Chapter 258: That Was Not a Roadside Assistance Plan

DOVE’S POV

The checkpoint had three armed men, a striped barrier, and absolutely no interest in the trucks ahead of her.

Dove watched a flatbed roll past without stopping. Its driver lifted a hand, one guard waved him through, and then all three men turned toward her van. Beside her, Edrik stopped adjusting the side mirror.

"Keep driving slowly," he said. "Let me look."

The road ran between a boarded hardware store and a gas station with sheets of plywood over its windows. Two cars blocked the gas pumps, but the driveway behind the hardware store was open. Dove had noticed it because a crooked sign promised deliveries around the back, and because she had spent enough years in retail to know somebody always wanted a truck where a truck barely fit.

One guard touched the nose of the van. "Female passenger gets out for inspection."

Dove kept her hands on the wheel. "Then inspect the passenger through the window. I’m right here."

His gaze dropped to her bare knees before coming back up. Sweat had glued her skirt to the seat, and she was already regretting opening the window. Edrik put one hand on the metal edge beneath it.

"Look at me," he told the guard.

The man did, although his smile took a moment to disappear.

"This is a standard check."

"Then check the other vehicles," Dove said. "Unless mine grew tits while I wasn’t looking."

Edrik’s mouth moved at one corner. The guard’s didn’t.

Behind him, another man reached for the radio at his belt. Dove glanced at the road ahead. More men waited beneath the gas station awning, too many to see clearly, and the barrier had been placed where a van couldn’t turn without backing up.

She didn’t need to find out what they intended to do after she got out.

*Sprout, anything useful?*

*Your bullet shield is ready. Your van is not covered, and neither is Edrik.*

*Then remind me before those thirty seconds run out.*

*The delivery entrance is clear of visible obstacles.*

Visible mattered. Sprout couldn’t tell her what waited behind a building, and she wasn’t about to pretend it could.

Dove smiled at the guard, a pleasant smile she had once saved for customers holding an expired coupon. "I can’t leave this across the road. I’ll pull into the driveway, and you can explain which part of me needs inspecting."

His eyes flicked toward the others. "Leave the keys."

"While I’m driving? That’s ambitious."

She eased forward before he could put a hand through the window. Edrik didn’t take his eyes off him. The man’s fingers slipped from the hood, and Dove turned into the narrow driveway alongside the hardware store.

A shout followed them. Dove called for her shield, and pale light fitted around her skin. Edrik reached across her, pulled her window closed, and held his palm against the door as the first shot cracked behind the van.

Dove ducked without taking her foot off the gas. The delivery driveway opened into a fenced parking lot. A dumpster stood beside the back door, and beyond it a second entrance led onto the next street.

A loose wooden barrier lay across that entrance.

"I can move it," she said.

"Stop beside it. Stay low."

He was out before the van had fully stopped, using the open door to cover her. Dove crawled across the seat and stepped down behind him. The wooden frame was taller than she had thought, but it wasn’t fixed to anything. She pressed her hand to its crosspiece, pictured the clear floor inside her storage, and sent it away.

The road beyond it opened in front of her. A bullet snapped against the light along her shoulder and dropped. She was still standing. For one stunned breath that was all she could think, then she scrambled back toward the van.

Edrik caught her waist and lifted her back into the driver’s seat. A man came around the building, gun up, and Edrik slammed the van door shut between them. The shot dented it beneath his hand. Dove heard the impact, heard Edrik swear, and then he was in the passenger seat, pointing ahead.

"Drive, sweetheart. I have the door."

She drove. The van hit a pothole hard enough to jar her teeth, then turned onto a street lined with empty houses and cars left at strange angles. Nobody followed immediately. Dove refused to mistake that for nobody following at all. The shield faded as Sprout counted down its last second. Until tomorrow, she was back to staying behind things that stopped bullets.

At the third intersection she pulled behind a brick laundromat, where the building hid them from the main road. Edrik got out, checked both streets, and returned with blood on his knuckles that hadn’t been there before.

"One followed on foot," he said. "He won’t be reporting which way we turned."

Dove breathed through her nose until her hands stopped trying to climb off the steering wheel. She had wanted a van. She had not wanted to learn whether she could drive one while somebody shot at it.

Edrik crouched beside her open door. "You saw the exit. You got us through."

"I also nearly swallowed my tongue, so let’s not make it a regular thing."

He kissed her knee, above the shaking she wished he couldn’t see. "We’ll put it below grocery shopping."

She touched his hair and let herself have that small, ridiculous comfort. Then she made herself check the van. The tire held air, the door still closed, and nothing leaked beneath the engine. Edrik tested the damaged latch before returning to his seat.

Ash would have torn that checkpoint apart. The thought arrived without permission, large and unwelcome and difficult to dismiss. She didn’t want to belong to him because he could fight. She did want another pair of hands that powerful between her family and men who thought a woman was something to unload from a vehicle.

Both thoughts could be true. Apparently her life wasn’t going to become simpler just because she finally admitted it.

The folded road map lay on the seat between them. Edrik tapped the reservoir road curving away from the direct route north.

"This keeps us off their road."

Dove followed the line with her finger. It went around the water, through smaller towns, and back toward the northern station. Farther from Thorne before it brought her closer.

"How much longer?"

"Several days, with the roads like this."

She looked at the fresh bullet mark beneath her window, then at the little black line that was all they had left.

"Then we’re taking the long way," she said, and turned the van away from her husband.