by Karen Chance
“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 eatin
g 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.
&nb
sp; “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.
