AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Did he take your car keys, then?”
“He really did. And maybe I should have—I don’t know.Notjumped off the roof at the first sign of—”
A loud, echoingcrackbounces off the driver’s side window. Lily lets out a stifled shriek at the same time somethingthunks into the door on my side.
“Hold on,” I tell her, pointlessly, since she’s already clutching at her seat belt with both hands. It’s all the warning I can give her before I drive up onto the sidewalk. The driver’s side mirror scrapes against a delivery truck. A chalkboard sign splinters underneath my front wheels. One of the big store windows shatters, but not because I’ve driven my SUV into it.
Because somebody’sshotinto it.
“Oh my God,” Lily whispers in a high, thin tone that I absolutely fucking hate. “Oh my God, oh myGod.”
I’d hold her hand, but I can’t let go of the wheel. We bump down off the corner and take off down a one-way street.
“Jameson,” Lily shouts over about a hundred pissed-off car horns. “Jameson, this is the wrong way.”
“Close your eyes.”
“No!”
Snowball lets out some sharp tweets that sound likewhat the actual fuck are you doing, trying to get her killed?
“Doyouwant to drive? Is that it?” I shout back at him.
“Jameson!” Lily and Snowball both scream.
I turn the wheel just in time to avoid a head-on collision with a Tesla. There’s a siren in the distance, but we’re almost to the nearest highway.
From there, it’s just a race against time and some guys with guns.
I let a Camry get on the entrance ramp ahead of me. Lily’s mouth drops open. “Why are you—what are youdoing? Why are you slowing down?”
“Might need to have a good deed banked later.”
“We coulddie!”
“Yeah.” There’s nothing else to say. I pass the Camry the second we’re on the highway. Accelerate. Accelerate again. Of course we could die. A car accident’s not the only way it could happen. Her grandfather has a few other options in mind.
That seems to sink in for Lily as I come up behind a black truck and tailgate him until he lets me pass.
“Oh my God,” she says softly. “We could die.”
6
LILY
Someone shot at the car.
Someone shot atourcar. The car that Jameson and I are in.
Someone shot at us.
My brain can’t take this in. Or—it can take in the facts, but not the meaning, because—
How can this be a coincidence? How could it possibly be coincidental that I ran away from my grandpapa’s house and now someoneshot at us?
I whip around in the passenger seat and search the highway for evil-looking cars chasing after us. Snowball jumps around in his cage, fluttering his wings. My pulse is like a door slamming again and again, shutting out the world in an incredibly inconvenient way.
“Anybody back there?” I’m honestly surprised I can hear Jameson at all. My heartbeat pulls back at the sound of his voice. It’s like he’s asking if another cute animal stowed away in the backseat instead of whether I can see the people who were just trying to kill us.
