I closed my eyes, tried to slow my beating heart, tried to listen to the darkness for an idea, a suggestion, the hint of an escape plan.
My heartbeat thudded in my ears, and I focused past it, strained for sound. It took precious seconds, but I finally heard the soft scampers of animals in the woods, the hoot of an owl, the rhythmic slap of water against the shoreline.
And there, in the back of the sounds, in the darkness, the squeak and groan of metal, just as rhythmic.
I opened my eyes again, stood up, looked in the direction of the sound.
“There,” I said, and as he followed behind, I jogged down the shore until I saw it: a metal dock, about twenty yards away. It floated on booms that squeaked with each soft wave.
Beside it, bobbing lightly in the water, was a boat. It wasn’t large, and it wasn’t new, but it was floating. And that was something.
Voices echoed through the darkness behind us, and they were getting louder.
“Dock,” I said, and we took off running. I pushed open the small gate—thankfully unlocked—intended to keep interlopers off the equally small pier, hurried to the boat docked at the end of it.
It was a powerboat, something a family might use for skiing on a day at the lake. A seat for the captain behind a control panel and short windshield, a seat beside for a passenger, a line of cushions across the back. Nothing fancy, but the outboard engine looked serviceable enough.
I hopped down onto plastic carpeting, the boat swaying beneath me. I hadn’t been on a boat in a very long time. Hell of a time for a reunion.
I sat down in the captain’s chair, checked the relatively simple dashboard—ignition, speed, fuel gauge, throttle. The key was in the ignition, and it looked as though the tank was full. There were other bits and pieces of high-tech equipment, which could have been whale-tracking machines for all I knew.
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.