Chapter 30 #2
Daniel and Sinead are climbing off the snowmobile as I slam the front door closed. They’ve been out searching for hours for nothing. I should have known to go straight to fucking Dovecrest from the beginning.
“You wanna put a shirt on, boss?” Sinead calls after me.
Fuck no. What I want is to rip Emeric, Camille, and her fucking mother apart.
And I will.
One-ninety on the speedometer and the Aston’s still pulling. Snow comes off the rear tires in two white plumes, the heater cranked against my bare chest.
Khloe’s been screaming through the speakers since I left.
“—actual stupidest motherfucker alive, I swear to God, Asher, pull over and I mean it—”
“Khloe, fucking relax!”
Snow sweeps across the road, hiding the faded center line. I steer from one clean patch of asphalt to the next, pushing the Aston through the winding roads between Veilarath and Désamour. The rear tires slip through a bend, catching again when I ease off for half a second.
Half a second is probably pushing it...
“Asher!” my sister snaps. The irritation would be perfect rage bait if I wasn’t dead fucking serious about getting to Ivy. “HE SENT IT TO YOU.”
I wince.
Her voice cracks the speaker. “You are being stupid and fucking erratic and—” she pauses. “Oh my God you’re giving Atlas right now!”
That kills all the smugness in my chest.
“What do you want, Khlo,” I say. “For me to pull over and give Emeric another hour with her?”
“No.” Pause. “Just twelve minutes until we catch up.”
“Sounds like I need to take you driving again. You’re a bit rusty…”
“Ash,” Khloe groans. “You go in alone, he gets exactly what he wants.”
I laugh. “I don’t give a fuck because he already has what I want.”
The video replays inside my head.
I press harder on the accelerator until I reach two thirty-five.
Punk pipes in, “I’ve got your car on the map, and something’s blocking me past the tunnel.”
A bend rushes toward me. I brake late, turning into it while the back end drifts wide enough to put the left tires near the drop. The stone barrier flashes past my window. Below it, several hundred feet of mountain and a funeral Khloe would destroy.
I correct the slide, accelerating out.
Khloe releases a rough breath.
“You’re half-dressed, armed, and driving on ice,” she says. “This is a tantrum with horsepower.”
The road straightens, giving me a clear view of the mountain ahead. A dark concrete tunnel cuts into its base, the entrance wide enough for two cars and hidden from the main route by dead pines.
I’ve never driven into Dovecrest myself. Waking up here, though, that I’ve done, and I gotta admit it was easier than this.
“Found the location data,” Punk says. Keys tap through the call. “The file pinged from Dovecrest, then passed through two Monét relays before it hit your phone.”
“I know.”
“How?” Khloe asks, though I kind of expected her to wonder where the fuck I was going six sentences ago.
I crack my neck. “Because I recognized the room.”
Silence takes the call for three seconds.
Khloe speaks first. “What room?”
She knows what happened to me that year. I’ve just never said it out loud. “The conditioning ward.”
Punk stops typing.
Khloe flattens her tone. “Turn around.”
I laugh once. “Good chat.”
“Asher, that ward has remote control over every electronic system —”
“My car isn’t registered.”
Punk cuts in. “Your car could be registered to a ghost and Emeric would still have access to it.”
The tunnel mouth swells in the windshield, a strip of black asphalt running into total darkness.
“Punk,” I say, checking the mirror.
No headlights behind me. They’re farther back than Khloe claimed. Lying runs in the family, even among the ones I don’t want to strangle.
“Get into my system.”
“I’m locked out!” she snaps, fingers hammering the keys again.
She’s never locked out. She’s the one who does the locking.
“Someone changed the access key six seconds ago.”
The entrance fills the windshield.
“Asher, brake,” Khloe says, tone way too calm for screaming Sally from earlier.
I drop into second and floor it. The engine revs hard, shoving me back into the seat. Tires spit dirty snow across the tunnel floor as I cross inside. My headlights catch damp walls and an old security camera angled straight at the driver’s seat.
“Wave,” I say, flipping it off.
“Brake!” Khloe shouts.
The road drops lower the deeper I go, the tunnel swallowing what’s left of the daylight behind me. The display flickers once. Punk’s name vanishes. Khloe’s voice breaks into clipped pieces, two words arriving out of order before the connection dies.
My headlights catch a warning sign bolted to the damp wall.
SHARP TURN — 100 FT.
I ease off and downshift, taking enough speed out to make the corner.
I put my foot on the brake and the pedal goes soft. “What—”
Fifty feet.
The center display turns white.
My foot’s still on the brake, but the accelerator pushes itself to the floor, launching the car forward.
“What the fuck?”
The wheel rips out of my hands.
It cranks full right on its own, tires screaming against the camber, and the throttle stays buried with my boot nowhere near it. I lock both arms around it and wrench left. The wheel fights back, turning itself while the corner arrives through my windshield.
Punk bursts back through. “ASHER, THE CAR’S—”
Her voice cuts out.
A new audio file opens on the display. Ivy laughs as the Aston mounts the curb and strikes the tunnel wall.
Concrete fills the windshield, dropping away when the car rolls, glass spitting over my face before everything goes to black.