“I’m coming for you,” I said to him. “Wherever you go, I’ll find you.” I was getting dizzy again. The world was spinning. Sounds were eating into colors. The drugs. Oh no. Not now. The scent of a thousand snowflakes overwhelmed me. If only I hadn’t left my gun on the car.
“So, then.” A smile slithered across his face. “A rematch.”
He slid one of the ascenders up the rope.
Nausea swarmed over me.
“I think I’ll pay Agent Jiang a visit tonight…” he said.
Everything was a blur. You can’t let him get up that cliff.
“I have a couple lessons I’d like to share with her.”
Get him closer.
I whispered to him.
He stopped. “What?” he said.
He loves to control others. Lien-hua said he has to be in control. I said it again, softly, ever so softly. Then I smiled and laughed at him.
He leaned toward me. “What did you say?”
I was struggling for breath. I felt myself slipping toward the edge of the hood. Toward the edge of the world. I reached back behind me for something to hold onto. Nothing. But instead of thinking about how I was going to die, all I could think of was how I’d let Tessa down. Let Christie down.
His leg is hurt.
My fingertips found the ridged outline of the windshield, and I curled them around the thin lip of metal, willing every pull-up I’d ever done into the tips of my fingers.
I whispered once again. He leaned close and sneered. “You’re pathetic. Begging like a little baby. I expected more out of you. Good-bye, Patrick Bowers.”
Yes, he was close enough.
This time I didn’t whisper: “Checkmate!” With one motion I twisted my body toward him, swiveling my leg and smashing my boot full force into the wound on his leg. His scream was bright and searing and very satisfying. It was a good, solid, bone-crunching kick that even Lien-hua would have been proud of. I’d hit him with his brake hand loose on the rope, and he hobbled backward, teetered on the edge of the hood for a moment, and then spun off into the valley. I heard the rope sailing through his Figure-8 and waited to hear him rip off the end of the line and plummet to his death, but somehow he was able to grab the searing rope in his palms.
“Bowers!” he screamed. His voice was thick with hatred. He barely sounded human anymore. “You’re mine!”
He’ll be back in a minute.
You have to save Tessa now.