Chapter 33
Apologetic, Sure
The two-door jalopy stank to high heaven, but Cass couldn’t care. She huddled in her seat, shamefully grateful for the roar of smoky air through open windows, fingers biting into her bare arms as she hugged herself once more.
It wasn’t working. Pieces of her were breaking apart and flying away, an endless internal earthquake. She was a curse, she was a plague, and she’d just gotten another person killed. A totally innocent stranger, whose only mistake was going to work on a normal day.
“Are you wounded?” Nigel called over the rush of wind. “Cass? Cass, are you hurt?”
What a silly question. A disease didn’t get hurt, it got a vaccine or an antibiotic and vanished.
Maybe this Mad God of theirs was just the natural corrective to her own stupid, painful existence.
Cass shook her head, hair tumbling and flying, attempting to worm its way into her tightly sealed mouth.
She could barely see the windshield through a cloud of waving strands.
Nigel freed a hand from the wheel and reached for her, fingers settling on her shoulder.
Her Captain America T-shirt was having a helluva time, acquiring a fresh set of holes—Cass flinched away from the touch, fetching up against the door, but he was relentless.
A burst of those funny near-invisible ripples, that strange almost-scent, and she was clean from top to toe again.
The magic did nothing for her flying hair, and even less for the agony of knowing what she was.
Nigel shouted something else, but she didn’t want to hear. Cass’s arms tightened, squeezing and squeezing as if she could collapse in on herself, a black hole of agonizing regret.
The miasma of stewing garbage cleared bit by bit, though its ghost remained.
Nigel rolled up his window partway; she made no move to touch hers.
Wind noise covered whatever he would say, and she couldn’t stand losing that small bit of relief.
If he started telling her how she wasn’t a curse, how she wasn’t responsible, she just might start screaming and never stop.
The little black two-door kept chugging along, taking curves and rising inclines with determination if not speed as sand-colored bluffs rose and fell to either side.
Scrawny brush and junipers clotted and whisked past, the railroad ran parallel or wandered away on its own course, and summer-low rivers glittered myopically before winking out.
Nigel kept his hand on her shoulder as if he was afraid she’d open the door and throw herself out.
Which wasn’t a bad call, since it was all Cass could think of to do. She sat, eyes closed, arms aching as she squeezed, and waited for his grip to loosen.
It didn’t. They drove for at least an hour that way, as the engine began to develop a not-so-subtle knocking both Apoc and Grik would have winced at, the temperature gauge on the dash ticked higher, and sunlight muted, brassy with wildfire smoke.
* * *
Signs began warning TUNNEL AHEAD, and still Cass waited.
The few cars and semis trundling along this stretch of highway had all passed their struggling little heap, probably with curses, each time an additional lane appeared on any more-than-moderate incline.
Still, there wasn’t much traffic—maybe it was the burning.
She wondered how big distant fires were, to produce this much smoke.
Maybe she was to blame for that, too. It wouldn’t be a surprise. What was around here to burn, though? It wasn’t bare as the high desert, but there didn’t seem enough wood or grass to produce this amount of haze.
When Nigel was finally forced to let go of her, it was because of a pinging sound that was definitely bad news—and a sudden giant billow of steam pouring from under the hood.
He pointed the car at the shoulder, speed bleeding away, and Cass was too shaken to bale out after all.
When the engine finally cut off, the hissing subsided slowly, fading into a blurring buzz of faraway cicadas, the formless mutter of outdoors air, and her own ragged breathing.
He’d cleaned both of them off, but the interior still stank. That sort of reek didn’t wash away even with magic, apparently. Which was depressingly par for the course, Cass thought, and reached numbly for her seatbelt’s buckle.
Nigel’s hand closed over hers, warm and dry.
He wasn’t sweating despite the thick heat, and when Cass turned her head she found herself unable to lift her gaze past his shoulder.
His jacket was scuffed and battered, his jeans scraped almost threadbare down the outside of his right leg, but his weapons seemed all right.
“Steady,” he said, a single soft word nearly lost in the immense, smoky hush. “Take a breath, love.”
