Chapter 6
EVERLY
The Administration mages find us at a rest stop outside Oklahoma City, and they are not subtle about it.
Three of them show up, all wearing suits. The kind of suits that say I work for an institution that has a clothing budget, pressed and dark, walking across the parking lot in a not-so-casual stroll that suggests they're predators closing in on their prey.
Felix sees them first.
"Two o'clock." His voice goes flat—the charm isn't just cracking, it's gone, replaced by something hard and focused that I haven't heard before.
He's standing beside the vending machine with a Coke in one hand and his cards fanned in the other, and his eyes have gone still in a way that makes the hair on my arms stand up.
"Three of them. Administration sigils on the inside of the jacket lapels. They're warded."
"How close?" Callum, already pulling shadows around himself like armor. His burner phone is in his hand—not to call anyone. Just there, like a bad habit.
"Fifty yards and closing."
My heart is doing something I don't like. Hammering. The bond is a mess—five people's adrenaline crashing into each other, amplifying, bouncing back. Ren's pulse spikes, Atlas's conductor starts humming, Callum's shadows thicken until he's barely visible in the afternoon sun.
"The car," I say. "Now."
We move. Not running—walking fast, the way you walk when you're trying not to look like prey but your body knows better.
Across the parking lot. Past a family loading a minivan, two kids arguing about Cheetos, their mother not seeing the three men in suits or the four magicians leaking power like a broken faucet because Callum's shadows are bending the light around us, redirecting attention, making us a thing you look past instead of right at.
The 4Runner is sixty feet away. Fifty. Forty.
"They're speeding up," Felix says.
Thirty feet. I have the keys in my hand. Brittany's keychain—a little brass spider—cold against my palm.
Twenty feet.
A spell hits the asphalt beside me. Silent. Just a crack in the concrete and a flash of something white-hot that sends chips of parking lot spraying against my ankles. A binding spell. If it had landed six inches to the left, my feet would be fused to the ground.
"Go," Atlas says, and his voice isn't a voice anymore. It's a sound the sky makes before it cracks open and kills everything beneath it.
Everything happens at once.
Atlas raises his conductor and the clouds that have been building all afternoon split open.
A wall of water pours out of them, thick and black, slamming down between us and the three mages like a curtain made of storm.
Lightning follows, sharp and vicious, three bolts in rapid succession aimed at the ground in front of the suits, close enough to blind, close enough to stop.
Ren's hand closes on my wrist. His blood magic surges through the contact—I feel him reach into my chest and grab my heartbeat and steady it, manually, the way you'd manually restart a stalled engine. "Get in the car. I've got your vitals."
Seconds pass, then I'm in the driver's seat, my hands unusually steady, putting the keys in the ignition.
The engine turns over like it couldn't ever consider doing anything else.
Bless Brittany and her goddamn maintenance schedule.
Ren takes the passenger seat, his dark brow furrowed as he does whatever it takes to keep my pulse steady instead of racing.
Callum climbs into the back. His shadows are pouring out of the car—out the windows, under the doors, a flood of darkness rushing across the parking lot, swallowing the security cameras and the overhead lights and the mages' line of sight.
I've never seen him use this much. Through the bond he feels like a dam breaking, something cold and massive flowing out of him now that it's released.
Felix slams into the back seat. "Left out of the lot, right on the highway, third exit, I've already nudged the traffic lights go go go—"
I go.
The tires scream. The 4Runner fishtails once on the wet asphalt and catches, and I gun it out of the parking lot and onto the access road and the rain follows us—Atlas's rain, covering our retreat, a localized storm that moves with the car like a shield made of weather.
In the rearview: chaos. The three mages standing in a parking lot full of Atlas's lightning and Callum's shadows and a rainstorm that wasn't there thirty seconds ago. One of them has a phone out. Calling for backup. Calling Catalina.
"Right," Felix says from the back. I turn right. "Third exit." I count exits. "Now."
