Elemental Damage: Confessions of a Summoner Book 2

by William Stadler

  “I can tell you this,” Stephanie said. “If this is one of the Fairy Godfather’s drivers, then he’s not steering off course for nothing. Nothing short of flipping that truck and taking him out.”

  “What about a blockade?” I asked.

  Stephanie shook her head. “Blockades won’t work. He’ll just drive right through it. Guys like him get paid a lot of money. They don’t do a lot driving, but the Fairy Godfather keeps their pockets full so that when situations like these come up, he’s already invested several hundred thousand dollars into them.”

  Carter scratched his head, which still had well-kempt hair. “S’lotta’ money just to put the pedal to the metal.”

  “Then we have to worry about collateral damage,” Umara said. “We don’t want to fling an 18-wheeler going 65 miles an hour off a busy interstate. Too many cars everywhere, especially with all the new construction bottlenecking drivers into two lanes instead of three.”

  The four of us contemplated our options, none of us seeming to come up with a solution.

  I tapped my finger on the table a few listless times. “So we can’t flip it off the road, and we don’t know exactly where it’s headed…our only solution is to hijack the truck. Take it over, and then figure out what’s inside.”

  “Yeah,” Umara said, “but which of us can drive an 18-wheeler? They’re not exactly your typical Chevy Cavalier, you know.”

  “Carter?” I looked at him.

  “What? You think just cuz’ I’m country and that I know my way around a farm that I can get behind a big rig?”

  “Just asking,” I said.

  “I have a few goblins who can do it,” Umara said, “but they’re up north in Knightdale right now. It might take them 45 minutes to an hour just to get to the truck.”

  “We don’t have that much time,” I said. “If they spotted the truck out near Chapel Hill, it’s probably going to be coming up on the Apex exit and heading on towards the airport in about fifteen to twenty minutes. We really need to get on the road now if we’re going to intercept it before it arrives in Raleigh.”

  “Maybe,” Carter said. “But just cuz’ it’s on 40 don’t mean they goin’ to Raleigh. I get the impression that this Shaman is tryin’ to hurt some folk. If it was me, I’d wanna’ hit where I knowed the most people was gone be. My guess is that they’re probably goin’ to the airport. Probably gone wait ‘til mornin’, then they gone do somethin’—somethin’ that just might well piss me off.”

  “Carter’s right,” I said. “We probably need to get moving then. There’s too much security at the airport for us to hijack the truck once it parks and sets up.”

  Umara frowned. “Right. So we need to stop it before it gets to the airport. But that goes back to our original dilemma. We still don’t know anyone who can drive the truck.”

  “I can.” Stephanie spoke up.

  Umara eyed her strangely. “You can? Since when?”

  “I used to drive for Anton back in California. It was the perfect fit. I had two jobs for him. I healed his men, and I drove. If things got hairy at the delivery site, I could heal people up and add some support to keep them stable while they finished the job.”

  “Good,” I said, standing. “Then let’s go stop this truck.”

  “No.” Umara said it firmly.

  “Why not?” I asked. “We need a driver, and she says she can drive.”

  “She’s not going anywhere near that wheel, you hear me? How do we know this isn’t what she’d set out to do? She can help us, but she’s not driving. Period.”

  “Are you really letting your suspicions cloud your logic?” I asked. “What sense would it make for Stephanie to have planned to hijack a truck? She’s driving. End of discussion. Now let’s go.”

  Umara got up from the table, clearly annoyed. With a finger, she warned Stephanie. “One false move, and I swear, I’ll show you how I deal with Druids.”

  Heading upstairs and out to Umara’s lawn, we knew we needed to move fast. Driving was out of the question for me. Really for three out of the four of us. Carter was already barreling down Glenwood on foot faster than any car could have taken him, and since he didn’t have to take the road, he cut through the woods and was out of sight before we could give him any more instructions.

