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As soon as I pulled out onto the main road, I looked in the rearview mirror to find a group of five motorcyclists right behind us. They all wore black handkerchiefs with the pale grins of skeletons over the lower half of their faces. They wore aviator sunglasses. They were trying to hide their appearance, but I could recognize each one of them. My blood ran cold. Obviously, it was a trap. How could they know about the cabin? I suspected that it had something to do with the blood oath. They’d tracked us somehow. I hadn’t even told anyone that I’d been raised outside of Boston.
I cursed myself. I had left Marla’s grimoire open on the kitchen counter. I had never gotten a chance to perform the protection spell. Too late now. It was burning, even as I thought about it. At the same time, I wondered how much good it would do. White magic against blood magic isn’t always the best match, and I didn’t have enough practice, even after seven years of lessons, to counteract what we were up against. I was literally flying by the seat of my pants.
Beside me, Laney was gripping my arm with her hand, her black-painted nails digging into the tattooed skin of my bare arm. I was gripping the steering wheel so hard that my knuckles had paled. She was turned around in her seat, crouching as she tried to get a good look at the people following us.
“Those friends of yours?” she asked. She was trying to sound cool and calm, but it was failing. She sounded as terrified as I was.
“Yeah,” I said, pressing down on the gas pedal with my foot. “You should put your seatbelt on.” I thought that she’d say something smart, but instead, she quietly slid down in the seat, turning to face forward, and pulled the belt across her body. The main road was passing by us quickly. There were few houses along this road. You could only tell where they were by the rickety mailbox that stood out on the road. The trees packed in around them, hiding them from sight. I passed the turn for the main street of the small town by the lake. There would be nowhere to hide there. Without signaling, I took the turn heading for the highway. With any luck, traffic would be heavy today. As the cover of the trees failed, we merged onto the highway, the motorcycles not far behind us. I fought to keep my cool.
I began to weave in between the cars and trucks that were out on the highway. Unfortunately, the Order was right behind us. Trying to escape motorcycles in a truck is not ideal, especially when weaving in and out of traffic, motorcycles are, by design, made to weave through traffic a lot easier than a beat-up pickup truck. My heartrate was through the roof, and the truck was making strange noises. It was almost fifteen years old, by Marla’s count, and it had never been tested at speeds in excess of sixty-five miles per hour. I glanced around to see who else was on the road around us. There just wasn’t enough traffic to hide us. We would have to get off the highway without being seen. I swerved, cutting off a tiny sedan. Its tiny horn beeped at us shrilly.
As I drove, another car sped up, as though trying to box me in. I hissed. The man driving the Toyota SUV was grinning at me. He thought that I was being rude. He didn’t understand that I was speeding for our lives. I pushed down harder on the gas, and he did the same. I glanced in the rearview mirror. The Order was right behind us. They were riding in a diamond formation. I cursed myself for leaving my own motorcycle, which was brand-new, in Boston.
If we kept this up, we would run out of gas and become stranded on the highway, sitting ducks, waiting for the Order to come and get us on their bikes. I finally slowed, getting behind the guy in the SUV so that I could pass him on the right side. As I finally maneuvered around him, I shot past a sixteen-wheeler. My only thought at that moment was Marla teaching me to drive: “Quick like a bunny, Mason! Quick like a bunny!” I cut to the right. Horns blared, and tires screeched as I cut off the sixteen-wheeler, its horn a loud blast behind us.
Laney screamed. She was gripping the dashboard with both of her hands. I pressed my foot down on the pedal, hard. We shot forward, away from the truck. Its wheels were screeching, and there was a sound like protesting metal as the truck jack-knifed across the highway, blocking traffic. It was horrific, but it was also a stroke of luck. The bikers were all stuck on the other side.
“Do you think anyone is hurt?” I asked, taking my foot off of the gas. The truck slowed as I watched the chaos that I had, inadvertently, created. My stomach roiled queasily, and it felt like I was having a heart attack.
