Layla said to our crew as Brady and Griffin matched the ’rents’ speed. Her tone was understandably grim.
I said. My encouragement was as much for me as for them.
I nibbled at my lower lip.
Griffin said, his eyes tight while they continually scanned the road, the woods to either side of it, and the occasional building. Magnum had purchased some major acreage here, tucked away on the outskirts of Ridgemore.
The institute’s long, private drive wove through the campus. Since we’d last been here, mere weeks ago, more of the project’sfinishing touches had been completed. There were now sidewalks crisscrossing the quads, lampposts standing at regular intervals along them like spying sentinels. A grandiose fountain shot water from the centers of exotic-looking flowers grouped together in a ginormous bouquet up into the sky. Welcoming benches grouped around the display, inviting students and staff alike to stay awhile. More benches and picnic tables dotted the campus as if the setting were as innocuous and pretty as it appeared.
The idyllic scenery made me feel as taut as a freshly strung violin.
We drove past the mansion that Magnum had supposedly built for us, the dining hall, the campus store, the coed dorms, and then the lab where our parents worked at scrutinizing every facet of our lives like we were their good little docile lab rats.
Brady asked.
Hunt said.
I muttered, sitting even straighter in my seat, my face practically pressed to the windows, searching for any threats to the people I loved too much to contemplate losing.
A significant stretch of forest lined either side of the drive before I noticed signs of another structure.
Brady commented.
Griffin and I were already studying the place while we rolled by it. The grassy ground beyond its sloping, hidden entrance revealed no indication that we’d seen a guy around our age with some sort of earthshaking power battle here for his freedom, maybe even his life.
I said softly.
There was no need to clarify to whom I was referring. None of my friends were likely to have forgotten standing by helplesslywatching while Fanny and her team had taken down a dude so outwardly similar to us.
Layla said. But her tone wasn’t as light as her words.
The weight of our own fates was burden enough without considering how the outcome of today’s confrontation held the potential to free others as well.
Hunt started to say, then Clyde rocked so hard that the Mustang’s tires lost contact with the asphalt for an instant.
Griffin slammed on the brakes while a concussive force so great that it sucked the breath from my lungs rattled the car’s windows, dashboard, instrument panels, everything.
My breath returned to me in a gasp when the unmistakable sound of an explosion burst like a thunderclap. A fleeting moment later, I saw the flames.
Terror gripped me while the climbing fire up ahead—not Bonnie, thank fuck—whisked me momentarily back to the day of the drag race—to the explosion that claimed the man beside me in another version of Clyde and made my own heart burst into a pulpy, mushy mess.
Bonnie’s doors pushed open. Brady, Hunt, and Layla were climbing out.
All I could do was stare at my friends, wishing to return from the nightmare that was remembering how Griffin’s body had burned. How I’d smelled his charring flesh in the nighttime air. How indelibly I’d feared I’d never get to touch him again.
“Joss.”
Griffin was calling me, I realized, possibly not for the first time.
“Baby, are you okay?”
I blinked as the rattling of Clyde diminished.
“Are you hurt?” he demanded—his own irrational fear of losing me, I knew.
I shook myself, cleared my head, turned toward him. “No, I’m fine.”
Of course, I wasn’t. Not really. Our trauma was the kind we’d need several lifetimes of immortality to overcome.
