Free Oceans Untamed by Cleo Peitsche Page B

liked roller coasters, the way they were terrifying and safe at the same time. She’d always laughed as much as she’d screamed.
    She wasn’t laughing now, though. She felt the car’s rear bumper hit the ground, then the car was being shaken, up and down, side to side, faster than she could have possibly imagined.
    Holding her breath, she grabbedtighter onto the steering wheel—like that would do a damned thing if he flipped her upside down.
    “Please,” she gasped. “I’ll—” She couldn’t finish her sentence. Her head and neck hurt, and the acrid taste of bile was creeping up her throat. She swallowed and squeezed her eyes closed.  
    He didn’t need to make a deal with her. He could shake her until she was too dizzy to drive in a straight line.Or until she passed out, which was becoming more and more likely by the second.
    Suddenly, the car slammed to the ground, bottomed out with a heavy bang. If not for the seatbelt, the top of her head would have collided with the roof. As it was, her upper body, which wasn’t as tightly restrained, whipped forward. Her arms flew up fast enough to keep her forehead and nose from crashing into thesteering wheel.
    Still, the taste of warm copper filled her mouth, and her teeth hurt. They must have banged together. She didn’t know; it had happened so quickly. Her head throbbed in six different places, and when she pushed herself upright, sharp pain stabbed from her neck to down between her shoulder blades. Every bone felt brittle, like a sneeze would turn her to powder.
    The shifter.
    Sheforced her eyes open, expecting to see him preparing to either shake her again or to rip off the door. But he was nowhere in sight.
    It wasn’t very reassuring because she couldn’t see very much. A dark mist hovered in her peripheral vision, and it moved along with her eyes. She blinked several times and redoubled her concentration.  
    The headlights were still working, miraculously, but it wasa cloudy night. Between the darkness and the brain fog, anything not directly in front of the car was all but invisible to her.
    She cupped her hands over her eyes and pressed her face against the glass. Turning her neck sent jolts of pain down her arm. When she didn’t immediately straighten her neck, her stomach heaved. She quickly faced forward and concentrated on the dark shapes of the Tureyguanlandscape.
    Where was he?
    If his plan was to lure her out by making her think he’d gone away, he was going to be very disappointed. There was no way in hell she was unlocking the door.
    But she could drive.
    The realization made it through the hazy cloud that seemed to have settled over her head. The engine had stopped, so she pushed the ignition button, and the car choked, coughed, then sputteredto life.
    Slowly, she pressed her foot on the gas, expecting to find that she’d played into the shifter’s trap.
    But the vehicle moved forward.  
    It didn’t sound healthy, like it’d be up for a cross-country trip anytime soon, but with luck, she could get back to town.
    Or she could have, if she’d known which direction town was. The haze was getting thicker, and her vision seemed to be narrowing,tunneling. Tunnel vision. Now she knew why they called it that.
    Carefully, she pointed the car toward the closest thing to a road in the area. Two shadowy shapes surged out of the darkness. Shifters. She knew they had to be shifters because of how quickly they’d moved.  
    Screaming, she floored the gas pedal and drove right at them.
    At the last moment, they lunged away. Her shoulders came uparound her ears as she braced for impact, or for the car to be picked up or flipped over, but nothing touched her.
    Then she was driving down the rocky, sandy road. Every little bump felt like she’d been stuffed inside one of the metal washing machines at her neighborhood laundromat, and it was stuck on the spin cycle. But weirdly, the headache was receding, the pain in her neck going away.
    It probably meant