“At eighty miles an hour!” David protested as he dropped back, eyes wide.
“Dude,” Jenks said with a chuckle. “I’ve got wings, and I still think that’s a dumb idea.”
“And pace them until we can get a team across the gap,” Trent finished. “If we’re lucky, we can get a call to the engine and they’ll stop the train for us once we’re there to take control of the situation. Edden, do you have a clean line to the FIB? I don’t want a hint of this leaked to the press or the I.S. until the train is stopped and they’re contained.”
“I’ve got Rose’s cell. That woman can do anything,” Edden said as he peered under his glasses at his glowing cell.
It sounded good, but the reality was a little more dicey. Ivy clenched her jaw, eyes fixed to the road. Around me, everyone became quiet as they estimated their chances, comparing their strengths and reflexes to the probable fallout if they failed to even try. We were talking about jumping to a train under full steam, but everyone’s culture, not to mention every vampire’s second life, was in the balance.
I was getting a bad feeling. Bis and Jenks had wings. No one else did. Trent slowly closed the laptop and slid it back under the seat. “This is great!” I said sarcastically, dropping my head into my hands and swaying with the van’s motion. “I like this plan! I’m excited.”
“Let me get my dad,” Bis said, and before I could say anything, he’d launched himself out the back broken window. I watched his dark shape vanish into the wider blackness, thinking that this much help was going to get all of us killed.
Twenty-Five
We were going just over fifty miles per hour according to the van’s speedometer, but with the sliding door open and the narrowness of the paved bike path we were careening down, it felt like more. Jenks was tangled somewhere in my hair, hiding from the wind ripping through the van and out the broken windows. Forty feet away, the train raced. Watching it, I felt as if it were the industrial revolution given life, a monster of power, oblivious as it raced through the darkness in one direction and its own destruction, powered by the death of a million plants and animals a million years ago.
But it was going fifty, not the usual eighty. The engine had indeed been hijacked, but the engineer was backing off on the speed, probably unaware that we were here but trying to alert the next station there was trouble. Bis’s dad, Etude, was ferrying us across. The adult gargoyle was about the size of a small elephant, but as light as a pony and variable as a kite. He’d helped me before when his son had been in danger, and I still felt guilty about the scars he now had on his pebbly gray skin. Scott had wanted to jump, but the only good handholds were the windows, and we were trying to stay unnoticed, hence our position at the back of the train.
It still felt too chancy for me, and I nervously tried to explain “a dark smear on a white wall” to the mystics. They knew their kin were close, which made them hard to hold on to, but if they left me now, they’d be pulled away and lost until they could catch up.
The drive out here had gone fast, especially when Nina took the wheel at the trestle. I’d thought it a bad move, but Nina was a better driver than Ivy, if that could be believed, her squeal of delight at the first tricky part filling the van and making Scott all but rip the seats out in his effort not to jump her jugular. Edden just hung his head, muttering about grounding his son for doing the same thing fifteen years ago. The I.S. vampires manning the tracks to keep people off them had let us through just to see if we could do it. The thousand bucks Trent had dropped into their hats at both ends had helped, too, I’m sure.
My grip on the edge of the door tightened, and I looked at Trent past the strands of my hair plastered to my face from the wind. His expression was grim as Scott made a crouched landing on the roof of the last car. Etude’s black wings shifted and he fell back out of sight. It would take him a moment to catch up.
Trent touched his pocket and turned to me. “Your turn.”
“Me?” I stammered, pulling the hair out of my mouth as Etude landed on the roof of the van with a light thump. “Ivy can go next.”
“We have only five miles of road,” he said, pushing me forward as Etude looked over the edge at us and extended a clawed foot for me to sort of . . . step into. Past it, the ground raced, grass and rocks a blur. My mind was telling me his foot was safer than a harness, but I’d seen what happened when the huge gargoyle let go of the van.
“Come on, Rache!” Jenks prodded, pulling the hair behind my ear. “Scott did it.”
Scott has a second life to look forward to, I thought, and the mystics in me buzzed about it, wondering how that made a difference. It doesn’t, I told them, scared as I glanced through the front window to be sure there was no turn coming, and then . . . stepped into Etude’s grip.