  Umara had gone to her garage, and when the garage door opened, a polished, red Honda motorcycle growled up the driveway. Her black helmet had pink and blue sparkling fairy wings painted on the back, and her black leather jacket read, “Fae This.” Pink lines spiraled around the jacket’s right sleeve, and glitter shimmered on her chest.

  “Let’s go,” she said. Her facemask slammed down, and she cranked the throttle. The front wheel popped over the edge of the driveway, before she thundered down the road and disappeared around the curve, fairy dust speckling in her wake.

  I looked over to Stephanie. “Ready?”

  She was already in midstride. Bounding into the air, her body contorted into a brown Peregrine falcon.

  “I like your style.” I raced after her, decanting into a dark blue falcon, tailing right behind her.

  Trees shrank beneath me and cars seemed to slow down the higher I got. I cawed to Stephanie, then banked to the left, leveling out and soaring out towards the interstate. When she tired, I led, and when I tired, she took the front.

  After what felt like miles and miles, Stephanie spotted the truck heading east on 40, just as Umara had said. We soared down at lightning speeds, hovering just over the truck’s trailer, keeping an eye out for Carter and Umara.

  “You see them?” I asked her, though I was speaking in falcon—mostly screeches and caws.

  “Not yet. You?”

  My head did a weird waggle—my version of a “no,” then something told me to drift back behind the truck, so I let the wind catch in my wings to slow me down. The back of the truck was normal, nothing but vertical rods on either door for opening the trailer, but underneath, I could see two feet sticking out.

  “I found one,” I called to Stephanie.

  “Carter?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Carter had somehow run so fast that he’d caught up with the truck well before we had, and he was holding onto the bottom of the trailer as the truck continued on down the road.

  That guy. I picked up speed, flapping my wings to fly up beside Stephanie again, keeping my eyes open for Umara.

  A loud roar barreled past us going down the westbound lanes on the other side of the median. When I glanced back, I heard a loud screech and saw white tire smoke whirling into the air, as Umara wheeled her bike around, crossing over the median through a thin emergency vehicle slit, slicing through cars to come up alongside the truck.

  “Lyle? Stephanie? Is that you?” She called up to us.

  I swooped down beside her bike and gave her an acknowledging caw, then soared back up top.

  “Where’s Carter?” she asked.

  “Down below!” came a voice from underneath.

  “All right,” she said. “I’m going to pull in front of him to slow him down. When he’s distracted, Carter, shatter the passenger side window so that Stephanie and Lyle can get inside.”

  “Okie doke’!” Carter said.

  Umara geared up and cut off the trucker, reducing her speed when she took the lead. Stephanie and I gravitated to the passenger side window, waiting for Carter to make his move. Metal clanged underneath the trailer as he scampered towards the door, but before he crawled out from below, something unexpected happened.

  The driver didn’t slow down at all. In fact, he sped up. The engine roared, as the front of the truck neared the back wheel of Umara’s bike. If the grill so much as grazed her bike, she would go flipping off in the middle of the highway.

  I could see everything from where I was flying, but there was nothing I could do—nothing except watch as the truck rumbled inch by inch up towards the tire. With a desperate glance over her shoulder, Umara gunned it, popping a wheelie and zooming forward.

/>   Realizing that the driver was onto us, her fist punched the air. “Go, go, go!”

  Carter spidered up to the passenger’s window, clinging onto the door. His fist drew back and went to break through the glass, but that didn’t work. The driver must have pressed a button or flipped a switch or something, because the exterior panel of the door disconnected—handle and all—leaving an armored interior frame with the window still intact.

  Carter, on the other hand, flew off, spinning through the air wildly. Cars swerved off the road, some of them slamming into each other, with a few of them flipping—the very thing we didn’t want to happen.

  Off beyond the shoulder, Carter was lying on the ground holding his head when a red pickup crashed dead into him. I had to shake it off, because that would have killed just about anyone else I knew, but not Carter. He was okay…right?

  “We’re going to have to do this ourselves,” I called to Stephanie who was still soaring next to me.