I don’t want to. “It’s no use.” She stared at the steam- and dirt-spattered windshield, thick curls of vapor rising from under the hood. The car was a tired dragon, burbling before naptime or a gentle drifting death. “Should just quit running.”
“Haven’t come this far to stop now.” His fingers tightened, briefly. “I know you’re exhausted, and this is more than you should ever have to put up with. I’m sorry. If I were… better, we’d already be there.”
“Don’t.” It was the final insult, Cass discovered, that he’d be apologetic. “The only reason we’ve gotten this far is because of you. I’m serious, Nigel. Just take off, go back to your people. It’s not worth all this.”
“You’re wrong.” Why did he have to sound so goddamn sure?
He left Bernadotte behind in that department, and Frank was the champion of stating a slim chance as if it were a done deal in order to give his soldiers a bit more heart.
“Getting you to safety is worth any price. Stay here, I’ll check what’s in the boot. ”
At least he let go of her. And Cass couldn’t sit in the car one more moment or she was going to lose her damn mind. She waited until he slammed the driver’s door, then scrambled to loosen her belt, lunging for the door-latch.
It felt no cooler outside, though not the hammerblow she expected.
The sun was an angry red coin, robbed of its strength, and the eastbound highway oddly deserted.
Sagebrush simmered on sandy hills and a stream was hiding in a landscape fold nearby, to judge by the line of juicier green in that direction.
Now she could see the tunnel—two holes bored in a giant tan-colored slab of rock, a pair of Army Corps-engineered nostrils.
A vicious winking in the westbound cavity turned into a big red semi hauling a refrigerated trailer, swelling as it roared closer, flashing past with nary a glance at two forlorn souls broken down on the opposite side.
Steel cables attached to posts in the shallow, pebble-choked meridian ditch swung slightly, pushed by displaced air.
“Bother.” Nigel had the trunk open, clearly underimpressed by its contents. “Gallon of water, spare just as bald as the other tires, and not much else.”
Cass stared at the hills, the highway, the stony shoulder starred with weeds clinging to thorny, stubborn existence. “So…” What on earth was she supposed to say?
“So we take the water and start walking. Sooner or later we’ll find other transport, or something else.
” He exhaled hard as he straightened, one hand dangling an ancient, cloudy plastic gallon jug of distilled water, the knob of his sword’s pommel above the leather wrapping giving a sly winking gleam.
“The smoke’s mostly high-altitude, it’s coming from elsewhere.
The heat’s not a problem, I can keep it from stressing your internal systems too much so long as you stay close. ”
Oh, that’s great. She wished he’d just tell her to fuck off, that she was on her own. Wandering out into the desert was probably a horrible way to die, but it was better than so much else she could imagine. “What about the bogeys?”
“Every step we take eastward now means the Mad God’s hold is lessened.
” He gave their surroundings a brief survey, though it was impossible that he hadn’t been aware of everything in the vicinity as a matter of course.
The patch of grey hair at his temple was oddly muted in the peculiar smoke-lensed light.
“That was an ulthrik—not really one of his servants, more an opportunistic predator. Probably did us a service by burning the van. Cheer up, love. We’re not done yet. ”
You don’t know how fucking done I am. Cass’s throat ached with dehydration, fear, a heavy rising scream. “I just killed another civilian just by—”
“You did not.” He slammed the trunk, a sharp, heavy sound; she flinched. “Come on, let’s get through the tunnel before more traffic happens along.”
She glanced at the concrete nostrils again, at the big stony bulk the holes were drilled through. A chill walked down her spine, doing nothing to relieve the still, breathless heat. “Is that a good idea?”
“It has to be done, regardless.” Blue eyes narrowed, he gazed down at her. “Can you walk a bit? If not, I’ll carry you.”
Oh, God. But of course he wouldn’t listen to reason. No man ever did.
If she couldn’t make him go back to his people, she had to at least try to not be a burden. When the next monster showed up, she could throw herself at it and hope to be a distraction, at least.
It was a grim plan. But Cass pushed her shoulders back, raising her chin as if staring down a bogey-hunter recruit who couldn’t believe a girl was calling the shots, and nodded. “I’ll walk,” she said.
There was no other option.