Tilford asked, “Do you want me to start easing up toward the roadblock?”
“No,” Edward said, “we don’t know what they put in the pile; better farther away until it blows.”
I kept staring out at the moonlight and trees as I said, “What could they put in the pile to make it dangerous?”
“Ask me later,” Edward said. I heard him move again. Enough that it made me glance back to find that he was standing on the headrests on the front seats, as if height were important.
I got a glimpse of Newman staring, too, and pointed at my eyes, and at him, and back out into the night. He went back to looking sort of guilty, as if I hadn’t been doing the same damn thing. I went back to glancing up at the star-filled sky, and then down at the trees. Nothing moved but the wind. It made the leaves shudder and gave that sound that always makes me think of Halloween, as if the leaves are skittering across the ground like little mice. Normally I like the sound, but tonight it was distracting, and the leaf movement made me jumpy.
Newman shot into the dark. It made me jump. Newman yelled out, “Sorry.”
“Nothing there, Newman,” Edward said.
“I said, sorry.”
“Get a grip, rookie,” I called.
Tilford spoke from the front. “We all shoot at shadows when we’re new, Blake.”
He was right, but I’d apologize to Newman later if I needed to. I went back to watching my own windy section of trees, and dark sky, and road. They came onto the road behind us, two of them in the same long black cloaks and white masks. It made them anonymous, impossible to tell if they were new Harlequin or ones we’d seen before. The only thing I was almost certain of was that they weren’t the ones Edward and I had wounded in the woods. These two moved in a slow, athletic glide. The moment they moved, I knew they were wereanimals and not vampires. Vamps move like people, just more graceful.
I called, “Newman, watch in front. I’ve got the shifters behind us,” I said.
There was a whoosh like the world’s biggest bottle rocket overhead. The heat pushed at the back of me, so that I flinched and dropped to one knee, turning as I did it to bring the MP5 up to aim at the Harlequin behind us. The explosion from in front of us made me flinch again and want to turn that way, but I had to trust Newman to handle anything in that direction. I knew there were two Harlequin behind us, and I knew I was fast enough to wound them; I didn’t know the same of Newman.
But there was only one thing in the road now. It was on fire, a blazing, burning shape, so bright that it chased back the dark in fire shadows, as it crouched on the road.
I heard Newman say, “Holy Jesus.”
It made me glance behind me to the roadblock that wasn’t there anymore. The road was clear. Tilford yelled, “Blake, get in!”
I got to my feet, the gun aimed back at the figure in the road. I realized he wasn’t crouching; he was trying to shift form. I stood on the running board, one hand on the handle by the roof, the other pointing the gun at the burning mass in the road. Did he think shifting form would help him heal, or put out the fire? Or maybe it was all he could think to do. Then he started to scream. It was a low growl of a scream as if a human throat and some large growling animal were both screaming at once. It was the kind of sound that would haunt your nightmares, or cause them. I’d seen vampires burn “alive,” but never a wereanimal. Vampires burn faster and more completely than humans do, but wereanimals are just people that heal almost anything. Anything but fire.
The SUV jumped forward. I grabbed the inside edge of the roof, one foot on the running board, the other on the door edge. My free hand aimed the MP5 out at the trees as they began to rush by. The open door brushed the trees and swung in on me. I used my knee to keep it riding just out from me. Edward was still at the sunroof. I wasn’t sure if Newman was in or out. Tilford was driving. I knew as much as I could. The car picked up speed. It bounced hard, and I was almost airborne. I couldn’t stay like this. I slipped into the open door and closed it behind me and hit the button for the window to rise. I had a moment to see Newman securely inside the car on his side. Edward slipped out of the sunroof and hit the button to close it. Then he yelled, “Anita!”
I was aiming at the window before I saw anything to shoot at. There was a gleam of silver, but it wasn’t at my closing window, it was at Tilford’s open one. I fired, and the bullet went past his head and into something dark at the end of that gleam of sword, because that was what it was, a sword, a fucking sword.
The shot was thunderous in the car, too small a space to be shooting without ear protection. I was deaf for a moment, but the figure fell and didn’t come back. The sword stayed like an exclamation point in Tilford’s shoulder and the seat. He was pinned.
Edward crawled over the seat and took the wheel. “Stay on the gas, Tilford.” He took Edward at his word because the car leapt forward as if he’d buried his foot to the floorboard. Edward steered one-handed, the other keeping the gun up and ready, though he had to watch the road, which left Newman and me to watch everything else. Fuck.
There was a noise from the roof, soft. I wasn’t even sure why I heard it over the engine and the ringing in my ears. It was almost as if I’d been listening for that soft slither of a sound. “They’re on the roof,” I said.
Newman didn’t react, so I said, “Newman, one of them is on the roof.”
He gave me wide, startled eyes. It was hard to tell in the dark, but he looked pale. The pulse in his throat looked like it was trying to jump out of his skin. He was scared, and I didn’t blame him. If I’d had time I’d have been scared, too.
I was looking up at the sunroof when someone looked down at me. I had time to register that there was no mask. It was just dark eyes in a pale face: vampire. I was firing up into the face before I had time to really “see” everything. The face slipped away, but I didn’t think I’d hit it.
Newman fired up into the roof after I did, but he kept his finger on the trigger so that the car was an echo chamber for the bullets, and the hot casings spilled on me. Most of them hit my jacket, but one found the back of my hand and there was nothing to shoot at now.
I grabbed his hand, yelling because I was too deaf to know how loud to talk to be heard. “Stop! You’re wasting ammo!”
He looked at me, eyes wild, showing too much white, like a horse about to bolt. I aimed his gun a little down. I could feel air through the holes he’d punched in the roof. “Ease down. Save your ammo.” I was probably still yelling, but he stared at me as if either he couldn’t hear me over the ringing in his own ears, or he couldn’t understand me through the fear. Sometimes when you’re afraid enough, the sound of your own blood in your ears is all you can hear. I remembered those days.
I got him to nod at me, and then I turned to look at the front seat. Edward and Tilford were driving like a team. We went through the smoking remains of the roadblock so fast I had only the barest glimpse of the charred remnants.
I saw the flashing lights in the distance, down the road, before I realized I’d been hearing sirens for a while. My hearing was not happy with all the shooting in the car. I wondered if everyone else was as deafened as I was.
I probably yelled, because I had no way to gauge my own voice, “Who called backup?”
Newman yelled back, “I did.”
It wouldn’t have occurred to Edward and me to call for help. We’d been lone wolves too damn long. For once I was very glad the rookie had done a rookie thing; he’d followed procedure and called for backup. The Harlequin were invested in remaining secret. We were safe, for now.
We began to slow down. Edward’s voice echoed thin and distant in my head, as he yelled, “Tilford, Tilford!”
Shit! I slipped my seatbelt as the car slowed to a stop and reached around the seat to Tilford’s shoulder with the sword still sticking out of him. I knew better than to try to take the sword out; that was a job for a doctor, but the bleeding, I could do something about that. I took off the Windbreaker and it was only as I slipped it over my arm that I remembered I was hurt, too. The jacket scraped over the wound, and the pain let me know I was hurt. The fact that I’d started to feel the pain let me know that the adrenaline and endorphins from the emergency were beginning to fade.