Eye of the Storm by Emmie Mears Read Free Book Online

is outside, they waited till they got out to spill it. The inside of the camper is clean and only a little cluttered from the owners' hasty vacating. Asher insists on taking the smaller bed.
    "You should take the bigger one," she tells me.  
    "I'm taking first watch. Someone else can sleep."
    "I'll go with you," Jax says, surprising me. "Nobody should take watch alone."
    I feel a pang at the thought of not lying down beside Mira and quickly squelch it. No time for that now.  
    Evis looks at her. "Mira and I can take second watch."
    "I'll wake you up in four hours," I tell them.  
    Jax and I head outside and climb up onto the roof of the RV. Even though there are a few scattered light posts on I-65, it makes no difference in the fog.  
    The fog is so thick I think I could climb it. It's cold and damp when I breathe in. Using the word watch may have been optimistic.  
    Jax and I don't speak, and slowly the rustling thuds and shuffling beneath us fade into the quiet rhythms of sleeping breaths. I pull out my phone. We've barely gone ten miles today. We'll be lucky to make that tomorrow.  
    I put my phone away again to conserve the battery.  
    I want to know why I haven't heard from Carrick or Alamea.  

CHAPTER FIVE

    The night passes in deceptive peace.  
    The world feels too quiet, and as we each down a Coke and a few pieces of jerky with baked beans from a can the next morning — the shades, of course, eat their meat — I can't help feeling like we've somehow been Twilight Zoned into another dimension where we are the only people in existence.  
    Fog still coats the land around us like mold on a tomato. It clings to every curve in the road. Mason doesn't bother to scout ahead today; we can barely see a hundred yards in any direction. Even the sunrise doesn't do anything to dispel the heavy mist.  
    If we moved slowly yesterday, today we're reduced to the pace of a tortoise in a bog. By midday, we've gone barely three miles with only a few short hours of daylight left. There's no convenient RV for us today, either. The best we can manage is a pickup with a canopy top. It's full of tools and smells like sawdust and axle grease, but it's some semblance of shelter. We scavenge towels and blankets from nearby cars — a meager amount of both — and spread them in the bed of the truck.  
    "I can take a watch," says Asher when we start divvying up timeslots.  
    "You can take third with me," I say without thinking. Mason and Jax are taking first, and Mira and Evis have opted for second again. I suspect Mira pounced on second watch with Evis for the second night in a row simply to force me to try and sleep, but she'd never admit it.
    Asher nods. "I can help."
    "We've seen," I say, thinking of the way the demons flew backward when we fled the cabin.  
    It feels like that was months ago already.  
    I curl up in a ball at the back of the truck bed. Asher does the same across from me. Sort of. She's not really at a stage of pregnancy where she can curl anything besides her toes, and after two days of walking, I bet her feet are too swollen for even that. I don't expect to be able to sleep, but somehow as soon as my eyes close, I do.
    Mira wakes me with a soft touch of my face. Even though my nose is full of grease smell and sawdust and both of us stink like B.O., she still smells ever so slightly of vanilla.  
    "You're up," she murmurs.  
    I don't intend to wake Asher, but she's awake anyway. She clambers out of the truck bed, rolling over a half-asleep Jax who doesn't even seem to notice or care.  
    As I climb out of the truck bed, I wonder what it would be like to kiss Mira goodnight. I suppose I should wonder that regarding a proper night in a proper bed when we're both clean, what that might be like. Instead all I can wonder is what it'd be like now, in this truck bed that smells of sawdust and grease and shade farts.  
    I walk a short ways away with Asher, who bundles a found beach towel around her shoulders like