Ashley did nothing but stare out ahead of the car as it raced toward the school. Kyla sat next to her staring at her profile. The taller brunette was honestly worried about her elder sister. Two days since Spencer had showed up at school and this was the first time Kyla had seen her half-sister. She had gotten into the habit checking the odometer on the powerful car whenever she was in it to try and keep track of where her sister had gone during her frequent absent periods. This morning when she climbed into the car she noted that the numbers had wound up another fifteen hundred miles in forty-eight hours.

She knew that Ashley worked the car hard and considering the age of the car it should by rights have broken down years ago, but it still ran like a dream. She looked at her sister again. She knew that Ashley was only going to school because Kyla had begged her for a ride. She would have left and never come back years ago if it hadn’t been for her baby sister. However, since Aiden she had come less and less. Teachers barely called her name any more and she would have been expelled had it not been for the fact that she passed every class perfectly.

Somehow she knew what was due and when and she turned in perfect papers and assignments from weeks that she missed. Kyla wonder how she did this but when Ashley had turned eighteen she had moved out of their foster parent’s suburban home and into her father’s apartment downtown. She pondered this for a moment before the squeal of tires indicated that they had turned into the parking lot.

The Carlin’s battered car pulled into the parking lot under protest. Glen was petitioning for a new one or even one that ran better but their dad was a fan of driving a car until it literally fell apart beneath you then applying duct tape and keep driving it. Spencer had to admit it seemed to work; her dad had only had two cars in his life time and his kids were still driving his first one.

She knew that she was skipping over the subject that she really wanted to think about and found herself holding her breath as they came up to their usual spot. Only this time their usual spot was occupied by a sleek black killer crouching on even blacker tires at the end of a spread of skid marks.