I exhaled. Bria was alive, which meant that I still had a chance to save her and Catalina.
I was driving so fast that I couldn’t tell which side of the bridge Benson was on, but I was sure that he was here somewhere. I would have been. But it didn’t much matter. I was killing everyone who stood between Bria and Catalina and me. If I got Benson here at the bridge, all the better. But if I had to come back for him later, that was fine too.
I was fifty feet away from the bridge and closing fast.
Forty feet . . . thirty . . .
I reached up, tightening the seat belt over my chest.
Twenty feet . . . ten . . .
I grabbed hold of my Stone magic and used it to harden my body into an impenetrable shell. The crash would be brutal, and I couldn’t afford to get knocked unconscious.
Seven feet . . . five . . . three . . . two . . . one—
My car rammed into the roadblock.
The air bag exploded in my face, momentarily obscuring my vision before finally deflating. The vamps had been so focused on killing Bria and Catalina that they didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late. Two of them dived out of the way, but the third man wasn’t so lucky. He rolled up and over my windshield, cracking the glass with his head, before vanishing from view. Even if he wasn’t dead, he wouldn’t be getting up from that anytime soon.
I’d built up so much speed that the force of the crash was hard and violent enough to slam the vamps’ first vehicle into the second one, forcing it up and back over a curb and then careening across the thin strip of grass, down the briar-covered bank, and into the river fifty feet below. One of the men had ducked behind that second car for cover, and a scream tore through the air as it slammed into him, knocking him out into the open air. A loud splat sounded as he belly-flopped into the surface of the river. A second later, the water grabbed hold of the car and sucked it under too.
I grinned. Well, that was one way to break up a roadblock.
But I wasn’t done yet. I threw my car into reverse, backing up about twenty feet, then shoved it into drive and rammed forward into the first car again, sending it up and over the curb too. But this impact wasn’t as hard as the initial one, so I kept my foot on the gas, engine whining, tires screeching, the acrid scents of burning rubber and exhaust flooding the air. Finally, gravity took over, and that first car started sliding down the riverbank and crashed through the tangle of briars to join the second one already in the water. This end of the bridge was now clear.
I threw my vehicle into park. Then I grabbed a couple of guns out of my bag, unsnapped my seat belt, and kicked open the driver’s-side door. I got to my feet and had started to run around the front of my car when I spotted a movement out of the corner of my eye. I pivoted in that direction—
Crack!
A bullet thunked into my chest, but my silverstone vest caught the projectile. Even if it hadn’t, I was still holding on to my Stone magic to protect myself. My gaze snapped over to the third vamp, who had somehow survived the crashes and careening cars. With one hand, he clutched the bridge railing for support. With the other, he raised his gun at me again, his finger squeezing back the trigger.
Click.
Click. Click.
Click.
He kept pulling and pulling the trigger, with the same empty result every time. I smiled, raised one of my own guns, and shot him three times in the chest. He was dead before he hit the ground.
But I was already moving, running toward the sedan in the middle of the bridge, my boots crunching through the glass, bullet casings, and smoking, twisted bits of metal that littered the asphalt.
“Bria! Catalina!” I screamed.
“Gin!” Bria yelled back. “We’re here!”
I reached the driver’s side of the sedan and glanced in through the busted-out window. Catalina was crouched on the floor of the passenger’s side of the car, with Bria draped over her, shielding the younger woman as best she could. My gaze flicked over them. Bloody cuts had sliced across their hands, arms, and faces from all the flying glass, but neither one of them seemed to be seriously injured—
Crack!
Crack! Crack!
Crack!
I ducked down beside the car as more bullets came zipping in my direction, my head snapping to the right.
The men on the far side of the bridge had gotten over their surprise, had pulled out their own guns, and were now firing at the sedan, trying to kill me, along with Bria and Catalina. I raised one of my own guns and returned fire, but I spotted at least eight men on that side of the bridge, all armed.
And Benson was there too.
The vampire kingpin stood about twenty feet behind his men, off to the left. He wore his usual white pants and sneakers, with a mint-green shirt and matching bow tie, his pen and notepad in his hands, as though he had been writing down details about the firefight. I didn’t see Silvio anywhere. I wondered if he’d known about his boss’s ambush plans. Maybe that’s what he’d been texting Catalina about, warning her not to let Bria drive onto the bridge.
Benson’s gaze met mine. But instead of seeming concerned that I was here, he tapped his pen against his lips before scribbling down another note.
“Gin!” Bria yelled.
“We have to get out of here!” I yelled back, pushing all thoughts of Benson’s odd quirks out of my mind. “Now! Crawl out the windshield! I’ll cover you!”
I raised my guns and fired again, as Bria slithered out the front windshield and onto the hood of the car, then reached back inside to help pull Catalina out. The two of them had just slid down in front of the hood when my guns click-click-clicked empty. Disgusted, I threw them aside.
The vamps realized that I was out of ammo, and they rose from behind their cars and took aim at me again—
Crack!
Crack! Crack!
Crack!
I tensed, expecting to feel more bullets slamming against my body, but this time, the vamps weren’t the ones shooting.
