One more stall out, followed by the engine racing in neutral, then grinding as Hannah forced the gear shift forward without depressing the clutch. The engine screamed in protest while Amara stood there, steely eyed. She slung the rifle behind her back, pulled out a handgun, and the back windshield shattered in a hail of glass.
The gears ground painfully. Amara was so close now Hannah could see the color of her eyes in the rearview mirror. Exactly the same shade as her brother’s.
That was when Hannah threw the car into reverse and gassed it, feeling the thump under the tires once, then twice. Being careful not to back over Asher, Hannah put the car in first and did it again. Then twice more, until there were no more thumps.
Stupid bitch, Hannah thought. Like I don’t know how to drive stick.
Hannah proceeded cautiously, pulling the sweaty handgun from her waistband before she opened the door. There was no sign of Amara. Checking the bumper and tires she was relieved to find no blood, no hair, not a trace of her. She was dead—for the moment. Asher was on the ground, alive, out cold, but thankfully still there.
She backed the SUV up as close to the unconscious Asher as she possibly could without running him over. After trying to move his dead weight she briefly considered shooting him, though if they managed to get out of here she would never admit it to him. Anyway, even if he had come back near her the last couple times he died, there was no guarantee it would happen again. If he died and things went differently this time, she wouldn’t know how to find him.
Hannah heaved and hauled until finally he toppled ungracefully into the back seat. He immediately rolled off onto the floor, wedging himself into the space behind the front seats. There was no chance she would be able to un-wedge him from there, so she shoved his feet inside and shut the door, and as quickly as possible, began to drive out of the park.
“Ash. Asher. Wake up.” Hannah reached back and poked him, getting no response. “Asher!” She smacked him across the face, swerving a little as she drove. Eyes back on the road, she struggled to subdue the full-body shaking and slowed to a less conspicuous speed. As inconspicuous as an SUV with a shot-out back window and a destroyed rear bumper could be.
There was a groan, then silence.
“Ash, can you hear me?”
Torn between the urge to put as much distance as possible between them and their last known location and the need to get Asher awake long enough to figure out where to go next, Hannah settled on the latter. At the next available turn she pulled off and backed the car as far out of sight as she could behind a shabby strip mall.
Asher was still crammed solidly on his side between the back and front seats, unconscious and deathly still. She gave him a tug, but she couldn’t begin to move him, especially with her ankle. She could already feel it swelling inside her boot, and her shirt was wet with blood where her arm had somehow torn open, yet again. That was definitely never going to heal.
Hannah moved the front seats up as far as they would go, then groped under him until she found the lever to move the rear seat, sliding it back until he was at least lying mostly flat. His face was slack and he was drenched with perspiration, his hair plastered to his waxy white forehead.
“Come on, big guy. Wake up. Don’t make me do anything stupid.” She was bluffing of course. She’d had no qualms about backing over his sister, but on the off chance this was his last get-out-of-dead-free card, Hannah could never do it.
The only thing she could do until he came to was keep moving. Careful not to shut his feet in the door, she climbed back into the driver’s seat.
“No . . . No. No. No.” When she looked over the seat to back up, there was nothing there.
Asher was gone.
She looked around hopefully. Maybe he would just reappear in front of the car. He’d climb in and they’d figure out what to do next. Hannah sat still, waited. Nothing.
Hannah bounced her head off the headrest. Where was he? She’d been right, it was a fluke, and this time—the worst possible time—it hadn’t worked.
Now what? She didn’t know what to do. Dropping her forehead on the steering wheel, she let hot tears drip down over the leather. But not for long, only for a moment. Picking her head up and hauling in a couple of deep breaths, she made herself pull it together.
Rolling down the window, Hannah took a careful look around, convincing herself that at least she had a while before Amara could pop up again. Maybe if she ditched the car and figured out an inconspicuous way back to Savannah she could get to Asher’s house. If she could find it. He’d make his way back there eventually. She wasn’t helpless, and sitting here waiting for some miraculous rescue would probably just get her killed.
Something made her ears prick, a sound in the distance. She didn’t move, except to pat the console to make sure the gun was still there.
She heard another scream.
There was a commotion in the plaza she was hiding behind. She fumbled the car into gear, rigid with fear, afraid of the pop of gunshots she was sure would come next. There was no way Amara could have found Hannah and gotten back to her this fast, but she wasn’t working alone. Was it the unknown factor, maybe her father, or someone sent to make sure she didn’t escape again? If that was the case, it was time to move.
Hannah put the car in drive and started to pull out when a police car blew by. A second followed, this one stopping halfway across the end of the narrow alley. They hadn’t seen her, but they were blocking her from leaving her hiding place without drawing attention.
She put the car in reverse and slowly backed it up, scraping against a loading dock with a shriek as she squeezed by. Hannah let out a sigh of relief when the stretch of pavement behind the long building didn’t dead end. Carefully, Hannah backed around the end of the building, looking for the police cars, or for worse, who the police were after.
