Page 55 of His Master

I tried something new. I reached for him through our bond, sending gratitude and love to him, along with something I hoped he’d feel physically.

Simon sucked in a breath, a look of wonder coming across his face that told me he had felt it. More than that, I felt a tentative stroke through our new bond that told me he was testing things out as well.

It was beautiful and exciting, and I wanted to play with it more, but I was distracted by the headlights in the rear-view mirror. The other car was approaching us so fast that it made me tense.

I expected the car to veer off into the left-hand lane once it reached us, but it didn’t. It drove right up on our tail, so close I thought it was going to ram right into us. I was surprised when it didn’t, but when it continued to tailgate us at high speed.

“What’s going on?” Simon asked, twisting to look over his shoulder out the back window.

“Hang on,” I ordered him. “Make sure your seatbelt is tight.”

Simon whipped to face forward, checking his seatbelt, then leaning a bit to the side to look through his side mirror.

I kept one eye on the road in front of me as it twisted and turned treacherously through the mountains and one eye on the rearview mirror. Within seconds, I was sure the car behind us wasn’t a random vehicle that also happened to be driving to Norwalk in the middle of the night.

“Hang on,” I told Simon, glancing around at everything, the road, the car behind us, the navigation map on the dashboard console, looking for a way out of the danger that had just snuck up on us.

It really was the worst stretch of road to end up in some kind of high-speed pursuit, but I supposed that was the point. The road twisted around cliffs and edged long drops. It was wide enough that I could avoid most of them, but one wrong move at the wrong time and we ran the risk of driving right off the side of a cliff and rolling down a steep hill into the forest.

The car behind us knew that. When I refused to be intimidated by them nearly ramming us from behind, they switched to the left-hand lane and drove until they were right beside us. I had a brief glimpse of a man dressed in black wearing a black cap in the driver’s seat before he jerked his car right into us.

It took every ounce of calm and control I had not to instinctively veer to get away from whoever it was. We were just about to reach another of the more dangerous curves, and I gripped the steering wheel tight.

That didn’t stop our pursuer from veering into us again, actually hitting us this time.

“Master!” Simon cried out, grabbing anything he could and bracing himself as the car jumped to the side, far too close to the flimsy guard rail for my liking.

Size was on our side. Mason and Hayden’s SUV was large and heavy. The car pursuing us was a sedan. They veered and smacked us again, but as long as I held my nerve, they didn’t have the power to push us off the road.

At least, they didn’t have the power to push us off the road when we were on one of the straight stretches. There was a bit of curved road ahead that would throw the balance right off.

On a gamble, I put my foot on the gas, speeding up as we approached the sharp curve, heading into it at a speed I never would have in other circumstances. The pursuing car followed, its engine revving loud enough for me to hear, even though we were driving at full speed with the windows up.

Just before we hit the curve, I slowed down quickly, pressing the brake enough so that our pursuer shot ahead of us. He tried to slow down when he saw what I’d done, but as soon as he was more than a car’s length in front of us, I shifted into the left-hand lane.

“Look out!” Simon gasped as we hit the hardest part of the curve.

“I’ve got it,” I said, wincing at the force of the curve as I gripped the steering wheel.

The pursuing car wasn’t as lucky. He’d gone into the curve too fast, and by the time he tried to make a move, I was in the right position behind him. As he shifted lanes to the right, I moved in behind him. When he tried to get back to the left, I moved behind him again. There was no way I was going to let him get behind us enough to force us off the road.

The cat-and-mouse game continued for a good ten minutes. We passed a few other cars, but maneuvered around them without the dynamic between us changing. I tried the same intimidation tactic on our pursuer that he’d tried on us when we hit a stretch of straighter road as we started to come down from the mountains by driving right up on his tail.

That must have been the final straw for whoever it was. When we neared the next exit, toward the bottom of the western side of the hills, he veered off to exit the highway. A minute later, he was far behind us.

“What was that?” Simon panted, still bracing himself and gripping his seat hard.

“My uncle,” I replied with a grim scowl.

It hadn’t been him directly, but I knew Uncle Vincent was responsible for whoever it was.

“I don’t like your uncle very much,” Simon said, loosening up a fraction.

I huffed a humorless laugh. “I don’t either,” I said. “I don’t think whoever that was knew what they were doing,” I added. “Someone who knows how to use a car as a weapon wouldn’t have given up so easily.”

“I’m not sure that makes me feel better,” Simon said, wariness radiating at me through the bond.

“It doesn’t make me feel better at all,” I said.

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