Discord’s Apple (27 page)

She drove, hoping she stayed on the straightaway, uncertain of her bearings. She needed to find the others. Alex was wrestling Robin among the gravestones. Arthur was chasing after that strange man again. Where was Merlin?

The goddess appeared in the middle of the lane, standing in front of the oncoming car, wholly unconcerned.

Evie pushed on the gas as hard as she could.

The car stopped as if she’d slammed into a wall, and the passengers fell forward. Evie’s foot leaned on the gas, the engine revved, the tires kicked up a spray of gravel, but the car didn’t move.

Hera didn’t have to raise a hand. She only stared, lips parted in wonder.

Frank picked himself off the floor, where the sudden stop
had thrown him. He put his hand on Evie’s shoulder and squeezed.

“What do I do?” she said, bracing herself on the steering wheel. What did destiny think it was doing, trusting the Storeroom to people who had no power to face such magic?

“I don’t know.”

A feathered thing rocketed from above, toward Hera. The goddess saw it at the last second and flung an arm to shield herself against the falcon that came at her, talons outstretched. She was distracted only a moment, and she struck back with a hand that had grown claws of its own as the falcon veered away. Their battle took them off the road.

Hera’s concentration was broken. The sedan leaped forward, free from her grip. They continued on the road out of the cemetery. The falcon—Merlin, a shape-shifting wizard—screeched and veered out of sight. Hera looked after the car, then after the falcon, and seemed uncertain which to attack first.

Evie could only drive and hope.

In the rearview mirror, she saw Alex running after them. No sign of Robin. She slammed the brakes. Her blood rushed painfully in her ears for the few moments it took him to reach the car. When her father opened the door and helped pull him inside, Evie was already moving again.

A thump crashed on the trunk of the car, then sounded on the roof. Evie craned over the dash, trying to look up through the windshield to what had jumped on the car.

Above her, Excalibur glinted in Arthur’s outstretched arm.

She hit the button to open her window. His hand gripped the edge of the roof.

“Drive!” he shouted. “Don’t look back!”

“Bloody hell!” Alex said with a laugh.

In command of the fiery steed, Evie drove.

The highway was destroyed because of the earthquake. In
her mind, she mapped out the way she’d have to take to get home, the dirt roads around the back of town that would get her to the farmland near the house, and from there she’d have to hope for tractor paths.

She still had to get to the other side of town, which meant she still had to drive through town. A block away from Main Street, emergency lights flashed ahead. The police had the way barricaded.

“I’ll go around,” she said, thinking aloud. Front Street to Third Street, along the neighborhood—

“Stop!” Johnny Brewster ran toward her, flanked by a pair of deputies. He had his gun drawn. Evie braked, swerving sideways as the car slid to a halt.

Arthur knocked on the roof of the car. Alex opened a door and leaned back as the warrior slipped inside and tried to look natural, his sword resting on his lap.

Now
that
wasn’t conspicuous.

“What do I do?” she said, glancing at her father in the rearview mirror.

He looked pale, his lips pressed nervously together. “Stop, I suppose. It’s Johnny. He won’t give us trouble.”

But there was a woman following the police, walking calmly, knowingly. She was lithe and predatory. Evie’s stomach churned. She was the one who’d come to the house to tell her her father had been kidnapped.

Johnny didn’t lower his gun. Even when Evie met his gaze, when he had to know it was her, his friend and harmless, and that Frank was in the backseat.

Alex said, “You’re going to have to drive, Evie.” He stared ahead at the oncoming troopers.

“But it’s Johnny, we just have to explain—”

“We have to get out of here.”

“Evie, get out of the car! Keep your hands up!” Johnny called. The other officers moved around to flank them.

“Dad, that woman with him is working for Hera. I think Alex is right. She might have told them anything.”

Her father’s car window hummed open. He leaned his head out. Alex held his arm, like he wanted to pull him back, and Evie nearly screamed at him.

“You, too, Frank! Out of the car!”

“What’s the problem, Johnny?” Frank said.

“Those men in the car, I need to take them in.”

“Why? What have they done?”

“They’re wanted. I’ve got warrants.”

Evie shouted out her own window, “Whatever that woman told you, it isn’t true. She’s lying. They haven’t done anything.”

