Rachel Caine - Thin Air

Well, of course, there was the threat against my sister. That helped keep me from doing anything stupid.

We didn’t talk, except that he directed me along Highway 95 to 160, where we turned west. He wasn’t telling me the final destination.

I hated the car about as much as I hated him. The pedal was sluggish, the steering was loose, and it shimmied through curves. Looked good on the outside, rotten on the inside, just like Eamon himself.

I didn’t draw Eamon’s attention to it, but somewhere outside of Pahrump we picked up a tail. Of course, it was hard to be sure-highways by definition had a lot of people traveling the same direction, especially in the boonies-but I did some experimenting with speed, and the white panel van stayed right with me, whether I sped up, changed lanes, or slowed down. He was hanging back, and he was covering up with other traffic, but he was a fixture in my rearview mirror.

He hadn’t been there when we’d dumped the body, though. That had been a clear road for miles, and no chance of being spotted by anything but a high-flying eagle. So if he was hoping to catch us red-handed, literally, he was out of luck. No doubt the trunk would sink us with forensics, if it came to that, and of course I was driving, wasn’t I? And Eamon had made sure that my fingerprints had stayed on the wallet, which was safely in his coat pocket. Insurance.

The weather was shifting. I felt it rather than saw it, a sensation like pressure in my head. I tried to focus on it as I drove, and before I knew what I was doing, I was looking at the world through the lenses that David had shown me. Oversight, he and Lewis had called it. And the world was different when you knew how to interpret the clues.

The car I was driving, in Oversight, was a rust bucket, tainted by indifference. Past the hood, the road glimmered flat black, sparking with little explosions of light-tiny creatures, maybe, living and dying in their own little dramas?-and in the distance the sky was a rolling, strange landscape of grays and blues and orange streaks. More like fluid than air. The orange was pushing its way through. I had no idea if orange indicated heat; if so, that was some kind of warm front, and it was creating all kinds of swirls and eddies and muted flashing chains of energy. Those showed as black streaks, like oil dropped in water.

I’d gotten so engrossed in the strange view that I’d backed off on speed. Eamon growled in frustration. “Are we on a sightseeing tour, pet, or do you actually want to get there ?” he snapped. I jammed the accelerator down and checked the rearview mirror. It made me light-headed to look at the world this way, but it was weirdly compelling. The van behind me looked like a scarred battlewagon. Whoever was driving that thing had an intimate knowledge of being in the thick of things. I couldn’t get more than a shadowy glimpse of the interior.

Sarah sat up and yawned, and I nearly yelped. In Oversight she looked horribly distorted-puffy, sick, surrounded by a flickering black cloud edged in red.

I didn’t dare look at Eamon. Some things I just didn’t want to know.

I blinked, and the visions were gone. It was just a road, and those were just cars, and in the mirror my sister looked grumpy, tired, and ill. “I need a bathroom,” she said.

“You’ll have to hold it,” Eamon said. “Nothing out here, love. Nothing but sand and things that sting.”

He wasn’t wrong. We’d taken 372 out of Pahrump, and although there was some traffic, there were no towns. A few clusters of sun-rotted buildings, but nothing that deserved the name of town. We’d seen one Nevada state trooper cruising slowly in the opposite direction, but I’d held our speed to just under the legal limit. No sense in tempting fate, when fate included jail time and possibly even a death sentence.

Clouds boiled up in the west by the time we’d crossed the border into California. Sarah had whined periodically about a need for bathroom, water, and food; I felt the same needs, but I knew better than to encourage her. We raided the polyunsaturated goodness of the snack aisle of a Quik Stop on the outskirts of Tecopa, which was more or less the last call for calories, gas, and restroom facilities.

Night closed in early, and with it came rain. Blinding, silvery waves of it, glittering in the car’s headlights like a downpour of diamonds. In a strange way it felt comforting. I’ve done this before , I thought. I could sense that, although I couldn’t really touch the memory of it. I could sense the energy up there in the sky, feel it rippling through me in ways that I couldn’t begin to understand or explain. It was soothing.

Eamon fell asleep. I kept driving.

And the white van stayed in the rearview mirror all night.

Ever driven all night through a rainstorm?

Tiring.

I stopped the car about dawn, or what would have been dawn if the sun had been able to pierce the cloud cover, and switched places with Eamon. We ate convenience store food, drank stale coffee, and after a while I dropped off to sleep, or at least an uneasy approximation of it, lulled by the steady drum of raindrops on the roof of the car.

I dreamed there was something staring at me from outside of the car window, something that looked like me but wasn’t me, something with my smile and eyes as black and empty as space. I can see you , she mouthed, and grinned with razor-edged teeth. You can’t run. You don’t belong here. I woke up feeling sick and afraid and lost, and it didn’t get any better when reality set in. I was sick and afraid and lost. I couldn’t trust Eamon. I couldn’t trust my sister. And I had no way of contacting anyone who might have had my best interests at heart.

Sometimes you’ve got to save yourself , I told myself. It didn’t make me any less afraid, but I did feel a significant improvement in my ability to keep a stiff upper lip about it.

“Where are we?” I asked. We were in the burbs of a major metropolitan area, and the landscape had definitely changed from flat desert to hilly desert. The rain had stopped, but the weather was still cloudy and-by the feel of my window glass-blood-warm. Eamon, still driving, looked tired and annoyed. Sarah was asleep again. I felt in the pocket of my jeans to be sure I still had possession of her Oxy. She was whimpering quietly to herself-bad dreams or withdrawal, I couldn’t be sure.

“Doesn’t matter where we are; we’re not where we’re going,” Eamon snapped. “Someone’s following us.”

No kidding. Well, I hadn’t thought he’d miss it. “White van?”

“Yes.” He glanced at me with hard, shiny eyes like wet pebbles. “You knew.”

I shrugged and stretched. “Didn’t matter,” I said. “Right? Plus, I didn’t want you solving the problem with a bullet.”

“The first problem I solved for you with a bullet is buried back there in the desert, love, and if I hadn’t, we’d be identifying you on a cold steel slab,” he said. I was ominously afraid he was right. “We need to find out who might have an interest in tailing us. One of your Warden friends, perhaps. Or someone from the police.”

“It’s not the police. At least, not official. They wouldn’t be following us across state lines. Besides, I think it’s probably about you, not me. You don’t strike me as the kind of guy who makes a lot of friends, Eamon.”

He evidently found that logic to be slightly persuasive. He even looked a little thoughtful. “They do tend to have a short shelf life,” he admitted. “Friends, lovers, relationships of any sort. I’ve often regretted that.”

Just when I thought it was possible to really work up a decent hate for him, he had to disarm me with self-deprecation. Dead guy , I reminded myself. Shot in the head. Remember who you’re talking to.