Meg Cabot - Safe House

Or guys, I should say, since she'd said "they."

On the other hand, I didn't exactly want to stay with Heather alone while Rob went for help, either.

Fortunately, Rob made the decision for me. Bossy boyfriends do come in handy sometimes.

"You follow our tracks," he said when he'd pulled me down the stairs, through the party rooms, and out into the night air. "The tracks we made through the pine needles. See them? Follow those back to the road, then make a left. Got it? And do not stop. Do not stop for anything. When you find the guy, tell him to take the old pit road. Okay? The pit road. If he's local, he'll know what you're talking about."

He had shoved his helmet over my head, making speech difficult. Still, as I straddled the seat of the Indian, my feet barely reaching the boot rests, I tried to express my great unease with this plan.

Rob wasn't listening, however. He was busy starting the engine.

"Don't stop," he shouted again, when he'd successfully maneuvered the kickstart. "Do not stop for anyone not in uniform, understand?"

"But Rob," I said over the noise from the engine, which wasn't all that loud, actually, since Rob kept his bike in good repair. "I've never ridden on a motorcycle alone before. I'm not sure I know how."

"You'll be fine," he said.

"Um. I hesitate to mention this, but I think you should know, I don't exactly have a driver's license yet—"

"Don't worry about it. Just go."

He'd been holding on to the brake. Now he let go of it, and the bike jolted forward. My heart lurched as I grabbed for the handles. I was so short, I had to stretch out practically flat against the body of the bike to reach them . . . but reach them I did. I'd be all right, I realized . . . until I had to stop, anyway. No way were my short legs going to be able to reach the ground while still keeping the bike, which had to weigh eight hundred pounds, upright.

Rob had been right about one thing, anyway. I absolutely could not stop, and not because some of Heather's attackers might still be lurking around, but because once I stopped, I'd never be able to get the stupid thing up again.

And then I was careening back through the woods, trying to follow the ruts the Indian's wheels had made through the bracken on our way in from the road. It wasn't hard, exactly, to see where I was going—the headlight was bright enough that I could see a dozen or so feet ahead of me at all times. It was just that it was much harder to steer than I'd thought. My arms were straining with the effort of navigating the bike around all the trees that kept looming up in front of it.

This is what you always wanted, I told myself, as I drove. A bike of your own, to feel the wind on your face, to go as fast as you've always wanted, but no one would ever let you....

Only when you are driving through the woods in the middle of the night looking for a cop, on your boyfriend's motorcycle that is, without a doubt, more bike than you can handle, you can't actually go very fast at all. Not if you don't want your wheels to spin out from beneath you.

My biggest fear was not that one of Heather's attackers might suddenly leap out at me from behind a tree, grab the handlebars of Rob's bike, and knock me to the ground. No, my biggest fear was that the engine was going to stall, because I was going so slowly.

I tried to kick up the speed a notch, and found that, by going another couple miles an hour faster, I could actually maneuver the bike much more easily. I tried not to concentrate so much on the trees, and instead concentrated on the open spaces around them. It sounds weird, but it actually helped. I figured it was like using the Force or something. Trust your feelings, Jess , I said to myself, in an Obi-Wan Kenobi voice. Know the woods . Feel the woods . Be the woods. …

I really hate the woods.

It was right after this that I burst out of the trees and skidded up the embankment to the road. There was a moment of panic when I thought I was going to tip over. . . .

But I threw out a foot and stopped myself at the last minute. I don't know how, but I managed to get the bike upright again and was off. The whole thing took barely a second, but in my mind, it seemed like an hour. My heart was thundering louder in my ears than the bike's engine.

Please be there , I was praying as I raced toward the place where we'd passed the squad car. Please be there, please be there, please be there .... Now that I was on the open road, I could really let loose, speedwise, and so I did, watching the speedometer go from ten, to twenty, to thirty, to forty. . . .

And then the squad car was looming up ahead of me, the overhead light still on, the cop inside, sipping a cup of coffee. The tinny sounds of the radio drifted out from the open window on the driver's side.

It was against the driver's side that I braced myself as I pulled up, to keep the bike from falling over.

"Officer," I said. I didn't have to say much to get his attention, because of course when someone on a motorcycle pulls up next to your car and leans on it, you notice right away.

"Yes?" The guy was young, probably only twenty-two or three. He still had acne. "What is it?"

"Heather Montrose," I said. "We found her back there, inside a house off that road, the old pit road, the one they don't use anymore. You better call an ambulance, she's really hurt."

The guy looked at me a minute, as if trying to figure out whether or not I was putting him on. I had Rob's helmet over my head, of course, so I don't know how much of my face he could make out. But what little he could see of me, he must have decided looked sincere, since he got on the radio and said he needed backup, along with an ambulance and paramedics. Then he looked at me and said, "Let's go."

It turned out the cops already knew about the house. They'd searched it, Deputy Mullins—that was his name—said, twice already, once right after Heather had been reported missing, and then again after nightfall. But they hadn't found anything suspicious inside . . . unless one counted a plethora of empty beer bottles and used condoms.

In any case, Deputy Mullins led me toward a clearly little-used dirt track just off the road. It was better, I found, than the way we'd originally taken through the woods, since I didn't have to dodge any trees. I wondered why my psychic radar hadn't led me this way before. Maybe because it ended up taking longer. It took us almost fifteen minutes of slow going over weedy, bumpy terrain to reach the house. It had only taken me ten minutes to get to the road through the woods. I knew from Rob's watch.

Deputy Mullins, when the house appeared in his headlights, pulled up beside it, then got on the radio again to describe his location. Then, leaving the headlights on, but his engine off, he got out of the car, while I leaned Rob's bike carefully against it, turned the engine off, and climbed down.

"She's in there," I said, pointing. "On the second floor."

Deputy Mullins nodded, but he looked nervous. Really nervous.

"Some people got her," I said. "She's afraid they might come back. She—"

Rob, having heard our approach, came out onto the porch. Deputy Mullins was even more nervous than I'd thought—either that, or the house was creeping him out as much as it had creeped me out—since he immediately went for his sidearm, sank down onto one knee, and, pointing the gun at Rob, yelled, "Freeze!"

Rob put both hands in the air and stood there, looking slightly bored, in the glare of the headlights.

May I just say that Rob Wilkins is the only person I know who would find having a gun drawn on him boring?

"Dude," I said to Deputy Mullins, in a voice high with suppressed emotion, "that's my boyfriend! He's—he's one of the good guys!"