17

RUN AWAY WITH YOU

On very rare occasions, Opal sometimes turned out to be wrong. But in almost every case, it wasn’t her fault. That was her official position on the matter, case closed.

In this particular instance, Opal had promised Dru that they would be back from Home Depot before dark. And then she had promised that the flat tire would take them only a minute to fix. Turned out she was wrong on both counts.

But again, not her fault. First off, there hadn’t been enough shoulder on the highway to safely change the tire without getting flattened by the torrential river of passing traffic. So they’d had to limp along to the next exit with their hazard lights blinking, a hulking semi breathing down their neck, and crazy drivers constantly whipping around them like a demolition derby on diet pills.

Eventually, sweat running down his face, hands clamped on the wheel, Ruiz had nursed the van safely off the highway without completely tearing the rubber tire off the rim. But then it had turned out that a couple of lug nuts were stuck in place. That was no real surprise, considering that half of this rattling old van was basically a giant cheese grater of rust held together by chunks of body putty that had been cracking apart since the last Bush administration.

So there they were, broken down on the side of the road, in the dark, completely unable to help Dru with her wraith problem. Which she had more or less brought on herself, in Opal’s opinion, but then again no one had asked her.

She told all this to Ruiz, who nodded and made sympathetic noises at all the right times, while he grunted and struggled with the rust-seized lug nuts. She watched him work, first with annoyance at being stuck here, then with growing respect as he quietly got one tool after another out of the back of the van. Like the serious professional that he was.

He sprayed the offending lug nuts with foul-smelling penetrating oil. Heated them up with a little pocket blowtorch that was no bigger than a can of soda. It shot out a sharp hissing blue flame that made Opal sure to keep her sequined and probably flammable skirt far back out of the line of fire. Then he brought out his heavy-duty battery-powered impact wrench. When that didn’t work, he fired up the noisy, clackety air compressor bolted to the rusted floor in the back of the van, unspooled a length of orange rubber hose, and attacked the seized nuts with a pneumatic air tool that looked like it could bring down small aircraft. And the whole time, he listened to her complain and just nodded right along.

She had to admit, there was really something about watching a man in uniform do his work. Capable, good-looking, and one hundred percent agreeable to boot. Now that was a man worth keeping.

Once the tire was changed and they were comfortably cruising down the road again, with the offending wheel tossed unceremoniously in the back of the van, Opal got to thinking about Ruiz and how good he was with his hands. And all the different ways she could put those hands to good use later.

She tried calling Dru to let her know they were on their way back, but there was no answer. Tried the shop phone too, but that didn’t work either. Nobody answered their phone when they were supposed to. Without her there at the shop, nothing got done.

It was only when Opal looked up from her phone with a heavy sigh that she realized that the highway outside had been somehow replaced with a narrow weed-lined frontage road she didn’t recognize. It was barely even a street, really. Just a long, potholed strip of asphalt that led across the river on a crumbling concrete bridge. On the other side, the pavement bumped to an abrupt end and the tires rasped onto a rough dirt track. Small rocks pinged the underside of the van like hail. Undoubtedly, some of them were likely to come up through the rust holes.

She turned to Ruiz. “I’m sorry, I hate to say this, but…where in the hell are we?”

Slouched back in the seat, not a care in the world, Ruiz grinned widely. “I know a shortcut, baby.”

“To where? Kansas? Better turn around and get us back on the highway.”

His smile didn’t dim. “No, this is better. The highway’s all backed up with traffic. Must’ve been a crash up ahead.”

“You’re taking us the long way around!”

“If you’re talking miles, yeah, maybe. But distance isn’t everything. I’m saving us time, see?”

She gave him her no-nonsense look. The one that always worked on difficult customers. Except for Salem. But Salem didn’t count, because nothing worked on him anyway. “Honey. It’s already dark. We have to get back to the shop. So the best thing to do? You need to turn around, and get us back on the highway, right this minute.”

