Except for one pair. A single car streaked along the overpass, hurtling along the shoulder. Its headlights flickered through the fence that ran along the edge of the highway.
With an explosion of twisted metal and concrete, the red Mustang smashed its way through the guardrail and hurtled down toward them.
36
DEATH MACHINES
The Mustang sailed through the air, trailing wreckage, until it bottomed out on the avenue behind them with a brutal crash. Sparks blazed along the asphalt as it clawed its way out of a wild skid and came charging after them.
Despite her choking fear, Dru found her voice. “Greyson!”
“I see him.” Hellbringer’s engine let out a throaty roar, shoving Dru deep into the seat.
They flew through the next couple of blocks of small car lots and run-down industrial buildings. An empty street opened up on the right, and Greyson aimed for it.
The Mustang came at them from the left, swerving to hit Hellbringer on Greyson’s side.
“Hang on!” Greyson yelled.
Dru barely had time to grab onto the armrest as Greyson nailed the brakes, making everything inside the car pitch forward. Hellbringer’s tires shrieked.
The Mustang sailed diagonally across in front of them, missing Hellbringer’s long black hood by inches. Before the Horseman could recover, Greyson accelerated and struck the Mustang’s back corner with a bone-jarring impact.
The hit sent the Mustang spinning away on smoking tires. It dropped behind them, shedding velocity as it careened into the side street.
As Hellbringer charged onward past the Mustang, it pulled out of its skid. Quickly, it got onto the road behind and closed in, headlights burning.
Greyson accelerated straight ahead, dodging around a stalled blue pickup into a lane full of oncoming traffic. He charged hard at the honking cars, then whipped Hellbringer back into the right lane just past the stalled truck.
The lane ahead of them was completely clear, and as he sped up, Dru understood Greyson’s move.
But the Mustang wouldn’t be stopped by a traffic snarl. The red car shoved its way past the blue pickup, stripping off the side mirror.
It kept coming. Unstoppable. Focused. Ferocious.
The Horseman wanted Greyson, and he would kill anyone and everyone in his way. Including her. Dru knew it with frightening certainty. She had to find a way to stop it.
As the Mustang closed in, the car’s demolished front end quickly uncrumpled and became whole again.
Greyson swung left around a slow-moving van, and the red Mustang streaked past the van, pulling up alongside Dru on their right.
Through the window, the Horseman’s reptilian snout gaped open wide in animal rage, sharp teeth shining in the passing flash of streetlights. For a second, his luminous eyes locked on Dru’s.
Then the Horseman yanked the wheel, and the Mustang smashed into Hellbringer’s right side, nearly knocking Dru out of her seat.
Greyson fought the wheel for control, trying to get away from the Mustang. But it stayed viciously planted against their passenger side. Ahead, a concrete mixer truck barreled head-on toward them, horn blaring.
Only a few feet away from Dru, on the other side of the window, the reptilian Horseman glared at her, inhuman eyes shimmering with fury. Its long, lizardlike snout stretched open, revealing rows of jagged fangs, and its howl of triumph drowned out the horn of the oncoming truck.
A hellish red flicker of flame erupted inside the red Mustang. With a savage leer, the Horseman brought up its flaming sword, its point aimed at Dru, and drove it home.
Dru tried to get away, but she was trapped in place by the seat belt.
Hellbringer’s passenger window shattered in an explosion of glass, a million fragments reflecting the red-hot flames of the Horseman’s sword as it pierced inward, aimed at Dru’s heart.
A flash of metal came down past her ear in a shining arc. At first, she didn’t realize what it was. But when Rane screamed in pain and rage, Dru realized she had parried the Horseman’s sword with her bare metal arm.
Rane’s fist stopped inches away from Dru. A horrible sizzling sound filled the air, amplified by the foul stench of burning metal.
Truck headlights whited-out the windshield. The unrelenting horn bellowed.
Hellbringer lurched as Greyson pulled a hard left, yanking the car free of the Horseman’s blade. The truck passed between the two cars with a roaring blast of wind.
