Breathe, she tells herself. Shrink!

She almost laughs at this second command. But that’s exactly what she has to do. Whatever crazy hormonal event is taking place inside her system, the only way she can think to counteract it so she can function normally is to shrink every action, her every move.

She bends down. Gently gripping the zipper’s pull between a thumb and forefinger, she slowly and carefully opens the bag. And even with all that deliberate restraint, the bag ends up opening like some horny dude’s jeans.

When she sees the rope and the rolls of duct tape and the Ziploc bags full of her bullets, all thoughts of shrinking are forgotten.

Jason’s still dead to the world when she returns to the living room.

He might actually be dead, but she doesn’t give a shit. The only thing that matters to her is that he stays exactly where he is so she can bring the cops back here and show them how he broke in. How he violated her space.

She’ll tell them everything. She’s got nothing to hide. By then this crazy adrenaline rush will have subsided, she’s sure. He can’t get away. That’s all that matters to her now. No way will she let him slip away into the shadows so he can lie in wait for the right moment to shatter her sanity and sense of safety again.

First she wraps his head in tape, making a muzzle across his mouth; then she binds his wrists, his ankles. When she starts binding his ankles to his wrists, she realizes she’s hog-tying him just like Daniel and Abigail used to bind their victims, but she banishes the thought before it can take hold. She’s trying not to beat him up, but she still can’t control her own strength entirely. Her tugs and pulls knock his head against the floor with sickening whacks.

Gun drawn, she backs out of the living room.

“I’ll be right back, fucker.”

Amazing, the confidence with which she’s issued this proclamation, the steadiness. Like her voice has recognized the magnitude of her newfound strength even as her mind refuses.

With the lightest touch she can manage, she hits a button on her key fob and opens the trunk of her Escape. With just as much care and restraint, she roots through the plastic bags from the office supply store. No sign of her phone.

Carefully, so as not to pull it off its hinges, she opens the door to the back seat, scans the floor. No sign there, either.

She slides behind the wheel like someone easing into frigid water.

She places the gun in the cup holder, barrel down, within easy reach, positioned to aim right through the windshield if she needs to. Ever so slowly, she reaches for the glove compartment, pops it open with three times less effort than she might ordinarily use. The phone’s not there, either, which means it has to be in Dylan’s office. Which means she’s got to drive to the nearest police station herself.

Just then she realizes there’s one place she hasn’t checked for accomplices.

Outside.

She hits the key fob. The garage door starts to open. Gun raised, she approaches the growing square of dark. It takes a few minutes for her eyes to adjust. By then she’s swept the opening. By then she can see there are no lurking shadows of cars hiding with their headlights turned off. The ground is flat. The nearest hiding place is an arroyo a good fifteen-minute walk away, the same place she does target practice with the Berettas. Besides, Jason has always worked alone.

Jason has always wanted her all to himself.

But how did he get my code?

She’s got no time to speculate. She’s confirmed that there are no vehicles waiting to ram her as soon as she leaves the garage. And that means she’s free to go.

As she slides behind the wheel of her Escape and places her Beretta back in the cup holder, she sees that her fingers have left indentations in the metal handle of her gun.

Not just adrenaline, she thinks. This can’t be just adrenaline.

8

The bikers roar out of the darkness, headlights winking on the minute their tires hit the road.

When Charlotte first met up with the highway, she went to give the pedal the usual amount of pressure and ended up marrying it to the floor, which sent the Escape rocketing through the night at more than a hundred miles an hour.

She’s been soft pedaling it since then. It’s kept the Escape close to eighty. That’s what she’s doing now as they cage her in.

They’ve been waiting for her, she realizes, maybe since they heard her approach. No doubt her third trip past their hideout in one day has them convinced she’s casing the place.

Thor’s next to her again, gesturing for her to pull over.

Her refusal to comply causes his mouth to contort into a snarl. The sight of his anger awakens something in her, a recognition that she’s been impossibly changed. And not changed like that guy, possibly an urban legend, who was able to lift a car in one hand to free an accident victim pinned beneath it. This is ongoing, whatever this is. It’s sustained. My body knows it. My mind’s starting to accept it. And that’s why Thor’s pissed—he doesn’t see any fear in my eyes.

He hollers something unintelligible over the wind, raises a fist in the direction of his buddies.

Watching Thor has distracted her. Her foot drifts down on the accelerator, defaulting to habit.

The Escape rockets up to ninety right as one of Thor’s buddies swerves to cut her off.

Almost gracefully, the man’s body flies upward onto the hood, then crashes into her windshield, leaving a mosaic of cracks. When he flips up and away, going over the roof with a sound like tumbling boulders, she sees the blacktop has been replaced by open desert. She tries to regain control, but the steering wheel’s been pulled almost entirely apart, the ring cracked on top and bottom. A bulge of wires protrudes from a mouthlike fold where the horn should be.

No way could the biker’s impact have done this.

She did it while holding on to the thing for dear life during the collision.

The Escape slams into a saguaro cactus with such force, the hood flips up and turns into something that looks like a wadded-up napkin. Only then does she realize she never put her seat belt on. But it doesn’t matter. She experiences the impact like a kid being jostled by her friends in a bouncy house. She can see everything with the slow-motion clarity of shock—the shattering windshield, the Beretta going airborne and disappearing out the passenger-side window—and then it all comes to an end.

Even though she should be either unconscious or dead, she’s sitting upright behind the wheel, her breathing rapid but barely strained.

There’s a loud thud. The Escape’s roof gives her scalp a sudden kiss. The top half of the giant cactus has fallen onto her hissing SUV.

She feels as if she’s belly flopped into a swimming pool. The car crash has left her with a rash of tingles across her flesh and dull aches here and there. But it should be worse. Much worse given the state of the car and the fact she was bounced around like a rag doll. The music in her bones has grown more intense, as if the trauma of the accident kicked up the tempo. Whatever this thing is that’s happening to her, it’s hooked to adrenaline. But that can’t be the only explanation.

She gives the door a push, and the entire thing comes free of its hinges and falls to the sand.

As they roar toward her through the darkness, the two remaining bikers make hairpin turns around rocks, bushes, and other knee-high obstructions. They’re coming with predatory fury.

Thor pulls around to her right; his friend dismounts at her left and draws a sawed-off shotgun from his back.

Her ears still ring from the crash. But she can hear some of their shouts. They’re gesturing to their feet, gesturing for her to get down, either to her knees or her stomach—they don’t seem to care which. The words bitch and cunt jump out at her from their threats like hot pebbles glancing across her cheeks.

She feels as though she’s observing herself from a distance, and she’s astonished to watch herself sink to her knees. Just as her foot defaulted back to its normal pressure on the gas pedal moments before, she now defaults to fear and submission.

But it’s a big shotgun, and she doesn’t know if this altered state renders her impervious to buckshot.

Then she sees the flex-cuffs in Thor’s left hand.

In his right, he’s got a gun, boxy enough to be a Canik TP9, but she’s not sure. She is sure that he’s aiming at her, lowering it only slightly as he approaches. He’s going to cuff her out here in the middle of nowhere. She thinks she can break the cuffs. Still, the ease and confidence with which he approaches her ignites a fire deep in her belly.