You Can Run
10
She didn’t try to engineer an excuse to call Hartgrave from the road. Rather the reverse: Besides wearing her thick gloves, she stopped every half-hour to get out and give the car an anti-magic break.
So she arrived without mishap. But he loomed over her Christmas vacation, memories of him popping up like specters at unexpected moments, making her stomach zip and clench and sink. She missed him. The arguments. The quarter, half and occasionally whole smiles. That kiss.
(God, that kiss.)
Her magic problem was forever jumping out at her, too. For instance, when her father wanted her to try the new global positioning system that could pilot his tractor .
For decades, he’d been saving spare change in glass jars squirreled through the house, and this was what he’d finally decided to spend it all on. No way was she touching the thing and ruining it.
“How about you use it and I’ll watch,” she said, backing away.
Her father chuckled, running a hand through his thinning but still-brown hair. “Never did like technology, did you?”
Oh, if only it were that. “It’s more that it doesn’t like me.”
He must have caught the undercurrent to those words because he stopped gazing with soppy affection at his new toy and shot her a look of mild concern. “Something wrong, Em?”
“No,” she lied, wishing yet again that she could tell him.
“Hmm,” he said, which was what he always said when he wanted a better answer.
“Dad—”
“Hmm .”
“It’s just ... complicated.”
He shook his head in a decidedly rueful way. “Ah. A man.”
That was an accurate answer to what was wrong. She sighed and nodded.
“Not going so well, I take it,” he said.
Every nerve in her body buzzed at the memory of Hartgrave’s lips, hands, tongue. Then that part of the mental replay was over, pushing forward to the look on his face as she pulled away .
“It’s not going anywhere. It doesn’t matter,” she added, wincing at this second lie and hastening to tack on a truth: “I’m sure you would think he was inappropriate, anyway.”
“Oh dear.” He slung an arm around her shoulders and led her out of the barn. “Inappropriate people are always the hardest to get over. Darn inconsiderate of them ... Would you like some cookies?”
She laughed, leaning into his wiry frame, and the tight knot of anxiety eased. Difficult to remain worked up about Hartgrave, anti-magic and her precarious position in the world when her position in this small corner of it was so familiar and comfortable.
But four days later, she approached her car for the trip back with the anxious knot filling her entire stomach.
“Drive straight there so you don’t get caught in that storm they’re forecasting,” her father said, setting in her trunk a full-to-bursting box of books—Christmas presents and old college texts she hadn’t gotten around to moving.
Her mother snapped one last photograph with her professional-grade camera—that was what she’d spent her squirreled coins on—and stood on her toes to kiss the top of Emily’s head, a childhood ritual she refused to relinquish just because a certain daughter was now slightly taller than she was.
“I wish you’d get a cell phone for emergencies,” her mother lamented. “Really—we’ll pay the bill if you can’t manage it yet. You should have let us cover your tuition, you know— ”
“Mom ,” Emily cut in with fond exasperation. Given enough time, all conversations with her mother came around to student loans. “I’m fine now. Actually have money in the bank and everything. Anyway, someone lent me a phone for this trip.”
“Oh! That was nice.”
“Yes.” Emily sighed. “It was.”
She drove off, white-knuckled under her gloves, but everything seemed okay—until roughly thirty miles from Ashburn. Then she heard an ominous clunk. She stopped on the shoulder, willing it to be a normal sort of clunk, and kept the motor running while waiting to see what would happen.
Nothing, as it turned out. No warning lights blinked on. No other unusual sounds manifested. Accelerating back onto the highway in the deepening dusk, she crossed her toes and hoped for the best.
Twenty-five miles from Ashburn, the “check engine” light flickered on, and she admitted defeat.
Hartgrave’s voice was faint over the scratchy connection, but the emotion in it was unmistakable. “What .”
“My car,” she said, leaning against the headrest and wondering if it wouldn’t have been better to simply walk the twenty-five miles back to campus.
“Did you pull over?” This time he sounded far more worried than annoyed.
“Yes.”
“Get out. Now. Stay at a safe distance.”
She thought about arguing that “check engine” did not usually mean “imminent explosion,” but opted to just follow his instructions .
“Where are you?” he asked as she shut the door behind her and stood, shivering, in the lightly falling snow.
