“Look out!” Dru shouted.
At her warning, Greyson slammed on the brakes. Dru’s head nearly struck the dashboard, and her glasses flew off. But the evasive maneuver worked. As the red car streaked ahead of them, the blast of energy meant for Dru missed. Instead, it split the night air just in front of Hellbringer’s nose, a jagged vertigo-inducing arc of dark energy that distorted everything around it.
For a moment, the bolt of dark energy, like black lightning, cast mad shadows across the road in front of them. Reality itself seemed to crack open for a moment, affording an eye-searing glimpse into the heart of the sun, or the frozen depths of space, or both at the same time. Instantly, it was gone. The rippling energy finished with a crack like thunder. Hellbringer drove through the blast of furnace-hot air it left behind.
Dru picked up her glasses and blinked, trying to see around the pulsing afterimage in her vision. Behind them, blackened trees toppled across the road, burning with eerie twilight-purple flames.
Greyson spared only a fierce glance in the rearview mirror before turning the force of his attention to Dru. “Did it get you? Are you hurt?”
Dru shook her head. “I don’t even know what that was.” She couldn’t stop her voice from quavering.
“We’re ending this. Now.” Greyson sped up, closing in as they entered a sharp turn. The two cars drifted around the tight curve in tandem, barely a foot apart, carried along the same path by the laws of physics. This close, Hellbringer’s headlights flashed across the other car’s blood-red paint as Greyson pulled alongside the sports car.
They were so close Dru didn’t dare blink. Didn’t dare breathe.
Coming out of the turn, the street ahead straightened out. On one side was a flat expanse of undeveloped dirt and weeds, dotted with muddy yellow bulldozers and backhoes. The other side of the street was dominated by half-built luxury apartment buildings and retail spaces. Everything was made of glass and aluminum, and it all shone in the glare of the headlights.
The sorceress put on a burst of speed and started to pull away. With an angry growl, Greyson chased after and struck the car’s back corner. Its tires howled as if in anger, and its rear end swung away. But the sorceress quickly recovered and shot diagonally across the road in front of them, preventing Greyson from trying the same trick again.
Snarling, Greyson hunched over the wheel, tendons standing out in his forearms. He shoved the gearshift and jerked the wheel. Hellbringer came at the red car again, this time at an angle, and the speed demon’s nose struck like a hungry shark, crushing metal.
With a shriek of tires, the red car lost control and spun out ahead of them in a spray of white tire smoke, sliding sideways in the road. Teeth bared, Greyson dropped his speed, turned the wheel, and accelerated again. Dru couldn’t tell who was in control now, the man or the machine. Hellbringer’s pointed nose rammed straight into the sports car’s passenger door. The speed demon pushed the red car sideways in front of it, like hapless prey in the jaws of a predator.
Dru gasped at the viciousness of the attack. She braced herself against the dashboard for all she was worth. Incongruously, it occurred to her at that moment that when Hellbringer was built—and subsequently possessed by a demon—nobody had yet invented airbags. Otherwise one surely would’ve exploded in her face by now.
With a shrill screech, the red car slid along the road, pinned against Hellbringer’s sharp nose. Then it slipped to the side, and the conflicting high-speed forces yanked the cars apart. Both vehicles spun off the pavement and hurtled toward an unfinished building.
The sorceress’s car slid past a zigzag orange tower of scaffolding. Luckily, it was late enough on a Friday night that no one was working at the construction site. With a resounding crash, the car plunged through the glass front of the empty building and disappeared into the dark interior. Hellbringer slid sideways a dozen yards behind it.
Against all logic, Dru was absolutely convinced that they wouldn’t hit the building. She had seen Greyson pull off so many split-second maneuvers that she had unshakable faith in his driving skills. She couldn’t even fathom that he might fail this time. There was no way they would actually crash into the building, she thought.
Until they did.
Glass exploded around them as Hellbringer burst through the floor-to-ceiling front windows. Aluminum window frames twisted and clattered off Hellbringer’s roof like hail. Fountains of sparks spewed from shredded electrical systems and sprayed tiny glowing embers across the speed demon’s windows. They punched through one unpainted wall after the next, the whole time spinning and rebounding as debris thundered down around them.
Seemingly an eternity later, Hellbringer bumped and lurched to a halt. The roar of its powerful engine dropped to a subdued growl.
