“Hand them over.”
She gave him a lippy pout, trying for an innocent look, he supposed, but that bad-girl gleam still shone in her down-tilted puppy eyes. And then she was twirling something; a bright blur encircled her finger. His keys.
“Gimme those,” he growled.
“Up—” she held them away.
God, she’d nabbed his keys. It was maddening, and a little bit hot. He moved closer, thinking to unbalance her, but she smelled so good, he was the one losing his balance, losing himself in those gray eyes, thinking too hard about the sugary pink of her lips. “Give them to me.”
“You never answered my question—do I get a ride?”
“Nope.”
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“None of your business.”
“Take me with you.”
“I don’t think so.”
She stuck out her bottom lip. “I won’t tell your future ever again. How about that?”
“You won’t be able to help it.”
“Sure I will. It takes a lot of concentration to tell the future. It’s a whole deal.” She narrowed her eyes. “As if you care, anyway. You don’t give a crap about the future.”
So that’s what she thought—that he didn’t care. And she liked it.
“Take me with you,” she said.
“I’m going drag racing.”
“Take me with you, Simon.”
It stopped him a little, the way she said his name. “No spectators. You’d have to be a passenger.”
“Good.”
“I thought you had a class or something,” he said.
“Not for a while.”
He grabbed the keys from her. She wasn’t the only quick one.
She frowned.
He walked off, leaving her sitting there. Soon enough, though, she was behind him. By the time he hit the gates she was beside him.
“I don’t have what you want,” he told her.
She just kept on. Wherever she’d been squirreled away, she hadn’t been properly socialized. He’d enjoyed seeing her steal that ringtoss ring, and nabbing his keys had its sexy aspect. But the way she was pushing it with him … he was generally in favor of a lack of socialization, but in Fawna’s case, it was making her too damn hard to blow off.
They reached his car. He was thoroughly out of breath now, but his mood lifted when he saw that he’d still avoided a ticket. He definitely should have had a ticket. A Midcity miracle.
At times like these, he thought that maybe he could live forever.
She was at the passenger door, looking over the car roof at him, eyes the color of rain clouds. “Take me with you.”
He found himself thinking about that fable where the scorpion asks the turtle to give it a ride across the river, promising not to sting the turtle, but then the scorpion stings the turtle anyway. It’s in my nature, the scorpion explains as they drown together.
Simon hated fables with their tidy, asinine lessons. He hated fables almost as much as he hated the fixity of fate. And what the hell, he was on a winning streak. He pointed at her. “You don’t tell my fate. You don’t look at my future.”
She smiled a gummy pink smile. “Got it.”
“Get in, sister.”
Just like that, they were heading off to go drag racing.
Simon had done some pretty unwise things that summer—he lost his savings on one bad gamble, and nearly lost his car in another. Some thug had almost chopped off his finger in a caper gone bad. He’d had five telekinetic assassins after him for a month as a result of certain ill-advised insults. But knocking around with a prognosticator? This, he realized with a dark thrill, was the most insane thing he’d done in a very long time.
Though she’d probably change her mind about the race the second she got a glimpse of the gullies and realized what she was in for. Then he’d have to figure out how to get her back to civilization without missing the race.
But what if she didn’t change her mind? For having been held all these years wherever she’d been held, she really was her own person. Unapologetically weird—and fierce, too, yet soft and open. Like a tenacious flower.
Racing with Fawna. The idea was intoxicating.
He turned to her. “What do you think Packard would say about you drag racing with me?”
“He can say what he wants.”
Simon smirked. Packard would kill him if he learned about it. Hell, Packard would kill him just for hanging around with Fawna. Packard had a real big brother streak when it came to Fawna.
Yet another upside.
“Packard was what, twelve, when you knew him before?”
“Eleven or twelve, yeah,” Fawna said. “And he had long hair—like a girl.”
“Wouldn’t I love to have a photo of that,” he said.
“He was sweet.” Fawna stared out the window with that lost girl attitude of hers. “I’m glad I couldn’t see his future back then. Or anybody’s.”
Simon nodded and waited for her to say more, but she just stared out the window.
They headed down a steeply angled service road into North Wash, a deep concrete gully strewn with trash and rusting appliances.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“North Wash. It diverts the overflow from the Midcity River during the spring rains and snowmelt. Keeps the toxic runoff out of the streets. Don’t lick the bottoms of your boots tonight.”
She grinned. “Roger that.”
Though he might like to lick the bottoms of Fawna’s boots—they were sexy and jangly, with a hint of the badass barbarian. He wondered what she’d look like wearing nothing but those boots. He could imagine her stomping over to him, naked in those boots, a gleam in her eye. The thought of it made him grow hard.
What the hell was he doing?
The car bumped down to the flat paved bottom of the North Wash, which was wide enough for two cars to drive side by side on—at least in the places not blocked by the massive pillars that supported the roads above. The sides slanted up at angles, creating the effect of openness, yet you could see nothing that was around. A lot of junk got thrown into the North Wash, making it an obstacle course of garbage. The entire stretch of it was typically dry except in spring, when it was a poisonous rapids.