“Just outside Clear Lake. Interstate 35, near U.S. 18.”
“How near?”
“Half a mile south,” she said, looking at the sign that announced this fact.
A pause, punctuated by faint clicking noises. “Anyone around?”
“Um ... no.”
“Right. Hang on.”
The connection went dead.
Before she could decide whether he’d hung up on her again or whether it was just the bad reception, something popped into view beyond the road sign, dark amid the swirling flakes. No, wait—some one . Someone wearing a black coat and wool cap. Holy crap.
She ran to meet him, all her intentions of starting with an apology driven clear out of her head. “That was amazing!”
He looked at her car rather than at her, his long coat blowing wildly around his boots. “What happened?”
She told him. Without comment, he slid into the driver’s seat and laid his hands on the dashboard. His frown deepened.
“Well, it’s not the engine control unit or the instrument panel,” he muttered.
He spent a few more moments feeling up her car while she watched, skin tingling, envying the junker. Then he popped the hood. They stared at the contents, playing a miserable version of “what’s wrong with this picture.”
She came up with the answer first. “Oh! The alternator belt’s gone.”
Hartgrave blinked at her. “What?”
She’d seen enough tractors at all angles to know what a vehicle was supposed to look like under the hood. She pointed: “Right there.”
“Schei?e .”
“How could I have been responsible for this?”
He let the hood fall shut with a resounding bang. “You weren’t. An alternator belt is mechanical, not electronic.”
“Then—”
“Your car is a piece of dreck and chose this evening to break down.”
She shook her fist at the sky. “Damn you, irony!”
“Exactly. Now go pop the hood and try to start the car.”
“Pop the—why did you close it, then?”
“I desperately needed to slam something.”
She laughed. He looked as if he’d been about to smile in return but thought better of it, and her stomach did its zip-clench-sink routine so rapidly, she had to steady herself on the car.
She almost launched into her kiss-debacle explanation right then. But he hunched more deeply into his coat, rubbing his arms, and she knew it would have to wait until they were both out of the cold.
Her first attempt at starting the car went nowhere. The battery was clearly stone dead. Hopeless, even if another car stopped to help—a jumpstart wasn’t enough without an alternator belt.
“Again,” Hartgrave yelled from behind the open hood.
Still, he’d just traveled twenty-five miles in seconds, so why couldn’t he reanimate expired car parts? She had a vivid image of him lifting both arms skyward and funneling lightning directly to the battery, cackling in grand mad-scientist fashion.
She turned the key a second time. The engine flared to life, sputtered and stopped.
“Verdammt noch mal! Again!”
This time, it took. He jumped into the passenger seat and she hit the accelerator.
“Thank you,” she said, realizing she’d forgotten that part.
“Don’t thank me yet.” He made a half-hearted effort to brush the snow off his coat. “I’ve no idea how long this will hold.”
“No, I mean—thank you for coming. It was very good of you.”
He said nothing. She took a deep breath—explaining what she’d meant post-kiss would need to be done without pauses—but at the first syllable, her car shuddered. The warning lights all blinked and the engine stalled out.
She just managed to force the vehicle over to the shoulder, and it came to a gasping halt not far from the exit for U.S. 18 east.
“Half a mile. Brilliant.” Hartgrave slumped further into the seat. “I can’t do this fifty more times. ”
“You recharged the battery a small amount?”
He nodded. “It would need to be recharged entirely to have any hope of getting back to Ashburn, and I can’t do it, I’d have to—”
He stopped. She waited for him to go on, then gave him a tentative prod. “You’d have to what?”
“Nothing.” He rubbed the heels of his hands over his closed eyes. “I can’t, all right? If the belt were still attached to the car, I could repair it, but as it is—we’re stuck.”
“But—but you can go anywhere . You could take us both home right now, couldn’t you? Well, maybe not me,” she amended. Sadly. “But you could go and ask Bernie Ballantine to come get me—he would, he’s a sweetheart.”
“No.”
“He is —”
“No, I mean—I can’t go,” Hartgrave said.
“What? Why?”
“In the name of all that’s holy, stop asking questions!”
She stared at him, bewildered. Well, perfect segue: “That’s why I had to stop kissing you.”