The rushing wind choked off as Hellbringer’s window repaired itself, glass growing up from the door like frost on a cold winter day.
From the back seat, Rane choked out an inarticulate cry of pain.
Dru unbuckled her seat belt and turned around. “Rane! Let me see your arm!”
Rane sat hunched in the back corner of the wide rear seat, huddled over her arm, where a red slice of heat burned inside a blackened gash. “Hhh . . . huhh . . . hellfire . . .” As the red-hot wound in her arm faded and went dark, a thin curl of smoke drifted up past her pained face.
“Tell me what to do!” Dru begged.
“Huhhh!” The muscles stood out in Rane’s metal face. She swallowed, her throat working. “Take this . . . bastard out. Before he . . . kills us all.”
The tremor in Rane’s voice was enough to shake Dru to the core. Rane was never scared.
Until now.
Dru dropped her gaze to Opal’s limp form lying across the wide back seat, unconscious again, face half covered in blood. She hadn’t made a sound during all of this, and that frightened Dru even more.
She glanced over at Greyson, who appeared more demonic by the minute, as he slammed gears with grim determination, just trying to keep them ahead of the unstoppable creature closing in behind them.
The crystals at her feet. They were her only hope. She bent over, fighting motion sickness, and fumbled with the clear plastic hardware case. She managed to undo the tiny latches and get the lid open, but Greyson’s every yank on the steering wheel threatened to send the crystals flying.
She dug through the case. A sparkling gold lump of iron pyrite. A faceted wand of icy quartz. A spongy metal mass of pink copper. None of them would help.
Then she found the galena, the anti-demon stone. A heavy chunk of it, glittering like cold blue-tinted chrome. As she turned it over in her hand, it left a trail of tiny fragments on her fingers that shone in the streetlights streaking past.
When Greyson had first come into her shop, she had touched a galena crystal against his skin, and it burned him. That burn had taken a while to heal.
If it had the same effect on the other Horsemen—or better yet, on their speed demons—then she had a chance.
But she only had one shot to stop the car dead in its tracks. And there was simply no way to do that, unless . . .
“Bingo.” Dru turned around in her seat again, the galena crystal cupped in both hands. She held it out to Rane. “Here. Take this. I need you to crush it.”
Between gasps, Rane looked puzzled. “What?”
Dru held out the crystal. “Just do it!”
Hellbringer’s engine throttled up to an earsplitting roar. The avenue ahead rose up to become a long, two-lane bridge passing over the railroad tracks below. On either side, short concrete walls choked off the shoulders, topped by chain-link fences that were nothing but a blur at this speed.
“Galena crystals have an octahedral structure,” Dru explained. “If you crush them, you break them into lots of little cubes.”
Rane grunted in a way that indicated that either she understood completely or didn’t care at all. The crystal disappeared inside her big metal hands.
The muscles in her iron arms flexed. Her fingers tightened, and her face contorted with the strain.
At first, nothing happened. A moment later, a sharp pop rang through her long fingers, then another, and then came a rush of crunching noises. When she opened her hands, she held a little pile of shimmering metallic cubes.
Heart pounding, Dru took the cubes, c
areful not to drop any inside the car as it hurtled down the road, swerving side to side at breakneck speed.
“I need your hand,” she said to Greyson.
“Little busy here.” He slammed gears, his right hand on the long lever of the gear shift, his left hand quick on the wheel.
She touched his shoulder. “Greyson. We need to do this together.”
His horns were definitely longer than they had been a minute ago. His skin was darker. When he finally met her gaze, his eyes glowed bright red. For the space of a few pounding heartbeats, she was afraid she was losing him to the demon.
But then he lifted his hand off the white knob of the gear shift and held it up. She took it. His grip was strong, warm, reassuring. All the noise, terror, and confusion around her began to melt away. For this one moment, she felt connected to something greater than herself.
Her fingers tingled in Greyson’s grip as his energy began to pour into her. It started as a quiet tingle but quickly rose to a sizzling burn.
