Hunt the Moon

Page 48

I kept my foot against the floor, hard enough to feel the blood pounding in my leg, but something was wrong. The back of the car was dragging badly, pulling the nose so far up that I could barely see anything over the hood. And considering how close together buildings were in this part of town, that was a very bad thing.
“What’s going on?” I asked Fred, who was peering back through the seats with his mouth hanging open.
“Oh, shit.”
“Oh, shit what?”
“Oh, shit, we have passengers!”
I whipped my neck around, but there was nobody in the car but us. And all I saw outside was a lot of night—and a huge shadow that was eating up the air faster than we were. It wasn’t entirely dark, after all; there were flashes here and there, like glints of sunlight through a storm, or a veil with rents in it that gave glimpses of the face underneath. But it didn’t look like Morrigan, or whatever had attacked me before. It was too big, for one thing, and the little I could see looked more like it was covered in scales than—
And then Fred screamed, and I realized that maybe this wasn’t the best time to take my eyes off the road—so to speak. I snapped my head back around in time to see us plummeting toward a parking garage. There was no time to stop, barely even time to course correct so that we flew into an opening instead of splattering onto rock-hard concrete.
Something else wasn’t so lucky, hitting the side of the building with the force of an earthquake. Gray chunks flew off the walls and scattered across the floor, but it looked like whatever was after us was too big to fit through the narrow opening. Because no dark ripple followed us into the glaring lights of the mostly empty space.
We barely made it ourselves, blowing out a tire on the ledge and scraping the floor, courtesy of our sagging rear end. But it wasn’t sagging as badly as before, and suddenly I could reach the gas pedal and see at the same time. Which would have been great, except that what I saw was a pylon heading straight for us.
I swerved but we still clipped the edge and went skidding around in a circle on a great wash of sparks. But at least I figured out what Fred had meant. Because clattering along behind us was what looked like half a mile of fencing, some of it with the posts still attached.
And trying to hang on to the bouncing, bucking, twisting mass was a very pissed-off war mage.
I blinked, sure I was seeing things. But if I was, I was still seeing them when I opened my eyes. It was Pritkin, and he wasn’t alone.
Three other guys were hanging on with him, and they looked pretty normal—jeans, dark jackets, dark hair—as far as I could tell in the brief glimpse I got before they slammed into the wall. But I didn’t think they were. Because while one hit an open space and catapulted over the side of the garage, the others acted like crashing into concrete at fifty miles an hour was a minor inconvenience.
They jumped back to their feet and, a second later, they jumped Pritkin.
I’d have thought they were using shields, but I didn’t see any, except for Pritkin’s—right before it popped. I stared, getting a really, really nasty feeling of déjà vu all of a sudden. And then I grabbed Fred with my free hand. “Do you have a gun?”
“What?”
“A gun! A gun!”
“Of course I have a gun. I’m a bodyguard,” he said, with no irony whatsoever.
“Then shoot them!”
“I . . . I’m actually better with a sword—”
“But you do know how to shoot, right?”
“Well, you know. Sort of—”
“Damn it!” I grabbed a gun out of the holster under his arm and thrust him into the driver’s seat. “Drive!”
Pritkin saw me as we careened back toward the fight, listing badly now thanks to our blown back tire, and his eyes widened. He ducked a punch that cracked a pylon and then shook his head violently, shouting something that I couldn’t hear over the ear-piercing screech of metal on concrete. And then he threw himself to the ground as I squeezed off a shot.
It must have missed, because the mage I’d been aiming for didn’t so much as flinch before throwing out a hand—and a spell. But the very familiar red lightning bolt crashed into the ceiling instead of our heads, due to Pritkin swiping the guy’s legs out from under him at the last second. A choking cloud of dust and rubble poured down from above, along with pieces of mangled rebar and the front half of a Nissan Sentra. And then a spell from the other mage took a man-sized chunk out of the floor, spraying concrete hail in my face.
But none of that seemed to intimidate Fred, who had apparently decided to solve the problem by just running everybody down. At least, I assumed that was why we were suddenly headed straight for the trio and picking up speed. They paused, staring at the mangled SUV with the flapping tire and the crazy vamp driver and the dustcovered woman brandishing a gun like she actually knew how to use it.
