Page 138 of Gravehouse

Punk pipes in, “I’ve got your car on the map, and something’s blocking me past the tunnel.”

A bend rushes toward me. I brake late, turning into it while the back end drifts wide enough to put the left tires near the drop. The stone barrier flashes past my window. Below it, several hundred feet of mountain and a funeral Khloe would destroy.

I correct the slide, accelerating out.

Khloe releases a rough breath.

“You’re half-dressed, armed, and driving on ice,” she says. “This is a tantrum with horsepower.”

The road straightens, giving me a clear view of the mountain ahead. A dark concrete tunnel cuts into its base, the entrancewide enough for two cars and hidden from the main route by dead pines.

I’ve never driven into Dovecrest myself. Waking up here, though, that I’ve done, and I gotta admit it was easier than this.

“Found the location data,” Punk says. Keys tap through the call. “The file pinged from Dovecrest, then passed through two Monét relays before it hit your phone.”

“I know.”

“How?” Khloe asks, though I kind of expected her to wonder where the fuck I was going six sentences ago.

I crack my neck. “Because I recognized the room.”

Silence takes the call for three seconds.

Khloe speaks first. “What room?”

She knows what happened to me that year. I’ve just never said it out loud. “The conditioning ward.”

Punk stops typing.

Khloe flattens her tone. “Turn around.”

I laugh once. “Good chat.”

“Asher, that ward has remote control over every electronic system —”

“My car isn’t registered.”

Punk cuts in. “Your car could be registered to a ghost and Emeric would still have access to it.”

The tunnel mouth swells in the windshield, a strip of black asphalt running into total darkness.

“Punk,” I say, checking the mirror.

No headlights behind me. They’re farther back than Khloe claimed. Lying runs in the family, even among the ones I don’t want to strangle.

“Get into my system.”

“I’m locked out!” she snaps, fingers hammering the keys again.

She’s never locked out. She’s the one who does the locking.

“Someone changed the access key six seconds ago.”

The entrance fills the windshield.

“Asher, brake,” Khloe says, tone way too calm for screaming Sally from earlier.

I drop into second and floor it. The engine revs hard, shoving me back into the seat. Tires spit dirty snow across the tunnel floor as I cross inside. My headlights catch damp walls and an old security camera angled straight at the driver’s seat.