I gulped. I got in the car and locked the door.
* * *
Griffin pounded on the window of the driver’s side of the car. I was sitting on the passenger’s side because my blood was all over the other side. I reached over and unlocked the door. He opened it, yanking a plaid blanket off his shoulder. He arranged it over the seat.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
“The car I took,” he said. “It was in the trunk. I grabbed it because I didn’t feel like sitting in blood. We’ll clean your car up properly later.” He sat down on the blanket.
“You think of everything, don’t you?” I said. The blood on my shirt was stiffening. Everything felt surreal. I could hardly believe that this had all happened. My life hadn’t been normal since I woke up after that car accident, but with every passing day, it got weirder and weirder. And Griffin didn’t help matters. He made things extremely weird.
He shrugged, starting the car. “I do my best.” He pulled out of the parking lot.
“You’re going the wrong way,” I said.
“I know that,” he said. “I can’t be sure that Matt was alone. Someone else might be following us as well. I’m going to drive off course a bit. If we have another tail, I’ll lose it.”
“So, you knew that guy? The one you just killed?” I felt a little sick at the thought of it.
“We were both Operation Wraith,” said Griffin. “Doesn’t mean we were friends.”
I twitched. “Does that make it easier? The fact he wasn’t a friend?”
He didn’t answer.
I stared straight ahead. The narrow road disappeared beneath the car. I watched the white line.
“They trained us to disconnect,” Griffin said suddenly.
I looked away from the road, at his perfect profile. His Adam’s apple bobbed.
“They taught us how to turn off our emotions,” he continued. “When your life is in danger, you can’t afford things like guilt or sentiment. You have to be sharp. You can’t let anything else get in your way.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “You planned for me to get shot, didn’t you?”
“I knew it was the best way to draw out the Op Wraith agent,” he said. “I knew it wouldn’t hurt you. If you’d been in the car, it would have gone a lot smoother. As it was, I was almost too late.”
“Sorry,” I said. And then I started to laugh.
“What’s funny?”
“Just the fact that I’m apologizing to a guy who got me shot. That’s kind of funny.”
“You’re fine.”
It was as though he’d turned off. The way he had at the party earlier. He’d shut down, become stone. It was as though he was two different people. My laughter grew more bitter. “I don’t think I’m fine.”
“Sure you are.”
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t think so. My father’s dead. I’m being chased by the men who killed them. I’m being protected by a guy who has no problem getting me shot, who’s able to turn off his guilt whenever he wants. I’m not fine.”
There was another long silence. I heard him draw several breaths, as if he was getting ready to say something. Then he would let them out, not saying a thing.
“I would never let anything happen to you,” he said, finally. “I need you to believe that. Do you believe it?”
“Why should I?” I said. “I don’t mean anything to you.”
“I promised your father,” said Griffin. “I owe him. He helped me get out of Operation Wraith, and I hated it there. You have no idea what that place was like.”
“Worse than prison?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Worse than prison, because in prison, you knew why you were getting fucked with. Everyone’s motives were clear. But in Op Wraith, they wanted to use me. They wanted to change me into someone else. Strip away who I was so that I could be a killing machine for them. They didn’t only teach us how to fight and how to fire guns. There was this psychologist we had to go to. She’d break us down, find out all our secrets, all the things we were ashamed of, everything that made us tick. And she used all that information to control us.”