picking up my backpack, but there it was on my shoulders. I’d need to go back for the laptop. I didn’t want to leave that behind. Candace’s car was coming around the curve and beginning to slow. There were other cars behind her. I lifted the rifle to my shoulder.
The driver’s door burst open. The big man rushed out. There was blood on his face. Blood and ink. His pale skin was covered in markings and tattoos. He raised his hand to us, palm out, and I saw the markings on his arm writhe like living things under his skin. He shouted and something moved past me, something unreal and angry and rich with malice. I felt something like teeth touching my mind.
In my peripheral vision, I saw Aaron raise his rifle with fluid grace. The report was a single barked command. The big man staggered back. There was blood on the car behind him. The thing with teeth-invisible, abstract, magical-shuddered against me and fell away. Blood darkened the big man’s shirt. His illustrated face went slack, and he slipped to his knees and then to his side, lying on the dirty street in a pose that could never be mistaken for sleep.
Aaron dropped his rifle and motioned me forward. One of the bullets was gone. Used. One of the Invisible College’s riders was dead or cast out of the world. The only bullet left was in my rifle, and I walked toward the back of Coin’s car. Candace and Kim stopped by the Hummer. Kim was out of the car. I ignored them.
He was there, sitting at the far side of the seat. His glamour was gone, his face inhuman with glyphs and sigils. His eyes were wide and stunned. He looked old. I lifted the rifle again and he threw open the door and fell out on the car’s far side. I sidestepped to my right, moving around the car’s back. Its nose was crumpled against the concrete barrier. There was no place Coin could go.
“Move it!” Aaron shouted, pointing me forward. “Get him! We’ve got to get out.”
I nodded and stepped forward, around the car. The traffic on the highway above us filled the air with the buzz of tires against pavement, the thump as they crossed the expansion joints. The smell of burned rubber was thick in the air, and there was something else. Blood. Death. Something.
Coin was on his knees, one hand to his chest just over his heart, the other pressed to his forehead. His lips, red striped with the black of his markings, were moving fast. His eyes were closed. I thought at first he was praying.
His eyes opened. There was writing on the sclera, tiny words worked on the whites of his eyes. He spoke a single word, but it resonated like we were standing in a tunnel, just the two of us.
“Heller?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Hurry!” Aaron shouted. I heard horns blaring and the crunch of tires on gravel. Candace’s car rolling toward me. I leveled the rifle at Coin’s chest. I couldn’t miss at this range. Even I couldn’t miss. Coin shrieked, his mouth hinging open wider than I’d imagined possible. There was writing on his tongue. His teeth were like scrimshaw. I squeezed the trigger.
I didn’t have the rifle snug enough to my shoulder. The kick was like a blow. I stumbled back as Coin’s body folded forward. I stepped closer, the rifle still at the ready even though there wasn’t a round left in it. A curl of smoke rose from the barrel.
He looked up at me.
He smiled.
He held out his hand to show me-shining, clean, searing his flesh with the heat of the discharge-the bullet, its etched markings squirming as if they were in pain. It was my turn to shriek.
Aaron was at my side. I hadn’t known he was there until he pulled me back. A black pistol in his hand fired three times, four. Coin stood up, brushing the grit and gravel from his knees, ignoring Aaron as if he wasn’t there.
“The car!” Aaron yelled. “Get in the car!”
I turned and ran. Coin shouted out words I couldn’t comprehend, and something detonated. I skidded and fell on the pavement, my hands and knees skinned. I wasn’t gong to make it to the car.
Candace was in the driver’s seat, her face pale. She’d forgotten to put on her ski mask, or else had already taken it off. I saw Kim in the backseat, her hand pressed against the window. She could have been a world away. As I rose to my feet, I wondered whether she’d gotten my laptop. It was a disconnected thought, something plucked from the middle of a car wreck.
Aaron was on the ground. Blood flowed from his nose. His eyes weren’t focused. Coin stood over him, head tilted like a man considering a crossword puzzle. I knew the next thing the rider would do would be to kill him. Or worse.
It was pointless. The Hail Mary throw. I gathered my qi the way Chogyi and Ex and Midian had taught me. In the thinned universe of Kim’s cantrip, it seemed weak even to me. I pushed it out my mouth as I shouted.
“Leave him alone!”
Coin looked up. His eyebrows rose. His hand moved faster than a human’s. The fabric of the world pulsed. The sense of being in a clockwork of physics faded. Someone was honking. I heard tires squeal. We were causing a traffic jam. If the plan had worked, Kim and Aaron and Candace and I would already be gone, speeding south on the highway, Coin dead on the road behind us. Aaron groaned, rolled over, rose to his elbows.
“Leave him alone,” I said again. “He isn’t your problem.”
“And you are?” Coin asked. “My problem. It’s you?”
“Yeah, it’s me,” I said. “So leave him the hell alone.”
We stood there for the space of five fast heartbeats. I had time to hope that Midian and Chogyi Jake had gotten away. I heard a car door open behind me.
“You aren’t Eric Heller,” he said. “Who are you?”
I pulled off my ski mask. I’d almost sweat through it in the few minutes I’d had it on. The air felt cold against my neck. I shook my head to get the hair out of my eyes. Candace stepped into my peripheral vision, a pistol in her hand. Coin didn’t even bother to look at her. His eyes were on mine. I felt something cold traveling up my spine. Aaron rose to his knees. Coin stepped forward, and Candace started firing. Four fast shots. Someone off to my left started screaming. An engine revved. Coin looked at her, his lips drawing back.
“No! Candace! Get Aaron and get back in the car!” I said, stepping between them. Then to Coin, “Leave them out of it.”
“As you’ve left Alexander out?” Coin said. He meant the big one. The one we’d killed.
“Alexander was mine too,” I said. “They were all mine. You want this stopped? I’m the one. Just me.”
Coin looked back over his shoulder, toward the body of his fallen man. I thought I saw something like sadness in his eyes. Then he turned back to me and nodded.
“Just you,” he said.
He closed his eyes, balled his fists, and shouted. The sound was deafening, a thousand times louder than anything human, and more complex. There were storms in his voice. Earthquakes. Huge beings moving underground. I felt my body tip back and thought I was falling.
When I looked down, the streets were a hundred feet below me. Aaron and Candace were gone, but I saw her car, just beginning to move, finishing the long arc to the south. I saw the tangle of cars and trucks, semis and motorcycles that had piled up behind us. The stolen Hummer, its black doors standing open. Coin’s car with its crumpled hood. The huge man’s body. I could even see the pool of blood.
And then it was two hundred feet below me. And then a thousand. I dropped the rifle, the small black stick flipping down through the empty air. The great asphalt cloverleaf of the highway spun in the distance. I felt a sudden regret. My plan hadn’t worked any better than Eric’s. I wondered what I could have done differently. If there had ever really been a way to win.
Something profoundly cold touched the back of my mind, and the gray world went black.
Twenty-five
I was cold.
Slowly, I became aware of other things. My knees hurt. There was a crick in my neck. All I could hear was a soft wind. When I moved, it made a scraping sound like gravel. But mostly, I was cold. I shifted my head, and