His eyes went wide. She pressed on at top speed.
“I really enjoyed it but I don’t know you, and that’s what I was trying to say, but it came out missing a few things, pretty much everything except the verbs, and I’d love to get to know you better so I could kiss you because that was about ten times better than every previous kiss I’ve had put together, and I can’t stop thinking about you, but I realize you’re not wild about—”
“Daggett!” He said it like a plea .
“Right. Stopping now.”
He rubbed his hands together to warm them, or possibly to buy himself some time. She waited in a frenzy of anticipation, expecting nothing good but hoping, hoping he would see a way for their competing needs to not be in conflict.
“I won’t talk about my past. Don’t try to—to entice me,” he said. He’d started this speech as hard and unmovable as a boulder, but then he looked up at her and his voice broke.
A hollow ache spread from her chest in just the way it had when he’d told her she would never do magic. So this too was impossible. She searched for something to say and came up with, “Bloody buggering hell.”
He worked his mouth open, abruptly shut it, then opened it again. A choked noise came out.
Laughter.
“Well,” she said, hard-pressed not to join in, the curse had sounded so ridiculous falling from her lips, “at least that wasn’t at all enticing.”
He reached out and tucked a few errant strands of hair behind her ear, leaving a prickling trail in his wake. “You’re the only person who can make me laugh. That’s incredibly enticing.”
She shucked off a glove, caught his hand and held it, looking at their intertwined fingers, thinking of their auras meshing at the point of contact. “We’ll have to stop spending time together, won’t we? One of us will give in, otherwise, and we’ll end up resenting each other. ”
He didn’t disagree. He raised her hand to his lips, giving her another example of what she’d be missing, and let go.
She swallowed, trying to regain her composure. They couldn’t keep sitting here, or she might give in immediately. “What should we do about getting home?”
“Well ... calling in Ballantine isn’t a bad idea.”
She hated to admit it, since she’d suggested it, but: “I don’t actually know his phone number.”
“I’ve got it.”
“Really?” She found this as surprising as if he’d admitted to owning a collection of loudly colored shirts. She’d never seen the two men even talk to each other, except for that once at Mexican Foo. “How did you come to—”
“Sod it. There’s no signal.” He glared at his cell phone. “How can I be getting no signal in a state that’s so very—”
“Don’t you dare say ‘flat.’”
“So very much in need of reception to communicate with people in more interesting states. Check the other phone.”
He didn’t sound hopeful, which was just as well, because that didn’t work either. Emily handed it back to him.
“We know it works well enough for a call half a mile south,” she said, slipping her bare hand into her glove and trying not to think about his lips on her skin.
He looked out at the snow and groaned. “I suppose there’s nothing else for it. ”
“I’ll go; you can stay,” she said, taking pity on him. He wasn’t dressed for the worsening storm. No gloves, no scarf.
“What sort of man would I be—”
“One who understands how royally pissed off I get when people treat me like I’m helpless.”
“Right then, equal-opportunity misery. We’ll both go.” He tucked the phones into his pockets. “But not half a mile back, not when there’s a restaurant over there that we can sit in while we wait for Ballantine.”
“Over there” was at the end of the ramp on the other side of I-35. Uneasiness flared up like a candle. It would be far quicker to cut across the road than follow the eastbound ramp to 18 and double back, but it was, after all, an interstate highway. And it passed through Clear Lake, where the plane carrying Buddy Holly and a handful of other pop stars crashed all those years ago—a plane they’d taken because the bus kept breaking down.
This was obviously a place where irony hovered, waiting for victims. It had been snowing that night, too.
Hartgrave, who’d stepped out of the car, stuck his head back in. “Have you decided you are in fact helpless?”
“Sorry, I’m coming.” She pulled on her hat and jumped out. “I was just imagining the worst.”
“What, frostbite?”
“No, getting hit by a truck.”
His lips turned up in that half-smile that was so him , the way she would always picture him. “The road’s empty, you know. ”
“No, it’s not,” she said, gesturing to a vehicle so far off that its headlights were nearly indistinguishable from the snow.
“That’s five minutes away,” he said, exaggerating but not by much. “Let’s go, or I really will end up with frostbite.”
