Read Online Shadow Burns: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Preternatural Affairs Book 4) by S.M. Reine - Free Book Online Page B

was because there were no news vans at all. They’d vanished as though they never existed. No tracks, no oil stains, no imprints on the ground where their tripods had stood.
    What the fuck?
    Isobel gasped somewhere ahead. I scrambled to my feet and rushed toward her.
    She emerged from the fog and bounced off of me.
    I grabbed her elbows to steady her. “Whoa!”
    Isobel had ditched the stilettos to run barefoot, and now she was covered in dust from the ankles down. Her eyes were wild and panicked. She looked like an animal that had spotted a hunter and heard the click of a gun.
    “It doesn’t end,” she gasped, digging her nails into my sleeves. “It just keeps going!”
    “What are you talking about?”
    She flung her hand toward the road. “There’s no escaping through there!”
    “We can’t just run off down the road anyway.” I employed my very best “soothe the crazy woman” voice. “We’re miles outside Mojave. There’s nothing but desert beyond the canyon. We don’t have water, we don’t have food…”
    “Fuck food,” she snapped. “You heard what that man said!”
    No hope .
    “I get that you’re scared, but we can’t just—”
    “We have to get out of here,” Isobel said. “We’ll die if we don’t! We’ll be worse than dead!”
    She was hysterical, but that didn’t mean she was wrong.
    I could still hear footsteps. I had no idea where they were coming from or even if they belonged to Nichols. The crawling sensation at the back of my neck hinted that there might be many worse things out there than Suzy’s victim.
    “All right. We can leave.”
    Maybe we could flag someone down outside the canyon. Or maybe escaping that creepy fucking house would make my cell phone work again. Fritz would send a helicopter to pick us up if I could reach him.
    But I’d only taken a few more steps when Isobel grabbed me again. “Didn’t you hear me? There’s no escape that way.”
    “That’s the only way.” I handed her the antenna from my car. “Hang on to this for me.”
    She clutched the antenna like it was a teddy bear. Didn’t even ask why I was giving it to her. “Okay. Okay, I can do that. But—”
    “No buts. Come on.”
    I dragged Isobel down the dirt road, ignoring her protests. I couldn’t blame her for being freaked out. I was freaked out, too. But if she wasn’t going to keep her cool, then I needed to hang on to composure for both our sakes.
    The road leading out of the canyon was just as twisting and narrow on foot as it had been in a car. Maybe even narrower. It felt like the creepers were growing thicker, giving us less room to navigate. The fog had definitely become denser again. Made everything feel cramped.
    But the exit was wide enough to allow cars to pass. I’d driven through it more than once. We could definitely get through on foot.
    The canyon walls weren’t going to close in on us.
    We didn’t get very far down the road. I stepped around a sharp corner and found myself staring at the Paradise Mile sign again, now consumed by so many vines that I could only make out half of the words. The house would be hidden in the mist just a few yards behind it.
    “Wait.” I looked back the way I had come. How had I gotten turned around?
    “That’s what I was trying to tell you,” Isobel said. “There’s no way out.”
    A chill crawled over my scalp.
    This was too much like the nightmares I’d been having—the weird distortion of reality, the doors that led to the wrong places, hallways where they didn’t belong.
    Now the road looped back on itself.
    No. I’m not dreaming. This can’t be right.
    I grabbed her a little tighter. “It’s just the fog. We got disoriented and took a wrong turn.”
    And I started walking again.
    Isobel protested as I moved faster, feet scuffing against the dirt.
    The vines were definitely covering more of the canyon walls now. The canopy was weaving tighter and tighter. No hint of sunlight could break through to burn away the