Fate's Surrender (Eternal Sorrows Book 3) Sarra Cannon (best english books to read txt) 📖

having to maneuver their way around the wreckage in creative ways. They even rode into some wooded areas and down steep hills in some cases.

They came across fires, rotters wandering between cars and others trapped inside, and horrible wrecks that had spread debris and body parts across the entire road. They were only about twenty miles into their journey when Noah was overcome by a sick feeling in his stomach.

At first, he thought maybe it was just a reaction to the stench of rotting flesh on this stretch of road. There was a particularly bad stretch of highway where at least sixty cars had piled up in a horrible accident no highway crew would ever show up to clear away.

They'd had to bike way out into a field to avoid it, but the smell of all the bodies stuck in cars lingered for miles.

Shouldn't his stomach have settled down by now?

They'd passed that wreck a good five miles back, and all he could smell now was the heat coming off the asphalt.

He really hoped it wasn’t some kind of lingering effect of the infection he’d taken on. It seemed to be completely out of his system after he pushed the antibiotics through.

And he was fairly certain it wasn't something he ate. All he'd had that day was an MRE they'd gotten from Tank back in Philly, and he said those things wouldn't go bad for years. He hoped he wasn't coming down with something.

Talk about bad timing for a stomach flu.

On their new bikes, the group was actually making decent time.

Crash had definitely been right about the bikes. The stretch of road they were on now was a relatively clear, straight shot, but they’d been through some rough patches the Hummer never could have gotten through.

They would have ended up on foot by now if they didn’t have these bikes.

For the last few miles, they’d been riding in a straight line.

Crash up front, then Karmen, Parrish, and Noah in the back. Every once in a while, they had to swerve around some debris, but overall they’d been flying through.

They pulled around a couple of abandoned cars and hit a clear stretch of road, and all of a sudden, dread and sickness rolled through Noah’s stomach with a vengeance.

He wobbled slightly on his bike and considered telling them he needed to pull over. Parrish wanted to be at the park by four, so he didn't want to slow anyone down and set them all back, but his stomach was not cooperating.

Inside his helmet, he could hardly breathe. It was so hot.

He had the overwhelming urge to pull it off and toss it aside.

He was going to be sick.

Noah slowed his bike to a crawl, set his feet down on the hot pavement, and yanked the helmet off his head.

Everything around him faded to these dull black and grey tones, but when he looked ahead at Parrish, her figure seemed to be outlined in a bluish haze. Noah blinked his eyes several times.

Was he having some kind of heat stroke?

The events of the next few seconds happened for him in slow motion.

Crash and Karmen zipped around a truck and narrowly avoided a box of sports drinks scattered across the road beside it, but Parrish didn't see them fast enough.

Her front wheel struck one of the bottles, and her bike jerked to the side.

Parrish lost control, and Noah reached forward as she skid across the blacktop, strengthening the light of the haze that surrounded her.

The light stretched between them like a rope.

He wasn't sure how he did it. His only thought was of keeping her safe.

When she stopped sliding, though, the blue light he’d stretched toward her snapped back at him, and he cried out in agony.

His calf burned. Quickly, he threw the kickstand up on his bike and rolled up his jeans. Part of his skin had been ripped off, and he was bleeding.

He limped toward Parrish, but Crash and Karmen had already parked their bikes and rushed to her side by the time Noah got to her.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She pulled her helmet off and her long, black hair tumbled down her back. She was obviously a bit shaken.

Her black jeans were ripped to shreds, but her leg seemed perfectly fine.

“I don’t understand it. I could feel the pressure of the road scraping on my leg, but there’s not a single mark, and it doesn’t hurt. I should be in a lot of pain right now.”

“There's not even a scratch.” Crash examined her leg and shook his head. “How is that possible? With that kind of a fall, you should have a huge burn or a strawberry on your leg.”

“Her jeans must have kept her safe,” Karmen said with a shrug. “Cool. Looks like your bike is okay too. You got lucky.”

Parrish’s eyes were glued to his leg, though.

“Noah, what happened?”

She quickly stood up and rushed over to him.

“Noah, are you okay?”

He stared at the long stretch of burned skin on his own leg, still trying to understand what he’d just done.

Parrish came around beside him and then lifted a hand to cover her mouth. She ran to grab her first aid kit and brought it over to him.

“Sit down,” she said. “This is going to hurt for a second.”

He did as she asked and winced when she sprayed something cold on his leg.

“I don’t understand,” she said as she applied some ointment and wrapped his leg in a clean bandage. “How did you get hurt? Did you crash, too?”

His eyesight had gone back to normal, but his mind was still spinning. He wasn’t even sure how to explain to them what had just happened.

“I didn’t crash, but I saw it coming before it even happened,” he said, realizing again just how wrong he had been about his abilities. He wasn’t invincible at all.

Not when he was helping someone else.

He was going to have to be more careful from now on, but there was one thing he was glad about.

He