Flying Read Online Free PDF Page B

Guy.
    Another step.
    â€œI knew you liked me.” Dakota actually winks. He’s really taking all this well.
    â€œIt’s what happens when I work solo,” Sunglasses Guy says. “My partner has more finesse.” He ignores my conversation with Dakota and steps in between me and the bag. I swear he smiles at me. I shudder.
    â€œPartner? What? You’re like some professional kidnapper?” Bad news.
    His lips part and he sort of smirks. “I prefer abductor.”
    I lean toward the bag. I have to save Dakota, who is obviously not himself right now, unless he really is some sort of freak bigot, but whatever. Panic can do weird things to people. It just means I won’t like him. I try to keep the guy talking. “Lovely. I will remember that. Abductor. How’s it feel to be abducted, Dakota?”
    â€œI’d rather it was you doing the abducting,” he says.
    â€œYou’re flirting with me now?” I ask, as I lean just a tiny bit more toward the bag. “I’ve liked you for weeks, and now you get kidnap—sorry, abducted—and poof! Now, you like me.”
    Sunglasses Guy loses his smile and interrupts me. “What’s in that bag?”
    â€œNothing.” Standing up straight, I try not to sigh from frustration.
    He reaches forward, lifts it up, opens it.
    â€œHey! That is private prop—”
    â€œPepper spray?” He holds the can with distaste. “That’s the best you can come up with?”
    I jump over the bench to Dakota and start trying to get his hands untaped.
    â€œDon’t touch him!” the guy roars.
    He shoves me away and I fall to the disgusting linoleum floor, smacking my shoulder into a row of lockers and Jordan Riley’s heels. A heel flies up into the air from the momentum and lands stiletto down into a tube of baby powder. A white cloud of soft talc explodes into the air and all over me. I sneeze instantly, and the lockers wobble. I round off out of the way, instinctively, and somehow land halfway across the room. Dakota’s eyes widen in a how did you do that sort of expression. If I can get us both out of this, I will tell him I have no idea how I just leaped a good twelve feet from the floor, but that I am going to try to do it again because—seriously?—how cool was that?
    But the guy? He doesn’t even notice, or try to help me up, just says in this dirt-hard voice, “You have no idea what he is.”
    â€œA flirty drummer,” I say, standing up again, trembling and rolling my shoulder. “A flirty racist drummer, but that still doesn’t make it okay to beat on him and tie him up and … do whatever sick thing it is you and your partner are thinking of doing to him. Sex trafficking? Is it sex trafficking?”
    He snorts, in disgust I think, and turns his attention away from Dakota for a second to focus on me. Something inside me shivers.
    He says, all quiet menace, “You have no idea.”
    Dakota shudders and his tongue lashes out. Only it’s not a normal-size tongue. Is it even a tongue? It’s where a tongue should be, but it’s three times as long as a normal tongue (twice as long as a 1980s glam rocker’s) and it is spraying some green liquid. Green! This wipes out any forearm sexiness.
    â€œWatch out!” Sunglasses Guy leaps in front of me. His back starts to sizzle. “Crap!”
    He whips around, like he’s protecting me. There is a mark across his back that has seared right through his leather jacket and the shirt underneath, all the way down to his skin. A long burn. The scorched leather smells like burning hair, but sweeter somehow.
    I press my back into the locker row that’s still standing, just as Dakota rubs his duct taped hands into the leftover liquid on the floor. The tape snaps right off. So much for the power of duct tape.
    â€œThis is not good,” Sunglasses Guy says. “Stay behind