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Caleb put a meaty hand behind his neck and rubbed it as if he had a headache. “There might have been some kind of . . . miscommunication . . . about you.”
The panic of a dozen near misses in the last twenty-four hours crowded the back of my throat, jostling for room with more current fears. Like Pritkin not making it out of the death trap I’d dragged him into. Like the fact that that little speech of his was suddenly sounding a lot like good-bye. And the fact that there wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do about it as drained as I was.
I really needed somebody to yell at, and Caleb was handy.
“A miscommunication?” I asked him furiously. “Which one would that be? When the warrant was issued for my arrest? Or when the shoot to kill order was given? Or, hey, maybe it was when the huge freaking bounty was put on my head!”
It was Caleb’s turn to do the slow blink thing. “If a mistake was made, you have a legitimate grievance,” he said. “But dying to prove a point won’t help anybody. Pritkin was right: there’s a war on and we need a Pythia. If you’re it, you have a responsibility.”
“My responsibility is the people I brought down here!”
“Pritkin and I will get out!” Caleb said, looking exasperated. “And when you do, I’ll be with you.”
“Cassie!”
“I can shift away if need be,” I reminded him. “Shouldn’t you send someone in the car who doesn’t have a life preserver?”
He regarded me narrowly. “You can still shift?”
“Absolutely.”
Caleb didn’t look happy, but he nodded. “All right, then. Stay here. I’ll come get you in a few minutes.”
“I’d rather be doing something.”
“All right. You could help by getting people sorted into a vehicle with a competent driver. They don’t have to navigate—there’s only one way out. But they have to be able to drive a stick.”
“Got it.”
Caleb took over at the tunnel’s mouth again, while Tremaine and I grabbed the dust-covered prisoners and stuffed them into cars. The line was moving swifter now, a blur of color and noise as cars made their way along a tunnel that was scarcely wider than some of them. I assumed the Consul’
s chauffeurs were vampires, and with their reflexes, a tight squeeze didn’t matter. But some of these drivers weren’t as skilled. I saw more than one fender get crushed as the car behind it got a little overly enthusiastic, and a number of polished side panels were going to need repainting from scraping against unforgiving rock.
And then the end of the line rolled into place, the last car for the last group out the door. I slipped toward the tunnel’s mouth in time to see a familiar blond head and pair of broad shoulders emerge. For some reason, Pritkin was facing backward.
“Pritkin!” I ran toward him, almost dizzy with relief, only to hear a thundering thud overhead and to have him obscured by a billowing cloud of thick red dust.
“In the car! Everybody in the car!”
I distantly heard Caleb’s voice, but I couldn’t find him. The exhaust fumes and the dust were a choking, blinding mist, the floor shook violently under my feet and rocks and gravel rained down on my head. Then something hit me in the temple, driving me to my knees, and the world went red.
And then nothing.
Chapter Ten
I woke up to find myself lying in a backseat, draped over a couple of smelly red men. Tremaine and Caleb looked like the Blue Man Group would if they’d suddenly changed their color scheme—completely coated in a thick red paste from head to foot. Dust and sweat, I realized as my eyes managed to fully focus. And I was in no better shape myself.
My lungs felt caked with about an inch of desert and I was having trouble breathing. I managed to cough, and that was both good and bad, because it opened my airway a little more, but then I couldn’t stop. I coughed and hacked and gagged and coughed some more until I was sure I was going to bring my lungs up.
It would have helped to have had some water, but there wasn’t any. Because we weren’t out of the woods yet. I slid into the modest gap between the two mages and peered over the seat. A red man who I vaguely recognized as Rafe was at the wheel. The speedometer said eighty-six despite the fact that the narrow red tunnel we were hurtling down couldn’t have been more than half an inch away from the car on either side.
Pritkin was riding shotgun, but he didn’t turn around to look at me. I sat back and tried not to stare at the almost hypnotic tunnel arrowing out in front of us. I heard a distant thud and the walls shook. No one said anything, but Tremaine’s hand gripped the door handle tight enough to crack his coating of mud.
“What was that?” I asked when the shaking finally stopped.
“Another level collapsing on top of us,” Tremaine answered, sounding a little choked.
“We had to go down a freight elevator to a lower level to avoid being crushed,” Caleb added. His voice was expressionless, but his hands kept clenching and unclenching on his thighs.