Magical energy, from Greyson and Hellbringer both, flowed through her body and into the tiny galena crystals in her hand.
They began to glow. Softly at first, then brighter and brighter until she had to turn away from the blinding glare.
“Open the window!” she told Rane.
Rane obliged, cranking a short silver lever that retracted the little window behind the passenger door. Cool air swirled through the car.
Dru stuck her hand out into the wind, trying to reach out as far outboard of Hellbringer as she could. The charged crystals would burn their own speed demon as quickly as they would hurt the Mustang.
The red car weaved side to side, headlights burning.
Dru’s arm shook with the effort of reaching out into the wind, and trying to steady herself against Greyson’s sharp turns as he dodged left and right. She needed the perfect moment, the perfect angle, because she only had one shot.
“Dru!” Greyson said over the noise of the engine. “Do it now!”
The timing wasn’t right. She couldn’t get enough leverage to throw the crystals far. But the Mustang closed in, aimed straight at them. She had run out of time.
She had to act. Now.
She took a deep breath, as deep as she could, then twisted her body and threw with all her strength. The burning white lights of the galena crystals flew in a brilliant arc up and over Hellbringer’s back wing, through the night, and scattered across the road behind them like a carpet of stars.
A split second later, the Mustang drove right across the shining galena crystals, picking them up in its treads, haloing its wheels with white heat.
Despite the darkness and the blinding speed and the whipping wind, Dru could see the smoke gushing out from all four wheel wells as the galena burned through the rubber.
As one, the Mustang’s tires all blew out, sending the red car into a sudden violent swerve, spinning it one way, then the other.
As the Mustang lurched, its tires shredded and flew off one by one, flapping away through the air like giant, malformed bats. Skidding on bare metal wheels, it shot up fountains of white-hot sparks.
Completely out of control, it careened across the width of the road and smashed into the bridge’s concrete barrier. It flipped onto its side and tore through the upper chain-link fence as if it were no thicker than a strip of gauze.
The smashed Mustang sailed through emptiness, lazily rotating through the night air. Then it pitched nose-first into the rail yard far below, disappearing between two parked trains.
The space between the trains erupted with an oily fireball of red-and-gold flames choked in peals of black smoke.
Inside Hellbringer, no one said a word as Greyson drove them off the other end of the bridge and turned at the blue H sign. Ahead, the glowing windows of the hospital complex loomed, just blocks away.
Dru turned to look at Rane, expecting to see her own terror mirrored there. But instead, Rane showed her teeth in a savage grin.
“Hells, yeah,” Rane said, nursing her arm. “Teach that bastard to tailgate.”
37
DEEPER CUTS
Dru sat alone on a puce-colored vinyl hospital seat, phone cupped to her ear, blinking her eyes to keep the tears from overflowing. “Nate, it’s me. I . . . I wish I could tell you this in person.”
She hated the way her voice sounded stuffy when she was upset. But sitting in the hospital hallway, waiting for word on Opal, she’d had too much time to dwell on Nate and all the things she wanted to say to him. The problem was that he would never understand.
Her entire life, her calling, was too inextricably linked to the world of magic. She knew that now. It wasn’t something she could just choose to ignore. Not something she could walk away from or compartmentalize.
As much as she desperately wanted to surround herself with a world of safety and stability, she could never live there. She didn’t belong in his normal world.
And he would never accept hers. He didn’t believe in magic. It was as simple as that. When things spun out of control, what he thought was a sane, rational response always ended up hurting her.
The heartbreaking truth was that there was no future for them together. There was no way to bridge that divide. She had known that for a long time, she realized, though she had tried so hard to fight it. It wasn’t fair to either of them.
She pulled off her glasses and ran an exhausted hand across her eyes. Grit clung to her skin. How could she possibly have this conversation with his voicemail?
“Nate, I just . . . I don’t want to leave things in this weird sort of limbo, not anymore. I think we both know . . .” A hard lump rose in her throat, and she had to squeeze her eyes shut to keep going. “We both know this isn’t working. And I’m so sorry about that. About your car. About everything.”
