Chapter Twenty-four
The engine must have
caught at some point, because we shot ahead, the luxury projectile
missing us by inches. I swerved and stomped on the brakes, avoiding
another car but slinging us into the fence. I barely noticed,
because I was sure the limo had just taken out the diner and
everyone in it.
Only it
hadn’t.
I stared through the
cracked and bloody windshield at the limo’s backside, which was
sticking, cantilevered, out of a wavering field of energy. Unlike
Pritkin’s seamless blue shields, this one was a patchwork of colors
and textures that ran and muddied together as they fought each
other and the car. But somehow, they’d stopped it. Like a fish
caught in a net, the huge hunk of twisted metal hung there, eight
or nine feet off the ground, quivering and shaking—and
leaking.
Something was
dripping from the tail end, enough to form a puddle on the ground
below. It reflected the sparks still shooting from the ruined sign,
which were showering both the car and the puddle. It took my
half-frozen brain a second to realize what I was seeing, and then I
was fumbling with the gears, shoving the SUV hard into
reverse.
“What now?” Fred
demanded.
“Gas!” I said,
stomping on the pedal while the war mages scattered, shields
retracting around their owners or being thrown in front of the
diner in a last-ditch attempt to protect the people inside. And the
car—
“Shiiit!” Fred
screamed as it exploded midfall, sending a cloud of lethal
projectiles scattering in all directions.
I ducked—there was no
time for anything else—only to find the floor already occupied. I
covered my head as we bounced backward, still moving but not fast
enough to avoid the spear of metal that obliterated the remains of
the windshield. Glass exploded through the small space, stinging my
arms and sending a wet trickle sliding down my temple. But thanks
to the dash, the rest of me fared better.
Although not as well
as Fred, who had been cowering on the floorboard.
“You’re supposed to
be a bodyguard!” I said, hitting the brake.
“I am.”
“Then what are you doing down there?”
“I’m not a very good
bodyguard.”
“Get up!” I yanked
him off the floor, intending to use vampire vision to help me spot
Pritkin in the chaos. But before I could get a word out, the scene
in front of us tilted, the diner skewed wildly to the left and then
disappeared entirely, replaced by a dizzying view of darkened
buildings and a star-flung sky.
“What’s happening?
What’s happening?” Fred demanded
hysterically, grabbing me as I grabbed the steering wheel to keep
from sliding through the missing windshield.
I didn’t reply,
because it was taking all my concentration not to lose my grip
while spinning in a kaleidoscope of falling glass and debris. Like
the limo, the SUV had risen into the air; unlike the limo, it was
slowly flipping end over end, slinging the headlights in a wide
parabola that intermittently highlighted the escalating fight
below.
“Where’re the
controls?” I yelled at Fred, as we tumbled around like two sheets
in a dryer.
“What
controls?”
“For the
charm!”
“What
charm?”
“The one you just
hit!” I said furiously, as half a dozen mages suddenly went
flying.
It looked like they’d
been blown sky high by some sort of explosion, only I hadn’t seen
one—or much of anything else except for Fred’s size-nine shoe. But
something scary was down there. Because the man who rocketed by the
windshield had the closest thing to fear I’d ever seen on a war
mage’s face.
I knocked Fred’s foot
aside and started frantically searching under the
dash.
A lot of cars in the
supernatural community are equipped with levitation charms to
access the ley lines, many of which don’t follow the ground. But
those usually belong to mages, who are the main users of the
earth’s magical highway system. Vampires tend to avoid areas that
can incinerate a person in seconds without proper shields, which
even masters don’t have.
As a result, I’d come
into contact with the lines and the vehicles that used them only
recently. And it hadn’t been in the kind of leisurely way that
allowed for a lot of questions—like what the damn charm was
supposed to look like. But if it wasn’t so goddamned
dark—
I’d barely had the
thought when a blow interrupted the spin cycle, sending us sailing
backward on a wash of heat and light. That turned out to be a good
thing, since the space we’d been occupying was suddenly filled with
diner. We slammed into a building across the street in a crunch of
whiplash-inducing speed, and the chrome roof of the restaurant shot
spaceward, shedding burning detritus like a Roman candle rocket
ship out of an old Buck Rogers film.
The car scraped off
the bricks and drifted back into the street, listing a little to
the left like an old drunk, while the diner arced impossibly high
above us. It trembled against the night for a long moment, as if it
really intended to leave gravity behind. And then it plunged back
to earth in a hail of bricks and old floor tiles and flaming orange
Naugahyde.
“Shit,” Fred said
faintly.
And then we both had
to grab the dash when the SUV was battered by a billowing cloud of
dust and debris. I tried to spot Pritkin in the chaos, but it was
impossible. But at least it looked like the Corps had evacuated the
diner before the explosion. Panicked people were scattering in all
directions—including a blond racing just ahead of a line of cars
parked along the street.