Xavier was.
The giant had finally arrived, zooming up the street and turning his car at an angle on the road. I saw him lean out the driver’s-side window and start firing at the vamps. One of them went down, then another one.
But it wasn’t going to be enough.
Xavier was on the wrong side of the bridge, and there was no way we could get to the giant without going through Benson and all of his men. Some of the vamps whirled around to fire at Xavier, but the others eased out from behind their cars, guns in their hands, and started creeping in this direction.
“They’re coming!” I yelled, backing up. “We have to get off the bridge! Now!”
Bria nodded. She grabbed Catalina’s hand, pulled the younger woman to her feet, and started running.
I turned and followed them.
18
Bria, Catalina, and I raced toward my smashed-up car at this end of the bridge.
Crack!
Crack! Crack!
Crack! Crack! Crack!
The vampires kept firing, and bullets zipped through the air all around us. I kept my hold on my Stone magic, running directly behind Bria and Catalina and trying to use my body to screen them from the bullets as best I could.
Crack!
A bullet punched into the middle of my back. My vest caught it, but the hard, direct impact still made me stagger forward. My boots skidded through a patch of broken glass, and I had to windmill my arms to keep from falling flat on my ass. But I managed to regain my balance and keep going.
Catalina tried the passenger door of my car, but it wouldn’t budge, so she wrenched open the back door and threw herself inside. Bria followed her. I ran around and jumped into the driver’s seat. I’d left the engine running, so all I had to do was throw the car into gear, stomp down on the gas, and wrench the steering wheel.
The Aston fishtailed wildly at the sudden, sharp turn, with metal, glass, and more crunching under the tires, but I forced the wheel and the car in the
direction I wanted to go—as far away from the vamps as I could get.
The street ahead was still deserted, probably on Benson’s orders, but that was actually going to help us now. The car straightened out, and the engine started humming as we picked up speed.
For a moment, I thought that we were actually going to make it.
Crack!
But then a bullet sliced through one of the rear tires, the air escaping with a sad sigh. Still, I put my foot down on the gas, trying to make it as far as I could on the deflating rubber. The car thump-thump-thumped along for about a block, before white sparks started flying up from the undercarriage. I steered the car over to the curb, stopped, and jammed the gearshift into park.
“Out, out, out!” I yelled.
I grabbed my duffel bag with its supplies from the front passenger seat, then kicked open the driver’s-side door again and got out. Bria and Catalina were already waiting on the street. Catalina was holding her hand to her forehead, blood trickling out between her fingers from a nasty cut. Blood covered Bria’s face, hands, and arms, but she had her gun out and pointed at the street behind us, watching our backs.
And with good reason.
Four vamps had made it to the end of the bridge and were running in our direction. They must have all had a pint or two of blood recently, because they were closing faster than Olympic sprinters racing toward the finish line.
But the charging men didn’t worry me as much as the SUVs did.
In the distance, at the far end of the bridge, I could see the remaining vamps opening doors and climbing into the vehicles. One of the SUVs lurched forward and rammed into Bria’s sedan, trying to push it out of the way and cross the bridge. The tires screech-screech-screeched as the other SUVs whipped into U-turns, probably heading to the next bridge over so they could zoom across it and come at us from that direction too. If they got ahead of us, they could cut us off, then wait for the vamps to come up from the rear and box us in. We needed to be out of here before that happened, or we were dead.
“Now what?” Catalina asked, her panicked gaze flicking back and forth from the vamps to Bria to me.
I hefted my duffel bag a little higher on my shoulder. “We run.”
• • •
I darted onto the sidewalk, with Catalina and Bria beside me, and raced toward the closest alley. Catalina glanced back over her shoulder, shoving her hair out of her face so she could see the men still chasing us. But she wasn’t watching where she was going, so she banged into a mailbox and stumbled forward several feet before she regained her balance.
“Don’t look back!” I yelled. “Just follow me!”
Catalina swiped some more blood off her face and gave me a quick, frightened nod.
I veered into the alley and zoomed over the cracked asphalt, darting around the overflowing Dumpsters, my boots sending crushed soda cans and crumpled paper bags skittering off in every direction. Behind me, I could hear Catalina’s and Bria’s footsteps smacking against the jagged pavement. I sucked in a breath and almost choked on the overwhelming stench of old take-out and other rotting garbage.
I reached the end of that alley and slowed down long enough to make sure that Benson and his SUVs full of vamps hadn’t reached this area yet. But the street was clear, so I darted across it and turned into the next alley we came to in order to lose the men chasing us on foot. Catalina followed me, with Bria watching our backs.
We ran out the far side of that second alley, and the landscape shifted, as though we’d stepped into a completely different world. Gone were the brick storefronts and smooth sidewalks that lined the street near the river. In their places stood dilapidated row houses, potholes big enough to blow out your tires, and yards covered with more trash than grass. Many of the houses had been tagged with rune graffiti that flowed across the cinder-block walls, down the cracked concrete steps, and out onto the sidewalks and the street beyond. The red and black smears of spray paint ringed the potholes like crooked streaks of lipstick.
