All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(93)
“You’ll get busted for missing school,” she said, leaning into Emmett’s window, her silver nails tapping the inside door panel. “Emmett, your dad will kill you.”
“Jesus, Becca, it’s freezing,” Emmett said. “Either get in the car or let me roll up the window.”
“His parents are out of town,” I said. “And my dad won’t even know I’m gone. We’ll be back by tonight. Tomorrow morning, at the latest. Six hours there, six hours back.”
“In or out, Becca,” Emmett said, rolling up his window.
She leaped back from the glass, swearing, and Emmett grinned. “Get in the back, Vie,” she said as she marched around the car.
“But I’m bigger—”
“Move!”
So I scrambled over the seat. I was bigger than Becca, and while that wasn’t an issue most times, right now it kind of mattered. The back of the Porsche was tiny. It wasn’t cramped. It wasn’t close-quarters. It was big enough to hold about a dozen matchsticks and that’s it. I had to sprawl across both of the seats, and my knees still felt like they were tucked up against my chest. When Emmett glanced back, he laughed.
“Comfy?”
“Very. Can we go?”
“Becca,” Emmett asked. “How’s your seat? Do you want to move it back? Get some leg room?”
“Emmett,” I growled. “If you don’t drive in the next five seconds, I’ll rip your head off.”
He laughed again, but the Porsche leaped forward, and within ten minutes we were on the highway blazing south. In October, the sky a light blue, so pale it looked like halogen lights flashing off snow, Wyoming grew. It stretched farther, sprawled wider, until it was this enormous, flapping sail pinned down here and there by mountains. The high plains had already turned golden-brown, and the wildflowers had died. Occasionally a patch of evergreens, bowing in the ever-present wind, broke the prairie in a blur of drab green, but so much of this place was empty. It was three-quarters sky, or maybe nine-tenths sky, or maybe more. Maybe ninety-nine out of a hundred. So much sky that the ground could have been just a broken jag of stone, maybe an arrowhead chipped and chipped and chipped until it was impossibly thin. The Porsche raced across the thin sliver of the earth, and I knew Emmett was pushing ninety, but no matter how fast we drove, we didn’t seem to be going anywhere.
Emmett seemed determined to make up for last time. The longer we drove, the harder it was for me to remember why I was mad at him. He made silly jokes, he laughed, sometimes he turned, when I responded grumpily, and squeezed my leg, and his whole face, his whole body, seemed to be broadcasting at billions of megahertz, and I was a receiver tuned only to him. It didn’t matter how much I glowered. It didn’t matter how many times I knocked his hand away, or told him to shut up, or begged Becca to turn on the radio. Emmett kept blasting out those broadcasts, and they made me hum from the nape of my neck to my heels.
It was a relief when we reached Denver and I could crawl out of the car, ignoring Emmett’s hand as he tried to help me. He squeezed my butt instead, so I palmed him in the stomach and heard a satisfying whoosh of breath as he staggered back. But he grinned. God damn him. The kid was going to fucking dig in his heels and grin because once he had an idea in his head, he wasn’t going to let it go, and he’d decided something was happening between us.
Like shit it was, I reminded myself. We’d parked in an expensive garage just south of the station. When my heels hit the cement, I let out a breath. It was like I’d been carrying an electric charge for the last six hours and now I’d been grounded, the charge gone, all those electrons scattering off into the universe. The garage had the usual smells in winter: cold cement, antifreeze, a dense layer of trapped exhaust. For the moment, we were alone.
Becca shivered, burying her hands in her coat. “What if it’s a trap?”
“How could it be a trap?” Emmett said. He came up behind me, resting his chin on my shoulder to look at Becca. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
His chin on my shoulder, his chest against my back—it felt good. Shake him off, part of me said. Just roll your shoulder once, send him a message, tell him to back up. But another part of me said this is nice, and that same part of me said, he could slide his arms up, right now, and wrap them around your waist, and that would be really nice. Goosebumps spread across my chest, and they had nothing to do with the freezing damp of the garage. I wasn’t cold. Not at all. I was burning up.
“Think about it,” Becca said, fixing him with a look of distaste and then shifting her gaze to me. “River gave that jacket to DeHaven. Maybe he wanted us to find it. Maybe he wanted us to find that key. Someone could be inside the station, watching the locker, waiting for us.”
Becca’s chilly gaze broke the moment. I slid away from Emmett, and he gave a low chuckle and ran his hand down my back, once, before letting me slip away. “All right,” Emmett said. “Anything’s possible. What do we do?”
“What can we do?” I said. “We’ve come this far. I’m not leaving without seeing what’s in that locker. We don’t have any other leads. If we turn back, we might as well sit back and wait until Mr. Big Empty comes for us.”
“I’m just saying we should be careful,” Becca said. In the dull fluorescents of the garage, the silver eyeshadow had lost its sparkle, and she looked drained. This had been hard on her, I realized. That was the understatement of the year, but there it was: this had been hard for Becca, hard in a way I hadn’t considered until now. Austin and Emmett had dealt with this craziness before. They had, to a certain extent, known the darkness behind Vehpese’s small-town facade. They had been its victims. But Becca—well, Becca had come face to face with all the nightmares at once. She had been yanked out of her safe, warm, comfortable life by the murder of a boy she hardly knew. Many people would have retreated, tunneling back into that shallow illusion of security. Pulling the blankets over their heads, in other words. But not Becca. Becca had stared straight into the whirlwind and spit into the eye of the storm.