Wildfire

  The blue tiger charged down the highway, massive legs pumping, its tail curling up and straightening with each leap. The fringe of tentacles spread upright from its neck like a glowing corona with a turquoise star on each end of the ray. If I lived a hundred years, I’d never forget this.

  Zeus leaped, forward and to the left, and landed on top of a car in the middle lane. His paws slid. He teetered, jumped forward, and crouched in the back of a black Ford 150 truck. Bern screeched to a halt.

  Zeus’ fur stood on end. His muzzle wrinkled. His lips rose in a ferocious snarl, revealing curved dagger fangs. The fringe pulsed with crimson. Magic thumped. A pulse of crimson ripped into the cab, biting at it. The Ford tore out of the lane, ramming into a blue Honda Civic. The impact pushed the Civic out of its lane, blocking us. The massive Ford screeched free and swung onto the shoulder and roared off with Zeus snarling.

  Crap.

  Bern laid on the horn. The woman in the Civic waved her arms, spinning around. Stuck.

  “Bug, it’s not a white Chevy, it’s a black Ford!” I stuck my head out of the window and screamed. “Get out of the way!”

  The woman flipped me off.

  “Get out of the way!”

  People behind the Civic honked. The woman picked up her cell phone. Damn it. She would sit right here until the cops arrived.

  Bern laid on the horn.

  Something thudded against our car. The Ford Explorer rocked and groaned, accepting a massive weight. I spun around and saw something dark in the rear window. The top of the cab bent inward. I pulled my gun out.

  An enormous shaggy paw lowered onto the hood, then another, and then a giant bear belly blocked out the sun. Sergeant Teddy slid off our roof and landed in front of the car. He lumbered over to the Civic.

  The woman dropped her phone.

  The huge grizzly leaned against the Civic and pushed. The small car slid back into its lane. Sergeant Teddy took a running start and landed on our hood. The Ford creaked. The grizzly slid over us and landed on the pavement, his huge head taking up the entire rear window. Claws scraped against metal. The hatchback rose and Sergeant Teddy climbed into the back. Even with the third row of seats stowed away, he barely fit. Suddenly the car was full of bear.

  Bern turned slowly and looked at me, his eyes as big as saucers.

  “They’re getting away!” I yelled at him. “Drive!”

  He shook himself and stepped on the gas. The Ford jerked forward. We sped down the shoulder.

  Ahead, crimson magic flashed again.

  “Bug?” I resisted the urge to shake the phone. “Bug?”

  “. . . Yes?”

  “Black Ford F-150, driving on the shoulder of I-10 just west of Fry Road exit. Get eyes on it.”

  There was a pause. “Drone launching now. It will take a few minutes from the helicopter.”

  The highway climbed as the road picked up altitude for an overpass. If we went over the side now, it was all over.

  Ahead the black truck veered wildly, scraped the side of the concrete barrier, bounced off, skimmed the line of cars, and slammed on the brakes. Zeus flattened himself in the cab. He was trying to shake off the tiger.

  “There are children in that truck,” Bern growled.

  “I don’t think he cares.”

  Gun shots popped like firecrackers. The deep roar of a pissed-off carnivore answered.

  Bern sped up to forty-five miles per hour. Our Explorer grazed the concrete on the right with a sickening screech. He straightened it out.

  The distance between us shrank.

  “Almost got him,” Bern said, his face savage.

  The sign for the exit for Westgreen Road came up ahead.

  “Take the exit,” I prayed.

  The truck laid on the horn. The line of cars parted and he tore through the gap.

  “Damn it.”

  Bern laid on the horn. Sergeant Teddy roared. The cars slammed on their brakes and we shot through the same gap. I stuck my finger into my left ear and shook it to clear the ringing out.

  The Ford was only a few dozen yards ahead now, but picking up speed. It grazed the cars on the left and bounced into the concrete barrier. My heart skipped a beat.

  The barrier held.

  The truck looked old, the back of the bed chipped. Likely stolen. Stolen truck probably meant it didn’t have the fancy run-flat tires.

  “Keep it steady.” I leaned out of the window.

  “Kids,” Bern reminded me.

  “I remember.”

