One young man grabbed Bron's door handle and pulled, but the doors were locked. "Get out!" he shouted. Bron looked up at Riley O'Hare, face twisted in rage.
Bron heard a click, and suddenly Olivia's gun was near his face, aimed at Riley's chest.
"No!" Bron shouted, pushing Olivia's hand. The gun discharged. The sound was deafening. The window shattered. Bron saw that Olivia had missed. The bullet had gone wide and to the left.
Olivia punched the gas just as Riley reached through the window, fumbling with the door lock. He grabbed onto the door post and just clung to it.
A truck honked and swerved as Olivia raced through the red light. Riley was still grasping onto the latch. He clung and cursed as the Honda dragged him.
Riley shouted in a foreign language, perhaps Russian, and Olivia sped up as she raced a couple hundred yards, hitting the next red light just before the freeway entrance.
Cars were coming from the opposite direction. She slammed the brakes, and Riley was thrown forward, onto the pavement, where he lay groggily. He had blood on his face.
Bron suddenly remembered when they were kids at the group home, Riley eating a ton of stuffing at a Thanksgiving dinner, laughing, with his mouth full.
He'd looked so completely different from now.
What the hell is going on? Bron wondered. He glanced back. The other three teens had returned to their Mercedes, which rushed toward them.
Olivia hit her horn and sped through crossing traffic, dodging a pair of cars.
"Get those paper bags out of the glove compartment!" she shouted. There was no way that Olivia could beat the Mercedes, but she floored the gas as she sped up the freeway's on-ramp.
Bron reached in the glove compartment. There were two paper bags. He grabbed one, and spikes poked through the paper and cut into his hand. He pulled the bag out. The thing was surprisingly heavy—perhaps eight or ten pounds—and was filled with little metal spikes of some kind. Olivia rolled down her window as she took the bag. She hurled it so that it lofted over the CRV and landed on the road behind them, breaking open. Little pieces of gray metal scattered like shards of glass.
Bron heard horns blare as the Mercedes barreled onto the onramp, accelerating. With over 550 horsepower in its engine, the Mercedes streaked toward them like black lightning.
The front tires on the Mercedes exploded, pieces of rubber flying like shrapnel. The car began to spin, then slewed off the embankment in a cloud of sand and dust. It rolled twice before settling on its hood.
Bron looked back at the flying dust, the battered vehicle, a side-mirror rolling down the on-ramp. He was scared and elated and confused, and found himself shouting inanely, "Epic failure!"
Olivia laughed in what sounded like pure relief, then punched the gas and raced ahead at eighty miles per hour until they reached the next exit. She was panting, her face stark with terror.
Bron's heart hammered, and his stomach twisted into a knot from adrenaline. His ears still rang from the gunshot.
He couldn't deny that those freaks had been chasing them. Olivia wasn't crazy. She had a right to be afraid. But pulling a gun?
"What the hell?" Bron demanded. He wasn't used to swearing in front of adults, but the situation seemed to demand it. "Who were those people?"
Olivia merely handed the gun to Bron, and nodded toward the glove compartment. He glanced down. The barrel said that it was a Glock 35, a .40 caliber. Bron didn't know much, but this looked like serious firepower. He laid it gingerly into the glove compartment, on top of the second bag of metal bits.
"Later," she said. "I'll explain later."
Blair crawled out of his overturned Mercedes, clutching at his chest. He felt a sharp and intense pain, one that nearly bowled him over, left him feeble and weak.
It's a heart attack, he thought, caused by the exhilaration. He knew that a heart attack was tricky to diagnose based on pain alone.
He worried. As a masaak, it was not wise to go to a hospital, expose himself to human doctors. With a careful examination, they'd recognize that he wasn't human.
Riley came limping up, nodded toward one of the acolytes. "I think Fields is dead."
Blair glanced back. Fields was lying on his back forty feet off the road. His eyes were fixed and staring. The boy's feet spasmed. His face was crushed and misshapen.
Blair, clenching his teeth in rage, called in his report.
"We've lost our quarry," he said.
"Lost them?"
Blair peered back. Another car pulled onto the ramp. Its tires exploded. It swerved to the left, into the median, completely blocking the road. The police would arrive soon.
"One of my apprentices was killed in the chase," Blair asserted. "And I'm not feeling well. It may be my heart."
There was a long silence. His superior would be trying to figure out how to remedy the situation.
"Take a hotel in town," his master said.
He's decided to let me die rather than letting the humans risk discovering us. If I'm to make it, I'll have to do it on my own.
He felt lost and alone, but among the Draghouls, to show weakness was worse than death. After all, everyone succumbs to death, but only cowards succumb to fear.
"Have your apprentices scour the area," his master ordered. "When you find your quarry, hobble them...."
"With pleasure," Blair said. Hobbling was a cruel thing to do. Stripping a captive of the knowledge of how to walk or crawl left prisoners as helpless as slugs, but it was effective.
They would not escape....
Olivia drove to exit four, then turned right, as if she'd head back into the mountains, to the little town of Pine Valley. Instead she turned into a crowded parking lot at a McDonald's and collapsed, resting her forehead on the steering wheel, gasping.
"You know those guys?" Bron accused.
"No," Olivia said. "I've never met them personally. But I've heard about them."
"Who are they? What have you heard?"
Bron felt desperate for answers.
Olivia picked her head up off the steering wheel and gazed into Bron's eyes steadily, as if wondering whether she could trust him to keep a secret.
"I'll tell you sometime," she promised. "Soon."
"I want to know now!" Bron demanded. He tried to reason more slowly. "In six months I'll be old enough to join the Marines. If there are dangerous cultists in town, you should tell me."
Olivia shook her head, as if she couldn't find the words. "Trust me, Bron. I just want to go home."
Her tone was pleading, but Bron didn't dare let her off the hook. He came to a decision. "I'm bailing," Bron said as he opened the car door. "I'm out of here."
He didn't know where he would go, or what he would do. He just knew that he had to force her to tell the truth.
"Wait!" Olivia focused on him. "Haven't you ever wondered who you were?" she asked. "Haven't you ever wondered why your mother abandoned you?"
Her words stopped him, yanked him as surely as if they were a chain around his neck. He felt like a child, again, a toddler whose world was defined by a dog collar and a length of rope.
He turned to her slowly, unbelieving. "You know?"
"I know," she whispered as if her heart would break. "I swear to god I know."
"Tell me," he said, settling back.
"I can't," she said. "Not yet. I'm not allowed to tell you."
"Is Mr. Bell behind this?" Bron demanded.
"No, he doesn't know anything," Olivia said. She held her arm next to his. "Do you see the color of our skin, the similarities in our hair, the shapes of our eyes? I can't tell you exactly who you are, but I know what you are."