And the winner would take the pot.
Heather was so nervous, it took her three tries to get the key in the ignition. She’d found the LeSabre pulled over on the side of the road, practically buried in the bushes. It was Bishop’s car—Dodge must have borrowed it.
She was unreasonably annoyed that Bishop had helped Dodge in this way. She wondered if Bishop had risked coming tonight—somewhere in the crowd, the dark masses of people, faces indistinguishable in the weak moonlight. She was too proud to text him and see. Ashamed, too. He’d tried to talk to her, to explain, and she had acted awful.
She wondered whether he would forgive her.
“How are you feeling?” Nat asked her. She’d offered to stay with Heather until the last possible second.
“I’m okay,” Heather said, which was a lie. Her lips were numb. Her tongue felt thick. How would she drive when she could barely feel her hands? As she pulled the car up to her starting position, the headlights lit up clusters of faces, ghost-white, standing quietly in the shadow of the trees. The engine was whining, like there was something wrong with it.
“You’re going to be fine,” Nat said. She twisted in her seat. Her eyes were suddenly wide, urgent. “You’re going to be fine, okay?” She said it like she was trying to convince herself.
Diggin was gesturing to Heather, indicating she should turn the car around. The engine was making a weird grinding noise. She thought she smelled something weird too, but then thought she must be imagining it. It would all be over soon, anyway. Thirty, forty seconds, tops. When she managed to get her car pointed in the right direction, Diggin rapped on her windshield with his fingers, gave her a short nod.
At the other end of the road—a thousand feet away from her, a thousand miles—she saw the twin circles of Ray’s headlights. They went on and off again. On and off. Like some kind of warning.
“You should go,” Heather said. Her throat was tight. “We’re about to start.”
“I love you, Heather.” Nat leaned over and put her arms around Heather’s neck. She smelled familiar and Nat-like, and it made Heather want to cry, as though they were saying good-bye for the last time. Then Nat pulled away. “Look, if Ray doesn’t swerve—I mean, if you’re close and it doesn’t look like he’s going to turn . . . You have to promise me you will. You can’t risk a collision, okay? Promise me.”
“I promise,” Heather said.
“Good luck.” Then Nat was gone. Heather saw her jog to the side of the road.
And Heather was alone in the car, in the dark, facing a long, narrow stretch of road, pointing like a finger toward the glow of distant headlights.
She thought of Lily.
She thought of Anne.
She thought of Bishop.
She thought of the tigers, and of everything she’d ever screwed up in her life.
She swore to herself that she wouldn’t be the first to swerve.
While in a dark basement, with the smell of mothballs and old furniture in his nose, Dodge realized, too late, why Nat had taken his keys—and, crying out, fought against his restraints, thinking of a little time-bomb heart, ticking slowly away. . . .
Something in the engine was smoking. Heather saw little trails of smoke unfurling from the hood of the car, like narrow black snakes. But just then Diggin stepped into the center of the road, shirtless, waving his T-shirt above his head like a flag.
Then it was already too late. She heard the high-pitched squeal of tires on asphalt. Ray had started to move. She slammed her foot onto the accelerator and the car jumped forward, skidding a little. The smoke redoubled almost instantly; for a second her vision was completely obscured.
Panic.
Then it broke apart and she could see. Headlights growing bigger. The slick sheen of the moon. And smoke, pouring like liquid from the hood. Everything was fast, too fast—she was hurtling down the road, there was nothing but two moons, growing larger . . . closer . . .
The stink of burning rubber and the scream of tires . . .
Closer, closer . . . She was hurtling forward. The speedometer ticked up to sixty miles per hour. It was too late to swerve now, and he wasn’t swerving either. It was too late to do anything but crash.
Flames leaped suddenly out of the engine, a huge roar of fire. Heather screamed. She couldn’t see anything. The wheel jerked in her hand, and she struggled to keep her car on the road. The air stank like burning plastic, and her lungs were tight with smoke.
She slammed on the brakes, suddenly overwhelmed with certainty: she would die. She saw movement from somewhere on her left—someone running into the road?—and realized, a second later, that Ray had swerved to avoid it, had jerked his wheel to the left and was plunging straight into the woods.