Page 14 of Forked Tongues Are Fun
“Well, shit,” Tavis said, but I could hear the smile in his voice. “I really liked that vacuum.”
“Me t—” A hard bump knocked my teeth together.
“What was that?” Calhoun asked.
The car braked hard, throwing me forward because I’d forgotten to put my seatbelt back on. Tavis lost my grip as he surged forward in the front. Calhoun flashed his arm over my waist and braced me back in the seat. We skidded to a stop on the side of the road, stirring up a whirlwind of dirt that cocooned the car, darkening the evening to almost night.
“We hit something,” Vance said.
“What was it?” I asked.
He shook his head, his wide eyes flitting to mine in the rearview, and something about the set of his jaw, the hardness to his pale eyes hinted that he knew exactly what it’d been and would never say. He pulled the door handle to climb out.
Dread soured the back of my tongue as I followed his silhouette moving outside the SUV. This didn’t sit right inside me, and not just because we still had about two hours to get to Evenza. My instincts had helped get me here, so close to finding Asa, and right then, they scraped every nerve to keep me on alert.
“Should we go with him?” I asked.
“Yes,” Tavis said.
“No,” Calhoun said at the same time.
“Could it be the same shifters that found you earlier?” I asked.
Tavis and Calhoun shared a look, confirming that possibility had scaled all the rest. Tavis unbuckled his seatbelt and started outside.
I gripped Calhoun’s thick arm, still wrapped protectively around my front, and pushed. “Well, let’s g—”
The car tipped sideways, toward Tavis’s passenger side. He scrambled the rest of the way out and away. But the car kept tipping, almost as if in slow motion so I could catch snapshots of my climbing terror in crystal clear detail.
Calhoun wrenched open his door. The flap of large wings sounded from outside, and then the snap of a metal chain. Glowing silver wrapped around Calhoun’s neck and yanked him out of the car. Leaving me here, alone, in a tilting death machine.
Time had violently caught up to itself inside the car. Holding tightly to Tavis’s empty seat, I squeezed my eyes shut at the rapid spin and the bangs of metal on rock. My stomach surged up into my throat and hung there as the car plummeted.
We must’ve been parked next to a ravine. Or a cliff.
I gritted my teeth, sure that a wail was ripping from my throat, but I couldn’t hear it. I fumbled for the seatbelt behind me, seeking any way I might survive this, but my fingers met emptiness.
This nightmare would stop soon. It had to somehow, even if I was rolling toward Hell itself.
Finally, the metal tongue of a seatbelt snapping through the air smacked my hand. I snatched it, and still holding to the seat in front of me, scooted my ass back enough to wrap the belt around my waist. I stab, stab, stabbed the tongue until it sank home into the buckle, securing me.
That would do little good if the car exploded on impact.
With one last crash of metal on rock, the car groaned to a stop and sighed. Rock and dust hailed down on top, and it wasn’t until I dared open my eyes that I realized the top of the car was actually the bottom. I was upside down. Alive, but everything was all wrong. The sight of my feet above my head disoriented me even more, and my stomach pitched as if the car were still rolling. I cried out, desperate to keep my wits about me, to keep from throwing up, to keep panic from clinging my lungs together.
I was alive. As of right then, at least. Time to do everything I could to keep that fact a fact.
I unbuckled the seatbelt and crashed to the roof of the car in a pile of limbs. My hands shook as I picked up my backpack and forced open the door, and then I stumbled out into the evening. The rocky ground tugged and pulled under my feet because the world wouldn’t stop moving so quickly, and I went down. A sob built inside my chest, and I released it with a flood of helpless tears.
What had just happened?
“Calhoun? Vance? Tavis?” I tried to shout their names, but my voice was too choked with tears.
Only a night bird called back.
The dragon shifter harem was gone, taken by other dragon shifters, if I had to guess. Were they to be killed? My heart clenched. I’d only known them for a few hours, but they seemed good and kind, much more than I was. Much more than I ever expected a dragon shifter to be.
Meanwhile, seconds ticked by toward midnight and the full-moon ritual, and I was still miles away from Evenza and rescuing Asa. I glanced toward the SUV even though I knew it was totaled, and then up as the last of the sun dipped into twilight. Soon, I would see the moon, sitting high and full on a ribbon of clouds, a majestic beacon challenging me in a race against time.
