“Boss,” I said, pointing them out.
“Get up there,” she said. “Smash through if you have to.”
There were two cars between us and the intersection. One was a pickup and the other was a Buick LeBaron. “Smash through? In a ProMaster?”
She cursed and opened her door, stepping into the roadway. The vehicles behind us, who had been blowing their horns every few seconds, started leaning on them nonstop the moment she appeared. It was like a chorus for damned souls, and Annalise didn’t even glance back at them.
Instead, she stalked between the vehicles like the intersection was a parking lot—which for the moment, it was—heading straight toward the trio of SUVs.
It would never even have occurred to me to step out of a car on a jammed freeway, and the other drivers seemed to feel the same. As Annalise moved toward the center of the intersection, more and more people leaned heavily on those horns, as though they were trying to scare a new kind of wildlife off the road.
And of course, people took out their phones and started recording her.
As Annalise came around the front bumper of a low-end Nexus, the driver lowered his window and shouted, in a deep voice that seemed to cut through the blaring horns, “Get out of the road, you stupid fucking—”
At the same moment, word of her approach had reached all three of the SUVs. Three back doors, all on the drivers’ side, suddenly swung open, and men in black tactical gear stepped out.
They raised those same unfamiliar little guns I’d seen outside of Emily’s place and began spraying bullets into the crowded intersection.
The horns stopped immediately and the screaming began. I blurted out a curse of my own and snapped off my seat belt.
Meanwhile, Annalise had raised her arms to shield her face as bullets ricocheted off the spells on her body and punctured the windshields, tires, and chassis of the vehicles around her. Mr. Stupid Fucking in the Nexus jerked backward in his seat and a splash of blood and hair blocked the backseat window behind him. Other bullets were hitting other vehicles, including the one in front of our ProMaster.
Annalise charged toward the gunman in the middle. She jumped, moving fast like a line drive toward third base. The door crumpled under her knee, but the asshole had already slipped to the side, avoiding her attack. He was moving almost too fast for the eye to see.
My phone chimed, but this wasn’t the moment for me to see who was texting.
I don’t know what Annalise did next, because I opened my door and slid out of my seat. The car in front of us was a Toyota pickup truck with a bed full of gardening equipment and potting soil. The driver opened her door, banging it against the fender of the Honda Civic beside her, and fell, bloody, onto the asphalt. The urge to help her was powerful—that’s what people did, wasn’t it? They helped each other.
But I didn’t. I bounded off her back bumper into the bed, stepped on those bags of soil, and climbed onto the hood.
There, I saw Annalise seize the gunman who had dodged her and throw him against the last SUV. Green ribbon in hand, she leaped onto the hood and punched through the windshield. Magical fire blossomed behind the glass and flooded out of the doors, engulfing the gunmen inside and out.
From my vantage point on the hood of the pickup, I saw a figure stumble out of the passenger side of the middle vehicle. I couldn’t identify who it was, because all I could see were movement, a satchel, a leather duffel, and long black hair, but someone opened a door in the front vehicle and I caught a glimpse as the figure dove into it.
Even without seeing that hair, I would have recognized the duffel bag. It was Lauren Woo.
I threw my ghost knife at her—or at the spot where I imagined she would be. The ghost knife went where I wanted it to go, but I couldn’t aim at a target I couldn’t see. The spell passed into the back window, then zipped out the front, and I had no idea what I’d hit, if anything.
But I was going to kill Lauren Woo, and I was going to do it right now if I could. If she was still doing Hardy’s dirty work after everything she’d seen, she needed to be in the ground.
Movement drew my attention to the middle vehicle, where I saw a man raise a shotgun and fire at me. So far, these assholes had been playing at being gun professionals, always shooting for center mass, where Annalise had given me the most protection, but someone must have finally realized they were wasting ammunition. I took a blast of buckshot on the inside of my right knee.
