A rustle of sheets. Cherise’s voice sharpened into focus. “Jo? What’s wrong?”
“I need a ride and a driver who’s not afraid of the gas pedal. Are you up for it?”
“Um… okay…” She sounded cautious. I didn’t blame her. She’d never heard me in full-on action mode before. “Give me thirty min—”
“I don’t have thirty minutes. I don’t care if you show up in a sheet and fuzzy slippers; for Christ’s sake just get here. Five minutes, Cherise. I’m serious.”
I chewed my lip and finally added, “My sister could die if you don’t.”
I heard her intake of breath and had a bad moment, wondering if she’d just quietly hang up and leave me stranded. But Cherise, when it came down to it, was made of sterner stuff than that.
“Five minutes,” she promised, and I heard the phone clatter to the nightstand before it shut off.
It was six minutes, but I was impressed with her commitment; when Cherise’s car screeched to a stop in front of me, she was wearing a pink crop top, tight sweat pants, and flip-flops. No makeup. Her hair was yanked back into a ponytail, still frizzy from the bed.
It was the most unpolished I’d ever seen her look, and I loved her for it.
I dived into the passenger door as she threw it open, and she hit the gas and scratched the Mustang’s first gear as she accelerated back toward the road. I managed to get myself buckled in—that much, I figured, was necessary—and got myself up into Oversight. Just enough to keep an eye on Lewis’s beacon.
“Get to the beach and head west,” I said. Cherise threw me a look, blew past a yellow light, and scratched the gears again as she hit third. The car roared and threw itself into a flat-out run. “I owe you.”
“Fuckin’ A,” she said, and checked her rearview mirror. No cops, so far. I didn’t dare glance at the speedometer, but when Cherise made the turn onto the highway I felt the tires screaming and struggling to hold the road. She wasn’t cutting it any slack. The Mustang got traction and fishtailed and broke into a full gallop on the open road. There was early-morning traffic, but it was light.
Cherise pegged her speed at just under a hundred and maneuvered in and around the slower traffic with the kind of precision reserved for combat drivers and NASCAR professionals. I’d picked the right girl. She did love to drive.
“So,” she said as we hit a clear stretch and the Mustang opened up to a low, feral growl in fifth, “maybe you’d better explain to me why I’m about to get my ass arrested, not to mention take a mug shot with bad hair and no makeup.”
“Cute British Guy,” I yelled, and held my whipping hair back from my face in the brutal wind. I’d forgotten how much of a beating it was to drive this speed in a convertible. “Turns out he’s not so cute. He says he’s going to kill Sarah if I don’t turn over a ransom.”
“What?” Cherise’s eyes were all pupil in the dim wash of the headlights, her face zombie green from the dashboard lights. “No way. Cute British Guy? Dude, he was fine!”
“I’d tell you that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but…”
“I know, first I’d have to have read one.” Cherise sent me a faint, wind-whipped smile. “I’m not dumb, you know!”
“I never thought you were.”
“I just like guys!”
“Yeah. I know.”
“So he’s bad? Really?”
I thought of him on the couch, smiling, a hand gripping Sarah’s pale, slack throat. “The worst.”
Cherise considered that for a few seconds in silence, and then nodded. “You going to pay him off?”
“I don’t know.”
She nodded again, as if everything I’d just said made perfect sense. “I’m glad we have a plan.”
We blew past one hundred twenty miles an hour, still accelerating.
The winds started kicking up twenty minutes later. I shifted my view in Oversight and saw that the storm was picking up speed and rotation. From the color bands in the aetheric, the eyewall probably had already hit Force Three speeds, and it was just getting started. The clouds were unfurling like war banners out of its core. The rotation was going to be monstrous. It could cover the entire state, once it got to its full size.
I could feel it. This storm was old, and angry, and it wanted blood. The core of it was surrounded by a thick, black curtain that felt like death.
I swallowed hard as I dropped back into real-world time. Cherise was nervously eyeing the clouds.
“I think I’d better put the top up,” she said.
“Do you have to stop to do it?” She sent me a wordless Are you mental? look. “We don’t stop, not for anything.”
“We’ll get soaked!”
“I’ll keep the rain off of us,” I said. There wasn’t any point in concealing anything now. “I can do that. Just worry about keeping us on the road.”
The rain hit about five minutes later, a patter of thick drops that quickly turned into a flickering silver curtain. Cherise backed off on her speed, shivering, and I hardened the air in a bubble over the top of the car. Warmed it a little, too. Invisible hardtop.
The rain hit the hardened barrier and slid off, just like glass. Cherise nearly wrecked her Mustang trying to get a look at it. “What the hell… ?!”
“I can do that,” I repeated. “Don’t worry about it. Just keep going.” If we survived all this, I’d be in big trouble, but trouble was a cute, fond memory, at this point. I’d settle for mere trouble. If the Wardens wanted to haul me in and dig out my powers with a spork, they were welcome to, but after I finished this. Anybody who got in my way today was going to get a very ugly surprise.
“Man, that’s… cool,” Cherise murmured. She took one hand off the steering wheel, reached up, and flattened it against thin air. “My God, Jo. That’s, like, the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. Or not seen. Whatever.”
The rain slid off in a continuous stream about an inch above her hand. The Mustang hit a puddle of water and shivered, unsure of its footing; she slapped her hand back down on the steering wheel and fought the car’s need to spin out.
It took an endless two seconds, but she got it under control and never slacked off the gas. “Okay, that was close.”
“No shit.”
“Fun, eh?”
We blew past truckers and passenger buses and nervous morning travelers. No cops. I couldn’t believe the luck, but I knew it wouldn’t last…
There was a sudden, white-hot bolt of lightning through the clouds, traveling in a straight line above our car.
Up on the aetheric, Lewis’s beacon suddenly went out.
Chaos. There was a lot of it, and it was getting hard to tell what was significant from what wasn’t; the storm towering up over the sea and moving relentlessly this way was filling the aetheric with energy and a kind of metaphysical static. On top of that, there was power being thrown around on a more Wardenish level, adding to the general blizzard of instability.
I could barely get my bearings up there. I hung on grimly, half aware of Cherise talking anxiously next to me, of the Mustang hurtling on through the darkness, and tried to remember where Lewis had been. Had he gotten Rahel to airlift him out? No, Lewis didn’t own Rahel, and without that bond, she wouldn’t have been able to blip him from one place to another. No Warden I knew—not even Lewis—could do that sort of thing on his own.
So he was still here. Somewhere. Moving, maybe, and concealing his presence from a magical perspective. Lewis was really good at it; he’d eluded the entire organization for years while continuing to do his own thing. That took guts and talent.
I didn’t see Lewis, but I did see a distinctive red-hot flare of power that surged and faded like a vacuum tube about to blow. I fixed on it and waited.
Another flare, brighter. It was off to the west, almost directly parallel to the road we were traveling.
“Turn right!” I shouted.
“Where?”
“Anywhere!”
I felt the heavy physical impact of the Mustang taking the turn, and grabbed for a handhold to keep myself from being thrown against the safety straps. Kept my attention up on the aetheric, though. It was getting tougher. The thin-air hardtop I was maintaining over the moving car took a hell of a lot of concentration and control, not to mention draining that finite reserve of power I had from Lewis.