Page 71 of The Alpha Dire Wolf
We both shuddered, our legs coming together slightly.
“I won’t risk Sylvie’s omega curse doing the same to me, or perhaps hurting someone else, or everyone else, in our pack. I can’t do that. None of us can. So for now, I work on finding out more. That’s all.”
That’s all I can tell you, at least …
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sylvie
As I turned the car onto Main Street, my fingers clamped down on the steering wheel hard, the prickle of unseen nails along my spine digging in with abrupt force.
Charlene, sitting in the passenger seat, glanced over at me. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, yeah, why?” I asked, trying to blow her question off.
The warning wasn’t at immediate danger levels yet, but the closer I’d gotten to the center of New Lockwood, the worse it got. I was looking around left and right for danger, wondering just what my instinct was trying to warn me about, while also working to discover a way to cut the trip short that wouldn’t be overly strange.
The sensation had started the instant I got in the car, and after picking up Charlene, it had only gotten worse block by block.
I shouldn’t be going into town. That’s what it’s trying to tell me. Turn around.
“Because it looked like you were in some sort of pain. You even hissed a bit,” Charlene said, right as another wave turned the nails into spikes. “See! Like that! You should pull over.”
“I’m fine,” I said, waving it off. “It was just a shiver, caught me by surprise. That’s all.”
I trusted Charlene to a degree, and as a ten-year-old had trusted her fully, but that wasn’t the same thing as being able to fully confide everything in her. If I told her about my “danger sense,” she would probably think I was nuts. Which was definitely not something I wanted right then. It was nice getting back in touch with her.
After the death of my grandmother and loss of relationship, I was more than a bit lonely. Any friend was a good friend right about now, at least while I was still in New Lockwood.
“If you say so.” Charlene didn’t sound fully convinced, but she didn’t push harder.
I drove on, my head on a swivel, looking left and right for whatever was out there. Long ago, I had learned to trust my intuition, and just then it was on the verge of going off like an air-raid siren at full blast.
The problem was, even as I slowed slightly to test it, adjusting speed didn’t change anything. I had no way of knowing if the problem was coming up behind me or waiting up ahead. All I knew was that out there, danger lurked. Stopping the car might fix it, or it might make everything a thousand times worse. So instead, I kept watching, my nerves twitching, ready to react to anything.
The road itself was nearly empty as we approached the bridge over the Dyne River that marked the entrance to town. The only vehicle was an old farm pickup way in the distance.
I glanced up, eyeing the sky for danger. One time back in college, I had visited a friend in the Midwest, and my warning sense had been able to give us an extra thirty seconds of notice of an incoming tornado. But the skies were clear and blue, no imminent threat visible there. It was a perfect day.
Tooperfect.
Uneasily, I lifted my foot off the gas. The car slowed. I caressed the brake pedal ever so slightly, almost without thinking, trying to figure out what the danger was.
A second later a huge red pickup truck came screaming out from behind the building on my right, cutting across our path. I screamed. Charlene screamed. The car shrieked a collision warning, and my foot jammed down onto the brake pedal so hard I could have broken it.
The heavily tinted truck’s engine roared, the sound louder than the squealing of the brakes and the shrieking of both my car’s occupants as we slid across the road. Rubber shrieked in protest as we started to spin, leaving black marks behind us and filling the air with the unmistakable acrid smell.
Then suddenly we slid freely, the tires finding a slick spot, and we picked up speed once more. Renewed screams filled the interior of the car as we whipped across oncoming traffic, going up and over the curb with a horrendous jolt that sent all the lose junk flying everywhere. The car slammed down, nose over the steep embankment, filling the windshield view with nothing but the deep, fast-moving waters of the Dyne River far below.
All that stood between us and a watery plunge was the walking path and a flimsy metal railing that wouldn’t stop my car if we went over the side.
Charlene and I both froze, neither one risking a single movement as we both silently willed the car to stay put. Thescreams were gone. The deafening roar of the red truck’s engine had disappeared into the distance, fleeing the scene of the near T-bone collision.
All that was left was a gentle creaking. For a moment, I feared the worst. We would go over the side, the car wouldn’t stop, and we would plunge into the river and drown. But my spine was calm. No hairs were lifted on my neck.
The danger had passed.
I don’t know who started it. But one of us let out a tiny giggle. Ahystericalgiggle. And then we both started laughing wildly as the adrenaline finally bubbled over. The laughter quickly turned to tears again as our shoulders heaved and our stomachs ached.
