When I realized I hadn’t felt the boat bobble with Morgan’s weight, I glanced back, found him standing on the dock, staring down at me.
“Get in the boat!” I told him.
“You know how to drive a boat?”
“I remember how to drive a boat,” I clarified. “My grandparents had one on the lake for a few years, and my grandfather taught me how to drive. Get in,” I said, and when he hopped down, I pointed him back toward the dock. “Untie the ropes and pull in the buoys. Push us off from the dock.”
“We’re clear,” Morgan said, and I popped the ignition, felt the engines roar to life behind me. I nudged the wheel enough to point her away from the dock, just as voices rang out behind us, and gunshots began to ping through the air.
“Get down!” Morgan screamed, covering his body with mine as bullets rained around us. An old soda can, sitting forgotten in a cup holder, was hit, spraying soda into the air like a fountain. Morgan tossed it overboard.
“Go,” he said, and I pushed down the throttle. The boat’s nose lifted, the hull skipping over waves as we roared into darkness.
Chapter Twenty
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
The lake was dark and quiet, the hum of the engine and the slap of water against the sides of the boat the only sounds. If the circumstances had been different—if it had been Ethan beside me instead of Morgan on the rear bench, silently mulling over his fate, and if we hadn’t been running from gangsters—it might have been a romantic trip.
As if he’d known I’d been thinking of him—and maybe he had—Morgan moved up to the front of the boat, took a seat in the opposite chair.
“It always seems to come so easy for you,” he said.
“What comes easy for me?”
“Being a vampire.”
The sentiment was so utterly absurd I laughed. “Did you miss the panic attack?”
“All right, present circumstances excluded. And do you want to tell me what happened back there? Because I don’t think it was really about getting off the island.”
I pushed windblown hair behind my ears. “Just something that happened to me a few nights ago. It made me a little panicky.”
“A little?”
I nodded, kept my eyes on the dark water in front of me, squinting to see the lights of Chicago, praying I’d recognize them before we ran out of gas . . . and that dark panic circled me again.
“Anyway, other than that, being a vampire seems to come easy for you.”
“There is no part of my being a vampire that has been easy, from the first attack to tonight’s little pool party. I was kicked out of school. I watched Ethan die. My best friend unleashed a demon onto the city. None of it has been easy. Some of it has been pretty great. Most of it has been awkward.”
o;Ah,” he said, his gaze on the sky. “Look up.”
“What?”
“Look up,” he said, and tilted my chin upward.
It was as if the moon had exploded and spilled its light across the sky—stars sprinkled the dark canvas like diamonds, the cloudy Milky Way gleaming among them.
I’d seen a similar sight in our few nights in Colorado, when the universe had flung open its arms to us. It was majestic, and it made me feel small in the best possible way.
“There is always light,” Morgan said quietly. “The stars are always shining, even if we can’t see them.”
He was the last person I’d have expected to hear something that philosophical from. And it helped.
A dog barked nearby. “We’ve got to go,” he said.
“Wait,” I said. “I have an idea. Just give me a minute. Keep an eye out.”