aimed the SUV at the center of the swaying bridge and drove straight into the mouth of the storm.