The guys were there. Flagger Burtido with his orange cap. The usual racers—Cruster, Harley, Jackson—were drinking and arguing.
“This is just like Grease,” she said.
“Grease?”
“The movie musical? Where John Travolta is in a race?”
Grease. He felt a little guilty suddenly for letting her come. She’d been a prisoner of some sort—nobody seemed to know where—for what? Seventeen, eighteen years?
He’d actually wondered about her captivity a lot. Worried about it. Hoped she hadn’t been hurt, but how could she not have been? Over the months, he’d noticed that she talked a lot about movies. Clearly, she’d spent a lot of time watching movies. He was never sure if it was a good or bad sign about how she’d been treated.
“I’ll tell you right now, this won’t be like a movie.”
Fawna made a big show of rolling her eyes. Then, “Excuuuuuse me for suggesting that your big, scary race is like Grease.”
“Seriously. If you’re expecting a song and dance here, that’s not what this is. I still have time to drop you somewhere and come back.”
“I’m all in. Take me at my word, Simon.”
He liked how she said that. Take her at her word. He could respect that. Fawna was a grown woman—around twenty-five, he guessed. Simon pulled up next to the burnt-out hull of a tractor.
“So those are your opponents?” she asked.
“That scruffy leather guy, Harley, he’s the one you don’t want to be against. He usually wins.”
“He’s that good a driver?”
“Crap driver, great telekinetic. He throws debris in front of your car. Really messes you up.”
Fawna smiled incredulously. “Are t
he other guys highcaps, too?”
“Cruster, the gray beard, he’s a short-term prognosticator. One of your brethren.”
“Nearsighter,” she sniffed. “One or two moves ahead—that’s all he can see.”
Simon smiled. She was on a bit of high horse with her talents as a farsighter. “In a race, one or two moves ahead is all you need. Not good to be against Cruster.”
She turned her wide-eyed smile to him.
He shut off the engine. “Jackson, the dreadlocks guy sitting on that striped Camaro? He’s a telepath. Best driver here. He’s got a good ear. You can skunk your thoughts by running a song in your head, but it’s not so easy to keep him out when your thoughts are screaming.”
“I think I can handle a telepath.”
“Oh, right. Of course.” He remembered—prognostication grew out of telepathy. A range change, Packard had once explained. Fawna would’ve been a telepath before she evolved into a farsighter.
The guys were looking over at them now. At Fawna. Wondering why Simon brought her.
Join the club, he thought. “Jackson knows when Harley the telepath is going to throw something. Knows when anyone’s going to make a move. He’s one you don’t want to be against.”
They got out and walked around to the front of the car. Fawna sat herself up on the hood and Simon stood.
“So, all these guys are guys you don’t want to be against,” she said under her breath. “You’re drag racing against three highcaps with serious powers. I’ll color you crazy.”
He smiled, liking her perched there on his car, liking that she’d said that. Yes, he was officially 100 percent crazy.
“Do you ever win?” she asked.
“I hold my own.” When there’s no chance in hell. That was a kind of winning.
“Do you zing them with your recklessness? Dump it into them and make them go wild? Is that your edge?”
“Hell, no. I keep it all for myself.”
She snorted. “So that’s your special talent? Huge amounts of recklessness?”
“You can still change your mind. We can get you home.”
“No way. I said I was in.”
The excited edge in her voice made him think of the jag she’d been on at the ringtoss. Whatever happened for her there, she was going for more. Pushing it a notch further. He knew he shouldn’t be pleased about that, but he was.
Pushing it was something he understood very well.
“I thought you disillusionists got off on zinging people,” she added.
“We do, but I’m not going to give up any recklessness before a race.”
Burtido waved.
Simon lowered his voice. “The big guy in the orange cap, Burtido, calls the races. We start and end down here.”
“Grease had a guy like that,” she said.
Simon gave her a level look.
She grinned. So she was being funny.
“And here I thought you didn’t like riding in cars,” he said. “Considering you walked here.”
“Not all the way. But a lot of it, yeah. I needed to,” she said softly. “I needed to be back wild and on my own, and I needed to, you know, regroup. Inside myself.”
Regroup? He didn’t like the sound of that. The guys who’d originally kidnapped her, taken from young Packard’s band of merry munchkins, those guys were long dead—suffocated by being entombed in a wall, he’d heard. Simon definitely approved of that. But there were still the people at the lab or wherever she’d been. They might still be alive. Was anybody going after them? Somebody needed to look into that.
He wanted to ask her about it. He’d heard that she didn’t talk about it, but he felt as if they were on a certain wavelength—a sort of crazy, unevenly scribbled wavelength that nobody else was on.
But now Cruster was ambling over, looking smug. He handed Simon a bottle of whiskey. “This is a fucked-up move, even for you,” he said, meaning Fawna.
Simon was about to give Cruster a bit of the smackdown, but the man suddenly looked cowed. Simon turned to catch Fawna smiling brightly and maliciously at Cruster. Yeah, she had a bit of the badass in her, this one. Badass in an utterly feminine way. It was 100 percent goddamn delightful.
