Chapter 18
Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting
Bas hops into the driver’s seat but halfway out of the parking spot—me sweating bullets, elbow-deep in the engine block—the stupid car dies.
“It keeps trying to turn off without the key,” I wheeze. “I can’t hold it from the passenger seat.”
Teeth clenched, Bas shakes his head.
“We don’t have time to hot-wire it,” he says, already folding himself between the seats, clawing into the back. “You drive.”
I scramble clumsily behind the wheel. My boots catch on the shifter.
My elbow bangs hard into the window, icicle pain screaming up my arm.
Every wasted, clumsy second sounds an alarm in my head.
I can taste something awful in the air, blaring through the jeep’s heaters—something too like river reeds and finality.
Jamming my fingers into the empty key slot, I flood the engine.
Lights flicker on the dash. The alternator complains, some vital thing under the hood clattering, threatening to break.
I won’t let it. Party trick hazing out around my body, I stomp a foot into the ground, toes reaching for a power line.
One massive fist closes around the car battery.
In the side-view mirror, my eyes flare an unholy night-sky blue.
Starlit and screaming through my teeth, I am the circuit—
I am dying. My spine rockets hard into the seat.
My muscles seize. I taste blood in my mouth.
In the rearview mirror, my pupils narrow to pinpricks, vessels bursting in the whites of my eyes.
Any more and my skin cocoon will shred, spilling me out to soar free of this clinging, claustrophobic meat.
My ocean sings a sweeter song than any on my playlist, the void calling me home, home, home.
Bas’s grieving eyes flicker in my head. His pain sears me hotter than my own.
Not yet. No. I have work to do.
The car roars awake. I snap back into my body, every bone an aching, fallow field.
“Shut up,” I snarl at it, “stop whining,” and stomp on the gas.
I take a right at the end of the aisle, following the SUV, but I can’t see where it went.
Too soon, I have to turn off—the road blocked by flea market vendors—and I know they can’t have cut a path through this traffic with any kind of speed.
Shoving myself up as high as I can in my seat, I scan over the crowds for some clue, something, anything. Where would Cain have gone?
In the distance, I spot a huge building, auctions picked out in white shingles on its slate-gray roof.
Auctions mean livestock, furniture, and farm equipment—I bet they have a loading dock, a separate entrance to keep from clogging up traffic.
But several parking lots sit between me and them, and I don’t have time for this.
Grappling my seat belt on, I cut the wheel, carving a mean serpentine course between parked cars, angling straight for the auction building.
Above us, the helicopter rounds on its circuit again, flying low enough to rattle my teeth.
Abruptly, it cuts off sideways. It passes me, outpacing me, headed in my same direction.
“They’re flanking him,” Bas says, gripping my headrest so hard the fabric darkens, heat shimmers dusting his bare arms in gold.
“I’ve got this,” I bark.
Cutting the wheel again, I barrel out into the main road between lots, picking up speed.
Up ahead, people scatter, screaming, shouting protests.
Two black SUVs shoot out of a seller’s corridor ahead of me, rubber burning on spitting gravel—and it’s supposed to be a one-way road, but they don’t let up on the gas, flying straight at me.
A cool mist fills my brain. Every thought, every fear, evaporates.
They want to play chicken? With me? Some feral dead thing dragged backward out of hell and seventeen years homesick?
Knuckles white on the wheel, head down, I hit the gas. The SUVs blare their horns; I stare them down. I flood power through the engine, demanding more, faster, smoke curling from under the hood and my poor jeep screaming louder than the helicopter up above. Forty feet and closing, thirty, twenty—
This close, a hot shard of sunlight cuts through their mirrored windshields. The driver closest to me stares at me in horror, the whites of his eyes bared, lips moving in prayer, in an unheard curse, and good luck to him—
—ten feet, five—
Because the only gods listening are us.
The opposing driver wrenches his wheel, veering off into the gutter. In the crash of his bumper into the embankment, I almost miss the distant boom of an explosion, a muffled series of crack-crack-cracks.
Gunshots.
The second SUV lays on its horn, swerving around me and down another aisle. Meeting up with another of its kind, it roars away in the direction of the distant gunfire, unaware of the answering thunder in the empty hollow of my chest.
Death swells in cold eddies from the autumn-stained grass.
