Then she began to sing obnoxiously cheerful popular songs to the burning stars and rising, orange-stained moon.
It was a very long ride.
Chapter 11
DAWN WAS STILL A HINT on the horizon when we began to pass signs that led not to Sedona, but Las Vegas; a course correction that mattered little to me, since there were also Wardens in that city, and people to defend from attacks. It surprised me that the Djinn had failed to discover us during the night, until Luis woke up with a raw, startled cry and surprised me into a wobble that I quickly got back under control. Losing control of a motorcycle at this speed was a very poor idea.
Rahel had stopped singing some time back, and vanished. I hadn’t thought much of it, except that her boredom had finally outweighed my torment, but now Luis leaned forward and said in a raw voice, “The Fire Oracle’s been turned loose. He’s burning cities. I saw it. I can feel it.”
He said it quickly, but with utter certainty, and I twisted to look over my shoulder. His face was set, his eyes shadowed, and I had no doubt he meant what he’d just said. “How is that possible?” I asked. “Oracles don’t leave their positions, except the Air Oracle, who isn’t confined.…”
“I’m telling you that he’s walking, and burning. The destruction—” Luis looked ill and shaken. “I saw it. I was dreaming, but it was real. I know it was real. I saw—people—Cass, it’s happening. It’s really happening. She’s going to kill us all.”
He’d known that from the beginning, but something—some instinct for self-preservation and sanity—had withheld that knowledge from him on a gut level. Now he knew, with all the certainty that I’d always carried.
There were tears in his eyes, I could see them in the reflected light of the dashboard in front of me. “We’re not going to win,” he said. “We can’t win, Cassie. We can fight all we want, but—”
I don’t know if he would have gone on, or could have, but there was a sound from the Mustang behind us—a harsh metallic grinding sound as its engine seized and suddenly died. We were topping a hill, and below us the city of Las Vegas shimmered in a sea of light. The area seemed eerily normal, oddly quiet. I wondered if people were still gambling in the casinos. It seemed likely. People sought comfort in the oddest things.
I let off the throttle to fall back to the now-coasting car… and then the same thing happened to the bike’s motor. A rattle, a cough, and then nothing.
I coasted it to a stop at the side of the road.
“Tell me we ran out of gas,” Luis said.
“No,” I replied. “It’s not a mechanical problem. Get ready. Something’s coming for us.”
We had just gotten off the motorcycle when the Mustang’s doors opened, and Joanne and David joined us; the Djinn in the driver’s seat didn’t move. He simply sat like a lifeless mannequin—as I supposed he was, unless Whitney decided it was necessary to move him. Each of them had canvas bags in the backseat of the car; Joanne dragged hers out and unzipped it. She pulled out a shotgun, loaded it with neat efficiency, and tossed it toward David, who fielded it effortlessly.
“I didn’t think you needed weapons,” I said to him. He looked up and gave me a fleeting smile.
“That depends on what’s coming,” he said. “And I never turn down an advantage. Not these days.”
Joanne was loading the semiautomatic pistol when I felt something stirring around us, a surge of Earth power that made me draw in a sharp breath of warning—but it was already too late.
Joanne must have had an instant’s warning, because she fell backward as a truly enormous eagle dropped out of the darkness overhead and extended its claws to rake her face. Light blazed out from a lantern that appeared in David’s hand, and I saw the eagle beat its wings and correct it course to strike at her again. She rolled out of the way. David tracked it with the shotgun, but didn’t fire.
I stepped in, focused all my attention, all of Luis’s tethered power, on the eagle, and called it to me. It was a wild creature, and there was no malice in it, only fear and hunger twisted by the will of another out there in the darkness. It did not deserve to be used this way; the bird was a thing of terrible beauty, and I would not have it hurt.
It glided toward me, but at the last moment the power out there in the desert ripped at its mind, forced it to see me as a dangerous enemy, and the eagle shrieked out its rage and aborted its landing to rake claws across my chest. It caught leather instead of flesh, and sliced it cleanly apart as it wheeled and fled…
… Toward a sky full of hunting birds, all coming together in an unnatural mixed-breed flock to circle overhead.
Luis turned his attention not up, but out. “We’ve got more trouble,” he said.
“More birds?” Joanne asked as she climbed to her feet and dusted herself off. “Jesus, I used to like them.”
I shook my head. “Not just birds. What’s coming is far more than that. They will catch us. We have to run now. No time for the vehicles.”
Joanne raised the pistol she’d held on to. “We’re armed.”
I felt myself grin, humorlessly. “Humans and guns. Do you have enough bullets for every living thing that survives in the desert? We have to run. We have no choice.”
“We can’t make it all the way into Vegas,” David said. “They’re coming fast, and in waves. There’s some kind of motel down the hill. We can make it there and hold them off.”
“Maybe you can, but I damn sure can’t run fast enough,” Luis said. He sounded worried. “Cass—”
“I know,” I said. “The car can coast down. I can handle the motorcycle.”
“Those birds are going to dive on you.”
“Perhaps, but I’m not leaving the motorcycle.” I shrugged. “I like it.”
He gave me a look that said I was insane—as perhaps I was—and got into the car with Joanne and David. Whatever Djinn force was animating the vehicle gave it a push, and the Mustang picked up rolling speed as the grade steepened. I had a more difficult time of it, balancing the motorcycle without the forward thrust, but I managed. We glided in a hiss of tires down the winding hill, and above us birds screamed. I heard the constant beat of wings. I kept a vigilant watch on them, waiting for an attack, but curiously, none came.
Not yet.
I’d expected the refuge David mentioned to be easily visible, but I was surprised.… It was dark against the hills, and it loomed up suddenly, with an unsettlingly barren aspect to it. The building was large, multi-story, and utterly deserted, with a smoke-blackened plaster exterior; and there had been a halfhearted attempt to board up a few of the broken windows, but it was clear that no one was interested in the place any longer. I supposed that at the edge of the end of the world, securing an abandoned hotel in hopes of later renovation might not have been anyone’s largest priority.
It would have been better to continue, but ahead I saw the Mustang was slowing… and then, with a greasy gray puff of smoke, one tire blew out, and then another. It hobbled on for a few dozen more feet, loose rubber flapping loudly, and then there was a surge of power through the aetheric, and the tires reinflated. The Djinn, repairing the damage.
Then the tires blew out again—all four this time, and more decisively.
The car drifted to a stop, metal grinding noisily on asphalt as the rubber shredded away, macerated between stone and steel.
Luis got out of the car, as did the lithe form of David; I watched them move the limp form of what had been the Djinn driver out of the way, and Joanne took his place behind the wheel. Odd that it would take both a Djinn and a Warden to push a car; David ought to have been able to move it with a thought, even without tires easing the process.
Instead, they seemed to be working very hard at pushing the bumper of the car. It went only a few feet, and then Luis stumbled, and…