01_-_The_Alchemyst

CHAPTER TWELVE
Josh spotted an opening between two cars—a VW Beetle and a Lexus.
He pushed his foot to the floor and the heavy car shot forward. But the gap
wasn’t quite wide enough. The SUV’s grill struck the side mirrors on the
other two cars and snapped them off. “Oops…” Josh immediately took his
foot off the gas.
“Keep going,” Flamel ordered firmly. He had Sophie’s phone in his
hand and was talking urgently in a guttural, rasping language that sounded
like nothing the twins had ever heard before.
Deliberately not looking in the rearview mirror, Josh roared across the
bridge, ignoring the honks and shouts behind him. He shot along the outside
lane, then cut into the middle lane, then back out again.
Sophie braced herself against the dashboard, peering through halfclosed
eyes. She saw the car hit another side mirror; it came spinning, almost
slowly, up onto the hood of their SUV, scoring a long scrape in the black
paint before it bounced away. “Don’t even think about it,” she muttered as a
tiny open-topped Italian sports car spotted the same gap in the traffic that
Josh was aiming for. The driver, an older man with far too many gold chains
around his neck, put his foot down and raced for the gap. He didn’t make it.
The heavy SUV caught the right front edge of the little car, just tapping it
on the bumper. The sports car was flung away, spinning in a complete 360-
degree turn on the crowded bridge, bouncing off four other cars in the
process. Josh tore through the opening.
Flamel twisted around in the seat, looking through the rear window at
the chaos they had left in their wake. “I thought you said you could drive,” he
murmured.