Simon grabbed the bottle. Fucked up. Cruster didn’t know the half of it. He, Simon, was hanging out with a prognosticator.
“We’ll see about that.” Simon smiled at Fawna and took a swig.
Drag racing was one of the purest forms of risk. It was an achievement just to survive, but when he placed—he’d never won—but when he placed, he had this sense that he’d gotten away with something.
Yet it was much more than that.
It was as if beating impossible odds got him closer to God. Not that he believed in any god, but it was something on those lines. As if beating the odds put him out of fate’s reach for a little bit. Saved him a little bit.
There had been that moment with Fawna in the ringtoss, her flinging the rings with all that intensity, where they’d looked at each other, and for a second it seemed as though they’d achieved a kind of lift-off together, like they met each other in a new and far place—a place he’d only ever gone alone. Fawna and all that crazy fury.
Yes, he very badly wanted her in on the race with him.
“What’s so fucked up about it?” Fawna asked Cruster.
Simon said, “He thinks that, if you ride with me, you’ll scream for me to stop and let you out. And I’ll have to abandon the race.”
“He’s a rough ride,” Cruster said, like the dirty asshole he was.
Simon gave Cruster a cold, steady gaze, warning him off that track of talk. And Fawna gave him a look so heated that it sizzled.
“Just sayin’,” Cruster protested, raising his hands against the pair of them. Simon felt this swell of pride that Fawna was with him.
The other guys gathered around now. Jackson passed the map to Simon, and Simon traced the route with a finger, explaining to Fawna how it took them out of the gully, over some surface streets, through the Tanglelands for a bit, then out and back.
“You’re drag racing on the Tangle?” she asked. The Tangle was the notorious Midcity highway interchange, a twisty Slinky of on-ramps and off-ramps rising high into the sky.
“No, we go under the Tangle. Through the Tanglelands.”
“But there’s no roads in there. Packard says it’s all psychos, slime lakes, and road construction rubble.”
“There’s one intact road. Well, sort of intact,” he added. “But, yeah, definitely not the ideal place to stall out. The goal when you’re in the Tanglelands is to get the hell out of the Tanglelands.”
Jackson the telepath eyed Fawna. “So who wins?”
Fawna screwed up her lips at him. “Maybe we do.”
Simon turned to her, startled. Fawna took the bottle and swigged.
“You didn’t even look,” Jackson said to her. “I know you didn’t look. But you want to look.”
Harley frowned at Fawna. “A farsighter? You brought a farsighter?”
“She’s here to ride, not to look,” Simon said, gazing at her. She’d said she wouldn’t look; he would take her at her word.
They talked about the route, and soon enough it was race time. Simon couldn’t believe she was getting back in the car, buckling her belt. She would go through with it.
Packard would kill him. But Fawna could make her own decisions.
She pointed through the windshield at Jackson, whose nose was under the hood now. “Looks like the telepath has car trouble.”
“Nah, the telepath shines up a certain part of his engine before every race. He has to do it before every race.”
“A superstition?”
Simon nodded. “You missed it, but Harley kisses the ground and prays to his uncle, who died out here. It’s this protective thing for him. Cruster has fuzzy dice, and he turns them to snake-eyes before he starts the engine. And he won’t race during a full moon.”
She traced the silver Cutlass logo on the door. �
��What’s your good luck thing?”
He couldn’t think of how to answer that. Everything. And nothing. “I don’t need one,” he said.
She’d fallen silent. Her finger stilled. Then she squinted at the dashboard.
“Ready? You can still change your mind.”
She bit her lip, still squinting.
He waited. Something was wrong.
“I have to tell you something,” she said.
His heart sank. She’d looked. “No, you don’t.”
“This you’d want to know.”
“If it’s the future, I don’t want to know. You want out? That’s fine, but I don’t want to know what you saw.” He was crestfallen that she’d looked. He’d wanted her word to be good.
“I have to—”
“No!” Simon put up a hand.
She grabbed his hand, pushed it down. “The world spins, then stops. Blood on the air bag.”
“Goddammit.” He pulled his hand away and gripped the steering wheel. His pulse raced. “I told you not to tell my future!”
“It’s the car’s future, not yours. The near future.”
“Same thing. You broke the spirit of your promise.”
“You’re not glad to know?”
“No, I’m not glad!” He hated the arrogance of fate, the mindless limits it set down. The vibrations of the engine moved through his hands, his forearms, and he closed his eyes, wishing he could un-know the car’s future. This is what he got from hanging out with a farsighter. God, she really was a menace.
The other guys had started up, except Jackson, who was still shining the carburetor.
“Sorry.” She unbuckled her seat belt, opened the door, and waited for him to do the same.
Screw it. He’d been in crashes and walked away. He’d walk away from this one, too, maybe even avoid it. Why not? He’d defied worse. He’d never met a future he didn’t want to punch in the eye, and he’d punch this one in the eye, too. It’s what made him what he was.
He would race anyway.
A little bright thing bubbled up in his soul. Something akin to happiness. He began to laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
He shook his head.
“What?”
Devil's Luck Page 4