He shook his head. “No, the highway is crazy with traffic. But, hey, check it out!” With a broad sweep of his hand, he indicated the pitch-black darkness outside. Their headlights illuminated the rough dirt track stretching out before them, walled in on both sides by dry shoulder-high weeds. “There’s no traffic out here.”

“That’s because this isn’t a road,” Opal said.

“Sure it’s a road. We’re driving on it, right? That makes it a road.”

“People drive up on the sidewalk all the time. That doesn’t make it a freeway.”

He glanced across at her, and his bright smile finally faltered. “Don’t worry. We’ll get back to the shop, ten minutes tops. There’s no traffic or nothing out here to slow us down.”

As he spoke, a flash of movement crossed through their headlight beams. Opal caught just the briefest glimpse of tan and gray fur. An unmistakably canine shape moving at top speed.

Ruiz went rigid in the seat, bracing hard against the steering wheel as he stomped on the brakes. Tools pitched forward and clattered behind them. A gut-clenching thump echoed from the front of the van.

Opal screamed at the top of her lungs.

The van slid to a hard stop. Road dust billowed into their headlights like a desert sandstorm.

Opal, still screaming, turned to Ruiz and saw that he was screaming, too.

“You hit a dog!” she yelled, waving her hands in the air as if she could somehow rewind the last few seconds and do them over again. Only without any dog casualties.

“That was no dog!” His eyes were practically as round as pie plates. “That was some kinda creature!”

“Stop screaming!” Opal screamed.

He did. With an effort, she clamped her mouth shut, too.

The sudden silence was deafening.

Ruiz got out of the van before Opal could stop him.

“No, don’t leave me here!” After a moment of panic, Opal got out on the passenger side onto the dark dirt road and immediately wanted to jump back inside. At least in there, she was surrounded by tools and things she could use as a weapon if she had to. Or she could hide in the back and make Ruiz fight this thing off.

Assuming it wasn’t really a harmless, cuddly little dog. That they hadn’t just hit with their big, ugly van.

Which she was pretty sure it was, and she was absolutely sure they had.

Besides choruses of crickets, and Opal’s desperately fast breathing, the only sound was gravel crunching under Ruiz’s work boots as he edged into the headlight beams and looked around. He held a thick metal flashlight the length of his forearm. But instead of turning it on, he wielded it like a baseball bat, and clicked on a tiny penlight he pulled out of the pocket of his coveralls.

Opal put her hands on her hips. “What are you going to do, club it over the head? You already ran it over. Poor thing.”

“I didn’t run it over, babe. Just a little tap, that’s all.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

A low moaning sound came from the side of the road. Not a dog’s whine or whimper. Definitely a man, who sounded like he was having a particularly bad day.

After trading glances with Ruiz, she joined him in hustling over to the side of the road, where the tall, dry grass was smashed flat.

Ruiz swallowed hard and raised his tiny penlight.

Down at the bottom of an incline, a well-muscled black man with tribal-looking tattoos up and down his arms lay sprawled across the grass, gingerly touching the top of his head.

“That man is naked,” Opal pointed out unnecessarily.

Frowning, Ruiz nodded sagely, as if this was important information that merited serious consideration. “Yes, he is.” Then he added, “And also, definitely not a dog.”

“Oh, thank God we didn’t hit a dog.” A flood of relief washed over Opal, and she clung to Ruiz for support. “You okay down there?” she called.

The man blinked up against the light, giving her an angry glare.

“Uh oh,” she muttered, then shouted, “Sorry we hit you!” She pointed at Ruiz. “He’s a very bad driver!”

“At least I’m wearing pants.” Ruiz cocked his head. “You don’t think he’s one of them shape-changer sorcerers, do you?”

“Protean sorcerer?” Opal was still shaking with panic. “I can’t handle any more craziness tonight. Long as he’s not a dog, we’re okay.”

“But he is running around butt-naked.”

“Honey, everybody’s got issues. Let’s just take him to the hospital, or at least give him a ride home.”

