Chapter 51 The Cliff
Evie:
The impact hit before my brain caught up.
Metal screamed. Glass burst across the cabin in a spray of sharp edges. The skimmer lurched sideways as if it had hit a barrier I couldn’t see. My shoulder slammed the seat; Harrow’s arm wrapped around my back, locking me against him and keeping me from flying forward.
The taste of copper filled my mouth. My ears rang hard enough to blur the world.
“Down!” Harrow roared.
He threw himself over me, forcing my face into the upholstery as another hit rocked the skimmer. Something cracked behind the dashboard. Lights blinked, died, revived in frantic red glyphs.
A shadow tore across the windshield, another car, black and fast. It slammed our left flank. Clean. Intentional.
Our vehicle spun half a rotation before Harrow planted a foot and absorbed the tilt through his body.
Someone pounded on the driver’s console from the outside. The driver, too calm, reached for the internal lock again. The doors sealed with a dull final click. That same soft, official voice chimed over the speakers.
“Estate protocol. Passenger safety override engaged.”
Harrow’s jaw flexed hard. His hand slid along the floor blindly until he found my fingers beneath him. He squeezed once, steady, grounding, a warning and a promise in one motion.
Then he rose.
No hesitation. No pause. He moved like a blow uncoiling. His eyes flashed gold. His breath deepened, catching on something sharp. His shift tugged at his skin, not full but close, a half-line of wolf beneath the human bones, enough to terrify any sane opponent.
He slammed his fist into the driver’s partition. Plastic and composite cracked. A second punch fractured the embedded console. Sparks spit across the cabin.
The attackers didn’t wait for him to break through.
Three black vehicles closed in. One from each side. One from the rear. They weren’t improvising. They moved like a coordinated unit, fast, practiced, like they’d run this scenario a dozen times before.
Rogue wolves didn’t move like this.
These weren’t rogues.
The rear car rammed us. The entire skimmer jolted forward, throwing me back against the seat as Harrow dug his claws, actual claws, into the upholstery to keep himself upright.
His breathing was a rough, ripping sound. His body shook under the effort of not shifting fully. He tore at the partition, ripping wiring and metal aside with brute strength, the plastic shrieking under his hands.
At the rear hatch, two figures slammed into the weakened panel. One wasn’t fully wolf. His gait was off, joints too sharp, too human. But his mouth flashed fangs.
A hybrid. Combat trained.
His blade glinted black, coated in something that wasn’t meant for clean kills.
Harrow pivoted before the hybrid reached us.
He hit the attacker mid-lunge. A snarl tore out of him, full and unfiltered. The sound was violent enough to vibrate through the floor.
He slammed the hybrid into the warped door, again, again, until the metal bent inward.
The hybrid shrieked, a distorted, too-high sound, before Harrow flung him aside like dead weight.
“Evie.... Down!” Harrow snarled, voice stripped of everything but instinct.
I crawled forward, fighting to orient myself. My arm burned where glass had sliced it open; blood slicked down my elbow. My breath shook. The alarms blared from every direction. My heart hammered so hard my vision pulsed.
A masked attacker appeared in the shattered side window, some kind of shock staff braced in his hands. He lunged inside with cold precision. Harrow blocked the first hit with his forearm, twisted, and slammed the man’s shoulder into the console. Something cracked. Sparks leapt.
Another attacker hit the rear hatch again.
Harrow’s instincts saved us. But I couldn’t just hide.
Evie Hart did not hide while wolves bled for her.
I grabbed a shard of composite glass, jagged, heavy, and steadied myself on the door frame. The hybrid surged forward again, reaching through the gap Harrow had torn open. I slashed across his forearm.
The cut wasn’t clean; it wasn’t meant to be. He screamed anyway, pulling back with blood slick on his skin.
Harrow growled something like approval, then hurled a broken piece of console at a second attacker. The chaos around us built like a storm, alarms, shouts, grinding engines.
Then a car hit us so hard the world flipped sideways.
The skimmer rolled half onto its side, metal scraping asphalt. Then momentum caught us and flung us back upright. The Ridge Road tilted at a terrifying angle in my sightline.
The cliff wasn’t distant anymore.
It was right there.
“Evie.... wheel!” Harrow snapped.
My hands were already scrambling for controls.
The driver’s body slumped lifelessly over the console, blood darkening the seat. The steering levers were scorched, half-melted, but a manual override glinted beneath the damaged shell, the same one Harrow had been clawing toward.
I yanked it.
The engine coughed once, twice, then engaged.
The skimmer jerked forward, sliding between two attackers as Harrow held the broken frame open with his arm. I felt the blast of air from a pursuing car skim past us, close enough that it clipped our bumper.
Fear didn’t sharpen me.
It narrowed everything down to three things: the wheel, the cliff, and the hands grabbing for us.
I drove.
The acceleration kicked under my palms, too much and too uneven, but I managed to steer just enough to avoid the next black vehicle that tried to cut us off. One attacker rolled across his hood after we clipped him. Another car swerved, missing us by inches.
Harrow braced one foot on the road, using the motion to pull himself back inside, panting like something half-wild, half-broken open by adrenaline.
“Hold on!” he shouted.
He swung a compact blade, I didn’t know when he grabbed it, and buried it in the ankle of the man climbing through the rear. The man screamed and vanished backward in a blur of asphalt.
Another car lined up for a flank.
I saw the helmeted attacker look straight at me through his visor.
Cold. Precise.
He accelerated.
We hit gravel.
The skimmer fishtailed violently, the tires grinding for purchase. Metal scraped. Flames licked along the corner of the engine housing. The whole frame shuddered.
I fought the spin.
The cliff edge appeared in the window, a drop of jagged rock and open air. Too close. Sickeningly close.
“Over the rai….!” someone shouted.
I spotted a break in the guardrail, twisted metal where another skimmer must have gone over days or hours ago.
My pulse spiked so fast it blurred my vision.
Harrow’s voice cracked, command and terror all at once.
“Evie, top of the road! Don’t let them pin us! Go!”
My knuckles turned white on the wheel.
The HUD flashed warnings over and over, useless and panicked.
A vehicle lunged behind us, closing like a predator sensing blood.
Harrow planted his boot, roared, and flung himself backward, grabbing another hybrid off the back hatch. The sound that ripped from his throat didn’t belong in the human world. It tore straight through me, heavy and devastating.
I steadied the wheel.
The cliff loomed.
The attackers pressed in.
And I did the only thing I could.
I drove us forward, away from the rail, away from the edge, toward the only thin strip of road left.
Toward survival.