She was petite and
busty, with short hair that was closer to brown than my strawberry
blond. It also didn’t curl like mine, and we weren’t dressed the
same, but I guess the resemblance was close enough. Because
something was knocking cars out of line left and right behind
her.
Yet, amazingly, no
one seemed to have noticed. Amid the choking dust and the burning
lot and the blaring car alarms and the screaming people, the
blond’s predicament had attracted zero attention. And by the time
it did, my doppelgänger was going to be toast.
I started working to
get the stalled-out car started again.
“Did you ever see
anything like that?” Fred
demanded.
“Uh, maybe a few
things.”
“Well, I haven’t. I
mean, damn!” He stared at the lot, the
fires reflecting in his wide gray eyes. “I guess a spell must have
hit a gas main or something.”
“Yeah,
maybe.”
“Maybe? What else
could it have been?”
“We’re about to find
out,” I told him, as the reluctant engine finally
caught.
I hit the gas and we
careened across the road, still listing a little, but moving. The
girl ran straight under the car, so panicked that the sight of a
levitating SUV didn’t even register. I flicked on the brights and
the emergency lights and sat on the horn, staring around for some
glimpse of what I was taunting. But all I saw was the carnage, not
what was causing it.
An invisible fist
caved in the side of a nearby delivery van, knocking it on its side
and sending it skidding back a dozen yards. An old VW Beetle gave
up the ghost in a fiery crash with a new Lincoln. And someone’s
motorcycle took an Evel Knievel–type leap over the rest of the cars
before flaming out against the side of a billboard, setting the
whole thing ablaze.
And then
nothing.
The metal massacre
suddenly stopped, the invisible cause pausing as it assessed the
oddity of a battered, airborne SUV lit up like a Christmas tree.
And a blond behind the wheel who actually looked like she wanted to
be caught.
I beeped the horn
again, just in case it had somehow missed us, and Fred gripped my
arm. “What are you doing?” he asked shrilly.
“Getting some
attention.”
“Getting
some—Why?”
“Because whatever’s
out there went after the limo and then the diner and then the
blond. It’s looking for me.”
“Well, of course it’s
looking for you!” he said, shaking me. “That’s why we need to get
out of here!”
“We’re about to,” I
said, as something huge and dark forgot about the girl and shivered
through the air toward us, visible in movement as it hadn’t been
before.
I still couldn’t tell
much about it, just a vague shadow that dimmed but didn’t obscure
the city lights behind it. And I didn’t have time for a closer
look. I mashed the gas pedal to the floor at the same time that
something lashed out at us with the speed of a striking
cobra.
It would have hit us
full on, but we’d scooted forward enough that it only caught our
rear end. But that was enough to send us spinning like a roulette
wheel into the chain-link fence. We hit backward, bowing out the
mesh, and the car tried hard to die on me. But I punched the gas
and, with a sputter and a groan, it leapt forward, tearing across
the lot and down the street like we’d been shot out of a
gun.
I kept my foot
against the floor, hard enough to feel the blood pounding in my
leg, but something was wrong. The back of the car was dragging
badly, pulling the nose so far up that I could barely see anything
over the hood. And considering how close together buildings were in
this part of town, that was a very bad thing.
“What’s going on?” I
asked Fred, who was peering back through the seats with his mouth
hanging open.
“Oh,
shit.”
“Oh, shit
what?”
“Oh, shit, we have
passengers!”
I whipped my neck
around, but there was nobody in the car but us. And all I saw
outside was a lot of night—and a huge shadow that was eating up the
air faster than we were. It wasn’t entirely dark, after all; there
were flashes here and there, like glints of sunlight through a
storm, or a veil with rents in it that gave glimpses of the face
underneath. But it didn’t look like Morrigan, or whatever had
attacked me before. It was too big, for one thing, and the little I
could see looked more like it was covered in scales
than—
And then Fred
screamed, and I realized that maybe this wasn’t the best time to
take my eyes off the road—so to speak. I snapped my head back
around in time to see us plummeting toward a parking garage. There
was no time to stop, barely even time to course correct so that we
flew into an opening instead of splattering onto rock-hard
concrete.
Something else wasn’t
so lucky, hitting the side of the building with the force of an
earthquake. Gray chunks flew off the walls and scattered across the
floor, but it looked like whatever was after us was too big to fit
through the narrow opening. Because no dark ripple followed us into
the glaring lights of the mostly empty space.
We barely made it
ourselves, blowing out a tire on the ledge and scraping the floor,
courtesy of our sagging rear end. But it wasn’t sagging as badly as
before, and suddenly I could reach the gas pedal and see at the
same time. Which would have been great, except that what I saw was
a pylon heading straight for us.
