Hellbringer started moving before Dru even shut the door. The car somehow scooped her up on the move, and she fell in. The door slammed closed as the throaty engine wailed. The rapid acceleration crushed her deep into the black vinyl seat.
“Are you okay?” Greyson demanded over the roar of the engine.
“Just ducky,” Dru muttered, buckling up the seat belt by the prismatic light of the glowing spectrolite crystal in her fist. “We can’t let her get away with the amulet. It’s too powerful. In the wrong hands, it could . . .”
“It could what?”
Dru hesitated. “I’m not sure, exactly. I just know it’s incredibly dangerous. That’s why I had it locked away in the safe. I thought it would be okay there.”
Greyson just grunted. Whatever he thought about that, he didn’t say. He drove on at breakneck speed.
Dru’s cheeks burned with shame. She thought she had taken the appropriate precautions. If she had been overly confident, who could blame her? After all, she and her friends had gotten the amulet by outsmarting the 2,000-year-old ghost of an evil Roman sorcerer, Decimus the Accused. That hadn’t been exactly a cakewalk.
Decimus was the only one who knew the true magnitude of the amulet’s powers, and he wasn’t spilling any secrets. He’d been killed in AD 79 when his enemies blew up Mount Vesuvius and entombed the entire city of Pompeii.
All just to stop him from using that amulet. Hence all of Dru’s precautions, including the magically sealed safe behind the bald head of Ming the Merciless. In retrospect, maybe not the brightest plan. Clearly, Ming wasn’t enough to stop this crystal sorceress.
Just thinking about the cursed artifact falling into the wrong hands made her shudder. In a voice that barely rose above the noise of the engine, Dru said, “The last time somebody got hold of the Amulet of Decimus, an entire city died.”
Saying the words out loud made them real for the first time. Someone who knew what they were doing could turn the amulet into a weapon of incredible destruction. A sickening feeling threatened to overwhelm her. In just the few minutes since Dru had discovered the sorceress breaking into her safe, everything had changed, and she was only now starting to catch up. Now she was fighting not only for her own life, but potentially the lives of millions of innocent people.
Greyson’s glowing gaze broke away from the night-darkened street and looked directly at her. Outside, streetlights streaked past. “So we need to get this amulet back. No matter what.” It came out like a terse statement, but it was really a question.
Dru’s throat tightened up with fear. Quickly, she nodded.
Greyson nodded once and faced front again. “Then hang on.” He yanked the gearshift into a lower gear, and the engine howled. Ahead of them, the sorceress’s car shot past a row of small closed shops and a new high-rise parking garage. Two blocks past that, the street intersected with the main road, which was packed bumper-to-bumper with Friday night traffic. There was no way the fleeing sorceress could get through that, Dru figured.
But the sorceress apparently had no intention of stopping. Ahead of them, the wide horizontal taillights of her car veered right, and the sports car vanished around the corner of a side street.
Greyson followed, closing in fast. Hellbringer didn’t so much drift around the corner as fly nearly sideways, tires shrieking. The brutal turn would have launched Dru out of the seat if she hadn’t been belted in.
Hellbringer was a speed demon, every inch of its black steel possessed by an infernal spirit created to serve the forces of chaos. It hungered for fast-paced destruction. Its entire existence was meant for moments like this, and it reveled in the bloodlust of the chase. Dru knew firsthand how willful and dangerous Hellbringer could be, if left unchecked. Greyson wasn’t just driving the car, he had to command it. Dominate it.
Given free rein, the speed demon would run wild, mowing down anything and everyone in its path. On a Friday night on the city streets, that could quickly turn deadly. Dru prayed they could catch the sorceress and reclaim the amulet before any innocent bystanders were caught in harm’s way.
Ahead of them, the red sports car’s taillights flickered as if the driver was hesitating, not sure which way to turn at the end of the block. Perhaps she didn’t realize she was being followed, Dru thought.
At that moment, Hellbringer’s headlights flared brighter. The demon car’s high beams blazed, lighting up the entire street. Dru knew there was no way the sorceress could miss the blinding headlights charging toward her.
