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He looked up just in time to see a woman standing in the middle of the road.
Grabbing the steering wheel with one hand and the cigar with the other, he swerved to the left and slammed his boot down on the brake.
Tires screeched as the vehicle came to a halt in the middle of both lanes, steering wheel juddering in hand. Luckily, there were no other cars around but his, no pedestrians except the one.
And luckily, he’d managed not to hit the fool who’d decided to stand in the middle of the damn road at night.
The woman—a hellseher, no older than twenty, maybe twenty-one—squinted in the glow of the headlights. Slowly, she began shuffling toward the vehicle.
But she stopped walking nearly as soon as she’d started, her upper body half-turning in the other direction, ready to bolt at the first sign of danger. Her white t-shirt and jeans were soaked and speckled with mud. Her chin-length hair might’ve been blonde, but it was too filthy to tell for certain, never mind how this road was heavily shadowed from a lack of streetlights, making it difficult to see anything. The ivory skin of her arms was flecked with shallow scratches, purple bruises, and more mud.
The leather of the back seat groaned as Tanner shifted forward to get a better look. “Think it’s a trap?”
Slowly, Max turned around in his seat.
Tanner was staring through the windshield, head jutting forward like a chicken’s. When he noticed Max’s attention on him, he began to pull it back. “What?” Tanner demanded.
“Who the hell would be dumb enough to set a trap for three armed Devils in the middle of the night?”
Tanner frowned. “Lionel?”
Lace didn’t look at either of them when she spoke. “Lionel’s smarter than that. If this is a trap, it’s a stupid one made by a stupid person on the wettest night of the stupid year.” That about summed up how everyone was feeling after Kalendae. They were all still rattled, still trying to come to grips with the crazy shit that’d happened and move on.
Max put the vehicle in park and opened his door. He placed a booted foot on the running board and rested a hand on the roof.
“Hey!” he called into the damp night. The woman flinched at the sound of his voice. “Are you hurt?”
She gaped at him in confusion, her eyes—bolted wide with fear, the irises a preternatural, crystal-blue—flicking about the area. There was a vacancy to them, as if she were seeing things no one else could. It made Max’s skin crawl.
Maybe she was on something. It wouldn’t surprise him; Angelthene’s drug problem was at a record high, and it was only getting worse every day.
“Is there someone I can call for you?” Max tried again. Her teeth were chattering, and she mumbled something he couldn’t hear. Max cupped a hand to his ear. “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. The river, the rain.” He gestured about the area with a sweep of his hand, to which the woman flinched again.
When she spoke, she used a language he wasn’t familiar with.
Lace whispered, “What did she say?”
“She’s speaking Ilevyn,” Tanner replied.
There was a beat of silence as everyone’s thoughts presumably went to the same place.
Lace said, “Isn’t that a dead language?” It certainly was.
Max made to step down from the vehicle, but just as he was lowering his boot, the woman turned and ran in the opposite direction.
“Hey!” he shouted. He jumped off the running board and took off after her. Behind him, he heard Lace and Tanner opening their doors.
Max ran down the road, grunting as his boots caught on sharp rocks and slipped in slick mud. Cold air whipped past, filling his open jacket like wind in a sail. He kept calling after the woman, but she did not turn around, nor did she slow.
How was she so fast? Was he really so exhausted and mentally troubled that he couldn’t keep up with a woman who was practically half his size, and with far shorter legs than his?
Another minute passed before he cursed and slowed to a stop.
To hell with this. If she wasn’t interested in getting help, he would let her run.
Still, he found that he kept watching her, remembering how he’d felt in his days as an older brother worrying about his little sister.
There had to be a good reason she was out here alone in the dead of night in a city like Angelthene. That look of bone-deep fear in her eyes had been put there by someone. Someone who’d given her a reason to run, to be reluctant to trust anyone who offered to help her. It was for this reason that Max’s boots stayed rooted in place.
