Page 67 of Just Dare Me
“Shit!” I jump into action, fumbling the shifter into reverse, but not in time. The iron gate crashes into Crap-pile’s front end, destroying my bumper and grill, shattering one of my headlights. A foot higher, it would have come right through the windshield.
Elle and Oliver walk through the smoking hole in the fence where the gate used to be. “Yikes,” she says, shaking her hands out. “Might’ve juiced that a bit much.”
“Oh, ya think?” I get out to inspect the damage.
“You said you wouldn’t mind having a sleeper again.”
“A sleeper, not a corpse!”
“Big deal. Nolan can fix it in two seconds with some tool he keeps in his back pocket. Oh!” She stops, admiring Nolan’s nakedness as he steps out. “That is, if he had back pockets.”
“Can we go?” he asks.
“See you soon,” I say, gesturing for them to move out. Nolan and Darby shift, slinking into the shadows beyond the gate. “Dominique’s moving into position?”
Elle flashes one of her megawatt smiles. “Don’t worry about Lady D. She’ll be at the right place, at the right time.”
After one final headshake at my busted front end, I drop behind the wheel. Elle and Oliver take the back seat, and off we go, passing through the gate into the heart of the mine, where the highway ends in a roundabout that branches off in three directions.
“This is it, A-team. We split off from here, then meet up in the middle. Don’t be shy. Call out everything you see. Happy hunting.”
Nora veers into the left tunnel, Russo takes the right, and I gun it for the chamber dead ahead. We enter to a dizzying sight—hundreds and hundreds of rectangular pillars in perfect rows as far as we can see.
Russo sounds awestruck in my earpiece. “Damn. Sothisis how you keep trillions of tons of rock from caving in.”
“It’s like one of your engineering problems at school, Oliver,” Elle says. “How many pillars would you have to destroy in order for the entire mine to collapse?”
“Let’s not find out,” I suggest.
“All these rows and columns,” Nora says. “Ew, I feel like we’re trapped in a piece of graph paper.”
Elle disagrees. “I kind of like it. Reminds me of my grandpa’s vineyards in Tuscany. Perfect rows for miles.”
Each perpendicular row of pillars speeds past us with a softwhooshingsound. Up ahead, the chamber ends. I turn left into one of the rows. I start to feel cross-eyed from the uniformity of it all. Like a maze, or an optical illusion, messing with my depth perception.
Which is why I jump when the monotony is broken by a sudden flash of movement across the road, from one pillar to another. Then again to my left, a streak of movement from behind pillars.
All at once, everybody in the car—as well as the voices in my earpiece—all say, “Contact!”
“To my left, closing—” Russo says.
Nora cuts him off. “On our right.”
“All around us!” Elle shouts, just before something slams into our rear end, spinning us sideways. I overcorrect the wheel, keeping us from wrapping around a pillar, but now we’ve stopped. We’re a sitting duck for another—
Before I can even finish that thought, another magic attack slaps Oliver’s door with a bolt of lightning. The window cracks.
“I see him,” Elle says. She makes a quick hand gesture, then snaps her fingers. I look out the back window just in time to see her displacement bubble explode, sending our attacker flying into a pillar.
Movement catches the corner of my eye. A figure rushes at my window with inhuman speed. Jay pulls me away from the window and blasts three holes through the glass, dropping a Cleveland bloodsucker.
“Vampires!” Charlotte announces. “Headed your way.”
“We noticed,” I say, watching the last bits of my window fall away.
Jay grips my arm, startling me. “Shayne. There. You see them?”
I see them, all right. Three blinged-out Cleveland vamps approaching from the front. But then, when they spread out, I see the actual “them” that Jay is talking about. Far behind the vamps, two cataract eyes glitter in the dark, reflecting the beam from my one headlight.
