Crimson Wind (18 page)

“We need a screwdriver,” Max called to Alexander. “See if you can find a tool kit.”

“A screwdriver won’t work,” Baker said. “You need a lot more …..” He trailed off. “Never mind. If you can lift a car, you have all the torque you need to break the lock pins and start the car.”

Max grinned at him. “Perks of magic.”

There were no tools in the van, but Alexander found a screwdriver in a rusty ranch pickup a few cars away. Max jammed it into the lock, then backed away.

“You’d better do it,” she told him. “The lock will open for me, but then they’ll never get it restarted if they need to shut it down. Break the pins, and it won’t be a problem.”

He leaned in and twisted. There was a crackling noise as bits of metal snapped, and then the engine roared to life. He stepped back, and Baker got in.

“So how do we get to this Horngate place?” he asked after a moment of awkward silence.

“Wait! I don’t know if I want to go there,” Matthew said from the rear. He held the baby against his shoulder, rubbing her back. Amanda was propped against the window.

“Where else is there?” Geoff asked quietly. “None of us can go home. Do you have family or friends somewhere else who could put you up?”

“There have been eruptions all over the world,” Max said. “Anywhere you go, you’ll probably find trouble.”

“You think this isn’t the only one?” Geoff asked, looking like she’d clubbed him in the side of the head.

“I know it’s not.”

“So what makes you think this Horngate place is safe?” Baker asked.

“That’s a long story. But it
is
safer than most places for you right now.”

“Are there more people like you there?”

Max nodded. “And some who are even more ….. interesting.”

He scowled. “They’ll welcome us?”

“They will.” She hoped. Giselle had claimed that she wanted to make Horngate a sanctuary for humanity in this war the Guardians were waging, but the witch-bitch had never said whom she was willing to take in. Maybe she was looking for Nobel Prize winners or people she considered more deserving than a biker, a father, two teenagers, and a young family. On the other hand, fuck what Giselle wanted. Horngate was Max’s home, too, and these people needed a place to go.

“Give me that pad of paper and pen.” She pointed at the console. She wrote down directions and drew a map to Horngate. “Call this number first,” she said, writing down Niko’s cell number. “Hopefully they’ll still have phone service. Tell them I sent you. If you can’t reach them, then drive to Horngate. Someone will stop you, and you should give them this note. She jotted a few lines and handed the pad back to Baker. “Tell them what happened here.”

She stepped back, bumping into Alexander, who stood silently behind her. He put a hand on her shoulder to steady her. She twitched as she started to shake him off, then stood still.

“Things will be strange there,” she warned Baker.

His brows rose. “Stranger than that?” he asked incredulously, pointing toward the enchantment.

She shrugged. “You might think so.” She wondered what they’d think of the two angels. If any in the van had a religious bent, they might be a little thrown to find out that angels were creatures of magic, not holy messengers of God. “You’d better get going.”

Baker hesitated. “Maybe we should wait for the two of you to come with us.”

She shook her head. “We might not make it back.”

He sucked his teeth. “Then we go by ourselves. Good luck to you.” He put the van in gear, then looked out the window again. “Thanks for your help. We wouldn’t have made it out of there if not for you.” He pressed on the gas and waved, and the van sped away into the night.

Max watched the taillights grow smaller. “Our turn,” she said. “We’d better hurry.”

“Right this way,” Alexander said, pointing at a blue Toyota Corolla.

Max opened it up and popped the trunk.

“Nice talent, that one. Valery would envy you. You could be partners in crime.”

“You’ve got the amulet. You be her partner,” Max said, regretting the words as soon as they slipped out. She didn’t know why the question of the amulet was chewing on her so much. She had told Alexander to leave, to escape living under the control of a witch. Why should it bother her that the amulet might make going easier for him? She ought to be happy for him.

“I have a partner already,” he said, his eyes glittering.

“Me?”

“No one else.”

He was looking at her with that hungry look that curled her toes. It made her want to hit him. He was demanding so much more than she had to give. She had no
time
, dammit, and if she did— And if she did, what would she do with it? She thrust the question away. It was stupid to even think about it. Scooter was waiting for her.