Now that she was actually saying the words, they seemed so small, so inadequate. None of them conveyed the pain of losing him, the relief of letting him go, the torture of all the things she still wanted to say. But this was no place to say them. And in truth, she was better off leaving them unsaid.
“Good-bye, Nate.”
She hung up, overcome by the finality of it.
That was it. No more Nate.
She stared off into space, trying to blot out the emotions crashing down around her, feeling oddly detached from it all and at the same time raw with hurt.
At the end of the hall, on TV, a newscaster spoke earnestly into the camera. The closed-captioning read, “Unexplained meteors nationwide.” It switched to footage of burning lights streaking across the night sky, then went to a map showing half the northern hemisphere blanketed by storms, punctuated by meteor strikes.
The sky was falling. Literally. The end of the world was at hand, and here she was breaking up with Nate. There was something so surreal about that.
A heavy hand landed on her shoulder, making her jump. Rane looked down at her with intensity. “Hey.” That one monotone word was loaded with meaning: a question, a comment, a vote of confidence.
Dru held up her phone. “Had to tell his voicemail.”
Rane’s face filled with compassion. “Oh, dude. That sucks.”
Dru nodded in agreement.
“Hey. Check this out. Serious bragging rights.” Rane held up her forearm, swaddled from thumb to elbow in a thick bandage. “Good news is both cuts were on the same arm. So I’m still packing a mean left hook.”
Dru winced. “Does it hurt?”
“The hell do you think? Damn right it hurts. But I’m looking for positives here.”
“Did they give you some pain meds?”
Rane snorted. “Tried to. But, dude, my body is a temple.”
Dru tried to give her a reassuring smile, but it faltered. “Are you still good to go to New Mexico?”
“Quit worrying about me. You sound like Todd.”
“Todd?”
“The doctor. I’m not even sure he’s old enough to be a real doctor. But I’m a sucker for freckles.”
“Did he ask how it happened, your arm?”
“I told him there was a tragic welding accident.”
Dru nodded, somehow unsurprised. “And he believed you?”
“Not the first time I’ve fed him that line. Besides, I acted all cute and gave him my number.” She smiled in a way that might’ve looked coy on most people, but on Rane it was slightly unsettling. “Actually, it’s your number, so if you get any weird calls, don’t answer. You ready to go?”
“What about Opal? They haven’t told me anything yet.”
“Todd said they’re going to keep her for observation. A wallop of a concussion and a head laceration. Other than that, no big.”
A wave of relief washed over Dru. “Could’ve been so much worse.” She stood up.
“Hey, do me a favor.” With a sly smile, Rane held out a magic marker and presented her bandaged arm. “Draw a big old heart on this bad boy and put ‘Dru plus Rane 4-eva.’”
Dru had no intention of writing anything on Rane’s bandage, but she took the marker anyway because she knew Rane would hammer on that same ridiculous note all night. Together, they headed down the hallway. “Where’s Greyson?”
“Sitting in his evil car, watching the road, being all martyr-y. Let’s go say hi to Opal, then get out of here.”
“Did you try Salem again? I know it’s a long shot, but if you tell him the scroll is buried at the archway, maybe he’d finally come over to our side? We need all the help we can get here.”
“He knows. He just doesn’t care. Kind of detached from the whole human race. We’re on our own, D.”
“Lovely,” Dru muttered.
“I know, right? It’s the end of the world. You’d think somebody would step up.”
“At least we have Greyson,” Dru said. “And Hellbringer.”
“Road tripping with two demons.” Rane shook her head. “That’s so messed up.”
38
UNSPOKEN
Nothing moved in the lone blackness of the desert highway.
If any witnesses had stood at the side of the road, where the asphalt ended in the silence of sand and cactus, they would have heard the soul-chilling wail of the speed demon’s engine long before it appeared in the night. Even then, all that arose on the horizon were twin pale halos that preceded headlights in the distance.
It Happened One Doomsday Page 23