A Study in Charlotte (Charlotte Holmes, #1)(25)

Holmes cleared her throat. “Watson,” she said in a funny voice, “you weren’t going to ask me to the dance, were you?”

“No,” I said, maybe a little too quickly. I tried to imagine Holmes under a disco ball, jumping around to some Top 40 song. It was easier to imagine a whale dancing, or Gandhi. Then I imagined some slow song, one that wasn’t complete shit, and the lights down low, and what it’d be like to have her in my arms, and I drank down my glass of water in one go. “Did you want me to? Because I had the impression you didn’t.”

“Watson,” she said again. I didn’t know if she meant it as a warning or an endearment. But then, I never knew, with her.

This was a subject I didn’t want to touch without full body armor and a ten-foot pole. She’d warned me away from it the first time we ever spoke.

“Right,” I said, picking up Lena’s keys, “we should go before your hall mother wakes from her thousand-year nap.”

I held the door open for her. The parking lot was almost empty. I squinted, waiting for my eyes to adjust, and just then, at the far end of the parking lot, a black sedan started up.

It kept its lights off as it peeled out of the parking lot.

“Holmes?” I said, frozen. “Did that just happen because he saw us?”

But she was already running for Lena’s car. “Come on,” she barked.

I fumbled to unlock the car, to back out of the space, to maneuver us out of the lot. Holmes was almost cross-eyed with impatience, but to my relief, she didn’t say anything. I hadn’t exactly done a lot of driving back in London. I mean, I’d driven my mum’s car through a parking lot. Once.

But my life dictated that the first night I was on the road, I’d end up in a car chase. It wasn’t like the movies, I thought grimly, as we pulled out onto the empty street. The sedan was only a pair of lights in the distance, speeding toward town. It was almost impossible to stay on its tail. The dark was stripped away by a series of streetlights, and ahead of us, the sedan burned through one red light and then another, leading us away from Sherringford and toward the coast.

Holmes had pulled a pair of folding binoculars from God knows where. She leaned forward, peering through the windshield. “The driver’s alone. He has a black coat and a black hat down over his ears. Blond hair under it. I can’t see his face. There’s—there’s a case in his front seat, the kind my old dealer used to carry his—”

“Dealer?” I asked tersely.

She shot me a look from behind the binoculars. “Yes.”

I thought about the pinched-face man talking to the BBC reporter. Charlotte Holmes is the head of this messed-up cult and James Watson is, like, her angry little henchman. “I think I know who it is. But if he’s a dealer, why the hell is he running from us?”

“Watson,” she said, in a warning tone, as I bore down on him. We cleared seventy miles an hour. Eighty.

“You’re not going to tell me to slow down, are you?” I asked, clutching the wheel.

“No.” I heard the smile in her voice. “I was going to tell you to go faster.”

We blew past dark farmland and stands of trees, past hints of civilization—a bait shop, a crappy motel. My brain was racing as fast as the car. If the police pulled us over and hauled us back to school, we’d be expelled for sneaking out after hours. If the car in front of us braked or even slowed down—

We’d be dead.

My hands tightened on the wheel. I wasn’t going to let up, not this close to finally learning something concrete. Give us a clue, I thought, a real one. Let us get just a little bit closer.

At the next intersection, he jerked into a hard right turn, trying to take us by surprise. Which is when he lost control. Under the bright streetlights, his car spun out down the center of the road, finally beaching itself on a curb outside a shuttered gas station.

I slammed on the brakes, and we fishtailed after him. Holmes’s binoculars flew out of her hands and into the windshield with a sharp crack.

We shuddered to a stop two feet from the sedan.

If I didn’t know it before this, I knew it now. I wasn’t like Charlotte Holmes. I wouldn’t ever be. Because while I was still unbuckling my seat belt with shaking fingers, trying to remember how to breathe, she’d freed herself, cleared our car, and was wrenching open the door of the black sedan.

While he was escaping through the passenger side.

“Holmes,” I yelled, stumbling outside. “Holmes!”

We were in the middle of nowhere. Trees crowded the two-lane road, dense with underbrush, and I watched her crash after him into the pitch-black wood, shouting for him to stop.

I took off after them.

It was like a nightmare. Branches lashed back at me as I ran, leaving stinging welts across my face, my arms. More than once, my foot caught on a tree root and sent me sprawling, and when I picked myself up, they were that much farther away. I remembered, suddenly, being a kid in a wood like this one, playing a game of ghost tag in the dark. I’d hidden myself in a burned-out tree trunk, and I remembered the hand reaching in to tag me, a white flash in all that darkness. I’d screamed myself hoarse.

Tonight didn’t feel all that much different.

Holmes pulled farther and farther ahead of me. She didn’t trip. She didn’t fall. She moved like a cat through the night.