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"Well, don't." I wiped my face on my sleeve and kept my eyes forward. "Eyes on the road, Blackman."

"I'm not driving."

"Then eyes somewhere else, pigeon. Look at the corn for all I care."

He did look at the corn field. He did it without a single word of sarcasm, which from him is practically a declaration, and I had to grip the wheel tighter for a second.

After a couple of miles his hand came over onto the bench seat between us. Palm up. Not reaching, not asking, just there, the way you'd leave food out for something that doesn't trust you yet.

Lesson number twenty-six: the people who love you will let you go when you ask them to. Nobody warns you that it's worse.

I let his hand sit there for about a mile, because I'm like that. An asshole.

Then I took it.

It was as cold as a windowpane in February. Always cold now, but I'd stopped flinching, thankfully.

"Motels that take cash," I announced to the truck cabin.

"I have money."

"Course you do." My snort had no bite to it.

"Quite a lot, actually." I saw his lips twitch from the corner of my eye.

"Lucky you, and now lucky me." I stepped on the gas and the old truck complained about that. "We have four days, Blackman. Find my dad, get my book back, don't set anybody on fire in front of the Council and we'd be golden."

"That's three impossible things when we are talking about you."

"Yeah, well." The road came up straight and empty in front of us. "I'm extremely annoying, what can I say. Ask literally anyone about it and they'll tell you the same."

Chapter Nine

Ohio in November is a state that has given up trying.

River had one rule and he made me agree to it before we cleared the gate. No interstates. No straight lines. Nothing that runs in a direction a person could guess off a map. Whoever sits inside the pack reporting to someone that can control demons would need a lead or a direction to find us, he said. So a lead was the only thing we could actually take away from them.

This is why we spent the entire day driving in a circle.

We never got more than forty miles out of Cleveland either. That part was the idea of yours truly. Who said I couldn't be reasonable? Everybody expects the hunted thing to run, which means everybody looks far and wide. Two idiots in a beat-up truck on a county road inside the same forty miles as the coven that wants me dead is nobody's first guess.

Hiding in plain sight. Basically my whole childhood, except with better scenery.

Well, the scenery was the same three things over and over like a song with two chords. Corn stubble. Gray sky pressed down low enough to touch that could make a nun start drinking. And every fifteen miles the same set of lights that had been a hot spot in 1974 but now consisted of three buildings. A gas station, a church, and a bar with a handwritten sign arranged around a crossroads like three people who had stopped speaking to each other years ago.

I drove until my hands cramped and then I drove some more, because stopping meant thinking.

River didn't ask where we were going either. That was the strange mercy of the day. He sat with his knees against the dash, his head tipped back against the headrest and he let the miles pass by him. Every so often he would say something about a barn or a hawk on a wire, and I would grunt in answer. Then there would be another twenty minutes of engine noise and nothing else.

He used to fill silences. He used to fill them the way water fills a glass, easily, without seeming to try. Now he let them stretch until they were uncomfortable for both of us, not just me. I kept catching myself looking sideways at him or his reflection in the window, trying to work out whether that was the loss of the grace making him that way or it was just what a male does after he's been alone in a dark room for almost two weeks.

In the meantime, the heater smelled like dust burning off something that hadn't been used since March. I wouldn't be caught dead in a horrible truck like this, which was the whole point. I had to remind myself of that quite a few times.

We stopped twice. Once for gas outside Medina, where I sat on the hood of the truck and ate one of Amber's sandwiches. I also cried for approximately ten seconds before shutting that down. The second stop was at a rest area with a vending machine that took my dollar and gave me nothing, which I chose to take personally. My toe was smarting for over an hour after I kicked the cursed thing. River dealt with it by putting his palm flat against the glass until the machine made a noise like a dying beast and dropped four things at once.

"That's an abuse of power," I told him but scooped up my three treasures like a gluttonous vulture before he could take them all.

"It's a Snickers, Hazel. Not a heart transplant."