Ruiz shook his head vigorously. “No way. Nuh uh. My van nearly got destroyed last time we picked up a naked protean sorcerer, thanks to Rane.”

At the sound of Rane’s name, the man’s head snapped up. But judging from the way he immediately winced, he wished he hadn’t done that. “You all know Rane?” he called up to Opal. His deep voice was urgent.

Opal just looked back at the naked man, trying to decide whether to answer.

Slowly, he stood up to his full height. “We need to warn her.” Opal glanced at Ruiz, then back down the hill. “Warn her about what?”

* * *

In the back of the shop, Dru circled the trapped wraith, deflecting the fiery blasts of its spells with the shimmering golden disk of iron pyrite in her outstretched hand. The flat, saucer-shaped crystal smoked, burning her fingertips. But she couldn’t set it down, or she would lose her only protection against certain death from this thing’s magical onslaught.

Greyson moved alongside her, his crowbar raised high. But as long as this thing kept throwing one powerful spell after another at them, there was no opportunity for him to strike. The clock was ticking until the moon dust wore off and the wraith became invulnerable again.

Whoever this dispossessed spirit had been in life, he or she had to have been one of the most powerful sorcerers around. The mighty barrage of spells it flung at Dru nearly blinded and deafened her. Her knees buckled with the effort of warding them off. She couldn’t take much more of this.

Dru had faced magic this powerful only once before. That was the night she had fought Lucretia, the only other living crystal sorceress, who had decades more experience than Dru, and all-consuming anger that made her even more relentless. Lucretia was one of the band of elite evil sorcerers known as the Harbingers, arguably the most powerful magic wielders of the twentieth century.

They had started out innocently enough as a radical group in the 1960s, protesting war, nuclear proliferation, environmental destruction, and other mid-century injustices. Being sorcerers, they had used magic to achieve their political ends. But as they grew more powerful and more radical, they had pursued darker and darker forms of magic in their efforts to set the world right again.

Eventually, they had gotten it into their heads that the world was too sick to survive. It was up to them, they believed, to remake the world into their idea of a paradise. They wanted a clean start. A fresh slate. And that meant destroying the world in a fiery doomsday, so that they could create a new world in their own image.

So, after a monumental effort, they had unearthed the apocalypse scroll and used their eldritch powers to break its seven wax seals, one by one. Each broken seal had summoned up a new calamity to threaten the world. So far, Dru and her friends had stopped them all. But there was only one seal left, and if it broke, there was nothing Dru or anyone else could do to stop doomsday.

She had to find a way to get the scroll back from the skeletal clutches of this soul-devouring wraith, a spectral creature of darkness that had potentially unlimited power at its disposal.

The wraith fluttered its bony fingers like the legs of a pale spider, and a shimmering web whirled straight at Dru, casting off eerie beams of sickly green light in all directions.

Dru braced herself for another fiery blast. But instead of trying to burst directly through her shield, the spell spread out like a giant radioactive spiderweb. It clung to her invisible shield and began to burn through it, releasing crackles of eerie purplish light.

The black hole of the wraith’s mouth widened with a cry of triumph, and a light shone in the dark pits of its eyes.

Heart pounding, Dru backed up a step, but the spell had latched onto hers. Her adrenaline spiked as she realized she couldn’t shake it loose. She had only seconds until it ate its way through her shield. And then her body.

Greyson put his strong hand on her upraised arm. The moment he touched her, his energy flowed into her hand. She could feel the invisible shield grow stronger, fighting back the wraith’s magic. But it only delayed the inevitable, buying them another minute at most. The warm flush of reassurance she felt vanished.

His voice was low but firm in her ear. “We have to push in. Go on the offense.”

She shook her head. This thing was too powerful. Even if they turned tail and ran for it now, she didn’t know if they would make it. “There’s no way we can take this thing.”

“We can. Trust me.”

As much as she trusted him, she knew he didn’t have anywhere near as much experience fighting the supernatural as she did. Everything she knew told her that pressing the attack was a terrible idea.

