Flames At Midnight

03 | quentin miller

"Okay, now you're a douchebag."

* * *

It was raining again.

It came down like bullets on my windshield as we cruised through town. It was unusual for Thornhill to have so much rain in October. The roads were perpetually slick with water and umbrellas never had a chance to dry off.

"Can you even see the road with that thing?" Grace asked, reaching for my mask.

I craned my neck so she couldn't grab it. "I can see just fine. I feel like a masked vigilante; driving around town, looking to fight some bad guys, and restoring justice."

"Yeah, okay," she said dubiously. "I saw you break a sweat last week trying to open a jar."

I gave her a dirty look. "You're no fun. I wish Porter were here."

She sighed. "Fine. I'll play nice. What would your vigilante name be?"

I took a second to about it. "I'd go with something classic, like Quentin the Magnificent. Oh, and you can be my sidekick, Grace the Great Killjoy."

She scowled. "This is what I get for going along with you. And Quentin the Magnificent? Would you be fighting crime or pulling white rabbits out of hats?"

She had a point.

"So it turns out that the Witches' Ball plan fell through. Tickets have been sold out for weeks. Want to hit up the carnival at the school instead?"

"Not particularly."

"But Paige is a huge part of the planning committee. You don't want to go support her?"

"Don't use my sister to blackmail me," Grace said. "But I'll admit, it sounds more appealing than going all the way to Salem."

"Great! The carnival it is."

"Whoa, let's not get ahead of ourselves. That wasn't an agreement," she said quickly.

We were halfway to Amber's apartment when the truck started making strange sounds, even stranger than usual. The seat shuddered beneath us. Through the rain, I could see steam curling out from under the hood.

"Stop the car," Grace said.

I had just managed to pull over to the side of the road when the truck gave a final splutter and died. I turned the key in the ignition a few times, trying to start it back up, but it didn't work.

"Great," I mumbled, tapping my gloved fist on the steering wheel. "Do you have your phone?"

She pulled it out of her pocket and looked at it. "The battery is dead? How the...? But I just charged it." She looked away from her phone and out into the distance, thinking. "Crap. It must've been when Max spilled his drink on me. I thought my phone was okay, but apparently not."

"That blows. We'll have to walk then," I said.

"In this weather? We'll drown."

"We have to walk somewhere to call someone to pick us up. I didn't bring my phone."

"Why not?"

I patted my costume and grinned sheepishly. "No pockets."

She groaned into her hands.

We both braced ourselves for the cold. The wind and rain hit us like a thousand tiny knives the second we stepped out of the truck. The cold numbed my face almost instantly.