  Either I shot the tires now, or they would wreck and go off the highway. I aimed at the right rear tire and squeezed the trigger.

  The shot popped off.

  “Did it hit?” Bern asked.

  “It did.”

  At that distance and at the relatively low speed, .40 caliber ammo would punch through the tire and likely exit on the other side. The tire would gradually deflate.

  Seconds ticked by.

  The tire went flat. The black truck slowed slightly.

  “I have eyes on the black truck,” Bug said. “The children are in it. I repeat, the children are in it.”

  Another burst of red magic flared in the truck bed. Zeus wasn’t done yet.

  Mason Road exit. He didn’t take that one either.

  “The chopper is coming,” Bug said.

  “ETA?” I asked.

  “At least four minutes.”

  A hell of a lot could happen in the next four minutes. It would only take a second for the black truck to hit something and roll over that concrete barrier to the ground far below. The image of a crushed, overturned truck flashed before me. We couldn’t let it happen.

  Sergeant Teddy growled low.

  “If we go any faster, we’ll wreck,” I told him. “Or he’ll wreck.”

  “Do you understand what he says?”

  “No, but I can guess. We have to keep the kids safe. We just need to follow him.”

  Frontage Road exit flashed by. An electronic sign offered words glowing with orange. Exit Closed Ahead. An orange sign followed. Right Lane Closed Ahead.

  Crap.

  Road Work Ahead.

  Traffic Fines Double.

  A white and orange roadwork barrier went flying ahead. The black truck tore through the flimsy plastic barricades and shot onto the overpass exit to the Grand Parkway. What the hell was Vincent doing?

  Ahead the black truck turned right sharply and screeched to a stop, blocking the lane, the passenger side toward us.

  A man jumped out of the truck, holding Matilda with one hand and a gun in the other. She was still clutching her white cat.

  Bern slammed on the brakes. The Ford Explorer slid to a stop. I jumped out of the car before it even stopped moving and aimed my gun. “Don’t move!”

  “I’ll blow her fucking head off!” The man aimed the gun at Matilda’s head.

  Matilda dropped the cat. The white beast yowled and lunged at the man’s legs, clawing his way up. The gunman cried out and spun, trying to shake the little cat free. Matilda fell to the ground. The cat ripped at him in a feral frenzy, writhing too fast to give me a clear shot. Zeus leaped out of the truck bed and crushed the man beneath his bulk. The huge maw gaped open and the saber teeth sank deep into the side of the man’s neck. His feet drummed the ground and went limp.

  Zeus spun toward us, his muzzle bloody.

  Sergeant Teddy charged past us, heading toward the truck.

  Zeus snarled, grabbed Matilda by her sweater as if she were a kitten, and sprinted past us, back the way we came. The white cat chased them.

  I ran to the truck. Bern and I reached it at the same time. Behind us the thumping noise of the helicopter rocked the air.

  Magic punched me, a terrifying avalanche of power. I struggled to draw a breath and couldn’t. Bern and I gasped at the same time.

  I craned my neck and looked around the truck’s rear. Sergeant Teddy was backing up toward me one foot at a time, snarling. In front of him Vincent stood in the
middle of an amplification circle, clutching Kyle to him. Behind them the overpass split, one exit going to North Grand Parkway, the other to the South. Construction vehicles and concrete barriers blocked both. The only way out was on foot.

  Above Vincent an angry darkness churned, shot through with purple lightning, growing larger. It flashed with bright purple and tore. A giant spilled into existence. Upright, vaguely humanoid, and completely hairless, it towered above us, its cloven feet bigger than the black truck. Its skin, the color of duct tape, stretched too tightly across its frame and formed what looked like rocky outcroppings on its shoulders and the top of its round head. Black, three-foot-long claws tipped its paw-hands. The creature had no nose, only a wide gash of a mouth, filled with long slender teeth and two slanted red eyes, glowing as if lit by fire from within.

  It had to be seventy feet tall.

  The huge hand reached down. The claws caught the corpse of the dead kidnapper, pulled it up, and the creature tossed it into its mouth. Bones crunched. It looked down onto the sea of cars and took an enormous step. The overpass shook.

  It was heading down to the traffic below and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. I glanced back. People were running between the cars. The creature focused on them. Its mouth gaped open, and an eerie, high-pitched shriek rang out.