  But Stephanie was a Healing Druid. She didn’t have but about three or four forms that she could shift into, and none of them were aggressive forms. Her skills lay with healing and with minor elemental Empyrean, so all she said was, “You go! I’ll back you up!”

  Dreading what I had to do, I decanted into Wraith form. The night fumed with deathly blue vapors, and everything appeared to warble, having no real substance of its own. Cars along the road made elongated streaks as if they were painting the street pale blue.

  My mind fogged, time seeming to be nonexistent as if hours were passing in seconds, or if seconds were lasting for days. When I slipped into the cabin, my mind told me that I needed to regard the seat as an obstacle, but my body proved me wrong. Half of me was within the seat, while the other half was above.

  Finnegan. Wait. Why am I referring to myself by my last name? My name’s Jessica. No. No, it’s not. That’s my mother. I’m Lucius, remember? Even by referring to myself as Lucius, I wasn’t sure if I was referring to myself or to my father. I thought to seep into the driver and take control of him, but with the few seconds I’d been a Wraith, I was already losing myself. What would happen if I drifted into him? Would I ever come back?

  Unsure if that was a question I wanted answered, I lifted myself up and decanted back to my human form. My head swirled, and I retched a few times. My head told me that I needed to subdue the driver, but I couldn’t bring myself to it. It felt like I’d been dunked under water and held there until I’d swallowed every ounce of water that my throat and stomach could hold.

  I retched again and again, still not able to focus on the man behind the wheel. His foot slammed into me, shoving me out the door that he’d apparently opened with another switch, and having no control, I found myself falling to the pavement.

  Lights from the car behind me beamed into my eyes, blinding me as I plummeted, and that was when I knew it was over, that I was dead. I would hit the concrete and be rolled by the sedan that had already begun to teeter and swerve, though it had nowhere to go but straight for me.

  Suddenly, I found myself being yanked out of the way, branches and limbs coiling around my body, reeling me to the top of the truck.

  “Stephanie?” I said, confused as she held me in place on the trailer.

  Her face was pale brown, and she’d extended her branches around the base of the trailer, locking herself into place. “Might wanna’ stay away from that Wraith form, huh?”

  “Tell me about it,” I said, finally getting a fix on my surroundings. “I don’t see how they do it.”

  The driver floored the gas, making me jerk to catch my balance, truck engine grinding, racing to catch up with Umara who was several car lengths ahead. Instead of racing off, Umara slammed on brakes in front of the 18-wheeler. Her rear tire screeched around, turning her to face the truck’s grill. Fearless, she gunned the throttle.

  Her motorcycle grumbled forward straight for the truck. With the flick of a switch, a spring launched her high above the vehicle. In midflight, two automatic rotator cannons rattled hundreds of shots at the windshield. The hood of the truck flipped up vertically, ricocheting the rounds out to the side, then the hood slammed back down once the truck had passed under Umara’s bike.

  Behind the truck, Umara landed hard, swerving through oncoming traffic, until she’d stabilized her bike, wheeling it around and racing back for the truck, fairy dust sparkling in her wake. The cannons on the sides of her bike coughed out shell after shell at the truck’s tires, but some unseen magnetic field swatted the bullets away before they ever punctured the wheels.

  Still on top of the truck with me, Stephanie asked. “Did you see anything of use on the inside of the cab when you were in Wraith form?”

  “I couldn’t focus on anything. All I know is that he must have a bunch of switches all around him, because the door was open before he kicked me out, and I know he didn’t reach across my lap to do it.”

  “Yeah, I was afraid of that,” she said. “A lot of the Fairy Godfather’s trucks are built like that.”

  “What about the hull?” I tapped a foot on the top of the trailer.

  “Solid. And reinforced if I had to guess. Only way in is through the windows,” she said.

  “Fine. Then through the windows it is.”

  Her vines still held onto me, keeping me from flying off the truck. She said, “Tell me when you’re ready.”

  “Go.”

  She released me, but not before I decanted into a gorilla, using her vines to swing around the side of the truck and land on the front. My weight nearly ripped Stephanie from the hull, and she had to grind her branches into the trailer, chipping off bark, just to keep from losing her grip.