And then they abruptly hurled themselves to either side.
“What are you doing?” I yelled at Fred, who looked at me wildly.
“Did I mention that I don’t know how to drive?”
“No!” I said, as we pelted off the side of the garage, snatching Pritkin along for the ride.
The charm caught us before we’d fallen more than a story, sending us dipping and bobbing and listing in a circle, heading back in exactly the wrong direction. I grabbed the wheel and wrenched it to the right, but it was too late. The two mages launched themselves off the side of the garage, one grabbing the fence in midair, and the other—
“Crap,” I said, as heavy boots dented the top of the SUV.
And then my gun was up and I was firing.
There was no way I missed him this time. I emptied a clip into the roof, saw bullets punch through felt and metal, knew they must have connected. But no body hit the roof or fell over the side, and a second later a spell slammed down through the middle seat, crumpling the roof like aluminum foil and knocking a two-foot hole through the bottom of the chassis.
The next one would probably have knocked a hole in me, too, but we suddenly streamed under an overpass, missing the clearance by pretty much nothing at all. It was close enough to skin the top of the SUV, to pop the headlights and to bathe the car in a shower of sparks. Close enough to have me hunkering down, seriously afraid that the roof was about to cave the rest of the way in.
Close enough to smash our assailant face-first into concrete.
I stared at Fred as we exited the other side, sans unwanted passenger. “I thought you didn’t know how to drive!”
“I don’t!”
“Then what was that?”
He stared at me, confused. “What was what?”
I didn’t answer, too busy vaulting over the seat to stare down through the smoking hole. I spotted Pritkin getting dragged along underneath, clinging to the fence and staring up at me with a bone white face. And then smacking into a pylon and yelling something that looked really profane.
I seconded the emotion, because three mages were somehow still dragging along after him.
“Son of a bitch!”
“What is it?” Fred demanded.
“There’s three more mages down there!”
“What? But there should only be one!”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I snarled, as one of them tried to sling another spell at us, only to have Pritkin all but wrench his arm off. One of the others responded by trying to do the same to Pritkin’s head, but he must have gotten his shields back up, because it didn’t work. But shields wouldn’t last long, not against these guys.
I crawled back up to Fred. “Change of plan.”
“We have a plan?”
“We do now.”
Pritkin’s shields might not work against the mages, but they worked well enough on most other things. I just had to find the right other things. Fortunately, there were plenty of options.
“Aren’t you taking this thing?” Fred demanded, as I got a knee up on the seat so I could see outside.
“No, you’re driving.”
“Didn’t you hear me? I don’t know how!”
“You’re doing fine so far. Just hold the gas pedal down and keep the steering wheel steady. I’ll correct if you get off course.”
“Gas pedal,” he said, looking panicked. “Which one is that?”
“The one your foot is on.”
“And which is the brake?”
“You’re not going to need the brake,” I told him, and yanked the wheel hard to the right.
We zipped back toward the garage and the row of buildings it serviced, the fence streaming out behind us like the tail on a very strange kite. “You can see, right?” Fred asked nervously.
“Yes.”
“Good. ’Cause with this damn hood in my way, I’m almost—Auggh! What was that?”
“It’s okay, you’re doing fine.”
“But I hit something!”
“You should probably get used to it,” I told him, staring out the back window.
The mostly flat-topped Vegas roofs are nothing like the slick fronts presented to the public. Along with the usual clutter of satellite dishes, old antennas and solar cells, they also house the city’s massive air conditioners, since sand clogs up the works if they’re left on the ground. And I made sure that we didn’t miss a single one, hurling the mages back and forth between giant units like very unhappy Ping-Pong balls.
Pritkin was still yelling, but I couldn’t hear him over the wind and Fred’s cursing and some weird noises coming from overhead, like leather sheets caught in a hurricane. But at least no one was trying to kill him right now. They were too busy hanging on for dear life.
And, unfortunately, they were hanging on pretty damn well. The mage near the end went flying when we tore around a corner, snapping out the wildly bucking fence like a towel in a locker room. But the other two were higher up and they grimly held on, despite smashing through a greenhouse, skimming across a pile of old bricks and then slapping face-first into a wall.