  Rogan’s chopper hovered above the abandoned vehicles. The quick staccato of a machine gun echoed. The bullets ripped into the creature. It didn’t even notice.

  There was nothing for Rogan to throw at it. Chucking cars at it would be like throwing pebbles at a bull.

  Rogan’s chopper swung to the side, where an empty field and the big rectangular building of a Cinemark theater bordered the highway.

  The creature took another massive step, crushing several cars that had been waiting to merge into the middle lane, and shrieked again.

  “Nevada!” Bern screamed at me. “What do we do?”

  I don’t know.

  “Nevada!”

  I never felt so helpless in my whole life.

  Something fell from Rogan’s chopper, a dark flash that plummeted to the earth and exploded into a colossal shaggy shape. Oh no. No . . .

  A monster landed by Cinemark. Stocky, huge, covered with long strands of jet-black fur, with muscled arms armed with talons, and a blunt head, shielded by a bone carapace. Two thick horns shielded the sides of its head, curving forward as if someone had taken two enormous ram horns and turned them sideways. Thick meat-eater’s fangs filled its mouth. Its two round eyes glowed with yellow.

  “Fuck!” Bern spat.

  People stopped running and gaped. Everyone had seen the footage. Everyone recognized this.

  The Beast of Cologne that was my sister roared a deafening challenge, lunged at the grey creature, and jerked it off the overpass into the field. The creature fell. An earthquake shudder shook the overpass. The red C in Cinemark fell off and crashed down.

  The grey thing clawed at Arabella, trying to fight back. She landed on top of it, a huge, muscled, shaggy nightmare filled with rage, and ripped at it in a frenzy, punching, smashing, clawing, throwing wet chunks of it wherever they would land. The terrible temper volcano that powered Arabella had erupted and there was no stopping it.

  Mom would kill us. Mom would kill all of us. We could never go home.

  The grey thing screeched again, desperate now. My sister squatted on it, clamped its head with one arm, its right shoulder with another, and bit its neck. I didn’t want to see, but I couldn’t look away. She gnawed at it, severing muscle and tendon. The grey giant flailed, kicking feebly, weaker and weaker. My sister bit one last time, jerked the head she had chewed off into the air, tossed it behind her, and roared.

  And dozens of people recorded it on cell phones.

  Arabella rocked back, sat on her butt, stuck her claws into her mouth, and pulled a long fleshy strand out. She spat it, her mouth wrinkling, spat again, her muzzle twisted as if she’d just bitten into slimy fruit.

  Under control. Everything was under control. She hadn’t gone crazy. I turned. A few feet away Vincent stood frozen, his mouth hanging open.

  I raised the gun. He saw me and jerked Kyle in front of him. He was holding an enormous handgun, so big it looked like a movie prop. The barrel had to be ten inches long.

  He pointed the gun at me and began backing up.

  The concrete barriers behind him slid together, cutting off the narrow space the workers used as a clear path. A heavy construction vehicle scraped across the pavement, joining the barriers. I didn’t have to look to know Rogan was walking up the overpass behind me.

  Vincent turned pale and chanced a quick glance behind him. Yes, you’re trapped.

  Rogan loomed next to me, a handful of coins hanging in the air in front of him. I’d seen him launch these before at a near-bullet speed.

  The coins didn’t move. He’d come to the same conclusion I did. If we had any chance at all against Sturm, we’d need Vincent alive.

  “Stay where you are,” Vincent called out.

  “It’s over,” Rogan said. “Put down the gun.”

  “Don’t come any closer or I’ll shoot you.” The barrel of the enormous cannon trembled.

  “You’re holding a Magnum BFR,” I told him. “Big Frame Revolver. Otherwise known as Big Fucking Gun. It weighs over five pounds loaded and has horrible recoil. The only way to fire it is to grip it with both hands and brace yourself. Your hand is shaking from the weight. If you try to squeeze the trigger, you’ll miss and hit yourself in the head with your own gun. Then I’ll shoot you where it counts.”

  Vincent gripped the gun tighter, which only made the barrel dance more.

  “You’ll hit the kid,” Vincent squeezed out.