I swerved but we
still clipped the edge and went skidding around in a circle on a
great wash of sparks. But at least I figured out what Fred had
meant. Because clattering along behind us was what looked like half
a mile of fencing, some of it with the posts still
attached.
And trying to hang on
to the bouncing, bucking, twisting mass was a very pissed-off war
mage.
I blinked, sure I was
seeing things. But if I was, I was still seeing them when I opened
my eyes. It was Pritkin, and he wasn’t alone.
Three other guys were
hanging on with him, and they looked pretty normal—jeans, dark
jackets, dark hair—as far as I could tell in the brief glimpse I
got before they slammed into the wall. But I didn’t think they
were. Because while one hit an open space and catapulted over the
side of the garage, the others acted like crashing into concrete at
fifty miles an hour was a minor inconvenience.
They jumped back to
their feet and, a second later, they jumped Pritkin.
I’d have thought they
were using shields, but I didn’t see any, except for
Pritkin’s—right before it popped. I stared, getting a really,
really nasty feeling of déjà vu all of a sudden. And then I grabbed
Fred with my free hand. “Do you have a gun?”
“What?”
“A gun! A
gun!”
“Of course I have a
gun. I’m a bodyguard,” he said, with no irony
whatsoever.
“Then shoot
them!”
“I . . . I’m actually
better with a sword—”
“But you do know how
to shoot, right?”
“Well, you know. Sort
of—”
“Damn it!” I grabbed
a gun out of the holster under his arm and thrust him into the
driver’s seat. “Drive!”
Pritkin saw me as we
careened back toward the fight, listing badly now thanks to our
blown back tire, and his eyes widened. He ducked a punch that
cracked a pylon and then shook his head violently, shouting
something that I couldn’t hear over the ear-piercing screech of
metal on concrete. And then he threw himself to the ground as I
squeezed off a shot.
It must have missed,
because the mage I’d been aiming for didn’t so much as flinch
before throwing out a hand—and a spell. But the very familiar red
lightning bolt crashed into the ceiling instead of our heads, due
to Pritkin swiping the guy’s legs out from under him at the last
second. A choking cloud of dust and rubble poured down from above,
along with pieces of mangled rebar and the front half of a Nissan
Sentra. And then a spell from the other mage took a man-sized chunk
out of the floor, spraying concrete hail in my face.
But none of that
seemed to intimidate Fred, who had apparently decided to solve the
problem by just running everybody down. At least, I assumed that
was why we were suddenly headed straight for the trio and picking
up speed. They paused, staring at the mangled SUV with the flapping
tire and the crazy vamp driver and the dustcovered woman
brandishing a gun like she actually knew how to use
it.
And then they
abruptly hurled themselves to either side.
“What are you
doing?” I yelled at Fred, who looked at
me wildly.
“Did I mention that I
don’t know how to drive?”
“No!” I said, as we
pelted off the side of the garage, snatching Pritkin along for the
ride.
The charm caught us
before we’d fallen more than a story, sending us dipping and
bobbing and listing in a circle, heading back in exactly the wrong
direction. I grabbed the wheel and wrenched it to the right, but it
was too late. The two mages launched themselves off the side of the
garage, one grabbing the fence in midair, and the
other—
“Crap,” I said, as heavy boots dented the top of
the SUV.
And then my gun was
up and I was firing.
There was no way I
missed him this time. I emptied a clip into the roof, saw bullets
punch through felt and metal, knew they must have connected. But no
body hit the roof or fell over the side, and a second later a spell
slammed down through the middle seat, crumpling the roof like
aluminum foil and knocking a two-foot hole through the bottom of
the chassis.
The next one would
probably have knocked a hole in me, too, but we suddenly streamed
under an overpass, missing the clearance by pretty much nothing at
all. It was close enough to skin the top of the SUV, to pop the
headlights and to bathe the car in a shower of sparks. Close enough
to have me hunkering down, seriously afraid that the roof was about
to cave the rest of the way in.
Close enough to smash
our assailant face-first into concrete.
I stared at Fred as
we exited the other side, sans unwanted passenger. “I thought you
didn’t know how to drive!”
“I
don’t!”
“Then what was
that?”
He stared at me,
confused. “What was what?”
I didn’t answer, too
busy vaulting over the seat to stare down through the smoking hole.
I spotted Pritkin getting dragged along underneath, clinging to the
fence and staring up at me with a bone white face. And then
smacking into a pylon and yelling something that looked really
profane.
I seconded the
emotion, because three mages were somehow still dragging along
after him.
“Son of a
bitch!”
“What is it?” Fred
demanded.
“There’s three more
mages down there!”
“What? But there
should only be one!”
“Tell me something I
don’t know,” I snarled, as one of them tried to sling another spell
at us, only to have Pritkin all but wrench his arm off. One of the
others responded by trying to do the same to Pritkin’s head, but he
must have gotten his shields back up, because it didn’t work. But
shields wouldn’t last long, not against these guys.