  I could see the driver now. Nothing too unusual. A red ball cap facing forward with a dirty, bent bill, and a beard that covered his entire chin. He even had the flannel shirt to match. His right hand reached overhead to a switch, but I was ready for it.

  The hood flew off, scraped up the window and flew behind the truck, but I had flipped into the air and latched onto grill when I fell. With all of my might, I slung my head forward like a missile at the windshield.

  It cracked. But that was about all it did. A lightning shatter shimmered from the top left corner down to the center, leaving me dazed. The driver rolled down his window and fired a pistol at me. The sound thundered in my head, but luckily the shots missed.

  The driver slammed on brakes, trying to wreck Umara who trailed directly behind the trailer with fairy dust flying off of her. Umara cursed so loud that I could hear her even from where I held onto the vehicle. She cut hard into the right lane, then snatched the bike hard to the side, tilting it so low to the right that her head almost scraped the road. Her bike slipped underneath the truck, out to the driver’s side.

  “Automatic follow!” she ordered the bike. The bike zoomed hard up to the driver’s window, and in a daring stunt, she stood up on her seat, leapt off the bike and wrenched the pistol from the trucker’s hand, still hanging onto his wrist so that she wouldn’t get rolled under the wheels.

  The trucker flailed to shake her loose, smashing his arm against the outside of his door and even swerving the wheel from one side to the other to try and throw her. With one hard tug on the wheel from left to right, the driver flung her off to the median.

  From the hood, I watched her swirl through the air, knowing that if she landed, she’d either be critically injured or worse. I glanced up to see if Stephanie was reaching her branches out to her, but instead, three cables fired from the front of Umara’s jacket, jamming dead into the hull of the truck. The cables reeled her into the truck, and she climbed up top and jumped to the side of the truck, landing dead on her bike and zooming forward.

  Latched onto radiator in silverback form with the hood off, I looked up and a brown bird swooped into the driver’s side window, shifting into Stephanie once it was inside.

  The driver cursed, grasping the wheel in both hands and swerving like mad across the lanes. Cars lay on their horns, while s
ome rumbled off the road or slammed on brakes. That didn’t stop the driver though. He slammed on the gas, slinging my gorilla body up and into the windshield again, cracking it some more. This time the glass shattered. My body flew into cabin, packing in tight since I was so huge.

  My foot must have kicked the steering wheel, or the driver must have yanked too hard, because suddenly, the entire truck’s front had veered left facing the median.

  “Stephanie, grab the wheel!” I was shouting to her, but she probably didn’t understand a word of it, since it all came out as gorilla roars.

  Still, she had the unction to grab the wheel, elbowing the driving so she could take control. The truck’s tires screeched as she stabilized the vehicle, but the driver didn’t quit.

  “You’re not takin’ this truck!” he shouted. His fist wrenched a wad of her hair, and he slammed her head against the doorframe over and over again. Somehow, she held on, keeping the truck mostly in the left lane, though veering halfway into the right.

  The speedometer didn’t quit rising. It kept going up: 65, 68, 71, 76. Several more of Stephanie’s elbows drew blood from the trucker, followed by the crunch of broken bones and a few curses. The trucker covered his nose and slammed on brakes.

  The vehicle wasn’t ready for that, especially not with the tires twisting every direction but straight. The trailer jackknifed, slinging the tail like a whip, but not before I grabbed Stephanie’s hand, both of us fluttering out of the chaos in falcon form.

  To keep the truck from spiraling over the median and injuring even more people, several cables fired out of Umara’s motorcycle, latching onto the big rig. Four metallic claws tore out of the sides of the bike, then drilled through the concrete and deep into the dirt below, anchoring the bike in place.

  As the cables snapped the truck back into the left lane, from above, I witnessed sparks fountaining from the trailer onto the pavement as if a welder were putting the finishing touches on mending two pipes together. The trailer twisted around then broke off from the truck, skittered along the road as cars dodged the pileup that ensued.