“You sure you know what you’re doing?” I shouted up at Etude’s craggy face, and Bis, his son, went spinning by, enjoying the wind.
The older gargoyle smiled. His thick grip on my waist shifted, the thick pads pressing almost painfully as he gave me a jiggle until my back rested against his leg. “Easy as cake!” he shouted, and with that being my single warning, he spread his wings. The wind snapped them open, and I gasped, my hands clenching the thick claw encircling me as we were yanked into almost a standstill.
“Ow . . .” I breathed. My lower chest hurt, but we weren’t as far back as I had feared. Etude tucked me under him, his huge wings beating as he closed the gap. Ahead in the moonlight, the track ran straight into oblivion, but the bike path veered away. Ivy. Trent, I thought. There wasn’t enough time.
“I’ll get you as close as I can. Scott will catch you,” Etude said, surprising me when he lowered his great head to break the wind. “Ready?”
Oh God . . . I thought, then nodded. Letting go of his gnarled foot was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Just a few feet below me, the train rocked side to side. Scott reached up to touch my feet, then my knees, and finally my waist just under Etude’s claw.
“What happens when you let go?” I shouted.
“Let go?” Etude called.
“Wait!” But it was too late, and Scott’s grip on me tightened as Etude’s fell away. Our balance was off. I clutched at the vampire, my chest hitting his face as he went down on a knee.
“Got you,” he said, voice muffled as the wind whipped over us and the train rocked.
I hadn’t known you could be scared and embarrassed at the same time, and as the roof of the car hit my knees, I forced myself to let go of his shirt. “Sorry.”
“Not at all,” he said, grinning.
I was just in time to see Trent ripped away from the van, his exclamation muffled by wind and the sudden distance. Pulling the hair from my eyes, I looked ahead at the ribbon of gray road. Ivy stood at the door, her expression clear in the dim light, David and Edden beside her. There wasn’t enough time left for her to make it, much less the two men. Etude might not be able to catch up once the van veered off. Ivy knew it as well as I.
“Catch me!” she shouted through her cupped hands, then ducked inside.
“Is she nuts?” Jenks shrilled in my ear, and Scott became three shades lighter.
The van accelerated, and Ivy reappeared at the door, looking back at us. “Ivy, no!” I yelled. “Etude can do it!”
But she was climbing onto the roof as David and Edden protested, the wind ripping her topknot to a long streamer of black. My heart pounded. Trent hadn’t caught up yet, and I wedged my foot under a handhold, slowly standing up against the wind. Scott blocked a tiny slice of the wind, and I looked past him. The bike path was going to turn. She wasn’t going to make it.
Lips set, Ivy inched to the front of the van, turned, and ran for the back.
“Hold on, Jenks!” I screamed, watching, then blinked as a layer of mystics seem to peel off my awareness, swirling thickly within the space of my aura as Ivy propelled herself right off the end of the van, feet still going as she leaped into space.
“Ivy!” I shouted, leaning into the wind, grasping. She was going to make it. She was going to make it! She had to.
“Got you!” Scott exclaimed as she fell into us. We dropped in a sliding tangle. My ankle twinged, and I gasped as my foothold caught and pain stabbed through it. The force of the wind vanished, but still it roared. My hands burned with wild magic. Don’t let go. Don’t let go! Eyes shut, I clenched her arm. We slowly slipped, and then . . . settled. Ivy was safe.
She just had to jump, I thought sourly, then thanked the mystics. I wasn’t sure what they’d done, but I knew they’d been there. “Jenks, you okay?” I called out, hearing his swearing and knowing he was fine. I squinted up to find Etude blocking the wind. Bis was on his dad’s shoulder, his tail wrapped around his dad’s neck and literally white with fear. Trent was sandwiched facedown between Etude’s massive foot and the top of the car. Etude’s other foot was halfway through the outer skin of the roof, and his tail was wrapped around Scott’s leg to keep him from sliding off. Ivy was in the vampire’s arms. Slowly I let go of her wrist, and she looked up, thin bands of brown around her irises. Crap on toast, Nina was going to get her killed with all this risk taking. She never would’ve jumped otherwise. Not my careful, precise Ivy.
