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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.
