Summer Sons(45)
Sam strolled past the hood of the car, one proprietary hand trailing over the sleek, glossy paint. He nodded to Luca first, but then his whole focus shifted to Andrew, eyes on his, hand raised. Andrew held the clutch and eased onto the gas, pushing revs while the digital readout reminded him to hold it, wait for the right moment to explode. Sam’s fingers touched the rim of the moon hanging in the sky. A shudder ripped across the bones of Andrew’s forearms, terror and delight and the promise of risk bringing him to life.
Smashing forward into motion was as natural as breathing when Sam’s bicep bunched and he chopped his hand at the ground. He felt his own heartbeat and the car’s lurch off the line, pinning his stomach to his spine with sweet vertigo. At that precise moment, his pulse bit between his teeth, the flick of shadow yanking at the corner of his eye from the passenger seat distracted him—and he dropped the bridge of his foot too fast. Tires shrieked in the fractional second before his traction bit. Luca zipped ahead smooth as a shot, white smoke wafting in his trail as he fought to shift to catch her. Disorganized noise and adrenaline and the image of Halse’s inked shoulder blade fought inside his head with the desire to push himself. No time to think; only time to react. The tach jumped to match his punishing acceleration. He shifted to second, then third almost instantaneously to boost his speed, a buzzing roar to fourth, but her taillights had barely begun to approach his grill and the orange cone was closing fast—
Zero to sixty in the Challenger was advertised below 3.0 seconds, but Andrew had fucked that up. The timer feature read 4.7 when Luca snapped over the line, a full car length ahead of him. The startling reality of his failure rattled him as he downshifted sloppily, while she blazed ahead to top out her speed in the distance before her brake lights flared, her horn blaring a cheery note as she rolled to a stop. The Challenger shook miserably at his rough handling. He dropped his head onto the wheel, panting from adrenaline and the increasing pressure around his wrists, behind his eyes. A hiss, too sibilant and muffled to understand, rattled from the gravity well of the passenger seat that had been sucking at his head all night. Oh fuck, he had time to think, before the blackness crawled up from the footwell in a hallucinatory blur, over the center console and across his legs.
He pawed at his seat belt and jerked it loose. His hands vibrated with fear, embarrassment, and guilt—he’d lost track of his purpose for a selfish moment in the excitement of the race, and the haunt had fucking noticed. He had to get the door open. The handle stuck. His revenant reared in patchy rotting fragments of oxidized light, pinned between him and the steering wheel in a manner impossible for a real living body, stinking with malevolence. He groaned in the base of his throat and shoved against the hard planes of the door, fingernails squeaking at the window glass. Eddie kept on breaking the rules in death, his shade manifesting without regard for witnesses, as unpredictable as he’d ever been—and growing stronger the more blood and desire and attention Andrew paid him. The static whisper rolling from between its unhinged jawbones sank into his ears like hot nails, jealous and unwilling to be forgotten. He caught the possibilities of words in the scratch of sound inside his skull—can’t or can or this or you—and tore at the handle again. It opened with a click. Andrew tripped himself out of the car, crashed to his knees, and puked.
12
Riley’s boots thumped on the pavement in a sprint as Andrew spat a last mouthful of stringy bile and saliva onto the ground. The asphalt scraped his palms as he swayed and gagged again, overwhelmed by the rancid stink. He used his cleanest hand to bunch his shirt up and scrub his face with it. Riley crouched next to the car, saying, “What the hell was that?”
“Bad timing,” Andrew slurred.
The miasma clung to him in a tenacious film, prying at the cracks in his focus the moment he directed attention to Riley. The dead thing would not allow him to refuse it for much longer, each pull more vicious than the last. I’m trying, he wanted to scream.
“What’s wrong with you? That felt like a goddamn bomb going off,” he hissed. “None of them would know, but I can—”
Andrew staggered to the driver’s seat and swung his feet back inside the car, wincing under the ghoulish pressure attempting to crack into his skull. “Tell them I’ve got a fucking head injury, I don’t care.”
“Andrew,” Riley said again, grabbing the doorframe with trembling fingers in a last-ditch effort to stop him.
Touching wholesome, living Riley seemed like the worst option while ridden by a ravenous spirit; he recoiled when the other boy reached for him. Riley let his hand hover in midair. The haunt dug at Andrew’s control, an insistent but unclear demand he had no resistance against—an incursion that prodded at his constant, habitual grip on the eerie power he’d shared with Eddie. As soon as he directed half a thought to it, the oily streaks in his blood pulsed to attention; the haunt blanketing his flesh reverberated in sympathy, prompting a revolting crawl across his skin. Riley flinched backward like a startled cat.
The longer Andrew stalled, the deeper the creature attempted to burrow, emboldened by the bonding communion he’d offered up on accident during his night of bad choices. It had bided its time for another shot at him, and the situation had spiraled out of his control. He jerked the door closed, even as white-faced Riley attempted to grab for the handle again. His phone hornet-buzzed in his pocket as he put the car in gear. He drove past Luca standing next to her Mustang and waving at him to stop. In his rearview, the confused pack mingled, Riley gesturing broadly at Sam as he jogged the distance to them.