Clouds of dust billowed through the air, surrounding them. It drifted through their headlight beams, swirling one way and then the next. Something that sounded like pebbles clattered across the roof. Minuscule cubes of shattered glass lay scattered across Hellbringer’s long black nose, glittering in the reflected light like a lost fortune in diamonds. The car’s windshield wipers creaked to life, startling Dru as they swept broken debris off the windshield. Across the room, the red car sat motionless, facing them, as if stunned. The car’s front end had been mashed into an ugly mess by the crash. Beneath its crumpled hood, its headlights burned blue-white beams through the swirling smoke. The chrome letters “SRT” gleamed in its shattered grille, under a wide, hungry-looking hood scoop.
“I’ll be damned,” Greyson said, sounding awed. “It’s a Demon.”
“That might explain Hellbringer’s aggressive behavior.” Dru’s voice shook as she settled her crooked glasses back onto her nose. “But that doesn’t make any sense. This car is too new. As far as I can tell, nobody has summoned up a speed demon since 1969.”
“Not a demon. A Dodge Challenger SRT Demon.” Greyson glanced at her, seemingly unfazed by the crash, and pointed. “It’s a limited-production car. See the hood scoop? It’s built for racing. That’s why it’s so fast.”
Dru couldn’t care less about what kind of car it was. She just needed to know whether the sorceress was still able to fight. And whether there was any way to get the amulet back from her. Only then did it occur to Dru that she and Greyson were, against all odds, miraculously intact and unharmed. That meant the sorceress might be, too.
“Hopefully, she’s stunned, at least a little bit,” Dru said, unbuckling her seat belt with shaking hands. “That’s our only chance for retrieving that amulet.”
But as Dru reached for the door handle, movement across the room stopped her. The red car’s sheet metal started to shift and flex. Its crooked front end straightened itself out, rising back into position as if massaged by invisible hands. The crumpled hood flattened out like a freshly rolled-out carpet. The dented fenders rippled back into proper shape. In moments, the car was once again factory-fresh and gleaming.
“Holy Hasselhoff!” Dru breathed. The sorceress’s car really was a speed demon. That changed everything.
That meant, like Hellbringer, it was possessed. That made it self-aware. Able to heal itself, drive itself, even attack on its own. Dru and her friends had fought speed demons before, during the battle against the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Despite her best efforts, Dru had never found a way to defeat the infernal vehicles. Galena crystals harmed them, but they could heal from that. She had only barely managed to trap the demon cars in the netherworld, and even doing that had almost been deadly to her and Greyson.
She had no idea how to take on another speed demon without getting killed.
Even as that thought froze Dru in fear, things got worse. With a flicker of motion, the red car’s window rolled down. A slender, black-clad arm snaked out the open window, pointing that same elongated metallic crystal directly at Hellbringer. The sharp tip of the crystal glowed, quickly heating to a blistering orange and then white, as if it had been thrust into a blast furnace.
There was no way to dodge the sorceress’s attack this time. Nowhere for them to go. They were sitting ducks. Icy adrenaline shot through Dru’s body as she stared at the burning crystal, knowing what was about to happen next.
Greyson reached for her. “Dru—”
She didn’t give him time to finish. She had to move fast.
Dru grabbed his rough palm with her left hand and yanked on the door handle with her right, then snatched the golden pyrite disk off the black carpet at her feet. As the door swung open, she thrust the pyrite disk outside the car and held it up like a miniature shield.
This summer, Dru’s magical powers had grown stronger than she ever could have imagined. Though she still found it hard to believe, she was now capable of standing on equal footing with some of the full-time sorcerers who frequented her little shop. But she still wasn’t any match for someone with decades of experience, like the older sorceress in the speed demon.
Luckily, Dru did have Greyson. He was an arcana rasa, a one-in-a-million person born with magical energy but no innate power of his own. For some reason that Dru had never fully understood, the power inside him perfectly complemented hers, as if the two of them were one. When she touched him, she could draw on his magical energy as directly as her own.
She gripped his hand tightly. It took her complete focus to summon up his power in addition to her own. As their combined energy raced through her, she felt as if she were floating, as if the magic buoyed up her soul within her body. The rush took her breath away, but at the same time it terrified her. Because if she couldn’t control it all, it could cause unimaginable harm to both of them.
But probably not as much harm as the sorceress could.