The sky cracks. Thunderheads boil out of nothing, a gruesome gray and spitting sparks.
A freezing wind howls through the aisles, tossing tents and overturning tables, winter roaring on its scream.
In the far distance, a horn blows, and I recognize the rumble of the RV that’s carried me from every home I’ve ever known.
A man shouts in pain. Guns fire, fire, fire—
The father of my other half is dying.
And the only gods listening are us.
Shucking my hoodie, I wrap it twice around the wheel, for padding.
Stomping on the gas, I rip the car in a brutal three-point turn that has Bas slamming into the back door, kicking at the wall, and head in Cain’s direction.
Bas’s eyes find mine in the rearview, a strange gold seeping in around the black.
No more time to talk—no more need for it; Bas understands.
He climbs over the back seats, into the trunk, and braces.
Through the smoke billowing from the jeep’s engine, I spot another DNR vehicle ahead.
I push the jeep harder, kicking up dust devils on the thin dirt track.
Smashing a fist into the window controls—no time to find the right one—I roll down every window and jam my arm out past the windshield, straight as a lance.
I tailgate them hard, the distance between us dwindling.
The SUVs throw on their horns, flaring brake lights, threatening.
A passenger window opens, a body levering out, pistol gripped in a black gloved hand pointed straight at me.
I don’t let off the gas. I stare down the barrel, stare down the man, spreading five fingers wide.
Pedal to the floor mat, my front bumper just barely kissing their tow jack, I close my eyes and lunge, blazing forward down the length of my outstretched arm.
I strike the driver straight in the spine, grab his passenger around the neck, dig my fingers into the meat of their gasping lights—and shove.
My abandoned body dangles from its seat belt.
My arm hits the car door. My head hits my sweater wrapped around the wheel.
I watch from outside my body as their lights billow away, caught by the storm.
Two threats transformed into windswept garbage, they tumble through the gutters, savaged by the wind and the violence of their passing.
Flinging off the projector, I suck in a fresh breath and back into my meat.
Just in time to jerk the wheel, coasting around the first SUV with its passengers slumped empty in their seats, idling off into a ditch.
In front of him, the newcomer must think better of having me on his bumper.
He cuts his wheel hard, plunging off into a side street filled with sellers.
People scream, scrambling to get out of the way. Folding tables crunch under his massive wheels, porcelain shattering, stuffed animals smearing in the mud. He drives alongside us, separated only by a single row of vendor vehicles, scattered food trucks, and sobbing civilians.
The barest corner of his window rolls down. A long black barrel peeks out.
Bas’s sneakers smash into the back door.
The cargo hatch unfolds. A sharp beam of sunlight sears through the storm, crashing onto the roof of our stolen jeep.
It burns, golden light blazing so bright I have to squint, dodging screaming pedestrians as best I can.
I have no time to turn, to even glance in the mirror, but I don’t need to see what’s happening. I know.
I know it like my own Google history, like a faded, fresh-kissed memory.
I know it like a death goddess, half flesh and half bone, whose trickster daddy stole her a shining golden harvest god.
A warrior.
From the corner of my eye, I swear I see the edge of a massive burning blade. Bas rears back, sunlight slicing from his hands. A spear of light sails across the distance, shattering into the side of the SUV. Bas roars and it sounds like no language I know.
It sounds like home, home, home.
The SUV flips, stranded on its side. I floor it.
Following the sound of gunshots, I reach the auction building at last, cutting so hard around the corner two of our wheels leave the road.
Even more beetle-black SUVs block my way, clustered so tightly I almost can’t see my mother’s RV parked sideways and idling, swarming with jackbooted thugs.
Before them, fresh ghosts burn in the thin autumn grass, faces fully defined and furious, pounding fists that melt to mist on the RV’s doors.
Trying to claw it apart to remain corporeal long enough to get it open.
Hitting in waves hard enough to shove the vehicle.
They swarm on top of each other, climbing on spines and shoulders.
A blind panic whites out my every thought.
Above us, the helicopter dips low. Any second, I expect to hear more gunfire, to see Cain’s face dodge past a window, but the RV sits dark. Silent. A jackboot in the lead holds up a hand, motioning to the parked vehicle. The hive lurches forward in a wave.
No.