Summer by Jeff Mariotte

Author:Jeff Mariotte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Published: 2010-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

12

Scott Banner was pretty sure he was going to die.

Daniel had magical powers or whatever, so he could probably survive the collision of the rented (or stolen, he wasn’t entirely sure which) Ford Taurus with any of the half-dozen vehicles it had almost smashed into, not to mention lane dividers and walls, as Daniel piloted it at breakneck speeds from Del Mar to La Jolla. But any of those near misses could have spelled instant extinction for Scott, who held onto his seat belt’s shoulder strap for dear life on each occasion.

Fortunately Daniel seemed to have an inordinately sure hand with the wheel, and his touch with the brake—though used sparingly—was also confident and precise. Of course, he drove one-handed, with his cell phone glued to his ear by the other, which made the whole experience that much more nerve-racking. They raced down the coast road (ocean to their right, lagoons to their left), then up the hill past Torrey Pines State Reserve, along the cliffs between the Scripps Institute and the University of California at San Diego, of which the campus looked lovely, if a bit blurry, finally speeding down the hill into La Jolla proper. Fortunately they had already been headed in that general direction, having stopped at one of the beaches to see if Season was there. If they’d been far from the car, or going the other way, Scott wouldn’t have wanted to see what shortcuts Daniel might have made to save time.

A few minutes after reaching La Jolla, they rendezvoused with Brandy and Josh in the parking lot of a chain drugstore. Josh still looked out of breath, his pale, sunken cheeks rosy with the effort he’d put into the chase. Scott climbed gratefully from the car and enveloped Brandy in a hug, pulling her close and sniffing the vaguely vanilla-like scent of whatever she used on her thick, luxuriant hair.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Did she see you?”

Brandy disengaged, shaking her head. When she answered him, her usual antagonism toward Daniel had vanished. “She might have seen Josh. I’m sure she didn’t see me—if we’d been close enough for that, we’d still be on her tail. Woman can move.”

“How did you find her?”

“We just walked into a dress store and there she was, looking just like she did in that coffee cup,” Brandy announced.

“Did you … like, cement that image in our heads somehow?” Josh inquired of Daniel. “Because when we saw her, both of us were, like, pow, that’s her.”

“When I conjured it there was a retention spell involved,” Daniel admitted. He didn’t sound reluctant or embarrassed about it, Scott noted. Just as if it had been something so mundane he’d forgotten to mention it. A retention spell. When I conjured it. Like i’D say, “I flipped on the light switch.”

Of course, Scott realized, to me it is basically magic how the electricity gets from the river, or the coal plant, or whatever, to the light socket. So I guess to him it’s just another kind of science.

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