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“You know, watching his shifting.”
Gwen gasped. “You’ve been looking at his shifter?”
“Would you just shut up!” She swerved around another car.
They were only three cars back. She looked at the back of the Escalade with its tinted black windows. The license plate had no numbers on it. It sent a chill down her spine. She wondered where they were taking him. Out of the city, maybe. It didn’t matter. The beginnings of a plan were forming in her mind. It was simple, but effective. She would offer them something. Something, she was sure, they would be interested in.
Maddy changed lanes and jumped another car length ahead. The Escalades were only two cars ahead, although traffic was teeming.
“We’re almost there,” she said, feeling a sudden surge of hope.
Then it happened.
What Maddy saw, her brain could not process at first. Her mind registered it only as a shape, a dark shape landing on the roof of the last Escalade. She heard the crunch of collapsing metal, followed by a rain of broken safety glass that pelted against the Ferrari’s windshield.
Slowly, slowly, her brain began to accept the images her eyes were sending, and the shape became clearer. It had a shimmering black body and vast, bat-like wings.
It had more than one head, she realized, like black snakes bursting forth from its body, horns that erupted out of its back like twisted tree limbs. A long, black tail whipped against the palm trees. Framed by the famous skyline, looming over the busy freeway traffic, the burning thing turned to look at her with strange, iridescent pairs of eyes. A sudden, overwhelming feeling hit her. It was the same feeling she had felt in the bio lab that previous night. A kind of mortal, suffocating dread.
Maddy now knew what she was looking at. She knew what had just landed on top of the Escalade. She froze in the driver’s seat, paralyzed by terror.
“What is that?” Gwen cried, the sound of her voice like tearing metal.
“Dark Angel,” Maddy whispered.
“What?” Gwen shrieked.
Maddy watched as the demon leapt off the moving Escalade and onto the next. The Escalade buckled and spun wildly against the concrete median before rolling back into traffic, right at them.
“Maddy!” Gwen yelled.
The destroyed SUV tumbled toward them like a bowling ball of death. Maddy snapped the wheel to the right and the Ferrari swerved. The car growled like a wild animal as they swung around the rolling vehicle.
Gwen started screaming something, but Maddy couldn’t hear her. She was hypnotized, riveted with fear. She watched the demon tear open the roof of the SUV with its various mouths and begin pulling Angels out of the vehicle and tossing them onto the freeway. Guardians were torn to pieces, their wings ripped from their bodies. Immortal parts rained down on the road. The demon reached in and pulled a struggling Angel out like he was a doll. Maddy’s heart hammered in her chest.
“Jacks!” she screamed.
She could see him now. He was in the arms of that burning thing, his eyes wild. It’s taking Jackson. It was the first rational thought Maddy had since the demon appeared. It’s got him now and it’s going to take him.
The demon lifted off the SUV and rose. Ascending over Angel City in the twilight, it was gone.
Maddy could barely focus through the fog of shock and terror as the second Escalade clipped the first and both vehicles rolled over and tumbled across the freeway, knocking cars into one another.
There was no time to think anymore, only to react.
“Crashing car!” Gwen yelled as a Civic ricocheted toward them.
“I see it!” Maddy yelled, and yanked at the wheel.
“Another crashing car!” Gwen yelped, and pointed at a truck that was hurtling toward them. Maddy veered around it; the twisted metal missed them by inches.
“Tell me where it is, Gwen,” Maddy said, keeping her eye on the chaos in front of her, trying to snatch glimpses up at the sky.
“Where what is?!” Gwen panted, her fingernails digging into the leather seat.
“The demon. Tell me where it is.”
“It’s a demon?” Gwen gasped in horror, “Like in the olden days?”