Instead of turning, the red car launched straight across the road, streaking between oncoming cars. Horns blared and tires squeaked as cars and trucks swerved to a stop.
Hellbringer was close behind, drawing another round of angry horn blasts as Greyson carefully threaded his way through the intersection and out the other side. Hellbringer’s engine revved with impatience.
Greyson’s watchfulness avoided any crashes, but it cost them time. Ahead of them, the sorceress’s car was rapidly dwindling into the night. Hellbringer poured on the gas, streaking along the residential street at an insane speed.
They blew past one stop sign after another, dodging around moving cars as if they were standing still. Dru gripped the armrest so tightly that her fingernails dug into the vinyl. More than anything, she wanted to tell Greyson to slow down, but they had no choice. They couldn’t let the sorceress escape.
Strangely, her car bore a passing resemblance to Hellbringer, with its long hood, small back window, and wide stance. But where Hellbringer was a sleek relic from a vanished Motor City age, this car was squared off and modern, like an athletic younger cousin. There was something else about it, too, that Dru couldn’t quite define. Something about the way it moved around the corners, less like an inanimate object and more like a predatory creature. Or maybe it was a trick of the light, as their bright headlights cut through the night.
Dru didn’t have a plan for how to get the amulet back from her. Brute force wouldn’t work. The mysterious sorceress was obviously far more experienced with crystal magic and more powerful than Dru. Besides, Dru had only two crystals to fight her with: a golden pyrite disk, which was strictly defensive, and her rainbow-colored spectrolite blade, which again was more of a protective crystal than an actual weapon.
Dru had used the spectrolite in the past as a spell component, an escape tool, and once as a particularly ineffective bookmark. That resulted in one book that never made it back to the library intact, unfortunately.
On rare occasions, she’d had to threaten to stab an especially atrocious enemy with her spectrolite. But Dru had never actually physically harmed anyone, and she honestly didn’t think she could. She just wasn’t a stabbing sort of person. She liked to think of that as a sign of good character.
But could she stab the sorceress, if she had no other choice? If it meant saving the lives of everyone in the city? She shuddered at the thought. No, there had to be a better plan than stabbing.
“How are we going to catch her?” Dru said, trying to keep the fear out of her voice.
“I’m going to flip that thing wheels-up into a ditch,” he growled. “See if that works.”
The street ended at a T-shaped intersection that bordered a grassy park. But instead of turning left or right, the sorceress again drove straight on. With a crunch of metal and plastic, the red car hopped over the sidewalk and flew across the grass. Its rear end slid to one side and then the other, as if it couldn’t quite get traction on the grass. Then it entered a stand of pine trees and vanished for a moment, except for flickers of headlights and taillights.
“I hate driving through the park,” Greyson muttered. He turned in a long arc and hit the curb at an angle. The four tires hopped the curb in rapid-fire succession, shaking the car. Then they were hissing across the dark grass, skirting the edge of the trees.
Without warning, Hellbringer’s headlights went out, plunging them into darkness. The flip-up headlights clunked closed, reverberating through the body of the car.
“Hey!” Greyson barked at the car. He slapped the top of the dashboard with his open palm. “Knock it off!”
“What happened?” Dru asked.
“Hellbringer’s stalking the other car. Trying to be stealthy.” He thumbed the rocker switch in the top left corner of the dashboard, but nothing happened. “Lights!” he ordered, to no avail.
As they flew along the jagged edge of the dark trees, Dru had to wonder who was really doing the driving. Was Greyson in control, or was it Hellbringer? Or did they work together through some kind of wordless bond?
Judging by the snatches of taillights that flickered between the passing trees, they were paralleling the other car’s path.
Dru was terrified that they would plow into some wayward tree trunk or other unseen obstruction at high speed. But there was just barely enough ambient light to see. Ahead, a small lake shimmered in the city lights and the glow of the nearby tennis courts, where a middle-aged couple in shorts and high socks swatted a ball across the net.