And yet, what choice did they have?

She felt Greyson tense beside her, ready to attack. The muscles bunched in his arm as he raised the crowbar. Its hooked end nearly scraped the ceiling. And that gave her an idea.

But how could she tell him without tipping off the wraith? Could it understand the spoken word? She had to assume so.

She glanced his way and caught his eye. “Ix-nay on the attack-yay.”

One of his eyebrows went up sharply.

“Ig-pay atin-lay,” she explained, enunciating carefully.

He shook his head. He was not, apparently, terribly fluent in pig Latin.

Switching tactics, she instead glanced pointedly up at the hooked end of his crowbar, then pointed with her chin at the scroll still clutched tightly to the wraith’s bony torso. If they pushed forward, there was a chance he could reach into the circle with his crowbar and yank the scroll out of the thing’s hands.

But they had to do it fast, before the radioactive purple spiderweb spell finished burning through her invisible shield.

Greyson shook his head slightly. He still wasn’t getting the message.

Dru tried again, with more pronounced eyeballing and chin pointing.

His red eyes narrowed. His lips moved, silently trying to form words out of her gestures. And failing. He did the eyebrow thing again.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” she blurted. “Just get the scroll with the crowbar!”

He nodded curtly. “Good plan.”

“Go!”

Together, they pushed forward. Dru’s rapidly dissolving energy shield shoved the hovering wraith back against the far side of the circle, pinning it. On Dru’s side of the shield, she felt like she’d run into a wall, and it knocked her off balance.

At the same instant, Greyson dodged to the side and swung the crowbar underhanded with surprising accuracy. The hooked end of it, originally designed to pry boards and nails off of wooden crates, jabbed up right beneath the thing’s bony arm. With a metallic tink, the very tip of the crowbar struck the scroll, which popped up into the air, eliciting a surprised screech from the wraith.

Dru watched, frozen in horror, as the scroll flew in a high arc toward her. As it tumbled, the spiked silver tips at its ends glittered in the pure light from her sunstone crystal. The broken wax seals along the edge of the stained parchment flapped at her. The single intact seal, a spot of bloodred wax, glared at her like an angry eye, daring her to catch it.

Every sport Dru had tried in school had ended in miserable failure. Her brain reminded her of this unfortunate fact by filling her memory with a flickering reel of spectacular fumbles, falls, and face-plants.

But this wasn’t just any old ball flying directly toward her. It was the most dangerous artifact in the world. And here she was, with her hands full. Sunstone in one hand, pyrite disk in the other. No way to even push her glasses back up her nose, much less catch the scroll.

She couldn’t afford to face-plant this time.

She breathed out, and the world seemed to stop. There was nothing but her and the scroll, and the unseen arc of its trajectory that connected them. She pictured the invisible parabola of its travel, pulled to Earth by the laws of physics. The acceleration of gravity. Feet per second squared.

She took one careful step back. Raised her hands. Dropped the crystals.

As the light of the sunstone faded, they were plunged into darkness lit only by the swirling purple fire of the wraith’s spell devouring the last traces of her fading shield.

In that moment, the apocalypse scroll smacked into her outstretched palms. Her glasses went flying off her face. But she caught the scroll.

Grinning widely despite the fact that she could barely see anything, Dru turned and dashed in the direction of the back door, which now was only a shadowy rectangular blur against the darkness. “Go! Go! Go!”

In a heartbeat, Greyson was right behind her. They burst through the door into the alley outside just as the wraith sent a flaming blast of rippling blue fire after them. Greyson yanked Dru to one side, flattening her against the brick wall as the unearthly flames roared past them, obliterating the door.

Huddled there between his hard body and the harder wall, unable to see anything, shrinking away from the torrent of magical flames that tried to incinerate them, Dru clutched the scroll tight.

Together, they’d done it. They had the scroll back in their possession. Now, she just needed to find Rane and Salem, and get everyone the heck out of there before it was too late.