I take the exit. Felix has done something to the traffic pattern—every light is green, every lane is clear, and the cars around us are pulling away like we're magnetic north and they're all south. We hit the interstate and I floor it.
"Is anyone following?"
Callum turns to look out the back window. His shadows are still trailing the car, thinning with distance but holding. "Not yet. But they'll have our direction within minutes."
"Atlas, the storm—"
"I know." He's in the back seat with his eyes closed and his conductor in both hands and the sky above us is black with clouds.
The rain is hammering so hard the windshield wipers can't keep up.
"I can hold it for about twenty more minutes.
After that the front will dissipate and they'll be able to see the road. "
"Ren?"
"I'm fine." He's not fine. His nose is bleeding—I can see it when I glance over at him, a thin line of red running from his left nostril to his lip. The masking spell plus the heartbeat thing plus whatever else he's doing is bleeding him dry. "Keep driving."
I keep driving.
Thirty minutes. Forty. The storm holds, then breaks apart the way Atlas said it would—the clouds thinning, the rain easing, the sky opening back up to a flat Oklahoma blue that looks like nothing happened. Like three people in suits didn't just try to bind my feet to a parking lot.
We pull off at a rest area an hour later that's rural enough to be empty. One picnic table and a bathroom that probably qualifies as a biohazard.
Nobody speaks for a full minute. We sit in the car with the engine ticking and the adrenaline draining out and five heartbeats slowly, reluctantly, returning to something like normal.
Callum moves first.
He takes his phone out of his pocket. Looks at it. The screen is full of missed calls—the same number, over and over, the leash that reaches from Connecticut to wherever he is.
He rolls down the window. Holds the phone out over the dirt. Looks at it one more time—the screen full of missed calls, the number he knows by heart—and opens his hand.
I've watched him keep a white-knuckled grip on that phone for a thousand miles, jaw tight, knuckles bloodless, like he was daring it to ring. You'd expect him to throw it, dramatically, but he doesn't. He just lets go.
The phone drops into the scrub brush and lies there, screen up, buzzing.
Nobody says a word.
The bond shifts. Something in Callum that's been holding on just—lets go. It isn't freedom, exactly, isn't anything as big or jubilant as that. But it does feel like there's a door opening somewhere inside him.
We sit with it, our heartbeats diverging as Ren lets them go, our breathing evening out. The scrub brush rustles where the phone landed.
Felix looks at the phone in the dirt. Looks at Callum. Says nothing.
Ren tilts his head back against the headrest and closes his eyes. The blood from his nose is drying on his lip. I want to wipe it away. I don't.
Atlas's hands are still sparking. Small ones. Aftershocks.
My phone buzzes. Brittany.
Heard there was an incident in Oklahoma. You okay?
I stare at the text. How the hell does she know? We've been driving for an hour. The rest stop is in the middle of nowhere. There's no way that's on the news yet, and even if it were, how would she connect it to us?
How do you know that? I type back.
Three dots. Then:
I have my sources. Be careful.
I want to ask. I want to call her and demand to know what's happening at Nyxhaven, what Catalina's doing, how a girl with a spider and a failing Sanguis grade has sources that can track a magical incident in Oklahoma in real time.
But I don't. Because Brittany doesn't waste words on things she isn't ready to say, and if she's telling me to be careful instead of telling me how she knows, it's because the how is something she can't share yet.
I put the phone away.
"Everyone okay?" I ask.
Silence.
"Define okay," Felix says.
Fair enough.
I start the car. The highway stretches west, wide and flat and empty.
The sky is clear and impossibly blue, as if the storm never happened and we are five people who just fought off three trained mages and somehow we won.
Barely. Sloppily. By the skin of our teeth and the grace of Felix's green lights.
But we won. And Callum's phone is lying in the Oklahoma scrub, and that means something, though nobody's saying what.
I drive. Four heartbeats in my chest that aren't mine, pulling at something I can't name.
Somewhere behind us, a phone buzzes in the scrub brush, and nobody is around to answer it.