“We’re running out of park,” Dru warned.
“She’ll have to make her move,” Greyson said. “And then we can catch her.”
At that moment, the other car burst out from between the trees. Hellbringer’s headlights blazed to life, lighting up the bright red car. It swerved suddenly, as if the flare of light had caught the driver by surprise. It slid across the slick grass, almost out of control.
Hellbringer shot toward it, nearly catching up before the other car got traction again. Hemmed in by the lake on one side and Hellbringer on the other, the sorceress headed straight for the row of fenced-in tennis courts.
Dru’s heart leaped into her throat. She pointed. “Look out! People!”
“I see them!” Greyson crowded Hellbringer closer to the red car, as if trying to herd it out of harm’s way. But then the wheel jerked out of his grasp, and Hellbringer slammed into the sports car’s fat flank, muscling it away from the people.
The impact startled Dru. The sudden crunch of metal. The shakiness in her stomach, as if she herself had been struck. She gripped her crystals so tightly they bit into her fingers.
The sports car punched through the chain-link fence of the empty tennis court at the end of the row. Sparks sprang off its paint from the shredded tatters of fencing. The car streaked across the green clay of the tennis court and out the other side. It slammed the opposite fence flat against the ground, like a metallic carpet, and rolled over it. Greyson swung around the end of the courts in a long arc, chasing after the sorceress.
“What the hell’s gotten into you?” Greyson muttered to the car. Hellbringer was acting even more aggressive than usual. Perhaps the demon car sensed something that Dru had so far missed.
A tall, grassy berm bordered the far end of the park, forming a low hill topped with colorful flowers. The red car swerved around the tapered end of the berm and plowed through the bushes that surrounded it. With an explosion of greenery, the car erupted from the end of the park onto the curving residential street beyond. It turned tightly, tires chirping, and accelerated.
Hellbringer was close behind. But instead of going around the grassy berm, Greyson headed straight for it. “Brace yourself!”
Dru didn’t know what Greyson had in mind, but she dropped her crystals on the floor at her feet and planted both hands against Hellbringer’s grainy black dashboard. She barely had time to register what was happening before Hellbringer slammed into the berm with a bone-jarring thump and ramped over it. A hailstorm of flower petals plastered the windshield.
Dru’s stomach dropped away as they went airborne. The wind swept the flowers away, and she had a clear view down the gently sloping hillside below, where the road snaked this way and that between peaceful-looking houses with golden glowing windows.
The other car was turning beneath them just as Hellbringer flew overhead, and for a moment Dru was terrified they would land on top of the sorceress’s car. Instead, they hit the pavement directly next to it with a deafening clang.
Through her window, Dru caught a glimpse of the redheaded sorceress’s flashing eyes. They opened wide in surprise, then immediately turned furious. Her ring-encrusted hands spun the wheel, and her car slammed into Hellbringer’s passenger side.
Even though Dru knew the impact was coming, there was nothing she could do about it. She slammed against the inside of the door and gasped in pain. She felt like she’d been punched in the ribs.
Greyson fought the steering wheel. “Dru!” The worry and urgency in his tone were unmistakable.
She tried to answer him, but couldn’t catch her breath.
With a crunch of crumpling metal, the other car released Hellbringer and surged ahead of them. Greyson’s eyes glowed bright red. His face flushed with rage, and the cords stood out in his neck. With one hand clenched on the wheel and the other on the gearshift, he chased after the sorceress.
Streetlights streaked past as Hellbringer pulled up alongside the car. The sorceress rolled down her window and glanced over at them, just an arm’s length away, her long red hair blowing in the wind. Her teeth gleamed from the shadows as she smirked at Dru.
With one graceful arm, she held out a long metallic crystal, pointing it directly at Dru as if it were a Saturday night special. The crystal began to glow a sinister fiery orange, like molten metal.
Dru’s breath caught in her throat. She raised her pyrite disk like a shield. Whatever the sorceress was about to throw at them next, Dru hoped the pyrite would offer some measure of protection against it. She could only pray it would be enough.