Doppelganger 2: On the Run (excerpt)

Chapter 1: The Running

This is the first chapter of Doppelganger 2: On the Run. The full length novel is available at the following retailers:

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********************Chapter 1: The Running

Spending hours in a car with Aedan Finnigan should have been a dream come true. It would have been if my life was normal. Too bad my life was never going to be normal again. I could just barely make out Aedan's features in the rearview mirror. I quickly looked away before he could notice me watching him, although it looked like he might be asleep. I was supposed to be driving anyway. I looked back at the road. I would rather have been looking at Aedan.

It didn't matter, though. I had Aedan's features memorized. First there was his red hair, which brought out his intense green eyes and those made the way his lips curved when he smiled all the more sexy.  His lips. Now I was thinking about kissing him and that brought me back to reality. I had never kissed Aedan Finnigan, but I had kissed his doppelganger.

His doppelganger. I blocked Doppel-Aedan out of my mind. Well, I tried to at least. It didn't help that the real thing was in the car with me and they looked alike. Yeah, my romantic notions about Aedan Finnigan might have been a little squashed when I fell hard over his doppelganger, Doppel-Aedan. Okay, so he was Aedan's evil twin or pod person alien or whatever he was. It wasn't my fault. I thought Aedan's doppelganger was him. I mean they looked exactly alike - wild red hair, green eyes, everything. How was I supposed to know that he wasn't Aedan? Seriously. It's confusing. It had happened to me and I was still having a hard time keeping it straight in my head.

I called the real Aedan, Finn now, and his doppelganger, Aedan. I had to separate them somehow. Ouch. My heart hurt just thinking about Aedan, the doppelganger. He was one of them, one of the beings that was hatching an evil plan that we still knew nothing about, but yet, he had saved us - me, Finn, Olivia, Melissa, Dan, Samantha, and Matt. What did that mean? Well, and there was the kiss that Aedan and I had shared. I hated to admit it, but I had wanted Aedan to kiss me, doppelganger or not. I really did, despite myself. Or did I really want Aedan to be Finn? Could I actually like a doppelganger? Did I like them both? It so didn't help that Finn looked just liked Aedan and I mean, really, I had a crush on Finn first, you know? It was super complicated. Then add to that the fact that we were running for our lives from doppelgangers and it only got more insane.

I couldn't think about that. My hands started to shake. I could not think about the doppelgangers. I focused back on the road. We were in the middle of a city. I knew I had passed signs for which one, but I was a little delirious with exhaustion. The adrenaline that had pushed me on for hours was almost gone. Even if there were doppelgangers after us, I was going to have to sleep sometime soon and not the sleeping in a car type of sleep, but the dead to the world passed out sort of sleep. I was getting pretty tired. It didn't help that the sun was setting and it was starting to get dark. I tried to pay attention to the road. I turned the air conditioning up. I didn't even know for sure what state we were in. Had we crossed into Arizona yet or were we still in New Mexico? I just knew I was supposed to head west. Once we got all the way west I wasn't sure where we were going to go. To Mexico? Canada? Would we even be able to cross the boarders without passports?

"When are we going to stop driving?" Melissa asked from beside me.

She asked the same question every hour. It would have been super annoying, but the truth was that I wanted to know the answer to that question too. I had just been too afraid to ask. I knew we needed to keep running even if it totally sucked. I did not want the doppelgangers to catch us and any inconvenience was worth our freedom. My only consolation was that I knew I could try to sleep again once I stopped driving, even if it wasn't super restful. I had a couple hours left of driving, though. Still, the good thing about driving was that I finally had some legroom. There were seven of us crammed into Finn's small Toyota Prius so it had been an awful twenty-four hours on the run so far. If you weren't driving, you were cramped into the smallest space imaginable. We had no choice, though, except to keep driving and deal with the less than favorable conditions.