She shrugs, slices off a bit of apple, and chews it noisily. “I’m assuming that what’s most important to you is surviving, right? In that case, don’t get into a fight. Bam. You survive.”
“What about when you fought for me?” I say accusingly.
“Surviving wasn’t the most important thing,” she says darkly. “And besides, that wasn’t a real fight. You think they’d have killed the Princess of Kentucky in front of her clan? Not that I couldn’t take them in a real fight, of course. Fuckers wouldn’t know what hit them—”
“What’s the little secret?” I cut her off.
Flannery cuts off another piece of the apple and studies it in her fingers for a moment. “Before you start, figure out who’s going to win.”
We make it to northern Illinois before we finally pull over in a shopping center parking lot for the night. We stop the car in the back, near a closed bookstore, and spread out on Wallace’s floor. Flannery is leaning against the rear doors, letting them press against her the same way the wall of her bedroom would have back at the camp. She’s eating from a drum of cheese puffs that she stole from a display outside a gas station.
“So, what happens when you find him? When this is all done?” Flannery asks, licking the cheese dust off her fingers.
“I… go home,” I say.
“What really happens?” Flannery says.
I look down, tucking my arms into my sweatshirt to get warmer. “I go home,” I repeat, and then continue, “but I don’t stay there. Not for long. I don’t think I could after all this.” Truthfully, it feels strange even calling Andern Street “home.” Kai was my home,
“Look how quickly we turned you into a proper Traveller.” Flannery laughs, cutting off my thoughts. “No place is your home, so every place is. So where will you go? What will you do?”
I pause for a long time. “I don’t know,” I say. “I adopted Kai’s dreams. I never really had my own.”
“And that made you happy?” Flannery asks warily.
I frown. “It did, but I’m not sure how. I guess it was enough for me, then. I still want Kai back, of course, but…” I swallow and can’t believe what I’m about to say. “I don’t think I’m afraid to be without him now.” I think I should feel guilty about thinking that, much less saying it aloud, but I just feel strangely free.
“Well,” Flannery says as she screws the lid back onto the cheese puff drum, “I for one think you’d make a stellar spy. Creeping around, car chases, hunting down monsters… if I were hiring spies, you’d get the job.”
“What about you?”
“That,” Flannery says, “is a mystery. You gotta understand, Ginny—you walk out on the Travellers, the way I’ve done, you walk out on them for good. I can never go back. But…”
“Callum.”
“Yes,” Flannery says, sighing. “And that’s my home. Those are my people. I’m supposed to lead them one day. I dunno. My mother thought I wasn’t tough enough to rule alone. I thought I’d feel free, running away. Happy. But instead I just feel like she’s right. Like I ran because I wasn’t strong enough, in the end. Forever the shit Princess of Kentucky…”
“I watched you take down a bunch of guys with your fists, Flannery. You’re plenty strong. Brigit is
Flannery doesn’t answer, but her fingers move to a chain around her neck. It takes me a minute to realize what the necklace charm is—her wedding ring. She catches me looking and shrugs, tucking it back under her shirt. “I’ve got a question for you,” she says slowly. “You knew Wallace was a stick shift. Which means you knew you couldn’t drive it when you stole the keys.”
“That’s not a question—”
“Why’d you take the keys then?” she finishes, staring at me.
I laugh and darkly enjoy the fact that it irritates her. “Because,” I say, “I planned on making you come with me the moment you announced your engagement.”
Flannery is quiet for a long time, so long that I think she’s fallen asleep. But then she speaks, voice small. “Why?”
“Easy,” I say. “I’m going to fight werewolves, and you throw a mean punch.”
Flannery laughs. “True. And with the way you handle a knife, you’ll definitely need me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
We make it two more days before the snow gets so thick that we can barely drive. The roads aren’t becoming slick, necessarily—they’re just becoming impassable, as if they’ve been paved in pillows instead of asphalt. The trees on either side of the highway are covered in ice, as if they’ve been candied, and headlights bounce off the snow and blind us every mile or so.
“We have to pull over,” Flannery says. “We can’t drive in this. Not into the forest, anyway.”
“We can’t pull over, we’ll lose her,” I answer, shouting—the snow is so heavy on the windshield, it sounds like a thunderstorm.
“Don’t be so stupid, Ginny. We’re not going to find her if we’re dead in a ditch somewhere. This thing’s got practically bald tires as is. It can’t handle snow this deep.”
I grimace as Flannery takes the closest exit; Wallace struggles to make it up the off-ramp and to the main road. There’s little here—it’s the sort of stop that’s geared to truck drivers, I think. There’s a Flying J gas station that advertises hot showers, which is attached to a fish restaurant and… not much else. We pull Wallace into the parking lot, struggling to find a space—we weren’t the only ones who decided to stop, apparently.
Flannery turns the bus off and we sit for a moment, watching the snow rain down as if it wants to suffocate us. We creep to the back and sit; Wallace becomes colder, colder, and colder still. It’s a million times worse than Atlanta, than Nashville—I guess Mora has less to fight in Minnesota, given how cold it is up here even without her influence
“Let’s go inside,” Flannery finally says. “We’ll dine and dash. I’ll talk you through it. I’m a pro.”
“How are we supposed to dash when we can’t actually move the car?”
“You worry too much.”
I give her a tired look, but I have to admit the idea of real food instead of crackers sounds appealing. We bundle up as best we can, layer upon layer of thrift-store clothes. I grab the cookbook just before we step outside.
“You’re bringing that?” Flannery asks, perplexed.
“Last time I left it in a car, I ended up getting kidnapped,” I point out, and Flannery laughs.
Together we tromp through the parking lot to the fish restaurant. There’re a few inches of snow on the ground already, and at the rate it’s coming down there’ll be a foot before it gets dark. The bottom of my jeans are soaked, and my lungs ache from the temperature.
I reach for the restaurant door, fling it open, and am punched by a wall of sound and wave of heat. People are huddled over tables, nursing enormous plates of food and cheap beer. They cast wary looks out the windows every so often, shake their heads, and go back to it. A harried-looking waitress calls out to us as she sets a basket of bread down.
“Two?”
I nod. She bustles over, grabs some paper menus, and leads us to a seat by the back wall.
“Order something,” Flannery says, fiddling with a wood-and-golf-peg game in the center of the table. “Don’t think about it, just do it. They’ll never even notice when we slip out.” When a different waitress stops by I order a fish sandwich without hesitation. Flannery orders the most expensive thing on the menu, and smiles at the waitress so genuinely that I’m impressed.
“How much farther?” Flannery asks.
“Maybe two hours if the roads are clear.” I say. “
