The Immortal Game (book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

from the rearview mirror.
    “My dad’s,” she said. “His first Medics for Mercy ID.”
    Ash turned the badge over and looked at the picture. She glanced too. She saw how young her father was then, not much older than Ash, mid-twenties.
    “You have his eyes,” he said and glanced from the picture to her.
    She squinted out the side window, embarrassed he noticed anything about her. The tall evergreens created an impenetrable wall on either side of the road. “Where are we going?” she asked.
    He flashed a playful look from beneath dark eyelashes, but he didn’t say anything.
    Her heart sped up, first at that look he gave her, then at the idea of being alone here with him. She realized she was breaking some pretty basic rules by going off with a man she hardly knew. But if Ash was preparing to do away with her, he hadn’t planned very well. She thought of the purpled-haired barista and the couple in the coffeehouse who smiled at them when they left.
    In the end it was a matter of artless intuition. Ash simply felt safe.
    Cool mountain air flowed into the cab windows as they followed the twisty road. The truck strained up the unrelenting hills and the conversation, like the mountain, didn’t flag.
    She told him about her father’s work with Medics for Mercy and how she wanted to make him proud, how she changed her major from history to premed after he was killed, and how she wouldn’t let his death be in vain.
    “But you love history?” he asked.
    “History doesn’t really help people. Not like knowing how to heal someone does.” It was her mantra. It was what she told herself when she switched majors. What she told herself when she read through the history department’s course offerings every term and chose only one class as an elective, though choosing felt impossible.
    “Those who don’t remember their history are doomed to repeat it,” he quoted the famous line.
    “I think we’re doomed to repeat it anyway,” she said. “At least from what I’ve seen. People have always been at war. I think they always will be. Humans can’t seem to figure out how to simply love each other.”
    He scoffed and looked out the window. “So that’s it then.” He sounded annoyed. “You don’t think of the present? Only the future?”
    She shrugged. “I have goals.”
    “You could die tomorrow. Or today,” he countered. “Life is short.”
    No one knew that better than she did. “That’s why I have to make my life count.”
    “You’re not,” he shot back. “You’re wasting it.”
    She blinked at the green trees and tried to make sense of what he said. “I’m making the future count,” she finally said, stating the obvious.
    He shook his head. “All you really have is right now, Ruby. This moment. You better look around and enjoy it before it’s gone.”
    “I don’t see it that way,” she said.
    “But that’s the way it is.” There was no humor in his voice, no apology over giving her unsolicited, and unwanted, advice.
    There was silence for the first time since they got in the truck. She thought of the chemistry test the next morning. She shouldn’t be here now. She should be at the study group, or home, or at the library; anywhere but here, driving into the mountains with a stranger for who-knew-what. She sat up straighter in the driver’s seat and glanced in the rearview mirror, but there was only the receding forest to see.
    “I thought all you did was play chess,” she said, annoyed that he had called her out. “What could be out here?”
    Instead of answering he pointed ahead of them. “Make a left up there.”
    She turned off the main highway and onto a narrow dirt road. Thick trees ran outside the windows and branches scraped at the already useless paint of the truck as it crept along, bobbing in and out of craters on the old complaining shocks.
    Ash peered ahead. “We’re close.” They passed over a set of railroad tracks. “Pull over up there.”
    She parked in the weeds