Shaken, I looked behind us. The road was gone. “You idiot!” I shouted as I untangled myself and sat up. “You could have been killed! Why didn’t you wait for Etude!”
Ivy smiled at me over Scott’s shoulder as she gave him a thankful hug. “He needs to save his strength,” she said, hair streaming in the wind. “Is Jenks okay?”
“I’m fine!” he yelled, but I don’t think she heard him, and I nodded.
Etude’s foot lifted suddenly when Trent wiggled, still facedown on the roof of the car. Almost dancing, the big gargoyle shifted back. The man looked shaken but okay, and he grimaced as he felt his midsection carefully as he sat up. Turning to the road, his anger eased when he saw it was gone. Thank you, Nina.
“I don’t think I’ll fit in the car,” Etude said, taking Bis from his shoulder and setting him on the rocking roof. “Bis, let me know if you need me.” His smile widened until his black teeth showed. “My world breaker.”
Bis flushed a pleased black, but I was uneasy as I looked at them: Ivy, Bis, Trent, Scott, and Jenks tangled in my hair. If any of them died or hurt themselves, I’d never let it go. “Let’s move!” I shouted, and Scott nodded. Staying low and never entirely letting go of the roof, he inched his way to the connecting bridge. It was covered to facilitate moving from car to car when necessary, and the moon glinted on the edge of steel as he cut a flap in the thick plastic and gestured us forward.
Are they here? mystics asked as they compared the real force of the wind to the memory of it of long ago. Apparently the air had thickened since they last had to plow through it with a solid body in tow.
Why don’t you go find out? I directed, suggesting that they go through the calmer air within the train so they didn’t risk being ripped away. A shudder raked through my soul as almost half of them streamed from me, some going through the hole Ivy was now snaking down, some through the skin of the train itself, some going through the soles of my feet. The mystics content to stay with me seemed to roll through my aura and settle in like a cat enjoys the sun. Promises to return eddied about me with the soft, binding force of a plant tendril, unexpected and worrisome.
Return to me, or their confederates still lodged in my soul? I wondered, then almost panicked when a twining of voices said it was the same thing. You are not mine! I shouted, trying to make my one voice louder than theirs combined. You are going back to the Goddess! That’s the entire point to this. We find the ones they stole, and you all go back!
But they didn’t seem to care, which scared the crap out of me. What if they didn’t want to go back? I couldn’t live my life as a mystic magnet.
“Rachel!” Trent shouted, and I blinked, looking down at his pale face and realizing that it was just Scott, Etude, and me up here. “Let’s go!”
He held out a hand, and I felt his strength as I slipped mine into it. I tried to pay attention, but a growing negativity swelled in me. It was the returning mystics with news of what lay below. The captives were not in the last car, nor in the hold below it.
Worried, I carefully maneuvered myself into the tight space between the rocking cars. The returning mystics were getting uncomfortably better at sorting themselves as they arrived, binding their myriad thoughts into one in such a way that I could understand them. Sure, it was unclear at first, with multiple perspectives making it a nauseating slurry of confusion, but by the time I’d gotten myself out of the wind, enough had returned to bring it into focus. They were adapting to me on an exponential curve, and whereas yesterday I’d been struggling to keep them from destroying my friends, now I could send them on a task and have them work together to find an answer—and it was scaring the hell out of me.
My feet hit the shifting surface as the returning mystics brought back with them a wave of free mystics, escapees that had lingered close to the captive splinter. They soaked into me, pulled by their kin and attracted to my aura. In a cascading wave, their confusion at the unfamiliar thought patterns and concepts curled like smoke and vanished. Where understanding and adjustment had once taken days, now it took seconds.
I had to get them back to her, and fast.
Jenks tugged at my hair, swearing at Tink, the stars, and the moon all in one breath as he fought with the snarls. I felt him give up and cut his way free, his angry red dust spilling down my front with the strands of my hair. Ivy was between me and the first car, and Trent beside me. The car behind us was mostly empty from a quick look through the milky glass. I was getting a better image from the mystics, dropping off their intel and leaving for more, their disappointment growing at their missing kin.
