A car suddenly swerved across the line and skidded toward me. I swore under my breath. No time to stop, only a fraction of a second to decide. A Djinn could survive such a crash; I couldn’t.
I shifted my weight and steered, heading forthe oncoming car, trusting instincts I hadn’t known I possessed.
The car brushed by me with inches to spare. The wind of its passage battered me, and I heard the thin, enclosed screams of those inside it. Not my enemies, only victims, trapped in a war they didn’t comprehend.
I couldn’t help them. If I stopped, I was dead. I had to hope that, having missed me, my enemies would release them to let them continue on their way.
Ahead, a large tractor-trailer shuddered, and the giant metal rack of cars it carried tipped and twisted as it jackknifed into my path. The entire rig crashed onto its side and skidded toward me, shooting dry sparks.
It blocked the whole road. No room to go around, and nothing but loose sand to the sides. If I went off the road, I’d crash, and if that didn’t finish me, I’d be on foot and an easy target.
I reached down into the earth and yanked a section of the road upward. The asphalt rose in a ramp, and then I was hurtling forward, leaving the ground in a long, flat arc.
The back tire of the Victory barely cleared the still-skidding wreckage. I couldn’t spare a breath for relief; I was coming down now, and I knew my driving skills were not equal to handling that challenge easily. My innate Djinn nature allowed me to learn quickly, but not completely.
I pulled at the road on the other side, giving myself a ramp to land on, and even so, the impact of the motorcycle’s tires grabbing hold almost overturned me. I controlled the wobbling machine somehow and focused ahead. Nothing could come at me from behind, not now; my enemies themselves had seen to it.
No, the next attack would come from ahead, or . . .
I had almost no warning, only an indefinable sensation on my left side. Just enough time to realize that speed wouldn’t save me this time.
I let go of the throttle and jammed on the brakes.
A massive off-road vehicle on tall tires, black as a beetle, roared out of the dark. It had no lights, but there was a glow inside it from the instrument panel, and it reflected off the panicked face of the driver. He was trying to steer, but the wheel was locked.
The giant beast was aimed directly at me.
I couldn’t get out of the way. He was too close, coming too fast, and as his front tires bit the gravel at the edge of the road, the truck erupted out of the dust with a roar and accelerated even more.
I flung myself and the motorcycle down, to the right. My side hit the road with a stunning impact, and a broad knife of agony tore through my body as the Victory’s weight slammed down on my right leg.
The truck’s undercarriage passed over me, reeking with hot metal and oil—a second of black terror, and then gone, spinning out of control off on the other side of the road, flipping in dust-devil showers of pale sand.
I had to get up, but when I tried, agony lanced through my right leg—broken or sprained.
For a precious few seconds, the power arrayed against me had nothing to throw at me. No oncoming vehicles. The ones it had used already were smoking wrecks.
Get up.
The leg, I decided between sobbing gasps, was not broken, only badly bruised and sprained.
Get up!
I struggled out from under the Victory, rolled over, and forced myself to my feet. I had to put most of my weight on my left leg, dragging the near-useless right, and it was an act of torture to pull the motorcycle to its balance point again. What had seemed so effortless and light in motion was cruelly heavy in stillness.
The Victory glittered in a sudden flash of headlights. Another oncoming vehicle. I gritted my teeth and calmed myself as I straddled the motorcycle.
It wouldn’t start.
“Please,” I whispered, and tried again. And again. On the third try, the engine coughed, caught, and roared.
I put it in gear and released the throttle. The bike leapt forward, back tire squealing and fishtailing, and the vibration felt like hot hammers pounding up and down my right leg. The lights smeared greasily in my vision, and for a black second I thought that my flesh would fail me.
I blinked, and the world steadied again.
The oncoming vehicle was large and dark, but I couldn’t see its details or edges. If it was another tractor-trailer jackknifing across my path, I might not be able to avoid crashing this time.
The oncoming vehicle’s lights grew larger, brighter, blazed like insane white suns. . . . . . . And flashed by me. No attack.
I gasped in a shuddering breath and jammed on the brakes again, bringing the Victory to an unwilling, skidding halt, because in the fraction of a second it had taken for the truck to pass me, I had recognized it. Black and chrome, with red and yellow flames.
Looking back, I saw brake lights blaze red, and heard the juddering shriek as Luis Rocha’s truck came to a halt crosswise in the road.
I stripped off the confining helmet, and the cold desert wind chilled my sweating face and fluffed my hair. It was a risk; it was Luis’s truck, but that did not mean it was Luis in the driver’s seat—and even if it was, the force that had attacked me had used innocents. It could just as easily use him, if it caught him unawares.
For a long second the truck idled, and then Luis Rocha opened the door and stepped down to the road. He didn't seem surprised to see me. Or especially happy. I shut off the Victory's engine, dismounted, and began to roll the motorcycle to the side of the road, limping badly with every step.
Luis, without a single word, came to my side and took hold of the machine. When it was safely out of the way, he turned to me. In the backwash of the truck’s headlights he was all shadows and angles, and the flame tattoos along his arms seemed to writhe.
“Leg?” he asked. I nodded. He crouched down and ran a practiced hand from my hip down to my ankle, and I bit my lip to keep from crying out as pressure found pain. “I can’t take care of this here. We have to go. Get in the truck.”
“My motorcycle—” I couldn’t leave it. I needn’t have worried; Luis rolled it to the truck, unlatched the back gate, and slid down a built-in ramp. He laid the Victory down in the bed, jumped down, and secured the back again.
“Like I said. Get in the truck.”
“There are people hurt—” I could feel their agony and fear battering at me, the way the boy’s pain had caught me that day in my apartment. I could feel them crying out for help.
“I know.” The resigned look in his eyes, caught in the headlights’ glow, was an awful thing. “Help’s coming.”
He was right. I could hear the rising howl of sirens, and red-and-blue flashes were visible just coming over a distant hill.
One of the wrecks—the tractor-trailer, I thought—shattered in an explosion and blew fire to the sky. I flinched, off-balance, and Luis’s hand closed around my scraped, aching right arm.
“Cassiel,” he said, “get in the truck. I’m not telling you again.”
“You don’t need to,” I said wearily. “I’m a Djinn. The third time’s the charm.”
We didn’t speak at first. I hated the closed-in metal of the truck cab, but that was less important at the moment than the enormity of the attack that had come against me. I’d seen Djinn wield that kind of force, but this—this hadn’t felt like a Djinn. While I didn’t doubt there were a few Wardens capable of such things, in terms of pure strength, I didn’t think they’d be so . . . obvious.
Then again, Scott Sands had not been a subtle man—but his power was Weather, not Earth.
The first thing that Luis said, after several miles passed beneath the wheels of the truck, was, “Ibby cried all day. I couldn’t get her to stop.”
She had lost her parents. It hardly seemed odd for a young child to be distressed.