Johnny glanced back at the woman. She didn’t move; her expression never changed. Three cops held guns trained on the car.

“I could arrest you for harboring terrorists. Both of you! They’re
terrorists,
Evie. You don’t want to help them!” His jaw clenched. He was close enough that Evie saw sweat on his face.

“I can’t do much against guns,” Arthur said softly. “Not that many of them, at least.”

“I can take as many bullets as you need me to,” Alex said.

Arthur muttered something that sounded like, “Good God.”

She’d gotten a citation from the President recognizing her patriotism. She couldn’t believe she was about to do this.

“Dad, get down,” she said, and put the car into gear. She stepped hard on the gas pedal, and the car screeched forward, hit the curb, bounced onto the sidewalk, then off it again as she cranked the wheel around. The officer who’d been standing there lunged out of the way.

Shots rang out. Evie flinched, ducking reflexively while still trying to steer. She hadn’t expected them to shoot. These were Hopes Fort cops—how often did they have to shoot in the line of duty? When did they ever have to stop runaway cars?

She squealed around the next corner and was five blocks away before the sirens started after her.

“The cops here are a little slow on the uptake, aren’t they?” Alex said.

“That’s Hopes Fort,” Frank said. “Is everyone okay?”

“I don’t think they even hit the car.”

Evie drove until the pavement gave way to dirt. One car screeched to a stop at an intersection to avoid hitting them, the only oncoming traffic they encountered. Once again, that was Hopes Fort. But the sirens—two or three sets of them—were getting closer.

A flash ahead caught her attention. One of the cars was approaching from the other direction. They were going to hem her in.

Out of town now, all around them lay barren winter fields, plowed clean, waiting for spring planting.

She hoped the sedan had good tires.

White-knuckled, glancing manically in the rearview mirror, Evie leaned the wheel to the right. The car slid off the road, listing as it rolled onto the shoulder, which sloped to a ditch. Steering a wide arc meant she didn’t have to touch the brakes, and she had no faith in her ability to execute a Hollywood turn-on-a-dime at high speed. In moments, she was driving across the field, spewing a cloud of dirt behind her. She checked her mirrors and couldn’t see the cop cars through the dust.

An honest-to-God car chase, straight out of an issue of
Eagle Eye Commandos.
Not to mention the larger-than-life heroes surrounding her. She couldn’t wait to tell Bruce about this.

Home was about five miles ahead. She’d never considered going anywhere else. No one argued, so she kept going. Home was safe; the others must have thought so, too.

“They don’t seem to be following,” Arthur said, twisting to look out the back window.

The police cars were still there: One stopped on the road, two others slid down the embankment to the field, where, near as Evie could tell, their tires were spinning. They were shrouded in a huge cloud of dust, which was getting farther and farther away. Hopes Fort police cars: ten years old and in need of new tires. Or maybe they had a little luck on their side. Merlin was still out there, after all.

Something thudded against the right side of the car. Evie looked in her mirrors, out the window, but she couldn’t see what had struck them. It almost sounded like she’d hit an animal.

The same noise slammed against the left side, and suddenly a canine head thrust over her father’s still-open window. Paws hitched over the glass, it barked, guttural and ferocious, saliva spraying, eyes dark and shining. Alex pulled her father away, and Evie used the master control to shut the window. It slid closed slowly, and the barks still echoed, even after the animal lost its purchase and fell away.

The hits sounded all around them now, animals throwing themselves against the car on all sides.

“Coyotes,” Frank said.

Evie drove through the middle of a swarm of them. They came from all sides to intercept her, inexplicably committing suicide in their attempt to jump on the car, to claw through the metal. The prairie was filled with coyotes; they yodeled at each other through the night when she’d lived here. She hadn’t imagined so many of them, though. Hundreds of them came at her, a sea of fur.

Her instincts cried for her to stop the car. She hated driving over them, hurting them. But if she stopped, they’d rush the sedan and maybe find a way inside.

“They’re Hera’s,” Arthur said.

“Or one of her followers’.” Alex watched out the back window as the sea of coyotes, alive and dead, spilled away.

She thought she’d be driving too fast for them, even over the dirt, and that they couldn’t keep up. But new ones, seeming to spring from the earth itself, replaced the old.