What she saw was a large naked man running across the parking lot of a grocery store, heading for the nearest exit. Tearing out, she sped across the parking lot, pulling up beside him. He looked wide-eyed into the window.
“Get in.”
30
“I really liked this car.”
Hannah nodded in agreement as Asher looked woefully at his mangled vehicle. At least she could meet his eyes, now that they had been able to stop and retrieve the bag with his clothes from the back seat. It had been a good half hour since she’d hopped it over the curb and taken off, and she’d kept her eyes firmly glued to the road—with minimal peeking—since she’d picked him up and told him everything he had missed.
They were sitting on the curb behind the back bumper in the far corner of a busy outlet mall. With the remaining bits of the back window knocked out, the gaping hole was a little less noticeable.
“The darts, that was new,” she said.
“Indeed. Amara must be getting desperate. They do not work well on us. It takes a great deal to knock one of us out, so much so that the heart will usually give out soon after the dart fully kicks in.” Asher shook his head in consternation. “She had to be wagering it would slow you down. If I was dead and gone you would run, but if I was lying there unconscious you might hesitate.” He looked over at her. “Hannah, you should have run.”
She didn’t respond. It was irrelevant now, and it had given her a chance to wipe the grin off Amara’s face with her bumper.
“So what do we do now?” she said. He didn’t answer. “Asher?”
He was looking at the battered car again. Maybe he was regretting driving it, having conceded that they were going to have to ditch it. Amara had seen them in it, and even if she’d popped back up halfway across the planet, she wasn’t working alone. She could have someone looking for it right now; keeping it was too risky.
“What were you going to do?” He looked at her, his lips pulling down at the corners.
“I was going to try to keep you alive long enough to see if you had any ideas. I blew that, sorry to say.”
“And after that?”
; She shrugged. Honestly, she hadn’t had time to worry about the next step in too much detail. “I don’t know. I would have kept driving I guess.”
“To where, Hannah? Where were you going to go? And when you needed fuel or food, what were you going to do? This is serious.” His voice grew sharp, and it felt like he was growing larger beside her.
“You don’t think I know this is serious? Why the hell are you getting upset with me? It’s not my fault I couldn’t manage to keep you from dying from an overdose of elephant tranquilizer.”
“I am sorry,” he said.
“Yeah, well maybe you should be. I don’t need your attitude. We’ve got enough else going on.”
“Not about that,” he said.
Hannah looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
“Not only about that. And you could not have saved me. I am sorry for bringing you into this situation in the first place. I took us from my house to avoid being detected by my sister and she finds us within the day.” Asher shook his head in disgust. “After this long I should be more adept at predicting my sister’s actions. She clearly anticipates mine. I even managed to take the money with me when I died, so you had limited resources to continue with. I have failed to do my duty and protect you properly.”
She shook her head at him. “I appreciate all the help so far, but when it comes down to it, I can take care of myself. And anyway, this isn’t your duty. I know you feel like it’s your job, making sure your sister doesn’t kill any more poor little helpless humans that you have to feel bad about”—Hannah looked pointedly away from him—“but don’t beat yourself up on my account. There’s no point. She’s going to get me eventually and it’ll be just like every other time. If I were you, I don’t know if I’d even waste the time.”
“You do me an injustice, Hannah.” His words sounded harsh, but his tone was soft, the edge from a moment ago gone. “You look at me wrongly, if you think that is at all how I feel. And how can you say I am not meant to watch over you?” he said. “What other reason can you think of for my being sent to where you are over and over again? I know now it has been going on longer than either of us knew.”
“What do you mean?”
He shook his head. “I told you about how I had lived out my allotted span of years and died before I found myself in your town for the first time. It had been nearly twenty-three years since the last time I expired. Can you guess where I found myself that time?” He didn’t give her time to answer. “I woke up in Macon, Georgia, which means I was sent to where you were while you were in the womb, Hannah.”
She sat back and tried to process what he was saying.
“Time after time I was sent back to you. Even at the Walmart when you were fleeing after my sister shot you. We must have missed each other by minutes. And it is happening more quickly and more precisely every time. What reason for it beyond fate can you imagine?”
He didn’t wait for an answer from her, which was fine, because she didn’t have one. Hannah didn’t really believe in fate, but she didn’t have a better explanation for why they were being thrown together.
“No more of this. I will not let Amara catch us unprepared again. I have been alive long enough that I should be fully capable of covering every possibility, despite this failure. If this happens again, if we get separated, you need to go back to the house in Savannah. In the—”
“Asher, don’t be an idiot.” It came out fast, but she mostly meant it. “What’s the point. In the end, she’s going to get me.” She turned away, face growing warm. “Truth is, you can plan all you want, but eventually she’s going to get me. I’m sure as hell going to avoid it as long as possible, but you’re wasting time making plans in the long term. No matter what keeps putting us together, it’s going to end with me dead.” She stopped and swallowed hard before she continued. “It’s going to end, and maybe if you aren’t there for that part, you won’t have to live with the misplaced guilt. Why make it worse that it has to be?”
