Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,266

the second and third lanes from the right. A prolonged series of crunches began as car after car slammed on the brakes and then slammed into the car in front of them anyway. Airbags popped loudly from the dashboards. Alice saw injuries, but no fatalities. The police, already racing after us, were only seconds away.

The sounds faded. Carlisle and Emmett were in their seats and I was racing forward again, desperate to make up for the seconds we’d lost here.

The tracker loomed over Bella. His fingers stroked her cheek. It was only seconds away.

One sixty-five.

On the other side of the divided highway, four patrol cars screamed in the other direction, headed for our accident. They paid no attention to the soccer mom SUV speeding north.

Only two more exits.

One eighty.

I couldn’t feel any strain in the SUV, but I knew the danger now lay not in engine failure—it would take a lot to compromise this German-built tank—but in the integrity of the tires. They weren’t manufactured for this kind of speed. I couldn’t risk blowing any of them, but it was physically painful to ease my foot back from the gas pedal.

One sixty.

Our exit was racing toward us. I whipped around a semi and swerved to the right.

Alice showed me the setup. An intersection spanned the length of the overpass. At the top of this exit, a streetlight was just turning yellow. In one second, the west side of the intersection would get a green arrow and two lanes of vehicles would cross the middle of the road.

Silently urging the tires to hold themselves together, I mashed down the accelerator.

One seventy.

We shot up the exit on the narrow left shoulder, passing within inches of the cars stopped for the light.

I careened left under the now-red light, the back of the SUV drifting out to the right as I narrowly made the turn, almost touching the concrete barrier on the north side of the overpass.

The cars headed to the on-ramp were already halfway across the intersection. There was nothing to do but hold my course steady.

I bolted past the Lexus leading the charge with not an inch to spare.

Cactus Road wasn’t as helpful as the freeway—only two lanes with dozens of residential roads and even some driveways opening onto it. Four lights between us and the mirrored room. Alice saw we would hit two of them on red.

A speed limit sign—forty miles an hour—flew by.

One twenty.

The road gave me one small advantage: A suicide lane edged by bright yellow lines ran right down the middle of almost its entire length.

Bella was crawling across the pine floorboards. The tracker raised his foot.

Alice refocused but my mind veered. For a tenth of a second, I was back in my Volvo in Forks, thinking of ways to kill myself.

Emmett would never… but maybe Jasper. He alone could feel what I felt. Maybe he would want to end my life, just to escape that pain. But probably he would run away instead. He wouldn’t want to hurt Alice. So that left the longer trip to Italy.

Jasper reached forward to touch his fingertips to the back of my neck. It felt like novocaine washing over my anguish.

I tore down the center lane uninterrupted for a mile, veering back into the legal lanes to fly under the first green light. The next intersection rushed toward me. The suicide lane transitioned to a left turn lane, with three cars already lined up and waiting. The right turn lane was mostly empty. I was able to avoid the motorcycle in it by popping up onto the sidewalk for a second, fighting to keep the SUV from rolling.

I glanced at the speedometer: eighty. Unacceptable.

I darted through the light cross traffic—fortunately a few drivers had seen me coming and lurched to a stop halfway into the intersection—and reclaimed the suicide lane.

One hundred.

The coming intersection was bigger than the last, wider and twice as congested.

“Alice, give me every possibility!”

In her head, the vehicles on the road froze. She spun them counterclockwise and then back again. I saw them stretching first vertically and then horizontally. The pattern was tight, but there were tiny holes. I memorized them.

One twenty.

If we clipped another car at this speed, both cars would be destroyed. We’d have no choice but to race out into the blinding sunlight and bolt for Bella’s location. People would see… something. None of the others were as fast as I was. I didn’t know what the story would be—aliens or demons or secret government