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And the other half spinning straight at us.
“How things usually go,” I told him, and floored it.
Chapter Twenty-four
The engine must have caught at some point, because we shot ahead, the luxury projectile missing us by inches. I swerved and stomped on the brakes, avoiding another car but slinging us into the fence. I barely noticed, because I was sure the limo had just taken out the diner and everyone in it.
Only it hadn’t.
I stared through the cracked and bloody windshield at the limo’s backside, which was sticking, cantilevered, out of a wavering field of energy. Unlike Pritkin’s seamless blue shields, this one was a patchwork of colors and textures that ran and muddied together as they fought each other and the car. But somehow, they’d stopped it. Like a fish caught in a net, the huge hunk of twisted metal hung there, eight or nine feet off the ground, quivering and shaking—and leaking.
Something was dripping from the tail end, enough to form a puddle on the ground below. It reflected the sparks still shooting from the ruined sign, which were showering both the car and the puddle. It took my half-frozen brain a second to realize what I was seeing, and then I was fumbling with the gears, shoving the SUV hard into reverse.
“What now?” Fred demanded.
“Gas!” I said, stomping on the pedal while the war mages scattered, shields retracting around their owners or being thrown in front of the diner in a last-ditch attempt to protect the people inside. And the car—
“Shiiit!” Fred screamed as it exploded midfall, sending a cloud of lethal projectiles scattering in all directions.
I ducked—there was no time for anything else—only to find the floor already occupied. I covered my head as we bounced backward, still moving but not fast enough to avoid the spear of metal that obliterated the remains of the windshield. Glass exploded through the small space, stinging my arms and sending a wet trickle sliding down my temple. But thanks to the dash, the rest of me fared better.
Although not as well as Fred, who had been cowering on the floorboard.
“You’re supposed to be a bodyguard!” I said, hitting the brake.
“I am.”
“Then what are you doing down there?”
“I’m not a very good bodyguard.”
“Get up!” I yanked him off the floor, intending to use vampire vision to help me spot Pritkin in the chaos. But before I could get a word out, the scene in front of us tilted, the diner skewed wildly to the left and then disappeared entirely, replaced by a dizzying view of darkened buildings and a star-flung sky.
“What’s happening? What’s happening?” Fred demanded hysterically, grabbing me as I grabbed the steering wheel to keep from sliding through the missing windshield.
I didn’t reply, because it was taking all my concentration not to lose my grip while spinning in a kaleidoscope of falling glass and debris. Like the limo, the SUV had risen into the air; unlike the limo, it was slowly flipping end over end, slinging the headlights in a wide parabola that intermittently highlighted the escalating fight below.
“Where’re the controls?” I yelled at Fred, as we tumbled around like two sheets in a dryer.
“What controls?”
“For the charm!”
“What charm?”
“The one you just hit!” I said furiously, as half a dozen mages suddenly went flying.
It looked like they’d been blown sky high by some sort of explosion, only I hadn’t seen one—or much of anything else except for Fred’s size-nine shoe. But something scary was down there. Because the man who rocketed by the windshield had the closest thing to fear I’d ever seen on a war mage’s face.
I knocked Fred’s foot aside and started frantically searching under the dash.
A lot of cars in the supernatural community are equipped with levitation charms to access the ley lines, many of which don’t follow the ground. But those usually belong to mages, who are the main users of the earth’s magical highway system. Vampires tend to avoid areas that can incinerate a person in seconds without proper shields, which even masters don’t have.
As a result, I’d come into contact with the lines and the vehicles that used them only recently. And it hadn’t been in the kind of leisurely way that allowed for a lot of questions—like what the damn charm was supposed to look like. But if it wasn’t so goddamned dark—
I’d barely had the thought when a blow interrupted the spin cycle, sending us sailing backward on a wash of heat and light. That turned out to be a good thing, since the space we’d been occupying was suddenly filled with diner. We slammed into a building across the street in a crunch of whiplash-inducing speed, and the chrome roof of the restaurant shot spaceward, shedding burning detritus like a Roman candle rocket ship out of an old Buck Rogers film.
The car scraped off the bricks and drifted back into the street, listing a little to the left like an old drunk, while the diner arced impossibly high above us. It trembled against the night for a long moment, as if it really intended to leave gravity behind. And then it plunged back to earth in a hail of bricks and old floor tiles and flaming orange Naugahyde.