I crawled back up to
Fred. “Change of plan.”
“We have a
plan?”
“We do
now.”
Pritkin’s shields
might not work against the mages, but they worked well enough on
most other things. I just had to find the right other things.
Fortunately, there were plenty of options.
“Aren’t you taking
this thing?” Fred demanded, as I got a knee up on the seat so I
could see outside.
“No, you’re
driving.”
“Didn’t you hear me?
I don’t know how!”
“You’re doing fine so
far. Just hold the gas pedal down and keep the steering wheel
steady. I’ll correct if you get off course.”
“Gas pedal,” he said,
looking panicked. “Which one is that?”
“The one your foot is
on.”
“And which is the
brake?”
“You’re not going to
need the brake,” I told him, and yanked the wheel hard to the
right.
We zipped back toward
the garage and the row of buildings it serviced, the fence
streaming out behind us like the tail on a very strange kite. “You
can see, right?” Fred asked nervously.
“Yes.”
“Good. ’Cause with
this damn hood in my way, I’m almost—Auggh! What was that?”
“It’s okay, you’re
doing fine.”
“But I hit
something!”
“You should probably
get used to it,” I told him, staring out the back
window.
The mostly
flat-topped Vegas roofs are nothing like the slick fronts presented
to the public. Along with the usual clutter of satellite dishes,
old antennas and solar cells, they also house the city’s massive
air conditioners, since sand clogs up the works if they’re left on
the ground. And I made sure that we didn’t miss a single one,
hurling the mages back and forth between giant units like very
unhappy Ping-Pong balls.
Pritkin was still
yelling, but I couldn’t hear him over the wind and Fred’s cursing
and some weird noises coming from overhead, like leather sheets
caught in a hurricane. But at least no one was trying to kill him
right now. They were too busy hanging on for dear
life.
And, unfortunately,
they were hanging on pretty damn well. The mage near the end went
flying when we tore around a corner, snapping out the wildly
bucking fence like a towel in a locker room. But the other two were
higher up and they grimly held on, despite smashing through a
greenhouse, skimming across a pile of old bricks and then slapping
face-first into a wall.
“I don’t believe
this!” I said, as we dragged them over the top of the wall and
through somebody’s patio set.
“These guys really
want you dead,” Fred said, staring in the rearview
mirror.
I didn’t answer,
because one of those lightning-bolt spells sheared off the
passenger-side mirror, rocking the car violently. It didn’t look
like the rooftops were providing enough in the way of distraction.
If we wanted to lose these guys, we were going to have to get a
little more extreme.
I nudged the steering
wheel slightly to the right.
Within seconds, smoke
billowed up in front of us, like a dark curtain held against the
sky. It felt like we’d been in the car half an hour, but it
couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes. Although I heard
sirens in the distance, no emergency vehicles were yet parked
around the crash site.
“Is the diner still
burning?” Fred asked, frowning.
“Not exactly,” I
said, as we plunged for the middle of the fiery
billboard.
The motorcycle must
have had a full gas tank, because the entire huge surface of the
sign was now covered in flames. The paper had already burnt away,
leaving an old wooden frame and heavy support beams to feed the
blaze. And they seemed to be feeding it pretty well, judging by the
heat that smacked me in the face, even this far away.
In seconds, the
conflagration had filled the whole length of the missing
windshield, the smoke-laden air whipping my hair around my face and
making my eyes water. I glanced behind us, and it looked like the
mages had seen it, too. They were staring through the lattice of
the fence, watching the approaching inferno in
disbelief.
And not watching the
deadly war mage above them.
Pritkin lashed out
with a heavy boot, snapping one man’s head back and then kicking
him viciously in the chest. He went flying, his head lolling at a
very unhealthy angle, and Pritkin turned on his companion. But he
wouldn’t get a fight there. The last mage just let go of the fence,
falling on purpose into the surrounding smoke.
“I guess he doesn’t
like fire as well as concrete,” I said in satisfaction, before
noticing that Pritkin hadn’t budged. “What the hell is he doing?” I
asked Fred, who was looking at me apprehensively.
“What
fire?”
“He’s just holding
on.” I climbed over the seats to stare out the back, but even a
full field of vision didn’t help much. Pritkin’s shields could
definitely cushion a fall from this height, but he wasn’t
jumping—or climbing or doing anything but staring, and not at the
billboard.
“What fire?” Fred
asked, a little more forcefully.
I flicked my eyes in
the direction Pritkin was looking, but didn’t see anything, aside
from a lot of smoke. Part of which seemed to have taken on a very
weird form. I blinked, but it was still there a second later, the
hazy outline of an impossible shape set against the brilliant
skyline.
And headed straight
for us.
“Oh, shit. Fire!” Fred screamed, and we crashed
into the middle of the sign.