“Oh my god. No, I don’t think it hit anyone. The driver is getting out,” Laney said. In the mirrors, we both watched as the man climbed out from the cab. He looked safe enough. He wasn’t bleeding, and he was definitely still standing. He glared at us, gesturing wildly with his hands. I couldn’t hear what he was yelling, but I could make a pretty accurate guess.
“Quick!” Laney yelled at me, bringing me back to our situation. “Before they figure out a way around it! Quick! Quick!” She was slamming her fists on the dashboard.
“Okay, okay,” I said as I sped up again, searching the road around us to see if any cops were in the area. The last thing that we needed was to be pulled over. We drove in silence past several exits. I went down a seemingly random one—Marla and I had gone this way a few times when she had needed to restock on herbs. There was an abandoned farm a few miles off the highway that had wide open fields where the herbs that Marla needed grew untended.
“Wait!” Laney said in shock. “Where are we going? We could get really far away on the highway.”
“There’s an abandoned farm,” I replied.
“No! We should keep going,” she insisted. “We could be in New York by tonight.”
“We can’t hide in the cities,” I explained. “The Order has chapters in every one. They’ll be on the lookout for us there.” She visibly deflated.
“It’s abandoned?” she asked.
“For years.”
“No running water?” she asked mournfully.
“Nope. We’ll be roughing it,” I said. “We’re going completely off the grid.”
“I hate roughing it,” she grumbled as we traveled down a quiet country road. She stared out of the window. She was still pale and shaken from the chase. As I turned my gaze back to the road, I reached out a hand, daring to place it over hers, which was laying on the seat. Beneath mine, her hand was cold and tiny. Out of my peripheral vision, I saw her start at my touch, and then look down at our hands. She said nothing. But she also didn’t withdraw from me.
I kept my eyes peeled as we passed by miles of heavily wooded land. It would be hard to spot the turnoff, and I hadn’t been down this way in a few years. There were woods on either side of the road. They were thick and overgrown, branches hanging over the road, creating a tunnel. Some of the trees were wide and thick—they had stood sentinel over this road for hundreds of years. Broken-down wooden fence posts, strung with rusted-out barbed wire began to appear. To the casual observer, it would have signaled land that someone was mishandling, perhaps. Maybe even a little late in getting to their yearly repairs. For me, it meant that the farm, our sanctuary, was close by.
The beginning of the driveway was almost entirely obscured by overgrown bushes. I turned the truck into the gravel drive. The tires crunched on the tiny pieces. The trees pulled away on our right, giving way to fields that had long ago gone fallow. At the end of the drive, I pulled the truck off to the side, backing into the stand of trees by the side of the driveway so that the truck was hidden, but could easily be driven back out again, should we need to. There was a large, two-story natural wood barn that had weathered and grayed over time. It was falling in to disrepair. There were places where the wood had fallen away or broken, and you could see into its dark interior.
The farmhouse itself was still, for the most part, untouched. Its once-white paintjob was peeling and dirty. It had sky-blue shutters and a wraparound porch. The windows were boarded up, but many of the boards had fallen down. The farm was set in a large field of wheat that had grown wild, along with bright goldenrod, and sky-blue forget-me-nots.
“It’s beautiful,” Laney remarked, voicing my thoughts aloud. I nodded in agreement.
“Marla liked to collect supplies here,” I said. “There’s a large cache of belladonna by the woods.”
“Isn’t that stealing?” Laney said.
“Nah. She would ask the plants their permission before taking them. Anyway, this place was foreclosed on about fifteen years ago,” I explained. “Not many people remember that it’s even here.” She nodded, thinking. She turned to me.
“Is there any way, any way at all that they can track you here?” she asked me. She was frowning and biting her lip nervously.
“I don’t think so,” I replied. “Only Marla and I knew about this place.”
“Okay,” she said simply, and got out of the truck, slamming the door shut after her. She began to walk toward the house through the overgrown field, her hand trailing over the goldenrod. She was barefoot, dressed in my clothes and her black leather jacket with the studs on the collar. I watched, feeling like I was looking at a painting. The scene was picturesque, imperfectly beautiful. She turned, looking back at me questioningly. When she looked at me, I felt as though my heart had stopped. I smiled to myself and opened the door to my truck. Getting out, I went to join her.