“Primes don’t have partners,” she said curtly, and turned her back before he could reply.

She looked down into the trunk. It was full of clothes, ratty shoes, bats and mitts, greasy rags, empty oil bottles, a deflated car inner tube, three stained ties, a collection of hats touting various businesses, a plastic tarp, a sleeping bag, and a half dozen empty cartons of cigarettes. She started grabbing junk and dumped it onto the road. She wrinkled her nose. It smelled like the bottom of an ashtray that had been dropped into a Porta Potty. Riding inside was not going to be pleasant.

“We should find another car,” she said.

Alexander looked over his shoulder and grinned maliciously. “No time. Everything around here either has no trunk or is too small.” He waved his hand at the surrounding cars. “And we are in a hurry, right, boss?”

He made
boss
sound like an insult. And he was right.
Bastard
. She bared her teeth in a silent snarl and started grabbing the debris again.

Alexander abandoned her to unfold the windshield screens and start taping them together in a large silver quilt. When she’d cleared the trunk, Max went to help him, overlapping the screens before taping them. This was going to be her light-tight shelter inside what protection the trunk would offer—if the stench didn’t kill her first.

In a few minutes, they’d folded together a soft-sided rectangular box. The top remained open. Max would climb into it, and Alexander would finish taping it up and put her in the trunk.

“We’ll have to find another screwdriver if you want to be able to shut down the car,” she said.

“You forget, I am telekinetic. I can turn the lock with my mind.”

She
had
forgotten. “Then let’s load up and get going.”

“Hey! What are you doing with my car?”

A man in a wrinkled brown suit was jogging toward them, threading his way between the vehicles. His hair was thinning, and his face was florid. He had a cigarette pinched in the fingers of his right hand.

Alexander leaned his hip against the car. “You want me to handle this, boss?”

Max glowered at him, resisting the urge to kick his ribs in. “Oh, look. It’s Mr. Helpful. Where were you when I couldn’t find any underwear?”

She flushed as his gaze dropped, his eyes sharpening as if he could see through the denim of her pants.

“I said get away from my car!”

The car’s owner had stopped a few feet away. He was panting, and Max could smell his strong odor, like he hadn’t showered in three days and had dumped a bottle of cologne over himself to mask the stink. It hadn’t worked. He pointed with his cigarette hand.

“Back off! I mean it.”

“I’m sure you do, Spanky. But it isn’t going to happen,” Max said. “We’re taking your car. We need it more than you do at the moment.”

“Like hell you are, bitch. I’ll call the cops.” His face turned a darker shade of red, and he was spitting.

“You do that. C’mon, Slick. Let’s go.”

Spanky leaped in front of her as she started for the car. He was shaking as he stabbed the air in front of her face with his finger. He might need it broken to teach him some manners. Course, she
was
in the middle of stealing his car. He might deserve some leeway for that.

“You bitch! I am going to teach you a lesson.” He flicked his cigarette butt at her.

Max batted it aside. “You know,” she said, “the pointing was rude, but I was going to let that pass, because I can see how you’d be upset. I mean, sure, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and you’re probably going to die screaming any day now, but I get that seeing someone steal your car would make you mad enough to lose your manners. But the cigarette? That’s just uncalled for.”

She snatched him by the collar and lifted him off the ground. He gagged, and his feet kicked helplessly. His face turned more red, and she could hear his heart galloping like a frantic goat.

“Seeing as how I’m in a hurry and you’ve got some right to be pissed, I’ll let you off easy,” she said. She carried him over to the rear tire of a battered old pickup truck. “Hand me that inner tube,” she told Alexander.

He brought the discarded inner tube from the trunk to her, and she set her prisoner down on the ground beside the truck. She snapped the tube in half and then pulled away two long strips. Spanky watched her with openmouthed terror.

“Put your hands behind your back,” she said.

He complied slowly. She tied them tightly together, then used the second strip to make a large loop off his shackles. She motioned for Alexander to lift the truck up and slid the loop under the tire. Alexander eased the truck back down, and Spanky wasn’t going anywhere for a while. Not until someone came along to help him. A thought caught her. She bent and patted his pockets, then reached into his front right and fished out the keys.