There was no pain, but I knew pain could be fashionably late when it came to shit like this. What did show up immediately was weakness. My knee gave out and I fell hard, the top of the open driver’s door driving up into my armpit and my body flopping onto the asphalt. Then the pain arrived, and I knew my knee was lying at the wrong angle even before I looked down and confirmed it. My lower leg wasn’t as crooked as it could have been, but even a small misalignment at the knee joint made my stomach heave, just a little.
I heard more gunfire and the roar of engines, but I couldn’t see anything because I was flat on my back between two cars, smelling blood and hot asphalt and car exhaust.
Then the woman who had crawled out of the truck rolled over and looked at me. She had a lot of blood on her face and the front of her overalls. One bullet had struck her beneath her collarbone. Another had punched through her left cheek and come out her right ear. Blood was pumping out of both of those wounds, and her skin was growing pale. She didn’t have much time.
But she looked at me, her eyes were filled with hope, as though I had a surgical kit or something in my back pocket. As though I could lay on hands and heal her.
“Hey,” I said, my voice hoarse. “You’re going to be okay.” A lie. That was all I had to offer instead of help. A lie. “Hang in there and be still. You’re going to be okay.”
I hadn’t finished talking when she suddenly reached out with a bloody hand and laid it on the side of my face.
And the act of speaking those last two words, be okay, wiped some of the blood off her palm and into my mouth.
Where it touched my lips and tongue and seemed to evaporate. With a jolt.
Power rushed through me. My knee snapped back into alignment. Through my torn clothes, I saw that the gunshot had almost healed. The skin was still slightly torn and punctured, but I’d hurt my knee worse than this by falling off a bike as a kid.
It was like a miracle, and that miracle had come from a few thin drops of human blood.
Impulsively, I grabbed the dying woman’s fingers, smearing her blood on my hand.
If I put more into my mouth, would my knee… Just this morning, I’d spent an hour forcing raw beef down my throat—not for the first time—and it had felt nothing like the smallest touch of what this woman had given me.
Did I want to go down this path? Did I want to know what a single bite of her flesh could do?
The dying woman was still looking at me, her bleeding slower now that her heart was fading. I was here with her in her last moments, but all my thoughts were about myself. I took hold of her bloody hand gently. Her expression, which had seemed hopeful, now seemed like kindness. Maybe I could also read generosity there, as if she was offering herself up to me so that I could go on. So that I could keep fighting with that rush of power running through me.
“Hector,” she said, her voice fading. I could barely hear her over the chaos. She seemed to be looking at nothing. “Hector, I still love you.”
I slapped my hand down on the street and wiped the blood onto the gritty asphalt. Who the fuck was I trying to fool? That woman in the overalls wasn’t dying for me. She was just dying. And that initial hit from her blood had been just that, a hit. It’d come on like a drug, and I wasn’t going to chase that rush. Or any rush. I’d seen what that did to people.
And of course she wasn’t offering her blood and flesh to me. What kind of a lunatic did I have to be to think that she, a living person, wanted to be eaten? And why did I lie to myself about this woman’s blood evaporating in my mouth? I knew the truth. Her blood hadn’t gone poof and floated away on a breeze. My skin, powered by a golem flesh spell that was becoming more powerful each year, had absorbed her blood into my body. I’d eaten a tiny bit of her, by accident, and God help me, I wanted more.
“Help is on the way,” I said, and struggled to my feet.
Annalise called my name. I dragged myself upright, bracing against the Toyota, and looked around. The lead SUV was gone. The one that had been in the middle looked like it had been hit by a truck. The one in the back was a burned-out shell.
The other vehicles all around us were pockmarked with bullet holes. Too many people lay on the ground, and too many windows were smeared with bloody handprints or worse. The blaring of horns was gone, replaced by the sounds of crying children, grieving adults, and ordinary people in agony.
And there were three people, at least, who were still holding up their phones to record it all.
This was a clusterfuck of epic proportions. The world was going to call this a gangland shootout or attempted kidnapping or something. And yeah, I was on the twisted path, but I couldn’t see how we were going to avoid blowback on this shitstorm.
