Hunt the Moon

I started working to get the stalled-out car started again.

“Did you ever see anything like that?” Fred demanded.

“Uh, maybe a few things.”

“Well, I haven’t. I mean, damn!” He stared at the lot, the fires reflecting in his wide gray eyes. “I guess a spell must have hit a gas main or something.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Maybe? What else could it have been?”

“We’re about to find out,” I told him, as the reluctant engine finally caught.

I hit the gas and we careened across the road, still listing a little, but moving. The girl ran straight under the car, so panicked that the sight of a levitating SUV didn’t even register. I flicked on the brights and the emergency lights and sat on the horn, staring around for some glimpse of what I was taunting. But all I saw was the carnage, not what was causing it.

An invisible fist caved in the side of a nearby delivery van, knocking it on its side and sending it skidding back a dozen yards. An old VW Beetle gave up the ghost in a fiery crash with a new Lincoln. And someone’s motorcycle took an Evel Knievel–type leap over the rest of the cars before flaming out against the side of a billboard, setting the whole thing ablaze.

And then nothing.

The metal massacre suddenly stopped, the invisible cause pausing as it assessed the oddity of a battered, airborne SUV lit up like a Christmas tree. And a blond behind the wheel who actually looked like she wanted to be caught.

I beeped the horn again, just in case it had somehow missed us, and Fred gripped my arm. “What are you doing?” he asked shrilly.

“Getting some attention.”

“Getting some—Why?”

“Because whatever’s out there went after the limo and then the diner and then the blond. It’s looking for me.”

“Well, of course it’s looking for you!” he said, shaking me. “That’s why we need to get out of here!”

“We’re about to,” I said, as something huge and dark forgot about the girl and shivered through the air toward us, visible in movement as it hadn’t been before.

I still couldn’t tell much about it, just a vague shadow that dimmed but didn’t obscure the city lights behind it. And I didn’t have time for a closer look. I mashed the gas pedal to the floor at the same time that something lashed out at us with the speed of a striking cobra.

It would have hit us full on, but we’d scooted forward enough that it only caught our rear end. But that was enough to send us spinning like a roulette wheel into the chain-link fence. We hit backward, bowing out the mesh, and the car tried hard to die on me. But I punched the gas and, with a sputter and a groan, it leapt forward, tearing across the lot and down the street like we’d been shot out of a gun.

I kept my foot against the floor, hard enough to feel the blood pounding in my leg, but something was wrong. The back of the car was dragging badly, pulling the nose so far up that I could barely see anything over the hood. And considering how close together buildings were in this part of town, that was a very bad thing.

“What’s going on?” I asked Fred, who was peering back through the seats with his mouth hanging open.

“Oh, shit.”

“Oh, shit what?”

“Oh, shit, we have passengers!”

I whipped my neck around, but there was nobody in the car but us. And all I saw outside was a lot of night —and a huge shadow that was eating up the air faster than we were. It wasn’t entirely dark, after all; there were flashes here and there, like glints of sunlight through a storm, or a veil with rents in it that gave glimpses of the face underneath. But it didn’t look like Morrigan, or whatever had attacked me before. It was too big, for one thing, and the little I could see looked more like it was covered in scales than—

And then Fred screamed, and I realized that maybe this wasn’t the best time to take my eyes off the road— so to speak. I snapped my head back around in time to see us plummeting toward a parking garage. There was no time to stop, barely even time to course correct so that we flew into an opening instead of splattering onto rock- hard concrete.

Something else wasn’t so lucky, hitting the side of the building with the force of an earthquake. Gray chunks flew off the walls and scattered across the floor, but it looked like whatever was after us was too big to fit through the narrow opening. Because no dark ripple followed us into the glaring lights of the mostly empty space.

We barely made it ourselves, blowing out a tire on the ledge and scraping the floor, courtesy of our sagging rear end. But it wasn’t sagging as badly as before, and suddenly I could reach the gas pedal and see at the same time. Which would have been great, except that what I saw was a pylon heading straight for us.

I swerved but we still clipped the edge and went skidding around in a circle on a great wash of sparks. But at least I figured out what Fred had meant. Because clattering along behind us was what looked like half a mile of fencing, some of it with the posts still attached.

And trying to hang on to the bouncing, bucking, twisting mass was a very pissed-off war mage.

I blinked, sure I was seeing things. But if I was, I was still seeing them when I opened my eyes. It was Pritkin, and he wasn’t alone.

Three other guys were hanging on with him, and they looked pretty normal—jeans, dark jackets, dark hair— as far as I could tell in the brief glimpse I got before they slammed into the wall. But I didn’t think they were. Because while one hit an open space and catapulted over the side of the garage, the others acted like crashing into concrete at fifty miles an hour was a minor inconvenience.

They jumped back to their feet and, a second later, they jumped Pritkin.

I’d have thought they were using shields, but I didn’t see any, except for Pritkin’s—right before it popped. I stared, getting a really, really nasty feeling of déjà vu all of a sudden. And then I grabbed Fred with my free hand. “Do you have a gun?”

“What?”

“A gun! A gun!”

“Of course I have a gun. I’m a bodyguard,” he said, with no irony whatsoever.

“Then shoot them!”

“I . . . I’m actually better with a sword—”

“But you do know how to shoot, right?”

“Well, you know. Sort of—”

“Damn it!” I grabbed a gun out of the holster under his arm and thrust him into the driver’s seat. “Drive!”

Pritkin saw me as we careened back toward the fight, listing badly now thanks to our blown back tire, and his eyes widened. He ducked a punch that cracked a pylon and then shook his head violently, shouting something that I couldn’t hear over the ear-piercing screech of metal on concrete. And then he threw himself to the ground as I squeezed off a shot.

It must have missed, because the mage I’d been aiming for didn’t so much as flinch before throwing out a hand—and a spell. But the very familiar red lightning bolt crashed into the ceiling instead of our heads, due to Pritkin swiping the guy’s legs out from under him at the last second. A choking cloud of dust and rubble poured down from above, along with pieces of mangled rebar and the front half of a Nissan Sentra. And then a spell from the other mage took a man-sized chunk out of the floor, spraying concrete hail in my face.

But none of that seemed to intimidate Fred, who had apparently decided to solve the problem by just running everybody down. At least, I assumed that was why we were suddenly headed straight for the trio and picking up speed. They paused, staring at the mangled SUV with the flapping tire and the crazy vamp driver and the dustcovered woman brandishing a gun like she actually knew how to use it.

And then they abruptly hurled themselves to either side.

“What are you doing?” I yelled at Fred, who looked at me wildly.

“Did I mention that I don’t know how to drive?”

“No!” I said, as we pelted off the side of the garage, snatching Pritkin along for the ride.

The charm caught us before we’d fallen more than a story, sending us dipping and bobbing and listing in a