In a fraction of a second, Greyson’s invisible energy intertwined with Dru’s and flowed through her arm, out her tingling fingers, and into the pyrite disk. Instantly, the round pyrite crystal shone with magical energy, as if thrust under a brilliant ray of sunlight. Its protective properties spread out around them. The air surrounding Hellbringer shimmered like heat waves over a hot desert highway.
From a few car lengths away, the redheaded sorceress unleashed her attack. The jagged bolt of dark energy was aimed straight at Hellbringer’s windshield. With a bone-shaking blast, it struck Dru’s invisible energy shield.
The old speed demon shuddered on its suspension as if it had been dropped off a building. Hellbringer’s throaty engine choked and died.
As instantly as it struck, the searing energy bounced back the way it had come. An eruption of purple fire engulfed the front of the sorceress’s speed demon. Its hood blistered and burned. Its windshield blackened.
The flash of heat from the energy bolt was so intense that Dru lost all feeling in her fingers. For a heart-stopping moment, she feared the blast had taken her hand from her permanently. She blinked through tears, trying to see through the blinding afterimage that pulsed across her eyelids. A crack of thunder echoed through the empty building, so loud that it sent needles of pain through Dru’s ears and shook dust down from the ceiling.
Then it was over, and ringing silence reigned around them. The beams of Hellbringer’s headlights had gone dark. The gloom was lit only by the crackling flames engulfing the red car.
The smoldering pyrite disk, now the color of ash, dropped from Dru’s numb fingers. She pulled her arm back inside the car. Greyson was calling her name, she realized, but she could barely hear him over the painful ringing in her ears. He held her close and turned her numb hand over in his, examining it closely.
Aside from being sooty and senseless, her hand was intact. With considerable effort, she was able to wiggle her fingers. She was relieved to see that all five were still attached, though she counted them just to be sure. Some surreal voice in the back of her brain nagged at her that she still hadn’t painted her nails.
Dazed, Dru stared through the windshield at the flaming wreckage of the other speed demon. The redheaded sorceress was trapped. Evil as she might be, she didn’t deserve to die in there. They would have to pull her to safety.
With her good hand, Dru pushed herself out of Greyson’s arms. “We have to help her,” she shouted at his puzzled expression. The explosion had left her partly deaf.
Before she could stop herself, Dru climbed out of Hellbringer and stumbled across the wreckage toward the blaze. She squinted through the raging arcane fire, searching for any sign of life. To her shock, the sorceress inside the car looked not only alive but completely unharmed, and she glared back at Dru through the window. With a snarl, the sorceress dropped her hand to the gearshift.
The red car wailed and lurched backward. Still on fire, it crashed through the sheet rock wall behind it and kept going, leaving a cascade of debris in its wake.
In the cavernous room beyond, the flaming car spun around so that it was facing away from Dru. In the same movement, it accelerated toward the opposite wall. It punched through the unfinished drywall and kept going, flames trailing out behind it like the tail of a comet.
Shocked, Dru didn’t know what else to do but chase the burning car through the half-finished building. She jumped over fallen metal beams and broken lumber, clutching her spectrolite crystal like a weapon. She couldn’t let the sorceress get away with the amulet.
Because if that sorceress figured out how to tap into the power of the amulet and destroy an entire city, it would all be Dru’s fault. Blinded by fear and guilt as much as by darkness and smoke, Dru scrambled through the flickering shadows. She followed the trail of receding flames, refusing to give up.
By the time she reached the shattered windows on the opposite side of the building, the red speed demon was long gone. It had vanished into the night, leaving behind only smoking tire tracks on the unfinished parking lot.
“Dru!” Behind her, Greyson came running through the rubble, his boots crushing debris underfoot. “Dru! Are you all right?” He took her shaking arms in his strong hands and turned her to face him, studying her with his glowing red eyes.
Dru blinked up at him through the dust that covered her glasses. “I’m okay,” she croaked. Coughing on the cloud of dust, her ears still ringing, Dru felt all the strength drain out of her body. She turned and stared out into the empty night, feeling empty and spent. She had failed.
In her mind’s eye, Dru could still see the redheaded sorceress’s deadly smirk as she pointed the crystal out the car window. That diabolical smile was unsettlingly familiar. There was something about it that the years could never erase. Dru was sure she had seen it somewhere before, long ago. But where?