  “I won’t. I’m Magus Sagittarius.”

  Vincent shifted his grip and pointed his cannon at Kyle’s head.

  “The child is keeping you alive,” Rogan said. His voice was ice. “Kill him, and I will kill you on this overpass, slowly, piece by piece.”

  Vincent swallowed.

  “There are two ways this can go,” Rogan said. “Let go of the child and you live. Harm the boy and you die.”

  “Decide quickly,” I told him. “You killed Kurt. I liked Kurt.”

  Vincent swallowed again and opened his hand. The oversized revolver clattered to the ground.

  “Let go of the boy,” Rogan said.

  Vincent squeezed Kyle to him. His eyes went wild. He looked like he would dash to the nearest edge and jump over it. If he sprinted, I had to shoot him in the head. Anything else was too risky for Kyle.

  Rogan’s voice snapped like a whip. “I don’t have all day, Harcourt!”

  Vincent let go of Kyle. The boy ran to me and I picked him up. Rogan strode toward Vincent. The summoner took a few steps back, put his hands up, and took a wild swing at Rogan. The punch missed him by a mile. Rogan reached out, almost casually. His fingers locked on Vincent’s wrist. He twisted and Vincent bent over, his eyes watering. Rogan grabbed Vincent’s shirt with his other hand and half dragged, half walked him down to us.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Arabella stalk to the Frontage Road exit curving below us. A familiar silver Range Rover pulled up. My sister shrank into her normal human self, naked and covered in arcane blood. The passenger door opened. She jumped inside and the Range Rover sped down the curve of the road, heading north.

  “Thank you,” I told Rogan.

  “We need to talk later,” he said.

  Rogan’s people handcuffed Vincent and put him into the helicopter. Rogan and I watched him being loaded. Bern backed our Ford down the overpass. Sergeant Teddy climbed inside.

  In the distance a cacophony of sirens shrieked and wailed, getting closer.

  Another from Rogan’s fleet of Range Rovers arrived with Troy behind the wheel. Rogan held the passenger door open for me. His face told me that he expected me to get into the damn car and if I didn’t he would put me in it. A storm was gathering on the hori
zon and I was about to be in the epicenter of it.

  Bern saw the hurricane too. “I’ll take Teddy home.”

  I got into the car and buckled Kyle in at the center of the seat. Rogan got in on the other side, Troy stepped on the gas, and we were off.

  We rode in silence for almost five minutes.

  “The Beast of Cologne?” Rogan finally said.

  “Yes.”

  “How?” The word cut like a knife. “How can she do this, how long, how many times, how many people know?”

  “She can do this because it’s her magic. She has done it since she was a baby. She has transformed a total of twelve times. Nobody knows except the family and her pediatrician.”

  “So she can control it.”

  “Yes. It was touch and go between the ages of eleven and fourteen, but she’s slowly maturing. We’re cautiously optimistic she will achieve complete control by the time her hormones settle down, which should be around twenty or so.”

  “Cautiously . . .” Rogan choked off the word. His blue eyes were hard like a glacier. “Is it genetic?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there a possibility of your children manifesting it?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “Victoria Tremaine couldn’t carry a child to term, so she paid off a Prime to obtain his sperm, had her egg fertilized and implanted into Misha Marcotte, who is being kept under sedation somewhere in Europe. Misha was the only Prime available to be a surrogate. My father carried the truthseeker gene from his mother, the siren talent from his father, and, apparently, the Beast of Cologne abilities from the surrogate. I don’t know how it’s possible, since talents are supposed to be genetic, and none of Misha’s genetic material would’ve made it into his DNA, but here it is. We are his daughters. We all carry his legacy.”

  Rogan squeezed his eyes shut for a long moment. Well, here it was. His head would explode.

  “Is there anything else you would like to tell me?”

  “I forgot to mention that Victoria Tremaine also knows. She admitted it when she and I had lunch together earlier today.”

  He stared at me.

  “The Office of Records sent Michael to kill her, but I talked them out of it, because she’s my grandmother and because she pushed me out of the way when one of Sturm’s thugs tried to kill me. She was bleeding from her shoulder and I couldn’t bring myself to watch Michael fry her to death. I now owe them a favor.”