Infected by Sophie Littlefield Read Free Book Online

skin crawl.
    “Ten minutes,” she repeated.
    “It’s okay, Ms. Boylston,” Baxter said. “They’re just kids. Give them a few minutes.”
    That earned Baxter a scowl, but Sheila reluctantly nodded, and Meacham let go of Tanner’s shoulder. Carina took his hand and they practically jogged down the path until she was certain they were out of earshot.
    “I’m sorry,” she murmured to Tanner. “I can’t believe I got you into this.”
    He pulled her closer. “This is really weird,” he whispered against her ear, “and try not to react, but that guy Meacham showed me his gun. When you were talking to Sheila. Like, if I tried to mess with you he wasn’t afraid to use it on me.”
    “Are you sure he wasn’t just trying to intimidate you?”
    “Uh, yeah. It’s hard to misinterpret when a guy holds his jacket open and points to his holster, you know?”
    “But Sheila said …” Sheila had said Meacham and Baxter were supposed to be protecting her, and presumably not just from the Albanian mafia. Was it possible he considered Tanner a threat?
    And if she was to leave with Sheila—what guarantee did she have that Meacham wouldn’t do something to Tanner the minute they were out of sight?
    “This is so messed up,” she said. “I wish we could just go somewhere, the two of us, and figure this out.”
    “Your uncle said to stay away from her. Do you trust her?”
    Carina considered; it didn’t take long at all for her to come up with an answer. “Yesterday I would have said yes.Today? I don’t know who to trust. But I certainly trust my uncle more.”
    “So come with me. Just us, we’ll go somewhere alone and figure out your next move.”
    “Now, you mean? There’s no way they’ll let us.”
    “I don’t know about that. It’s the middle of a memorial service, and there’s, like, half a dozen news crews here. Even those guys wouldn’t risk making a scene that will end up on the Internet or TV.”
    Carina turned over the possibility in her mind. She had the key—and Walter’s instructions to go straight to the address in his note. Whatever waited for them there, was it any riskier than staying here?
    “Look over behind me, to your right,” Tanner said. “Don’t let them see you doing it, but … there’s a little road that goes around the Dumpsters. I’m pretty sure that’s a service drive. We go that way, get a head start, there’s no way they’ll catch us before we get outside.”
    Carina calculated the distance to the wall that ringed the cemetery. If Tanner was right, there would be a break in the wall, just around the corner, for delivery trucks. If he was wrong …
    Well, he couldn’t be wrong. That was all there was to it—because what he proposed was better than trusting Sheila.
    “All right,” she breathed against his neck, hoping Tanner looked convincingly like a guy consoling his distraught girlfriend. She felt his muscles tense under his shirt.
    “On three, okay?” he said softly, and she subtly shiftedher stance, finding purchase on the gravel, wishing she weren’t wearing such ridiculously high heels.
    “One … two …”
    When Tanner got to three she ran harder than she’d ever run in her life, ignoring the shooting pains in her feet from the shoes, narrowing her focus to a single thought:
Get away
.

Before Carina had gone three strides, Sheila started yelling.
    If Carina had been holding on to any hope that Sheila really did care about her welfare, that she was merely a dedicated scientist with a few paranoid notions, those hopes came crashing down when she heard the fury in her voice. “Baxter, Meacham!
Go!
Stop them!”
    Meacham grunted with exertion as he chased them, hindered by his close-fitting designer suit. Carina held tightly to Tanner’s hand for balance as she ran, terrified of coming down wrong on her high heels and twisting her ankle. But the shoes didn’t seem to be slowing her down at all. In fact, the strange jittery buzz she’d been