“They can’t hurt us,” Frank said, but his tone was uncertain.

Alex huffed. “Yeah, until we try to get out of the car.”

That problem presented itself quickly as the Walker house appeared, a block on the flat horizon.

“Do I slow down or what?” Evie said.

No one answered, and she swerved, hoping for a solution to present itself in the extra few moments.

“You might as well stop,” Alex said. “We’ll run out of gas eventually.”

“What about the coyotes?”

“One thing at a time.”

Bouncing hard, passing from cropland to the dried-up grasses of the prairie, which was untilled and rocky, Evie aimed for the house. Her passengers braced against the front seat. She paralleled the road leading to the house and counted it a small blessing that no police cars were waiting there. The broken highway had helped them on that front.

The car’s shocks were shot. She didn’t dare slow down, but the vehicle slid and swerved under her, the wheel jerking out of her hand. She clung to it to try to keep it steady, like she was guiding a ship in a storm. She’d never noticed so many ditches and dips in the land, which she had always insisted was maddeningly flat.

One last burst of gas, one last rise to scale, and she roared onto the driveway, cut left toward the house, throwing the men to one side of the seat. She hit the brakes, the car lurched, and they were still. She gasped, and her heart pounded like she’d run the whole way from town herself.

Two dozen or so coyotes swarmed around the car, yipping and leaping to claw at the windows, which were smeared with their saliva and blood.

“Now what?” Her voice quailed.

Arthur, sword in hand, prepared to open the door. “Close it when I’m out,” he said to Alex, next to him.

“Are you crazy?” Evie cried.

But he’d already shoved the door open with his feet. Slashing a clear path with Excalibur, he gripped the edge of the roof and hauled himself up. The sound echoed inside the car as he hit the roof and steadied himself. Alex kicked a coyote away and slammed the door shut as soon as he was clear.

As the chalky smell of the dust settled, the coyotes’ scent became discernible—a musky animal odor of unwashed fur and hostility. One of them sprang onto the hood of the car. Evie flinched back as it lunged up the windshield, its claws smacking the glass. Excalibur swept down, caught the animal on the shoulder, and cut deep. It squealed and fell, rolling off the hood. Then Arthur was at the back of the car, stabbing a coyote crawling up the trunk.

“It almost makes it all worthwhile,” Frank said, his voice hushed. “Getting to see him fight.”

The sword flashed again, and another coyote yipped and fell.

Alex shook his head. “This isn’t a proper fight. It’s slaughter. This wasn’t meant to hurt us. It was meant to slow us down, annoy us. She still needs one of you alive, to get into the Storeroom.”

A new sound entered the fray, more barking, but deeper, rougher, from a large dog. Queen Mab came racing from the back of the house, eating yards at a time with her great stride.

She barreled into the nearest coyote, slamming her claws on it and closing her jaws around its neck. It yelped, and blood poured into its sandy fur. In a moment it lay still. Three others sprang at the wolfhound.

“She’ll be killed,” Evie said, her breath catching. “They’ll kill her.”

But Mab wouldn’t be left out of the fight. Her purpose was to defend the house.

Mab writhed and caught a coyote by the throat, even as another scraped its claws down her back. She didn’t seem to notice, wanting only to kill her enemies. Arthur’s sword swung again, another coyote fell, and Evie hoped that Arthur could kill enough of them to be able to help Mab before the coyotes finished her.

It would be far too close. For every throat Mab ripped out, two more coyotes rose up to sink their fangs into her legs and flanks. Arthur stood on the hood now, slashing to keep them away from her, hollering at them to get away.

A bright light flashed, like lightning, though the sky held no storm clouds. Arthur fell to his knees, shielding his eyes with his left arm, and the coyotes yipped and cowered away.

A voice rumbled a word that Evie couldn’t make out, but it rattled her bones. She covered her ears to make it stop. They all covered their ears, even Arthur. He kept Excalibur in hand, though he hunched over on the hood of the car, distracted. Vulnerable.

Evie thought the worst until the coyotes, the dozen or so that were left, gathered themselves and ran, bundles of wounded fur and muscle racing from the driveway onto the prairie.