At first glance, the area seemed deserted. No one was strolling down the sidewalks. No kids were playing with toys in the yards. No old folks were sitting on their front stoops, shooting the breeze and sipping glasses of iced tea. But all around me, the stone of everything from the street to the sidewalks to the houses whispered of the danger, despair, and desperation of the people who called this place home.
This was the heart of Southtown.
It was also the worst possible place for us to be right now, since it was deep in Benson’s territory.
My footsteps slowed as I glanced around, my head snapping left, then right, then back again. Thick brown sheets of cardboard held up with duct tape stretched across the windows of many of the houses, since the glass had been busted out long ago by bullets, fists, and rocks. Small holes had been cut here and there in the cardboard, and flashes of light and shadow appeared as folks peered out their peepholes at us, then scurried away. No doubt, someone was already dialing into Benson’s network, and word would soon reach him about our location. We needed to move.
“Gin?” Bria asked, stopping beside me, her breath coming in soft gasps as she put her hands on her knees. “Where to now?”
That was the question—and the answer would determine whether we lived or died.
I glanced at first one end of the block, then the other. Going south would take us back toward the river, which was no good, since Benson could always order more of his vamps to guard the bridges. The police station was about two miles north of here, but I doubted we could make it on foot without running into some of Benson’s men.
Killing my way through the vamp’s goons didn’t bother me. I could take care of myself. So could Bria. But blood was still oozing out of that gash on Catalina’s forehead, and her face was white with fear, adrenaline, and the strain of running so far so fast. I unzipped my duffel bag long enough to grab a tin of Jo-Jo’s healing ointment. The salve would take care of the ugly cut, but it wouldn’t be long before her body shut down completely and she went into shock, if she wasn’t already there.
“Here,” I said, shoving the tin into Catalina’s trembling hand. “Put that on your forehead.”
Catalina took the container, but instead of popping off the top, she hunched over between Bria and me, her hands on her knees, her breath coming in ragged puffs, her hazel gaze locked on a beer bottle sitting upright on the curb, one that wasn’t broken like all the others we’d waded through in the alleys.
Catalina stared and stared at that bottle, although I knew that she wasn’t really seeing it. I started to look away but found myself strangely hypnotized by the glint of the afternoon sun on the glass, making it flare with an inner amber fire. A faint breeze gusted down the street, tickling my nose with a hint of stale, sour beer.
The color, the smell, the fingers of wind tangling my sweaty hair . . . For a second, I was in another place, another time, another street where I was clutching a beer bottle, getting ready to cut that man to save Coral—
“Gin?” Bria asked again.
I snapped back to this place, this time, this street. I knew where to go now.
“This way.”
I hurried across the street, shoved through a gate in a chain-link fence, and jogged around the side of a house in the middle of the block. Classic jazz music purred out from behind the walls, and the whiff of fried meat seeped out of the cardboard-covered windows. I headed into the backyard, ducked under a clothesline filled with white undershirts and blue boxers that were snapping back and forth in the wind, and hopped over the waist-high fence at the edge of the yard.
Again and again, I repeated the process, cutting through yard after yard, taking a zigzag route, with Catalina and Bria behind me. Finally, we reached the last of the houses, but I didn’t slow my pace until we’d crossed another street and ducked into an alley. Even then, I kept going until I reached the apartment building in the center of the block.
I stopped in front of the back door of the building. It
was still red, although the color had long ago faded from that bright, glossy crimson I remembered to a dull, flat rust. More memories rose up in my mind about all the terrible things that had happened the day I’d followed Coral through that door, but I forced them back into the bottom of my brain. More terrible things were going to happen if I didn’t get Bria and Catalina out of here.
“Gin?” Bria asked, her gun still clutched in her hand, her head swiveling back and forth from one end of the alley to the other. “Why are we stopping?”
Instead of answering her, I dropped my bag onto the pavement and then crouched down in front of the door so that I was eye-level with the lock. Catalina slumped against the brick wall next to me, trying to get her breath back, her face even paler and bloodier than before. She still had that tin of Jo-Jo’s ointment clutched in her hands, and she started fumbling with the top, her bloody fingers slipping off the smooth surface.
“You still have your phone?” I asked Bria.
“Yeah. Why?”
“Text Xavier. See if he got away from Benson’s men and if his car is in one piece. Ask if he can pick you up at this address.” I rattled off a location.
Bria frowned, but she pulled out her phone and did as I asked. Meanwhile, I reached for my Ice magic, pulling the cool power up out of the deepest part of me and letting it flow out through my hand. A silver light flared in my right palm, centered in my spider rune scar. A second later, I was holding two slender Ice picks, which I inserted into the lock.
Bria’s phone beeped, and she read the message. “Yeah, Xavier’s fine. He’ll be at that location in five minutes.”
“Good.”
The tumblers clicked into place. I threw down my Ice picks, twisted the knob, and opened the door. The inside of the building was dim and murky, although I could see light spilling from the door at the far end of the hallway.
“Come on, Catalina,” I called out. “Just a little farther now. Go inside and wait for us. Bria will be there in a second.”