It creaked horribly.
Dani jumped. She clutched her spear and whipped her head about to look down both sides of the street.
Lynn stood and peered inside. She inhaled deeply. Dust. Mold. It didn’t smell of animals or death.
Skeever almost knocked her over in his hurry to explore the inside of the garage.
The only bit of light from a source other than the door opening came from small holes in the metal grate right next to it. The garage was small and still held a big, red car that filled up almost the entire space.
Skeever didn’t growl nor bark. She could hear him sniffing in the echoing brick box.
“Let’s go in.” A quick inspection revealed Skeever’s nose had been right: the space was deserted. Lynn slid off her pack and groaned when her shoulders came to life with an explosion of pinpricks.
Dani closed the door behind her quickly, minimizing the duration of the noise, then pushed the room’s sole chair under the handle to bar it.
Lynn tried to open the driver’s side door. It gave. When she pulled the handle, the rubber seals around the edges of the door panel extended for the last time, then crumbled into dust. She threw her hair back and bent down to peer inside. The upholstering was fairly intact. No signs of snakes, poisonous spiders, deadly traps, or anything else that might cause harm. Nothing scurried away, and if there were ratholes, they weren’t apparent.
She slid in gingerly and laid her tomahawk on her lap so she had her hands free to run along the leather-covered steering wheel. Dust came away in flakes and tickled her nose unpleasantly. She grinned in spite of it.
When Dani pulled the passenger side door open, the sound of the rubber seals coming unstuck echoed through the garage.
Skeever scratched at the concrete floor in a corner.
The pedals under Lynn’s feet moved to various degrees, which heightened both the experience and her sense of glee. She’d never seen a car this intact and could almost imagine how it would be to drive it.
Dani slid in and stilled.
“Have you e—?” The words died on Lynn’s lips as the last of the daylight caught on something metallic in Dani’s lap.
Dani’s fingers tightened around the handle of her long butchers’ knife.
Amusement turned acidic in Lynn’s gut. Her hand twitched as a prelude to lifting from the wheel.
“Don’t.” Dani’s tone was short. She turned her head to look at her and tilted the tip of the knife in Lynn’s direction with a minute motion of her wrist. The rest of her body was tense. “Don’t take your hands away.”
Lynn swallowed and tightened her hold on the steering wheel instead. Dani was a hunter and had a hunter’s reflexes. There was no way Lynn could grab, angle, lift, and bring down her tomahawk before Dani ran her through. Options! She could throw herself out of the car and hope Dani didn’t get her first—hope the tomahawk wouldn’t skitter away into the solidifying darkness and leave her defenseless while she grabbed her knife. She could try a bare-handed attack and pray she could get the knife out of Dani’s hand. Risks, risks, risks. “What are you doing?”
“We need to talk.” Dani’s voice strained like something bound and prodded.
“Since when do we talk with weapons?” Lynn tried to put amusement into her voice, but the tightness in her throat mangled it to something shrill and adversarial. She set her jaw and forced herself to look away from the knife and up to Dani’s face.
“Since we’re at a… uh… well, a fork in the road. Literally.” Dani managed a little snort.
When their gazes met, Lynn’s insides churned. She knows. Instinct took over. Deny it! “Fork? What are you talking about?”
“Don’t do that!”
Lynn startled. Her hand flitted away from the steering wheel.
“Last warning! Keep ’em on the wheel, or I’ll have to—to—”
“Do what, Dani? Are you going to kill me?” Lynn halted her hand but didn’t move it back. These inches closer to a weapon were too hard earned. She took her fear and turned it to anger. “Hm? Is that the plan? Spit it out!”
“I don’t know!” The shout seemed to drain some of Dani’s hostility. She slumped into the seat, but the knife didn’t budge. That wasn’t anger in her eyes now; that was desperation. “I don’t know, Lynn. What do you want me to say? To do?”
Lynn stared her down. She took advantage of Dani’s inner turmoil by lowering her hand a few inches more. “What’s going on?” Back to neutral, maybe a bit of care. She needed to figure out what chord to strike to get out of this situation—and fast.
“Could you not lie to me?” The unspoken for once was as loud as Dani’s voice in the claustrophobically small space.
Lynn didn’t react. She wondered if Dani could hear her heart pounding.
Dani took a deep breath. “When you run away tonight, were you going to kill me first?”
“What?” Lynn frowned and shook her head. “No, I wasn’t.”
Dani inspected her. “That’s stupid.”
Lynn felt dizzy, a physical reaction to the continually shifting tone of the conversation. “Wha—why?”
“I could hunt you down.”
Lynn shorted. “No offense, but I sincerely doubt that.” She nodded at Dani’s feet. “You can barely walk, and you’re exhausted. Yeah, you have the food, but I’ve been without food before. And I’ll have Skeever. You’d limp back to the Homestead instead of coming after me.”
Dani’s hand around the knife twitched.
Lynn’s gaze flitted down. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
“You’re wrong.”
Too quick, too shaky. “I’m not.”
Dani’s eyes narrowed, and she sat up straighter. “You are.”
Lynn’s certainty faltered. She was silent for several seconds. “Even if you did, Dani…” She felt the strong urge to drive this point home, just in case Dani was really stupid enough to come after her. “You won’t be able to catch up. You’re a good hunter—you must be—but you’re not used to the Wilds. You can’t track me on the roads; you can’t move as fast as me, and you’d be in danger the whole time.” She reached out toward Dani but withdrew before she touched her.
Dani squinted at the hand, but her posture had slumped as if the dose of reality Lynn had unloaded onto her shoulders was weighing her down.
Lynn seized the moment. “Really, Dani. You’re so much better off just letting me go. Tell them I died or something or that I knocked you out and ran away. That you tried to find me but couldn’t. They’d take you back. They wouldn’t be angry.”
Dani seemed to consider the proposal. The knife remained trained firmly on Lynn.
“I could tell you where to go, and you can have the map. I’ll tell you all the markers I remember. You can go back to the Homestead; the whole group can go out to get him, and it’ll be much safer than just you and me. All you have to do is agree to let me go, okay? Think about it. You didn’t want to come out here either, did you?”
The almost imperceptible headshake felt like a major victory.
“Good.” Lynn smiled softly, and risked a now-deliberate move of her hand toward Dani as a sign of comradery.
Dani tensed. Her features were becoming harder and harder to decipher now that the light had drained away almost entirely.
“Sorry.” Lynn shifted and forced her body to relax even though every fiber in her being pushed at her to grab her tomahawk. “Didn’t mean to startle you.” She smiled. “Do you have a candle or something?”
Dani nodded.
“Okay, how about we get that lit, eat something, and we’ll talk, okay? We’ll have a rest, and I’ll tell you all I know. Then I just… get my things and leave. You can sleep here tonight, safe and sound. You know the way home, and if you leave really early tomorrow, maybe you can even make it to the Homestead by nightfall. Sounds good, right?”