I leaned back, banging my head against the door. “Goddammit!”
“What is it?” Vayl asked.
Since I didn’t want to discuss my current need to roll up in my blanky and snooze for a week, I risked a look through the window. “Yale has reached the top of the hill.” He was leaning over, both hands on his knees, puffing like an overweight smoker. Sergeant Betts hit him and he went down.
“Yes!” Betts shook his head in disbelief as Yale got back up. “What the hell?”
“Middle of the forehead, boys!” I yelled. But they couldn’t hear me. As if it would do any good. Yale would never turn toward us. Not willingly.
Vayl had mounted Jericho’s Ninja and started it up. He drove it over to me and Cole helped me on. “Aren’t we just a pair of lightweights?” I told Vayl as he gunned the engine, driving us across the street and into the lot of a rundown gas station.
“We would be if we were on the moon,” he replied, which somehow struck me funny. I laughed, and hoped to God Jericho’s tires were fully inflated.
I looked up the hill. As if on cue, Yale opened up another secret compartment in those dandy leather pants of his. I’d have made some smart-ass comment about setting up the reaver’s tailor with Mistress Kiss My Ass, but then he pulled out a plastic bag. The dark red organ inside seemed to squirm, as if trying to escape its fate.
“Oh my God.” I wanted so badly to look away. Save that little bit of myself that still thought it wasn’t a complete waste to wish upon a star and that Santa Claus was a dandy old dude, even if parents had to do the heavy lifting for him. But part of my job required me to be a witness. You couldn’t aim true if you kept closing your eyes.
Yale launched the heart, splattering it against the side of the defiled church, releasing a rain of blood that slowly built itself into a door. Just as it began to throb, Vayl hit the gas.
I clutched him around the middle, thankful for the sudden spurt of adrenaline that allowed me to hold on. We shot toward the ramp like a couple of stunt junkies, hit that puppy right in the sweet spot, and jumped the barrier so clean you could’ve driven a semi underneath us as we flew up the hill.
If my bladder hadn’t been empty I might have peed myself as Vayl nearly lost the front wheel on our landing. We swerved so far to the right I smelled earthworms, then overcorrected so badly to the left my calf spent a long moment pinned between the grass and the muffler. The heat burned completely through my jeans and left a blistering souvenir on my skin. Only Vayl’s vampire strength saved that bike—and us—from major wreckage.
Halfway up the hill a couple of bullets zinged off Vayl’s armor, but they stopped when I pulled Grief and returned fire. It’s tough to hit your target when you’re accelerating up a bumpy incline, but I got close enough and my backup shooters were doing their jobs so well, the reaver gang decided maybe they should keep their heads down for a while.
We motored toward Yale, quickly regaining the ground we’d lost at the bottom of the hill.
“This is going to be close,” Vayl said.
Yale had nearly reached the door. It had begun to open. Unearthly light, black and razor sharp, like the kind that shielded him, gaped through the crack.
I took aim at Yale, trying to steady my hand though it was like balancing a marble on a bowling ball. I squeezed off a shot. It pinged off Yale’s temple. He staggered and fell to his knees. Without even trying to get up, he crawled toward the door, lunging for it when he finally came close enough. It opened farther and he wrapped his fingers around the edge, giving it a helpful tug.
Vayl drove the Ninja right over the top of Yale’s legs, forcing a scream from him that made bats fly out the church’s chimney. We both rolled off as Vayl ditched the bike. I struggled to rise, but something punched me in the back so hard I thought for a second my lung was going to come flying out of my chest. I keeled over onto my face, realizing instantly that I’d been shot. The body armor had done its job, but it still hurt like hell.
“You son of a bitch!” I looked up.Is that Cole’s voice? Oh, can I have a big amen! He’d found a gully running up the west edge of the hill. I could see it from here, though it hadn’t been visible from our original vantage point. He’d made good progress, though he was still positioned probably fifty yards below us. I saw a flash from the muzzle of his gun and heard the scream of a dying man. Cole had brought his own rifle with him.
“Jasmine! Some help, please!” called Vayl.
Another boom from Cole’s gun and another scream let me know it was time to get a move on. I scrambled to Vayl’s side. He seemed to have entered a tug-o-war match. Clawed, bony fingers the color of raw, sunburned skin had wrapped around Yale’s wrists and were trying to pull him through a crack that had widened in the doorway. Yale himself had dug a small trench in the ground with his boots in his efforts to break free of Vayl’s hold.
Vayl had him around the middle, but with a grip composed mainly of ice he found it nearly impossible to maintain his grasp. He kept having to reanchor himself, and every time he did, Yale gained ground. Before I had a chance to take aim, Yale’s accomplice pulled hard enough to get his head behind the door.
“We have to pull him out!” said Vayl. “Grab on!”
I latched on to those old man legs and yanked, eliciting a scream from their owner that told me the cycle had done some damage. Good. I kept pulling, and with Vayl’s help we got Yale’s head back into target range. But as soon as I let go to take the shot, Vayl lost his grip.
“Goddammit! I am so freaking tired of this shit!” I yelled as I took hold of the calves above the cowboy boots I’d once admired and heaved to. “I’ve been shot and stabbed and burned on this mission! I’m so freaking worn out I could sleep through a nuclear explosion, and I have just realized I’m going to have to kill yetmore of Samos’s underlings before I finally work my way up to him. I am so pissed off!” I gave one last big jerk and fell on my back.
I’d just struggled to my knees when Vayl said, “I see the third eye!”
“Well, what the hell do you wantme to do about it!” I bitched. “If I let go he’s just going to slide back in!”
“Well,somebody has to shoot him!” Vayl growled.
The thunder of Cole’s gun drowned out my reply.
The legs in my hands went limp. I turned to look. Cole’s shot had been right on target. The reaver died where he laid, his fingers still curled around the edge of the door. And out of that blasted third eye emerged a lovely magenta soul that flew off into the night like a comet.
Vayl and I both moved back. I trained Grief on the spot where the reaver gang had holed up, but the ones who’d survived had scattered as soon as Yale passed.
The clawed hands continued to pull Yale’s body through the doorway, and as his feet crossed the threshold the entire door disappeared with the boom of overhead thunder.
CHAPTERTHIRTY-SEVEN
Cassandra and Bergman met us at the RV door.
“You’re back to yourself!” Bergman said the second Vayl pulled his helmet off.
Vayl nodded wanly. “Apparently I simply needed some quiet time in the aftermath of the battle.”
“Also a towel would’ve been nice,” I added. Although Vayl thought he’d reabsorbed a great deal of the armor, he’d still ended up wringing wet. And since I’d driven us home, that meant I now looked as if a football team had tried to douse me with the Gatorade cooler and only done half the job. The back half.
We’d said our thank-yous and goodbyes to Jericho and the guys at the site, with a promise to return a cleaner, shinier Ninja to Jericho in the morning. The SWAT guys had volunteered to supervise the cleanup since we’d sort of saved the day with the festival. An unusually quiet, introspective Cole had stayed with them.