Page 25 of Reaper Flame

“I’ll try,” he joked.

“I mean it!” I insisted, my tone serious. “Next time, don’t try to play the knight in shining armor. I can’t save your ass for a third time.”

“I think I preferred it when you were groveling,” he teased, slipping back into our usual playful banter. “But I’m gonna make everything up to you. Do you remember when I promised to take you on an adventure?”

I did. When we were teenagers, our favorite place to go was an abandoned warehouse. We sat on the edge of its roof and dangled our legs off the sides without fear of falling. One night, we were sharing the last of a spliff and staring up at the stars.

Rocky had turned to ask me a question, “Where would you go if you could go anywhere?”

“Somewhere where I can be free,” I’d said after taking time to think. “A place with no rules and nothing standing in my way. I’d like to go somewhere where I could be anything I want to be.”

“So, you wanna go on an adventure?” he’d said, blowing smoke rings into the air. “We’ll go together. I promise we’ll go somewhere where we’d never want to look back.”

I’d laughed and called him an idiot, but the conversation stayed with me. Back then, everything felt sopossible.All these years later, it’s a memory I kept coming back to - especially when I believed his life was hanging in the balance.

“This isn’t exactly the type of adventure I meant.” I scowled. “Faking your death and forcing me into a car is basically abduction.”

Rocky chuckled. “I wondered how long it’d take you to go back to your normal self.”

“I’m getting driven around by a freaking corpse,” I said, looking out the window at the interstate rushing past. “Nothing about this is normal.”

“It may not be normal,” he said, “but I keep my promises. You wanted an adventure, and that’s what we’re going to do. We’ve reached our first stop.”

He turned to pull up at an abandoned rest stop, where a white van was waiting.

“Time to go, C,” Rocky said, yanking up his hood and putting on his sunglasses. He didn’t want the world to know he’d been resurrected from the dead yet.

The driver of the van followed our lead. He approached us, and Rocky slipped him a roll of cash for a set of keys without exchanging words.

“Since when are you so good at this shit?” I asked, following Rocky into the white van.

Switching vehicles was smart. It’d throw any followers off our trail… for a while, at least.

He arched an eyebrow. “Are you impressed?”

“Impressed?” I laughed, then it turned into a snort, and I clapped my hands over my mouth in shock. When was the last time I laughed like that? I tried to recover and play it cool. “As soon as I get over the novelty of you being alive, I might just have to kill you again.”

Rocky smiled, making his face light up, and draped an arm over the back of my seat as we rejoined the highway.

“It’s us against the world, C.”

* * *

The sun broke over the horizon like a split egg yolk, casting an orange glow over the purple sky. The beautiful view took my breath away.

“Are we going to stop?” I asked, fighting back a yawn.

After days of no sleep, tiredness was finally catching up with me. We’d been driving all day and switching vehicles every hundred miles. Hiram following in pursuit was still on my mind, but even the fear of his fury didn’t dampen my happiness at seeing Rocky again.

“Soon,” he promised. “Very soon.”

“Are you going to tell me where we’re going yet?”

It’d been hours since we passed a town or city. Were we going to hide in a mountain cabin? Start a new life on a patch of farmland where there was no internet connection?

“You’ll see,” he said. “It’s a surprise.”

“I’ve had enough surprises today,” I grumbled, pouting and crossing my arms. “Like you coming back from the fucking dead.”

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