“Let’s go,” she said, tossing them to Alexander.

Spanky said nothing as they loaded the trunk with the silver cocoon, the grocery bags, and the rowan spear. They lifted his car out from between the bumpers of the vehicles trapping it in place. They climbed in, and Alexander fitted the key into the ignition. The car roared to life, and they sped off north.

Max rolled the windows down, trying to clear the stench of stale food, cigarettes, and spilled coffee from the car. She looked into the backseat. It was knee-deep in snack wrappers, drink cups, and fast-food bags and boxes. Her tennis shoes clung stickily to the floor mat.

“Maybe we did him a favor, stealing this cockroach hotel,” she said.

She popped open the glove box. A bottle of Tums fell out. She riffled through the papers and found a map of California. She unfolded it, searching. “Looks like if we get off at Edgewood, that will take us to Gazelle. From there, we can get to the coast.” She showed him on the map. “That might be cutting it a little close, though. We could also go up to Yreka and not have to go back quite so far south.”

“Let us do that,” Alexander said. “We will not lose much time by it, and it gives us better odds.”

Max sat back and folded up the map before crushing it in her hand. She stared blindly out the window, wondering what was happening in Winters.

The last memory she had of her family was of the big picnic just before she went back to college. It was a long-standing tradition. They cooked barbecue ribs in a smoker and made enough food to feed half the town. Then they invited friends over and played softball. It never ended before dawn the next morning.

That last one, Kyle had only been a few months old. He was a bubbly, happy baby, and everyone wanted to hold him. She remembered how her mother had laughed and passed him around.

Her mother. Max hadn’t thought about her in years. Her eyes burned. Her mother was an artist—she made the most beautiful ceramics. Or had. She quit after Max disappeared. Guilt burned in her gut. And hate. Giselle had done this. Max cut the thought off. Old news.

At that picnic, she remembered her parents telling stories of how they met and of the embarrassing things Max and Tris had done over the years. Max and Tris had fought back with stories of their parents, and soon they were all laughing so hard that Max’s stomach hurt. Then she and her mother had made ice cream. They’d talked about Max’s boyfriend, about school, about what she wanted to do when she graduated. Her mother had confided that she had planned a big surprise party for Tris and that Max would need to be sure to come home for it.

Time had flown, and all too soon it was morning, and Giselle had showed up to drive Max back to college. But she still remembered the safe, warm feel of her mother’s hug and her promise to visit soon. Max hadn’t told her mother she loved her or that she would miss her. That always went without saying. After all, they would see each other soon enough. Now she wished she’d forced the words out.

Tris and her father had been asleep when she left. Max had left her sister a note, promising to let her come visit over Halloween. It had never happened.

Max swallowed the ache in her throat, her hand clenching. They couldn’t be dead. And if they weren’t? How would they react to seeing her? She bit her lips, tasting blood. If they were okay, it didn’t matter what they thought.

She felt the itch of the sun just as Alexander pulled over. They were only a few miles from Yreka. She got out and went around to the rear of the car, pulling the cash from her pocket and handing it to Alexander.

She hopped up onto the fender and slid her feet into the silvery cocoon and stopped.

“Better get that amulet on. Let’s make sure it’s working.”

He pulled it out of his pocket. He’d found a piece of curly ribbon at the grocery store to hang it on. He took out his knife, cut across the pad of his thumb, and rubbed it over both sides of the disk. Instantly, he vanished. Max blinked.

“Well, it works. You might refresh that blood every so often, just in case. I’d hate to see you barbecue yourself.”

“That is nice to hear,” said the air. “It looks like you want to cut my throat.”

“And lose my taxi driver? Not a chance.”

He reappeared. He’d wiped the blood off and was dangling the amulet from his finger. “There is that chain saw mouth again. Maybe you need a nap so you are not so cranky.”

She chewed the inside of her cheek. They didn’t have a lot of time for—whatever this was. She was wasting too much by finding reasons to be pissed at him. Old habits died hard. Part of her wanted desperately to keep him at a distance, and the other part of her wanted to be in his pants. Not just that. She didn’t just want to screw his brains out, though the idea of it about made her drool. No, she wanted him. He was gasoline to her fire.