Page 120 of Forever Never
But it was too late. The car rammed them from behind again. The impact sent her body lurching against the seatbelt as the Mercedes smashed into the guardrail that separated them from a dark drop-off. Metal scraped and buckled. Sparks lit up tiny pockets of the night.
Shrill screams echoed over the music. Remi didn’t recognize her own voice.
The high beams disappeared around the next bend in the road.
“Hello? Can you hear me?” Remi yelled, blindly feeling for her phone.
Camille was frozen in the driver’s seat, hands gripping the wheel. Chest heaving in shallow breaths. Remi’s own lungs burned.
The Mercedes was still running. But the acrid smell of smoke and rubber filled her nostrils.
“He’s gone,” Remi breathed. “He’s gone.”
Camille was shaking her head. “He’s never gone.” Tears glistened on her cheeks in the light of the dashboard.
“We have to get out of here,” Remi said sharply. “We have to get out of the car.”
“He’ll find us. He won’t stop.”
Remi was reaching for her seatbelt when more lights cut through the windshield. High beams traveling much too fast. For one second, Camille’s lovely profile was frozen in time, burned in the light of the approaching vehicle.
And then there was nothing.
* * *
She wasn’tsure if she’d been knocked out or if she’d blinked and the world had gone away. Her vision was obscured by the airbag that had deployed. Something felt unstable, wobbly. Almost as if the car wasn’t on solid ground anymore.
Camille’s head hung limply, face down.
Remi could smell something besides smoke now. The brackish tang of blood.
“Oh my God. Oh my God.”
The music was still on, still loud. But the world tipped. Or was it just the car. Through the splintered, fractured windshield, Remi saw trees and twisted metal.
He’d pushed them through the guardrail. And they were balanced precariously on the edge. How long of a drop was it? Her brain scrambled to calculate how far from Camille’s house they were, but her thoughts were sluggish.
Behind them, maybe above them, Remi thought she could hear the muffled purr of another engine. Another car. But turning her head hurt.
The world tipped. Or maybe it was the car. But this time, it went just a degree farther.
As the nose of the car dipped, Remi opened her mouth to scream, but no sounds came out. There was just the music loud in her ears and the first roller coaster hill drop in her stomach as she went weightless. As gravity pulled the car down, down, down.
There was a crunch, and the car’s descent slammed to a brutal stop. Her seatbelt cut painfully into her chest.
The music cut off and was replaced by a hideous creaking sound. Trees. A pair of them sprouting out of the steep ravine and stretching toward the black heavens had stopped their descent. But how long could they hold back the mangled wreckage of the car against gravity?
“Camille?” Remi whispered. She reached out and touched her friend’s limp arm. “Camille. We have to get out of here.”
There was no response. She was sick and woozy and fucking terrified.
But in the eerie silence, she heard something else. A car door closed.
If she could hear that, they couldn’t be that far from the road, she realized. Maybe they could climb back up and—
She realized whose car door it was. Whose footsteps she could hear through her broken window. Her breath was nothing more than ragged whimpers, and she clamped her free hand over her mouth, trying to muffle the sounds.
He was looking down at them, debating if his job was done. If he could go home and start practicing looking concerned, then shocked. That motherfucker. Hate fueled her, giving her a cold kind of calm she’d never before experienced. An icy rage took root in her soul. He wouldn’t win this. He wouldn’t end Camille’s life because he found her humanity inconvenient. And he sure as fuck wouldn’t end her life. She had paintings to paint. Men to kiss. Worlds to explore.
