Hellforged

think I wanted to know the answer.

Once again, the plane leveled off. This time, the screaming didn’t stop.

“Are you okay?” I asked Kane.

“I think I broke my shoulder blade,” he said. “I’ll be all right.” His superfast werewolf healing would take care of a broken bone, but even Kane couldn’t recover from a plane crash.

On my other side, Ms. Iron Hair clutched my arm, crying.

The plane nosed upward. The pilot was trying to regain some height.

The PA system bonged. People shushed each other so they could hear the message. Other than the thrumming engines and a couple of hysterical screamers, the plane was quiet. “This is your captain speaking. Please remain calm. It seems we have a glitch in the aircraft’s stabilization system.”

Glitch. As soon as he said the word, I felt a tug, and everything went gray. Demonic laughter rang out; something had grabbed my perception and yanked it into the demon plane. I whipped my head around to see if Difethwr shadowed me. As I turned, a movement outside the window caught my eye.

Pryce, in his demon form, his massive wings expanded, flew beside the plane. He held up three taloned fingers.

Third, Victory falls.

The plane dropped again.

Oh, God, no.

This was the third test. Not “Victory falls in battle” but “Victory falls from the sky.” How the hell was I supposed to keep a jumbo jet in the air?

I braced against the seat in front of me as the plane fell. Pryce had loosed a Glitch and escaped into the demon plane. The Glitch was frying the system that kept the plane in the air. And there was nothing below us except thirty thousand feet of empty space and the Atlantic Ocean.

33

I HAD NOTHING WITH ME TO FIGHT A GLITCH. NO BRONZE weapons, no Glitch Gone. Nothing. And the plane was bucking and swooping like an out-of-control roller coaster.

Ms. Iron Hair half-tore my arm out of its socket. I pulled away, but she grabbed me again. Mascara smeared her face in two black streaks, but not a single hair was out of place.

That stiff hair—I had an idea. “Do you have any hairspray with you?”

She actually reached up a hand to check her hairstyle.

“No, for me. I need hairspray.” It sprayed, it was sticky. It might work like Glitch Gone. Or it might not. But it was the only idea I had. “It could fix the plane.”

She looked at me the way people look at a scary-crazy seatmate, but just then the plane dropped with another stomach-lurching jolt. “My purse! It’s in my purse.” She scrabbled around under the seat in front of her. “Oh, no! It spilled.”

Pens and lipsticks rolled around our feet, along with gum, a cell phone, a makeup compact, keys—no hairspray. I bent over to get another look and whacked heads with her. I couldn’t see the hairspray anywhere.

“What are you looking for?” Kane asked.

“Hairspray. I think I can use it to draw the Glitch out of the instrument panel.”

He went up the aisle on his hands and knees, peering under seats. A woman screamed when he lunged toward her. “Got it!”

He tossed the bottle back to me. I grabbed it from the air and shoved it into the front pocket of my jeans. Then I unclipped my seatbelt and started up the aisle.

It was like trying to walk with one foot on each side of the fault line during an earthquake. Kane had the right idea; I dropped to all fours. I met him a few feet up the aisle. “Vicky,” he said, looking into my eyes. “If you can’t —”

“No. No good-byes. I’ll stop it.” I wasn’t sure how, armed with nothing more than three ounces of hairspray, but I was not going to let Pryce kill all these people. I brushed my lips against Kane’s and crawled past him.

It was rough going. The plane would dive, and I’d slide or tumble or somersault forward, banging into seats, legs, junk that had fallen into the aisle. Then it’d rock violently the other way, making moving forward like climbing a cliff. I grabbed the seat legs and pulled myself forward with my arms.

Somehow, I made it to the front of the plane. A flight attendant was strapped into a seat by the cockpit door. She clutched the sides of her head; panic contorted her features.

“Get me into the cockpit,” I said.

“You can’t go in there. Federal regulations prohibit—” The plane lurched, and her scream cut off her words. I slid forward, whacking my head on the cockpit door with a bang. I started banging with my fists, too. “Let me in! I can stop the Glitch!”

The door remained closed.

“Stop it,” the flight attendant hissed. “They’re trying to keep this plane in the air.”

“So am I.” I climbed to my knees. I closed my eyes and thought of strength—eight-hundred-pound gorillas, elephants, the Incredible Hulk. Not enough concentration to shift, but enough to bulk up my arm. Strength surged into me. I made a fist and hit the door, right above the lock. The door buckled. I drew back and hit it again, and then once more. The lock gave way. I yanked the door open.

Two pilots sat at an instrument panel that shot sparks like Fourth of July fireworks. The pilot on the left wrestled with the controls. The one on the right aimed a gun at me. Or tried to—the way the plane jumped around, it was impossible to keep steady. “Get out!” he yelled.

“I can help!” I yelled back, grabbing the door frame to keep from sliding away as the plane bucked upward. “A Glitch is a demon. I kill demons!”

His eyes narrowed, and I thought he was going to shoot. I got ready to duck in case by some fluke he got lucky. Instead, he lowered the gun. “It’s a … demon?”

“A Glitch. They hate technology.” Understatement of the year.

He must have decided that anything was worth trying, because he motioned me in. I crawled into the cockpit and braced myself against the wall. The view outside the windshield was dizzying—sea, sky, sea, sky—as the plane seesawed. I focused on the instrument panel. A fountain of sparks shot from its center, showing the Glitch’s location. I dug the hairspray from my pocket and leaned forward.

“Is that hairspray?” The copilot clearly thought he’d let a lunatic into the cockpit.

“This? Um, no,” I lied. “It’s a magical Glitch-fighting elixir. I put it in a hairspray bottle to get it through security. You never know when a Glitch might strike.”

Aiming at the sparks, I pumped a dozen quick squirts at the instrument panel, praying it would work.

I held my breath. Nothing changed.

Then a blast of sparks erupted from the instrument panel, and the plane took a nose dive.

“Shit!” shouted the pilot. “I can’t hold it!” We screamed straight toward the ocean. The plane shuddered like it was breaking apart.

With a loud pop and a stink of ozone, grapes, and rotten fish, the Glitch sprang from the instrument panel. It landed in the lap of the copilot, who screamed and shook as a couple thousand Glitch-volts zapped him. The demon slashed the man’s face with its claws and ran from cockpit. I nailed it with more hairspray as it leapt over me. It howled with rage and took off down the aisle.

The pilot pulled the plane out of its dive. Slowly, groaning, the plane began to climb.

I ran after the Glitch.

The hairspray had forced the Glitch to materialize in daylight, and it wasn’t happy about that. It leapt around the cabin, landing on seatbacks, on the floor, on people’s heads, trying to avoid the light that streamed in through the windows. Its skin smoked where sunlight touched it, giving off an odor of charred Glitch-flesh.

A woman screamed when the Glitch landed on the back of her seat and grabbed her head with its claws.