I looked at the amulet, my heart pounding as I saw how far apart the two little red dots were. I wondered if Oliver had made it. Looping the cord around my neck, I crouched beside Vivian. “You take her feet, I’ll take her hands.”
Immediately Ivy shifted, and together we lifted her, me straining far more than Ivy.
Trent backed up a step, confused. “What are you going to do with her?”
“Put her in the car,” I puffed, moving awkwardly to my mom’s car.
Trent scooped up his toiletry bag. “You’re joking, right? Rachel, she’s coven. We can’t take her with us.”
“I’m not going to leave her here,” I said, and Ivy’s eyes flicked to him as the unconscious woman seemed to gain fifty pounds with every step. “Will you get the ice?”
Frowning, he turned away, but I couldn’t help but be impressed as he gave the waitress a story about us traveling together and knowing her and her friends, and that we’d make sure she got home okay. Pace fast, he caught back up with us in time to open the back door.
“You can’t be serious,” he started in again, his eyes pinched as he held the door open. “They want to kill you!”
“Maybe I’m trying sugar instead of vinegar,” I grunted as I scooted backward into my mom’s car, hitting my elbow as I pulled Vivian in after me. Ivy wrestled with her feet as Trent stood behind her and watched, his toiletry bag in one hand, the ice in the other. He looked totally different in his black clothes, his hair slicked back, his expression worried.
“You should be tucking her away in that hotel room you rented,” he said, “and throwing her keys into the desert. She’d never find us then.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it would just tick her off,” I said as I tossed my bag to the front seat and tugged Vivian farther in. My back hit the far door, and puffing, I opened it and backed out. Exhaling, I looked at him across the roof, tired. “I’m not leaving her unconscious in a hotel room a hundred miles from civilization to maybe wake up as someone’s desert-bunker wife. You put a zip strip on her, and she goes from coven to incapable. But frankly, the real reason she’s coming with us is that I’d rather have her tell the coven all our secrets than have a twenty-four- hour gap that they can use to invent stuff.” Seeing Vivian laid out on the seat, I carefully shut the door and looked out over the desert. “I’m driving. Who has the keys?”
Ivy opened the driver’s-side door. “I’ll drive, you work the amulet,” she said, and I just looked at her, my heart pounding and adrenaline surging through me like a sugar high.
Her eyes dilated at the fear I was giving off, and smiling wryly, she tugged the keys out of her pocket and dangled them for me. “Okay, you drive,” she said. “I’ll sit with my head hanging out the window like a golden retriever.”
“Thanks,” I said, shaky as I came around to her side, got in, and adjusted everything. Ivy slipped into the front passenger seat as I cranked the engine over, tossing her overnight bag with her dirty clothes in it over the seat at Trent. He barely got his hands up in time, having been trying to arrange Vivian in a somewhat upright position.
“You want to wait a minute so I can move some of this to the trunk?” he said, dropping the ice bag on the bump just now starting to rise on Vivian’s forehead.
“No.” Everyone’s arms and legs were inside the vehicle, and I put the car in reverse, hitting the gas hard.
Ivy already had her hand on the dash, but Trent went flying as the car jerked backward. Teeth clenched, I hit the brakes hard, and he was flung into the backseat where he belonged. His door, which had been open, bounced shut from the quick stop, and I jammed the gearshift into drive while ignoring Trent yelling at me.
“You think you like speed?” Ivy said as I spun the tires and we left a cloud of dust, bouncing wildly until we found the road. “You’ve never seen Rachel drive with purpose.”
Yeah, purpose. If purpose meant scared to death and to hell with everyone else, then I’d be driving with purpose.
The ride smoothed out, and my eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, not to see the restaurant grow smaller in the distance, but to see Jenks’s absence.
I had a chance to find him. A chance. And if he wasn’t okay, I was going to do some serious damage to my already wafer-thin credibility as a good witch, even if I was a black one.
Ten
My grip on the wheel tightened until my knuckles hurt. I was trying to keep my worry from turning into anger, but it was hard. Especially now that Trent was awake. “I don’t care how far we’ve
“I understand you’re concerned about your partner,” he said in that same persuasive voice that was starting to sound patronizing, “but I doubt they’re planning on sacrificing him to their local god. You have a locator amulet. You’ll find him. Slow down. Let them land. They’re running because they know you’re chasing them.”
It was a nice thought, but they weren’t running because of us. They were running to somewhere, their path arrow straight and their pace unflagging. I wasn’t about to slow down, and Ivy didn’t look up from her map, a long white finger touching where our paths might cross again.
Vivian kicked the back of my seat as she tried to find a more comfortable spot. On the other side of the backseat, Trent frowned out the window. Okay, so maybe I was going a little fast, but I’d been driving a huge, frustrating zigzag for the last four hours. I had raced down I-40, then gone south on 602 to get in front of them, as Ivy had suggested. We had, only to see them rise up right over the car and swear at us. We spent another hour on 61, watching them go a rather speedy forty miles an hour, paralleling us until we roared ahead to where 191 crossed their theoretical path. They simply flew higher, shooting arrows at us when I demanded they stop.
From there, we’d taken 191 north in an effort to get back to the interstate. We didn’t know the next time we’d find gas, and Ms. Worries-a-lot in the front seat next to me was getting fidgety. By now, Ivy had enough data points to predict where they’d cross the road next. I was hoping that if we could get far enough ahead of them in time, I could hide behind a rock and simply catch them in a big bubble. Every time they saw the car, they raced out of my reach.
Right now, they were somewhere behind us, me going about eighty and the pixies hitting a steady forty miles an hour. It was their top speed—which meant Trent was wrong and that this was a planned snag-and-drag; pixies couldn’t go that fast for that long. They were switching off and carrying Jenks. Carrying Jenks who knew where.
It was about two in the afternoon and hot. I was frazzled and ready to snap. Ivy wasn’t much better, leaning over the seat to shake Vivian awake every half hour in case she had a concussion—which was totally pissing off the coven woman. Trent had been up for only a few minutes, but he already looked bored, staring out the window and clearly irate that the time he’d made was
As I fidgeted, Ivy rolled her window down to let in a warm blast of air, overpowering the hefty air- conditioning my mom’s car had. Her eyes had gotten dark and her posture was tense. She wasn’t hot, she was randy, and I rolled my window down a bit as well.
“I think they stopped,” she said, eying the amulet. “Somewhere by 180. See?”
She held out the map with her notations and calculations. I didn’t look, teeth clenched as I blew past a van with a wizard painted on the side.
“Rachel?”
“Just tell me what road to take,” I muttered.
She pulled a strand of her blowing hair out of her mouth. “The next exit,” she said, putting on a pair of dark glasses to hide her eyes. “You’re going to have to go north for a few miles before it loops around and goes under the interstate.”
“More backtracking?” Trent said, hardly audible.
“Shut up! Just shut up!” I yelled, then exhaled, trying to relax. “I mean, I understand your concern,” I said
