Metal was creaking. The engine was making a ticking noise. I was dangling upside down. Tasting blood. Didn’t think it was mine.
Everything hurt. Head hurt. Body hurt. Thinking hurt. I couldn’t stop blinking. My throat was constricted and there was a lot of pressure in my chest, but I could breathe.
The threat was still out there. Have to assess. Have to act.
The ghost sword had spun right through the center of the cab. Curtis had been sitting in the middle of the back seat. The bottom half of his torso was still buckled in. His top half had landed below me. Sonya was ahead of me, also buckled in and hanging limp, unconscious. Stricken was . . . gone? The driver’s seat was empty. The headrest had been sheared clean off by the sword.
Franks had landed in back. My shaken brain processed this from the noise as Franks crawled out the broken rear window. Of course he was the first to move.
I tried to get my seat belt unbuckled, which was when I realized that I was bleeding. The blood was dripping toward the roof, not squirting. So, minor cuts, no severed arteries. File that in the to-deal-with-later pile. I didn’t know where Cazador had ended up.
When I got the buckle released, I awkwardly dropped, but I used my other hand to brace myself and not break my neck. Curtis’ remains were below me, a hot sticky mess. My bullet-resistant window had popped out during the roll, and though the door was deformed, there was still room for me to squeeze through. I started crawling outside.
Franks was already standing there, because of course he was. Franks was indestructible. Except then I realized that he was missing his right arm. Okay. Almost indestructible.
He’d been hit by the flying sword, so sharp and moving at such a combined velocity that it had cut right through his MCB armor, flesh, and bone. And from the angle, it hadn’t just removed his arm near the armpit, but it had cut deep into his chest too.
Franks looked down at the giant laceration, and then at his stump, and frowned. “Hmmm . . . ”
“You okay?” I gasped.
“Lung collapsing. Primary heart badly damaged. I’m three minutes from being combat ineffective.”
Oh shit. It took a lot to render Franks combat ineffective. For him that meant he would pass out, unable to do much, until his MCB handlers could do major surgery, transplant some organs, graft on some new limbs, and then weld it all together through his mystical elixir of life. But better him than me because if the blade had been angled the other way, I’d have died instantly.
Wobbling to my feet, I looked around. No sign of the Drekavac. No sign of Stricken either. Maybe he’d been tossed free when we rolled? I couldn’t remember if he’d been buckled in or not. I went to Sonya’s door.
“Sonya, can you hear me?” No answer. “Sonya!”
She coughed. “I’m alive.”
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are bones sticking out or you’re squirting blood?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Then you’ll be fine,” I lied, because internal bleeding was a bitch. I squatted in so I could see her. Her door was more crushed than mine, and the front roof was caved in, but she was skinny and could probably wiggle out. “Can you move?”
“Working on it.” There was a thump as she got her seat belt unbuckled. “I didn’t sign up for this shit, Opie.”
“You kinda did.”
Then Stricken walked around the crumpled front of the truck, holding the shotgun he’d threatened Franks with in one hand and making a big show of dusting himself off with the other. Somehow, that son of a bitch was in one piece. I didn’t think there was even a scratch on him. But the way the top of his seat had gotten sheared off by the Drekavac’s sword, he should’ve been decapitated. How’d he do that?
“That didn’t go the way I hoped,” Stricken said as he took in the debris-strewn field we’d landed in. “Okay, we can still salvage this. Let’s go.”
I helped drag Sonya through the broken glass and into the dirt; then we lay there, breathing hard.
“Sorry, team. Clock’s ticking. We’re going to be late. Who’s up for a jog? That’s the path right there.” I think he might have actually been trying to make himself sound chipper. “Let’s go. Chop, chop. The sun’s about to rise. We can’t be late.”
We were a sorry-looking bunch. I didn’t know about running. Franks would probably just bleed out faster with exertion. Sonya actually didn’t look too shaken, but that was probably because being half kodama was a real lifesaver. I was wrecked.
“Damn it,” Stricken shouted. “I didn’t spend all these resources and do all this planning and gather you mopes for this mission just to have you punk out now. I need at least one Chosen and a Ward Stone to present to the queen or this mission is aborted! You want to save lives, Pitt, get up. You want your ten million bucks, Sonya, you’ve got to earn it.”
“Ten million?”
Sonya was still lying next to me. “Contract renegotiation.”
So that’s why Stricken had wanted Sonya to ride with him. Bribery. “That song sucked.”
“Still gonna buy a whole lot of trees.”
“Incoming,” Franks warned.
Silas Carver had survived the collision and was stumbling across the field toward us, coat tattered, and leaking tears of flame from his torn-open face. It was clear that the impact had really damaged him. The Drekavac was nearly dead, but an even nearly dead hellish creature like him could still destroy us, especially with our biggest badass Franks running on fumes.
“Tenacious bastard. You can see why I wanted to recruit him.” Stricken said. “We don’t have time to fight. We run, he catches us, we’re all late. I only need to present one Chosen to the queen. So which one of you two badasses is going to do the heroic gesture and slow him down while the rest of us save the world?”
“I will,” Franks said without hesitation.
It wasn’t like I went
