Night Is Darkest by Jayne Rylon (books recommended by bts .TXT) 📕

Lacey composed an answer in her mind. Or at least she thought she had but she couldn’t make her mouth articulate the thought. She reached for the dregs of her coffee but her uncoordinated hand bounced off the side of the cup holder.

A garbled noise drew her attention toward Tyler but she couldn’t make sense of the way his funhouse features swirled and rolled. She blinked to clear her vision, but her eyes refused to open again.

Then everything went dark.

“Lacey!” Tyler’s gut gave a sick lurch as her eyes rolled in their sockets. Then she slumped over the steering wheel.

He lunged across the cabin to grab for the free-spinning controls. They’d already drifted across the center line into the opposite lane. The crescendo of a horn blowing scared ten years off his life. Awkward angles, combined with the pressure of Lacey’s torso, resisted his efforts to correct their course. He yanked the wheel to the right, missing an oncoming dump truck with inches to spare. The tires squealed but held as he stabilized their trajectory on the gentle curve of the road.

In his peripheral vision, he caught the flashing red and blue lights Mason had engaged along with the siren to warn other motorists of whatever the fuck was going down here. The deadweight of Lacey’s leg rested on the accelerator, preventing them from rolling to a stop though his glance at the gauges confirmed they had slowed to about thirty miles an hour.

Tyler mentally raced ahead on their route, ticking off possible places to ditch the car, but he couldn’t come up with an alternative that would guarantee Lacey’s safety. He debated yanking the emergency brake but couldn’t predict how much control he’d retain over the vehicle at this speed. Her older sedan wasn’t equipped with all the safety features, like side-curtain airbags, that were standard in late models.

While steering with his right hand, he twisted in his seat to grab for her pant leg with his left. The clink of gravel and branches slapping the side of the car returned his attention to the road. He swerved back onto the pavement with a bounce and a curse.

“Fuck!” He couldn’t reach over the center console from this position. Without a lot of choices remaining, he unclipped the buckle on his seatbelt and scooted to the left. The fabric of Lacey’s baggy scrubs crumpled in his fist as he contorted his arm between her limp torso and thigh.

Tyler tugged but her knee banged the dash housing and he lost his grip. The added momentum of her falling leg surged the car forward. His eyes flicked between the road and her foot as he attempted to keep them on course while searching lower with frantic swipes of his hand until he encountered what he sought. Bingo!

Finally, he threaded his fingers through the laces of her ugly-ass white platform sneakers. He raised her foot free of the pedal and prepared to coast to the shoulder. When he glanced down to ensure the weight had shifted off the small pad, Mason flashed his high beams and laid on the horn.

Tyler looked up just in time to catch a glint of light sparkling off the chrome bumper of the muscle car backing out of a driveway up ahead, right into the road. In the split second he had to decide, he chose to swerve around the guaranteed collision.

Still propping Lacey’s leg off the gas, he spun the wheel in the opposite direction then yanked the parking brake and prayed.

Chapter Eleven

Mason couldn’t believe the nightmare playing out in front of him on the dark, winding road. More than anything, it tortured him to be utterly helpless to prevent the unavoidable horror assaulting Ty and Lacey. Other than alerting other drivers and calling in an ambulance, which he’d done the second he realized something had gone haywire, there was nothing he could do.

What the fuck had happened to Lacey?

If she’d fallen asleep, Tyler would have woken her up then forced her to pull over. Why the hell hadn’t he driven in the first place?

Mason wasn’t a religious person but, in those agonizing seconds that stretched into endless millennia of fear, he begged every source of supernatural power he could conceive of to let this clusterfuck end with minimal consequences. Anything else would be asking for a miracle.

Illuminated by the super-powered spotlights mounted on the patrol car, he caught the determination and terror on Tyler’s face as he wrestled the steering wheel for control. Lacey’s compact body had vanished behind the mass of her seat. His heart seized in his chest when Tyler ducked below the dash, leaving Mason to be his eyes.

That’s when he saw it.

Up ahead, the rear panel of a classic car poked into the lane directly in the path of Lacey’s car. He mashed the horn and the brake simultaneously to evade the imminent pileup. The backup lights of the hotrod disappeared but the distance didn’t allow time for them to pull out of the way. They were going to crash.

“No! No, no, no, no, no, no.” He didn’t realize he repeated the cry like a mantra until the screech of tires drowned out his voice. At the last possible moment, Lacey’s car avoided collision with the heavy, steel-constructed vehicle by swerving toward the embankment lining the opposite side of the road.

With such a sharp change in direction, Ty had no hope of keeping control. Though it had slowed some, Lacey’s car had plenty of momentum left when it skidded sideways into the mounded dirt. It clipped a tree then bounced before toppling into the ditch behind it, sending up a cloud of pine needles and torn grass.

The crunch of sheet metal and the shattering of glass pierced through the scream of Mason’s siren. A fraction of a second behind, he abandoned the cruiser off the side