Getting up abruptly, Hannah walked around the car, out of the shade to where it was brighter. She was eternally grateful for the protection, but why suffer the guilt of fighting a battle you couldn’t win. It would be better if he walked away and never even knew how it ended.
“You think I would just leave you, that my only lookout is the state of my conscience? Is that what you think?”
He had come around the car silently to stand in front of her. She looked up at him, and he stared her down, her back against the warm metal of the SUV.
“Maybe you should. It’s the truth, isn’t it?” she said. Asher didn’t answer. He put a hand on the car on each side of her shoulders, then leaned down and silently rested his forehead against hers. They stood there for a moment. Then he leaned back and looked away.
“You are wrong. So very wrong. And I am not going anywhere.”
Hannah stood there for a moment, trying to understand, wanting to ask, but she pushed it away. It all had to wait. He was choosing not to walk away, whatever the reason, whether he should or not.
“So . . . if you’re staying.”
“I am staying.”
“Then what now?”
What they needed most right now was to put some distance between themselves and Macon and regroup without being detected. It was easier said than done without knowing exactly where Amara was and how many people were working with her, or exactly how anyone was continually managing to find out where they were.
“My sister has the advantage. She has never been one to hide from the world, and she is never afraid to use others to do her bidding,” Asher took one last wistful look at the SUV and began to walk across the parking lot, hunched in his usual I’m-trying-to-blend-in fashion. Hannah followed. “She will enlist anyone who can be of use to her, so you can bet she has some tech-savvy lackey, or more likely several of them, scouring the country for one of my identities to pop up, or for some type of facial recognition to catch us. Amara has always embraced the passage of time and the advancements that come with it. She will always be one step ahead of me in this matter. I have learned to accept the changes, but she courts them.”
Hannah stopped. “So let’s pop up.”
Asher looked at her quizzically until Hannah told him what she had in mind. After she was done, he stood for a moment, going over it in his head.
“My instinct is to get as far away from here as quickly as possible, but it may be too late to leave unobserved. I feel as though we are being closed in on already. If it were not for that I would not even consider it.”
“But you are, since we don’t have a whole lot of other good options.”
He nodded.
“And because my sister always seems to know what my plans are. It might not occur to her you might have plans of your own.”
Asher ordered a ride share for them on his phone. In the car he took out the new IDs and credit cards from the forger’s little bag and used them to book two tickets to Portugal, with about four different layovers. He had barely finished when the car pulled over next to the door heading toward departures. They were out the door before the driver could put it in park.
Inside Asher disassembled the phone and dropped the body, SIM card, and battery into the the first trash can.
“Our new identities were short lived, but hopefully useful. If Amara knew about the meet to obtain them, there is a chance she knew about the identities themselves and will be on alert for them to be used. The credit card is an old alias, so there is a chance she is on watch for it as well.”
Walking through the door, they found there wasn’t as much cover as they’d been hoping for.
“Should be easy enough to blend in with the crowds here,” she said, sarcasm evident. The airport was tiny, four or five gates, a little newsstand and souvenir shop, and a restaurant where three men in suits sat at the bar. Asher and Hannah walked through, stopping at an ATM to take a cash advance from another of Asher’s credit cards. They dumped the card in the next can then went to the
kiosk to buy her a baseball cap. Finally they turned toward the security stand under the sign with the arrow for departures.
“Are you ready?” he said. She nodded and they starting walking. He followed her past the entrance to security, through the baggage claim, to the doors that led out to the taxi stand.
Asher handed her a wad of cash. “Keep your head down. Do not look back. Take the first cab directly to the bus station, then tell him you changed your mind and have him take you to the hotel. There is a bar in the lobby. Stay there, and I will meet you. If I do not come within the hour, get a cab back to the bus station. Get a different cab from there to the address I gave you. When you think it is safe, go back to Savannah. You have the address memorized?”
She nodded. “Of course I have it memorized. It was my idea.”
“Make sure you are not followed.” He put the hat on her head and pulled down the brim over her face. Tucking her hair underneath, he said, “Whatever happens, I will find you, without fail.”
She looked up at him and took a deep breath, then took a step toward the door.
He pulled her back by the arm just briefly, squeezing it, then pushed her toward the door. Hopefully Amara would take the bait, anticipating their taking a flight; Hannah would be out the door unnoticed and long gone before it took off. The minute her taxi was away, Asher would go check in for their flight with the passports, discard them, and if the coast was clear, get away and find his way to her. Once they met up, they could start the next part of the plan.
Echoes (Book 1): Echoes Page 25