Annalise called for me again, and this time her voice came from behind me. She’d returned to the van, and I had to limp out in front of the pickup before she saw me again.
“We failed,” she said, marching toward me. “Again.” She was spattered with blood, but her face showed no injuries other than a cut below her eye. “Whatever they’re taking to Hardy’s private jets, it’s still on the way.”
My phone chimed again. This time I took it out and looked at it. The name Tredwell appeared at the top. It was vaguely familiar to my adrenaline-jacked brain, but I had more important things to deal with.
“It’s Lauren Woo,” I said. Annalise cursed again. “And she was carrying something.”
“A summoning spell, I’d guess. Okay. We’re killing her, too.”
A woman stumbled toward us. She had blood in her blow-out, and a gray linen suit with tiny red handprints on the front. “What happened here?” She was addressing Annalise.
Who ignored her. “We need to get after them, but the van is trapped. I don’t think we’re getting it back this time.”
She opened the glove compartment, took out something that was the size of a paperback book, then tossed it into the back. Flames spread quickly.
Oh, well. I wasn’t sure if I still had any material possessions before this moment, but now I was sure I had none.
I called my ghost knife to me and put it into my pocket.
“What happened here?” the woman shrieked. She was about to grab Annalise and make her questions into accusations.
“Hey!” I caught her attention. “This woman just stopped a terrorist attack.”
The woman stared at me, her eyes brimming. “Stopped?”
Annalise brushed by her and let me lean on her shoulder. “It’s an imperfect world,” she said, then led me, limping, in the direction the SUVs were going.
There was an on-ramp right below us, and we could see nothing because that big charter bus had swerved and smashed into the rail, blocking both lanes. There were bullet holes in the back glass of the bus, too, and as we went around it, we saw a whole crowd of retirees being helped out of the front door. Only a few were actually bloody, but many were lying in the grass, weeping or catching their breaths or clutching at their chests.
There were no vehicles in front of the bus.
“Wait here,” Annalise said. She ran back into the mess.
People gathered around, asking me questions. All I could do was lie and tell them no one knew anything. It was a sign of how fucked-up the situation was that I started telling them to wait for the cops. But I didn’t care. All I wanted was to fix my knee and get moving again.
A pale blonde woman in a navy double-breasted jacket and old-fashioned stewardess hat was directing passengers off the tour bus. A much older woman with bronze skin, fake auburn hair, and a big belly stood beside her, speaking in soothing tones to the fragile-looking old people creeping out of the bus.
Annalise came up behind me with one of the little machine guns Serrac’s people brought. I limped after her as she approached both women.
“Get everyone off right now. We’re taking this bus.”
“You can’t…” the bus stewardess started to say, but she glanced at the weapon Annalise was holding and wisely changed tactics. “There are a few who are too frightened to leave.”
“Move them or they’re coming with me.”
Pale Woman ducked into the bus. Fake Auburn scowled at Annalise. Her name tag read MARIA RODRIGUEZ, which was so generic a name that I wondered if it was fake. “What are you doing, scaring these people and stealing buses? What good is that?”
“Some of the people who did this got away, and they’re going to do worse if we don’t catch up to them. Fast.”
She leaned back and lowered her chin. “Can you drive a bus? Because this boy can’t, not with that leg.”
“I can manage,” I said, although I had never even tried to drive a bus before, even with two good legs.
“You will not,” she said matter-of-factly. “If you’re going after the men who did this, I’ll drive you. And I’ll do it with a smile. Hurry now, Gretchen,” she shouted into the vehicle.
Gretchen emerged with three final stragglers, two tiny birdlike women who were so terrified, they were trembling, and one old man with a resentful scowl.
Annalise practically shoved me up the stairs while Maria told Gretchen it was her job to look after the passengers and Maria’s to look after the bus. Then she climbed up, sat behind the wheel, and pulled the lever that shut the doors.