“I'm afraid that's not going to happen, pretty ladies,” he laughed disgustingly and showed us his filthy teeth.

Then everything happened far too quickly. A shadow pulled the man in front of us away from the bike so that Larissa simply shot off, and I struggled to hold on to her without slipping backwards. Larissa accelerated more and more. I looked around, where I could vaguely make out that a third figure seemed to be fighting with the psychopath. He simply flew through the air into a tree, then the brown-haired man disappeared into the forest, leaving the bald man behind with whatever had just appeared in front of us.

Larissa took the first curve, then the second and finally the third. Another long section of road followed.

I looked around again to make sure no one was following us, but the fact that no one was there didn't reassure me one bit.

What in God's name had just happened?

I realized that it hadn't been one of the Copelands.

An icy breeze swept past my shoulder and I jerked my head toward the forest. Larissa was driving far too fast, and I shouldn't have recognized anything, but I spotted something. Him. The man with the knee-length coat. He was running through the thicket at the speed of the motorcycle, dodging every single tree without taking his piercing eyes off us.

“Fuck, Larissa. Drive faster!”

I didn't have to tell her twice, and although the needle on the speedometer was already way too high, Larissa sped up again.

I looked back into the forest, where this guy wouldn't stop running alongside us. He got closer to the edge of the forest, but stayed in the thicket.  And the scariest thing was that he looked me straight in the eyes.

Goose bumps ran down my spine.

Then, suddenly, he looked ahead and disappeared deeper into the forest again until he finally disappeared out of my field of view entirely.

We came out onto a more even road, where isolated Victorian houses appeared at the side of the road every hundred meters.

As far as I remembered the borders correctly, this was the start of the Blairs' territory. We drove through it until we were back in the city center and Larissa took me to Mum's house.

She braked loudly and got off the hot machine she'd been given for her birthday by one of her ex-boyfriends. Probably the one with the rich parents in the drugs business who'd always said he'd change. And I was grateful to that bastard, because without that bike, Larissa would still have had that piece of junk from back then. And that wouldn't have saved us.

“Holy shit!”

Larissa took off her helmet. I did the same.

My breathing was going crazy and I suddenly felt so weak. Then I got off the bike, coughing, and propped myself up on my shaky knees, but when I gasped for air, I couldn't breathe.

Was this a panic attack?

“What happened?”

We both wheeled our heads around in panic, where a person I was all too familiar with just jumped out of his bedroom window like it was a normal thing to do.

Julian's face was full of shock, as if he had just been in the middle of this chase.

Larissa eyed him with suspicion until she recognized him.

“You must be Bay's neighbor. The one who got into a fight with Nash Copeland...” she realized and continued to scrutinize him. “And you just jumped out of the second floor...” she continued.

Julian ignored her and looked at me.

“You're shaking, what happened?” When I didn't answer because I was simply in shock, Julian looked at Larissa. “Where have you been?”

“Somewhere in the woods. I don't know...”

His expression darkened.

“What happened?” he repeated his question, which no one seemed to want to answer.

Larissa didn't seem to understand anything. And I understood even less, because how did Julian know that anything had happened at all?

“There was some crazy guy with completely black eyes in the middle of the forest, and he and his friend wanted to do something to us... But we managed to get away,” Larissa groaned, running a hand over her forehead.

Julian's jaw was clenching hard. He seemed to be struggling for composure.

“What the... What were you looking for in Fogs Forest?!” He gave me an intense look, his olive-green eyes sparkling, then looked back at Larissa.

She was silent, probably because she didn't want to reveal that we had been looking for something that was none of our business.

“I don't want you to ever set foot in there again!” he said harshly. But more to Larissa, who raised her eyebrows.

“Whatever's wrong with you, we barely escaped two very nasty men, and I don't think I want to go back there any time soon.”

Only then did I realize how much I was actually shaking. My knees had gone weak and the headache that had disappeared after the blueberry milkshake earlier had returned. And for the first time, I considered taking Mum's stupid pills again. By choice. I wanted the throbbing behind my temples to stop.

“Good!” Julian grumbled.

He looked tense.

Little did he know Larissa. I knew that she had convinced me to go there for the last time. But did that also apply to her? Her curiosity was bigger than her fear. This trait powered her into every adrenaline rush.

“I'll take you inside,” Julian said, addressing me.

I just nodded, because I felt too weak to argue now. I just wanted to go to bed, with the unrealistic hope of being woken up by Mum's vacuum cleaner in Sacramento in the morning. I never thought I'd miss that stupid thing so much.

“And you should go home now, too.”

He glanced over at Larissa, who snorted and put her helmet back on.

“We're texting, Bay!”

I nodded.

Then, she disappeared on her motorcycle along the lantern-lit street. Into the night.

I jumped up and realized with relief that I had only been dreaming that Amara Blair had taken off her hood and suddenly turned into that psychopath from yesterday who had tried to shove a blood-soaked dagger into my heart.

I was going mad in this town!

Julian had simply picked me up after the upsetting events of yesterday and carried me through the whole house to my bed.