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Sure, okay.
I did say whatever the price, didn’t I?
Chapter Fifteen
Wilder was relentless.
He refused my suggestion that we get a couple hours of sleep before hitting the road. I tried to reason we would be sharper with some rest and be more responsive, but he was having none of it. Either we left now, together, or he’d go without me.
Cain had provided us with the information we needed, in spite of my misgivings about agreeing to his price. It wasn’t so much the life of Timothy Deerling I cared about. Given what he thought about my people and what he was planning to do to Hank…if there was a hell, he deserved to go there.
I just hadn’t planned on handing him the one-way ticket myself.
Wilder and I pulled into a gas station about forty minutes outside of New Orleans. I was wiped out, soul-crushingly exhausted, and getting more than a little cranky.
I’d have traded my left boob for a hot shower, a beer and about a hundred hours in a soft bed. What I got instead was a bumpy cross-state road trip on a motorcycle. Since we couldn’t exchange chitchat, we were both getting worn thin by the journey.
Lifting my cell over my head, I hoped I might pick up a scant amount of signal, but with no towers nearby it looked like I was shit out of luck. Too bad I didn’t know any spells that would give me four bars and free WiFi.
Maybe I was better off without signal. Early risers in the pack, Callum included, would be up by now. Someone must have figured out I was gone. I chewed my lower lip, nursing misgivings about this whole stupid plan. A few hours ago it had seemed vital, like it was the only smart move. Now I wasn’t so sure Wilder and I weren’t on a wild-goose chase.
I switched my phone back to GPS mode, which thankfully kept chugging away regardless of cell towers. The directions suggested we still had another hour to go to our destination.
For the life of me I couldn’t imagine what the Church was thinking, building their mecca out in Franklinton of all places. We were less than an hour outside New Orleans, and already it was like being on a foreign planet. The gas station alone gave me the creeps. It looked like the set of a bad slasher movie.
Franklinton, a town I’d never been to and had barely heard of, was briefly well-populated following Katrina. But in recent years smaller towns like that had started to dry up, and even the appeal of their huge annual fair—the only reason I knew about the place at all—wasn’t enough to keep people around. I wasn’t expecting a bustling metropolis at the end of the road.
Wilder jogged out of the small convenience store and threw a strip of beef jerky at me. I didn’t bother to ask questions, I just ripped it open and devoured the salty meat without much consideration for decorum. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until right then, and I could have kissed him for thinking of it.
“You ready, Princess?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
I took my last bite of the beef jerky and reminded myself it was my choice to come along on this ride, and without me things would probably end poorly for Wilder.
After checking my GPS one last time to make sure we were headed the right way, I hopped on the back of his bike and wrapped my arms around his middle. The gesture was becoming second nature by now, and it was strange to me how fast I could get used to holding someone I didn’t know all that well. It wasn’t unpleasant or off-putting, just unusual.
The engine rumbled to life, and we were off. In spite of the fact we were in a hurry, I appreciated that Wilder didn’t put us at further risk by going too much over the speed limit. He kept the pace a bit too fast, but not so much I thought we were in real danger.
Even at night it was obvious that the farther we retreated from the big city the farther we got from civilization. We barely saw any cars and drove for miles at a time without seeing the light of a house.
Having grown up in a relatively secluded area, I was no stranger to the stillness of a rural night, but given what I knew lay ahead of us, it made me all the more uneasy. The quiet should have been broken by sinister horror-movie music or something. Anything that might suggest we were driving headfirst into a bad decision.
I was glad I’d brought my gun.
Bullets might not do a hell of a lot against werewolves and vampires, but they could stop a human in his tracks any day.
Maybe it was the comfortable scent of a wolf from my own pack, or perhaps it was the lull of the road in harmony with my exhaustion, but I soon closed my eyes and pressed the side of my helmet to Wilder’s back. I wasn’t asleep,
but in a comfortable haze between sleep and wakefulness that would allow me to hold on to him but also enjoy the static of a conscious doze.
At first I thought the light was my imagination, maybe a reflection of a passing home or a rare streetlight to mark a turn. I blinked quickly, mostly to pretend I’d been awake the whole time, and tried to chase away the brightness without being able to rub my eyes.
I glanced over my shoulder, and my heart jumped into my throat.
A car was following us, and directly behind it was a pickup truck with roof-mounted lights turned up as high as they go. Those were the kinds of lights I was used to seeing aimed towards a high school football game or lighting up a pasture after folks had gone hunting. They weren’t something you used on the highway before dawn when there were cars in front of you.
“Fuck,” I said.
