Page 61 of All Her Ghosts

“What?”

Bas cracks an aching smile.

“Get in the fucking car.”

CHAPTER 18

Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting

“1000 Ships of the Underworld” by Two Steps From Hell

Bas hops into the driver’s seat but halfway out of the parking spot—me sweating bullets, elbow-deep in the engine block—the stupid car dies.

“It keeps trying to turn off without the key,” I wheeze. “I can’t hold it from the passenger seat.”

Teeth clenched, Bas shakes his head.

“We don’t have time to hot-wire it,” he says, already folding himself between the seats, clawing into the back. “You drive.”

I scramble clumsily behind the wheel. My boots catch on the shifter. My elbow bangs hard into the window, icicle pain screaming up my arm. Every wasted, clumsy second sounds an alarm in my head. I can taste something awful in the air, blaring through the jeep’s heaters—something too like river reeds and finality.

Jamming my fingers into the empty key slot, I flood the engine. Lights flicker on the dash. The alternator complains, some vital thing under the hood clattering, threatening to break. I won’t let it. Party trick hazing out around my body, I stomp a foot into the ground, toesreaching for a power line. One massive fist closes around the car battery. In the side-view mirror, my eyes flare an unholy night-sky blue. Starlit and screaming through my teeth, Iamthe circuit—

I amdying. My spine rockets hard into the seat. My muscles seize. I taste blood in my mouth. In the rearview mirror, my pupils narrow to pinpricks, vessels bursting in the whites of my eyes. Any more and my skin cocoon will shred, spilling me out to soar free of this clinging, claustrophobic meat. My ocean sings a sweeter song than any on my playlist, the void calling mehome, home, home.

Bas’s grieving eyes flicker in my head. His pain sears me hotter than my own.

Not yet.No.I have work to do.

The car roars awake. I snap back into my body, every bone an aching, fallow field.

“Shut up,” I snarl at it, “stop whining,” and stomp on the gas.

I take a right at the end of the aisle, following the SUV, but I can’t see where it went. Too soon, I have to turn off—the road blocked by flea market vendors—and I know they can’t have cut a path through this traffic with any kind of speed. Shoving myself up as high as I can in my seat, I scan over the crowds for some clue, something,anything. Where would Cain have gone?

In the distance, I spot a huge building,auctionspicked out in white shingles on its slate-gray roof. Auctions mean livestock, furniture, and farm equipment—I bet they have a loading dock, a separate entrance to keep from clogging up traffic. But several parking lots sit between me and them, and I don’t have time for this.

Grappling my seat belt on, I cut the wheel, carving a mean serpentinecourse between parked cars, angling straight for the auction building. Above us, the helicopter rounds on its circuit again, flying low enough to rattle my teeth. Abruptly, it cuts off sideways. It passes me, outpacing me, headed in my same direction.

“They’re flanking him,” Bas says, gripping my headrest so hard the fabric darkens, heat shimmers dusting his bare arms in gold.

“I’ve got this,” I bark.

Cutting the wheel again, I barrel out into the main road between lots, picking up speed. Up ahead, people scatter, screaming, shouting protests. Two black SUVs shoot out of a seller’s corridor ahead of me, rubber burning on spitting gravel—and it’s supposed to be a one-way road, but they don’t let up on the gas, flying straight at me.

A cool mist fills my brain. Every thought, every fear, evaporates.

They want to play chicken? Withme? Some feral dead thing dragged backward out of hell and seventeen years homesick?

Knuckles white on the wheel, head down, I hit the gas. The SUVs blare their horns; I stare them down. I flood power through the engine, demanding more, faster, smoke curling from under the hood and my poor jeep screaming louder than the helicopter up above. Forty feet and closing, thirty, twenty—

This close, a hot shard of sunlight cuts through their mirrored windshields. The driver closest to me stares at me in horror, the whites of his eyes bared, lips moving in prayer, in an unheard curse, and good luck to him—

—ten feet, five—

Because the only gods listening are us.

The opposing driver wrenches his wheel, veering off into the gutter.In the crash of his bumper into the embankment, I almost miss the distantboomof an explosion, a muffled series ofcrack-crack-cracks.