American Vampire. Jennifer Armintrout

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      She didn’t have to tell him twice. The engine roared and the transmission protested as he pushed all three hundred and fifty of the horses under the hood to haul ass and get them out of there.

      “What was that?” He checked the rearview mirror. The gas station, a crumbled ruin, stood alone at the side of the road, but nothing around it had been disturbed. The power lines stood, the cornfield waved placidly. “Was that a tornado?”

      “How did you get here?” The human trembled, gripping the dash with one hand as she sat sideways to face him. Her voice held some of the same panic she’d had in the darkened station, as though whatever the hell had just happened to them hadn’t ended yet and that his relief was premature.

      Very few things rattled him anymore, but the strangeness of her question did. Not a good feeling. “How else do people get here? I drove.”

      “No, that’s impossible.” She sat back, stared blankly out the windshield. “This can’t be happening.”

      Shell-shocked human. Fantastic. He should just pull over and eat her, dump her body in the ditch and keep going, but some instinct that was smarter than him warned that it wouldn’t be a good idea. “Well, I hate to tell you, but it is happening, and I’m about two seconds away from kicking you out of this car if you don’t stop acting so damn crazy. If you’re lucky, I might even hit the brakes first.”

      “Oh my God, you’re really here. From the outside.” Her eyes got even wider, if that were possible.

      “The outside of what? Ohio? What, are you Amish or something?” He pulled the car to the side of the road. Something about the whole situation was fishy, and he had a personal rule about getting caught up in human problems. And he definitely didn’t eat crazy. “Look, I don’t know what’s out there, or why that place got ripped to shreds, but you need to get out of my car now.”

      “No!” She grabbed his arm, her fingers digging in through the sleeve of his shirt. “No, you have to go back!”

      “My dear, I don’t have to do anything. Get out, or I’m going to throw you out.” If there was one thing he didn’t have time for tonight, besides being lost, it was being lost with a human who was deranged past the point of making any sense. She continued to babble as he opened his door and grabbed her by the arms, dragging her out over the gearshift. Even when she was out of the car, she kept pleading, as if she didn’t realize she was already on the ground. He pushed her back to get her desperate, clawing hands off him, and got back in the car and slammed the door before she could grab him again.

      He rolled the window down just a crack. “Where’s the nearest town?”

      “You’re in it,” she snapped at him, wiping her eyes. “I hope you enjoy your stay, asshole.”

      Right … so, she wasn’t going to be any help. Sure, he was leaving her on the side of the road, but he had just saved her life. Humans could be so ungrateful.

      He pulled away. She’d called him an outsider. What the hell had that been about? As much as he didn’t want to head back toward … whatever it was that had destroyed the gas station, he really didn’t want to drive straight to the heart of some religious commune, either. He blew past a THANKS FOR VISITING PENANCE sign with peeling paint and a faded metal Rotary Club seal on it and pressed the accelerator to the floor. He didn’t want to see the gas station when he passed it—at least, not as anything more than a blur. It had been about three miles since he’d passed the last county road. He’d backtrack to that and take it wherever it ended up leading. If he had to sleep in the trunk to stay out of the sun, well, he would. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but it would be a hell of a lot more pleasant than being held hostage by religious freaks.

      After a few long, silent moments, he turned on his iPod. Weird stuff happened all the time. It didn’t bear thinking about. He found Lily Allen’s latest album and turned it up, singing along absentmindedly as he struggled with the TomTom once more.

      Three songs later, he noticed he hadn’t made it back to the road yet. No, that couldn’t be right. He probably was just too distracted trying to change the settings back to English to notice that he’d passed it. He pulled a U-turn and headed back. He’d only gone about a quarter mile before the ruined gas station loomed to his left, and he passed a WELCOME TO PENANCE sign on his right.

      “What the …” Up ahead, a figure walked at the shoulder of the road, her head hanging, arms wrapped around her middle. He slowed beside her, double-checking the odometer. He’d driven fifteen miles. It was right there, in black and white on the little dials that worked just as well as the rest of the car.

      The girl shot him an angry look over her shoulder, then faced forward again, tossing her long, brown hair.

      He drove past her and waited, watching in the mirror as she tried to look anywhere but at the car she approached. He couldn’t help but notice her long, suntanned legs sticking out of a nice, short pair of denim cutoffs. Country girls. Yum. He rolled down the window as she walked by. “Something strange just happened.”

      She didn’t answer, but kept walking. He gave her a little room, then rolled after her. When he pulled up even again, he continued, “I just tried to drive back to county-road-number-whatever-that-number-was, but I don’t seem to be getting anywhere. Got any idea what that’s about?”

      Still no answer.

      He let her get ahead again, then drove up beside her once more. “You can either get into this car, or stay out here with whatever that was that just wrecked a building.”

      She laughed humorlessly and kept walking. “You didn’t seem to care about leaving me out here when you thought you were going to be able to drive away and never see me again.”

      “Well, yeah,” he said, creeping slowly alongside her. “But that’s only because I thought I was going to drive away and never see you again … Why didn’t that work out?”

      “You’re a real gentleman.” She shook her head, still walking. “You can’t leave because It keeps us here.”

      “It?” She’d said the word like it was a name, like it should be obvious what she was talking about, but Graf had no clue. “What do you mean, ‘It'?”

      There was something hard about the way she wrinkled her nose, as though she had been defeated a long time ago and didn’t like talking about the fight. Whatever bad memories were associated with the subject, they made her voice a little less strident. “I don’t know. No one does.”

      “Well, what do you mean I’m—” His foot slipped on the accelerator, and the car lurched forward. He hit the clutch and downshifted into Neutral. “Damn it, get in! This is ridiculous.”

      To his surprise, she walked around the front of the car and opened the passenger door. “Are you going to drive me home, or just abandon me on the side of the road a little farther down?”

      He ignored her. “You told me to enjoy my stay. So, I take it other people have had this same trouble?”

      “No. You’re the first.” She wasn’t being sarcastic. She dropped into the seat and pulled in her long legs as she closed the door. “The rest of us have been trapped here, but outsiders never stop.”

      Trapped. Well, that sounded great. “‘Never’ meaning … how long exactly?”

      “Five СКАЧАТЬ