Page 36 of Bound

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“And you’re sure this is the right place?” August muttered from the backseat. “Because if I’m giving up my Friday night to get murdered—”

“No one’s getting murdered. I just got Cedric detailed.” Putting on my blinker, I turned off the deserted two-lane road onto an unmarked gravel drive leading up to Prickly Pear Quarry.

In the distance, a train sounded its horn. I scanned the dark tracks we’d just crossed. A line of empty freight cars with graffiti-covered doors and rusted wheels stood parallel to the quarry entrance drive, white limestone dust stirring ghostly dervishes in the wind as I slowly approached the gate.

August swore under his breath.

Topher grinned. “What page are you on?”

I cut him a dark look. “Death wish?”

“Did I say anything?”

“Forget the undead. I will seriously kill both of you if you ruin the ending for this book like you did with The Girl on the Train. Which, yes, I’m still not over. Bite me.”

“Clearly someone forgot me driving out to the new food truck in Marble Falls just to get their specialty flame grilled cheeseburger with signature sauce they’d read about on that food blog as an apology.”

“Which turned out to be mayonnaise.”

Topher smirked. “Pretty sure since you wolfed two of them down before you figured that out, the freaky mayo-phobia might be all in your head.”

August leaned in between the seats. “Not to interrupt this fascinating childhood trauma that I’m sure Cal will want to write up in his next research paper—”

Topher coughed. I made a mental note to order three dozen Dragon Lemon Delights and have them sent to his station the next time he was on duty.

August continued, “But I’m trying to check our firewall.”

I pulled Cedric off the gravel drive behind a gnarled tangle of cedar. Texas had two basic weather patterns: drought and flash flood warning, which in terms of the native vegetation meant you needed cockroach-level lasting power in order to survive here. “It’s been two nights. Your hacker girlfriend isn’t coming back, bro.”

“I’m going to kill River. And for the fifth time, I didn’t say I thought she was hot. I said she looks like Emma Stone.”

“Who we all know you have a not-so-secret thing for. And how can you even be sure it’s the same girl who you caught on the security feed?”

“Because a second after she appeared on camera, she winked up at me, clicked something on her phone, and crashed our network.”

Topher muffled a cough. “And she just so happens to look like Emma Stone? How many of those painkillers did you take right before bed?”

I high-fived him.

August growled. “You can both go to hell. She uploaded a wicked virus onto our network that breached all the firewalls I had in place and erased the images we captured of her. It was pure luck I saw her on the security feed before the file was corrupted. Killer code. Took me and River thirty-six hours to get everything up and running again.

“She’d be crazy to come back now that she knows you’re onto her,” I said, pulling up the text London had sent. “Okay. Two-minute warning.”

“Trust me. She’ll be back.”

“Is this some secret geek code I don’t know about?”

“Says the person who spent the summer before high school building a replica of Fangorn Forest that covered half your bedroom floor.”

Topher barked out a laugh. “A subject we’ll definitely be revisiting later.”

I glared at my brother. “You were supposed to take that to the grave. Speaking of which, are you feeling any better? You look like hell.”

August shot me a dark look and I silently kicked myself. Yeah, we could all see the dark circles under his eyes, his auburn hair bedraggled as if he hadn’t been sleeping well for days, or more likely, shifting uncontrollably in the night and destroying the contents of his bedroom. August had always been thinner than the rest of us, a consequence of autoimmune episodes that left him hooked up to an IV line at the full moon when he should have been out on pack hunts. And yeah, the rest of us tended to swoop in and go into overprotective mode when he got like this, even knowing that he hated it, that more than anything, he just wanted to be normal.

“I’m fine. Naomi’s going to run an infusion for me later if I can’t kick this headache.”