The black car wasn’t so lucky. Not only did it hit the water, it had been going so fast that it hit it with all the force of driving into a brick wall. I could hear the splash, and as I looked in the rearview mirror, I saw the huge wave that came out of the pool.
The Dodge came to a shuddering halt, bumping against something solid that I thought might be my mom’s new birdbath.
Whoops.
I put the car in park and turned it off, plunging us into silence. Well, not total silence, since I was breathing pretty hard and David kept mumbling, “Please don’t let us be dead, please don’t let us be dead.”
“David,” I said, reaching over to grab his arm. He reached over with his other arm and covered my hand with his.
“Pres?” he said, opening his eyes, which still looked very wide and very blue in his pale face. “We’re not dead,” he said, almost like he was talking to himself. “How did we not get dead?”
I smiled at him and squeezed his arm. “Because I’m awesome.”
He stared at me and his smile got bigger and brighter as the fear drained out of his face. “We’re not dead!” he said, like he just now got that we were still sitting in his gross—and now completely busted—car instead of playing harps in the sky or whatever.
I was smiling back, my grin probably exactly as crazy as his. “We’re so not dead!”
He laughed and the sound was so full of relief that I found myself laughing, too.
He turned to me, still grinning. I was grinning back when he reached out, grabbed the back of my neck, and pulled me to him.
Chapter 9
FOR ONE horrifying second, I thought he was going to kiss me. I wasn’t really sure how I’d react if he did. I mean, I knew that if he kissed me, it would be a kiss of the “I am so glad I am not dead that I would kiss a flesh-eating zombie were it sitting in this car beside me” variety more than the sexy “I only write mean articles about you because I am secretly in love with you” type.
But it was only a hug. And if I maybe spent a second or two thinking that he actually smelled really nice, or that he was much more solid than he appeared, so what? I was traumatized by all the car chasing/nearly dying.
Luckily, it didn’t last long, but when I pulled back, I noticed that my heart was pounding and there was this weird fluttering sensation.
Butterflies.
No, I thought to myself. Near-death flutters of anxiety. That’s all.
Then I noticed that David was staring out the shattered windshield, looking as weirded out as I felt.
Oh my God, what was wrong with me? I could barely muster up the enthusiasm to make out with my own super hot boyfriend, and I was . . . oh dear God, was I blushing? Ugh.
Ugh ugh ugh.
Yup, the car chase had clearly addled my brain.
I was about to say something mean to David, you know, to restore equilibrium, when his eyes got big and he blurted out, “Bad guys in the pool!”
Huh? Was that like thinking of baseball when—OH! Right!
I pushed open my door and leapt out into my yard, taking deep breaths, hoping the cool air and sight of people drowning in my pool might get my hormones or whatever back under control.
I had knocked over Mom’s birdbath. It lay in three big pieces right under David’s bumper. And then, of course, there was the giant hole in our fence. But those were really the least of my problems. This biggest issue was the black Cadillac currently sinking into my pool.
No sound came from the car, and there didn’t appear to be any activity inside, so I guessed the impact had knocked out the driver and any passengers he or she might have had.
David was standing next to me, watching the car as the aqua water bubbled and churned around it. “So are we, um, are we gonna let them drown?”
I was glad he said that. We.
I had killed Dr. DuPont, and I didn’t feel bad about that. I couldn’t. He had been seconds from killing me when I jammed that shoe into his neck. But whoever was in that black car . . . well, I didn’t know what they’d wanted. My gut told me they had been bad guys, but that still didn’t make me feel great about letting them drown in my pool.
I was also more than a little worried about explaining this whole thing. All evidence of my fight with Dr. DuPont had mysteriously vanished, but I wasn’t sure how whoever had worked that particular mojo could cover this up. I expected our neighbors to start congregating in the street any minute now, like they did when the power went out.
David gave a huge sigh and ran his hands over his hair. “Well, this is weird. And awful.”
“Yup.” My skirt had gotten twisted around my hips somewhere in all of this, and I started straightening it. Anything to avoid looking at the pool.
“Who are you?” David asked me for the second time that day. “International assassin? Ninja? Vampire slayer, maybe?”
I lifted my head. “No, I’m a—”
There was a slight popping sound from the pool, and David and I both turned our attention back to the water.
Which was now empty.
And with one loud crack, the hole in my fence was suddenly gone. I didn’t even have to look behind me to know that the screech of metal was David’s car repairing itself. In just a few seconds, all evidence of the insane car chase, the crash, all of it, was gone. Then the only sound in my backyard was the singing of birds and the rustling of the leaves.
“That really happened,” David said softly. “All that shit, it . . . disappeared, right? I didn’t hallucinate that?”
My adrenaline seemed to vanish as completely as the Cadillac, and it was all I could do not to collapse in a heap on the grass. It was one thing to see the aftereffects of stuff disappearing. It was another to see an entire car—with people inside—poof out of existence.
“Yeah,” I replied. “That happened.”
“Do you know why?”
When I turned to him, David was still staring at the pool, the fingers of his right hand pressed against his temple again.
“No. But . . . David, something seriously weird is going on.”
The hand at his temple moved up to tug on his hair as David made a sound that was part sob, part laugh. “You think? Jesus, Harper. You . . . you flipped Ryan Bradshaw like a pancake. You drove a car like Jason Bourne. And then this . . .” He waved his hand at the water. “I don’t . . . I mean . . .” His words trailed off and he sank down into a crouch, eyes still fixed on the pool.
Walking over to him, I pulled at the shoulder of his jacket. “Okay, I get that it’s weird, and while I totally respect the need for a PTSD moment, we really need to talk.”
His eyes moved up to my face, still kind of unfocused. “About what? Why bad guys are chasing you, and why freaking magic is apparently real?”
“I actually think the bad guys might be chasing you, but yeah.”
David staggered backward, and sat down heavily on the grass. As he did, he nearly overturned Mom’s statue of two little girls reading on a bench, but I was able to grab it before it fell.
His sleeves, too short as usual, fell back from his thin wrists as he rested his elbows on his knees, hands tugging at his hair. “Hold up, what? You think those guys were after me? Why?”
“I don’t know. Do you know why?” I towered over David, my shadow falling on his body.
Dazed, David shook his head. “I can’t—”
And then I saw it. Something flickered across his face and he flinched.
“You do know,” I said, yanking him to his feet. “David, what is it?”
He swallowed heavily. “Nothing. It’s nothing.”
At that moment, I really hated that my superpowers prevented me from shaking the crap out of him. I settled for balling my fist up in the front of his shirt and pulling him down to meet my eyes. “David, look around you. This? This is crazy-sauce. And if you know anything that could help me figure out why I’m suddenly Wonder Woman, I need to know it right. Effing. Now.”