Lost Girls(16)

Neither one of those made any sense.

That was why I needed to find the girls on that list. I was hoping one of them might have a clue about what had happened to me when I was taken.

Kyle sat in the car, seat belt on, drumming his fingers on his leg. He’d reached his limit of patience, which was about a minute and a half. “Hey, we’re gonna be late if you don’t speed it up here.” He craned his neck to peer out at me. “I don’t wanna miss first period. Amber Griffin was actually nice to me yesterday and she hasn’t been nice since fifth grade and she’s smoking hot now—”

“Okay, okay.” I climbed in and started the engine. Kyle continued to ramble on while I backed out onto the road.

“She was pretty goofy-looking all the way through middle school, with short, frizzy hair and braces, but then POW, one day she just, I don’t know, turned into a real, live girl, with boobs and everything—”

“I don’t need to hear your horny drool fest over some girl who smiled at you in class—”

“She didn’t just smile at me. We said, like, words, real words about important stuff.” He gasped when he thought I drove too close to a parked car, but other than that he never shut up.

We ventured slowly through a few intersections, him messing with the radio and me trying to block out his non-stop chatter. Then somewhere between Grove and Adams, I noticed a dark gray sedan following us. It must have been parked somewhere in our neighborhood, maybe down the street from our house or around the corner. It didn’t register at first—everybody drives a car like that nowadays, like they all want to look the same.

It wasn’t until we were halfway to Lincoln High—when I was adjusting my rearview mirror and wondering which one of the five girls I should hunt down after school first—that I realized it was a Toyota Camry following us. Exactly like the car that had been sitting outside our house the other night.

An apprehensive shiver slid down my arms, making all the tiny hairs stand on end.

They weren’t going to take me again. They couldn’t. And no way in hell was I going to let them hurt my little brother.

I took another glance in the rearview mirror. Whoever was driving the Camry sat cloaked in shadow. I couldn’t see his or her face.

My breathing slowed, my conscious thoughts melted away, and a cold instinct took over. I turned the steering wheel, taking us down an unexpected side street, a meandering detour that would take us at least six blocks out of the way.

I had to see if we were really being followed.

“Hey, you’re going the wrong way!” Kyle yelled.

“Never hurts to try a different route.”

He slumped in his seat, a scowl on his face.

“We’ll get there on time,” I told him.

“Taking the long, crazy way to school seems like the perfect way to be late to me,” he grumbled.

I shot another glance in the rearview mirror. The other car stayed with us, no matter where I turned. My pulse ratcheted up a couple more notches. Whoever was following me was wearing a baseball cap pulled low, the visor shadowing his face, even when he drove through a patch of sunlight. My alternate route led us back to Highland Avenue, and Lincoln High sprawled up ahead, a campus of seven acres.

“I’m going to let you off here,” I told Kyle, slamming the car to a stop in a no-parking zone, right in front of the main entrance. The gray sedan pulled over half a block behind us. Within a second, it was invisible, hidden behind the line of buses that had just pulled up. “Quick! Get out and run inside.”

He gave me a puzzled look. “What the hell’s going on? Why are you dropping me off here?”

“You don’t want to be late, remember? Get going!”

He opened his door and swung his legs outside, muttering. At least here he’d be in plain sight of the school security guards, the bus drivers, and about a zillion students.

Kyle sauntered out of the car, fingers wrapped around his backpack, glancing back at me with a curious expression. He stood there for a long moment, as if he sensed something was up but couldn’t figure out what. Finally, he headed toward the front door. I kept my eyes on him and only him until he was safely inside. Then I pulled away from the curb, heading toward the student parking lot on the other side of the building. Sure enough, as soon as I got clear of all the morning traffic, that gray Toyota sedan appeared in my rearview mirror again. Only this time, the driver had taken off his cap.

He wanted me to see his face.

I sucked a long, slow breath between my teeth when a beam of sunlight spilled into his car, lighting up his features, carving human flesh and bone from shadow. Chiseled cheekbones, short, sandy-brown hair slightly mussed from wearing a hat, dark brows shielding cool green eyes that looked like they could read all the secrets of my soul—even the ones I didn’t know yet.

Agent Ryan Bennet.

WTF?

I’d been expecting to see my kidnapper and now I was…disappointed? I’d wanted to see that monster again. I wanted to run him over. I wanted him dead.

I’d had myself under control, but now my heart started a rapid thu-thump-thu-thump despite all my efforts to slow it down, and my palms started to sweat. What had I been thinking? It’s like I wanted some jerk to follow me to school. Tires crunching over gravel, I swung around a corner and pulled into the school parking lot entrance, then rolled my car to an awkward stop.