She took off at a sprint. She got as far as the middle of the southbound span when irony caught up.
“Ow ,” she said, down on her hands and one bruised knee. She didn’t even know why she’d fallen, it had happened so fast.
Hartgrave leaned in. “Are you all right?”
She took a quick inventory. “Yes, fine,” she said, accepting his hand up. But when she tried to get the heck off the highway—
“Oh, God. I’m stuck .”
She’d managed to wedge her foot completely into a small pothole. Tugging only made her lose her balance.
“Hang on, hang on,” he said, clearly trying not to laugh at her predicament.
But the smile died on his lips when he couldn’t get her free, either.
The headlights no longer looked far away. They were getting bigger at a rate that suggested high speed—perhaps as fast as her heart was now pumping. Blood roared in her ears.
“Get the boot off, just get it off,” he barked. “No, not with those gloves on— I’ll work on the laces, just be ready to pull it off— damn it! Why did you make the knots so bloody tight? ”
She could hardly hear him. The vehicle barreling toward them was a truck. A huge, jacked-up pickup truck.
“Magic!” she choked out. “Use magic! Hartgrave!”
He tried once more to undo the knot, something like anguish twisting his face, before jerking both hands back and aiming them at the pavement near her foot. “Don’t move .”
Brakes squealed. The driver must finally have noticed them. Thank God—
And just like that, the truck fishtailed violently, spinning, its entire length stretched across the highway. A dozen feet from impact. A yard. Inches.
It passed right through the space where she was standing, only she wasn’t standing there anymore. She was wrapped in Hartgrave’s arms, cheek pressed against his chest, feet dangling in the air at least thirty feet above the proceedings.
The vehicle stopped and disgorged the driver, a rattled-looking teenager. The boy stared back along the road, then turned his head both directions to scan the shoulders. He did not, of course, think to look up. Eventually he climbed back into the truck and drove off at a speed so slow it would have been amusing, if Emily were in any condition to be amused.
She wasn’t even in a condition to properly enjoy the flying.
“I think,” she said, voice sounding all wrong, “that I might pass out.”
“No!” Hartgrave maneuvered them onto the side of the road they’d been trying to reach. “Stay conscious—we have to get out of here now . Fuck,” he added, which seemed an odd thing to say, considering that he’d just saved them. “Fuck fuck fuck .”
“What’s—”
“Take off a glove and give me your hand,” he said, holding his out. “Quickly!”
Befuddled, she did.
“Gah!” she cried in tandem with his “bugger!” It hurt . (It also cleared the about-to-faint feeling right out of her system.)
“Right, that settles that,” he said, not explaining what, exactly, settled what. “Can you walk? Can you run?”
“Yes,” she said instantly, because she knew she had to. Something was clearly wrong.
She tore off across the snow-covered patch of land beside the ramp, Hartgrave behind her only—she assumed—because he worried she might again lose her footing.
“Hurry,” he said, “hurry, hurry ...”
She couldn’t think what had happened to make him so agitated. They were alive. The driver was alive. And no one knew he’d managed it with an impressive bit of magic.
Almost directly in front of them, two women materialized out of thin air.
They wore long, pale coats and fierce expressions. If she’d had any doubt their appearance was what Hartgrave had feared, his sharp intake of breath would have erased it .
He jumped in front of her. His phone’s frantic beep-beep-beep alert went off, and she suddenly realized what it was: Morse code. SOS.
One of the women had a dark bob that stood out against the snowstorm like ink on paper. Her companion’s hair was a brilliant crimson. Snow White and Rose Red , her brain supplied as if this were the contribution she most needed right now.
The next second, luminescent magic sizzled from the women’s fingers, racing outward—not directly at her or Hartgrave, but around them all. Like that, the four of them were hemmed in by a sizable dome. Trapped. Hartgrave was casting, too—a barrier between them and the two women, splitting the dome in half.
Could this possibly be what it looked like? Had he been hiding in Ashburn from some sort of magical hit squad?
She’d wanted adventure. She’d wanted to know Hartgrave’s secret. Two wishes fulfilled for the price of one—a price that might be far too high.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” Rose Red said to Hartgrave, breaking the fraught silence. She sounded British—and furious.
“Wasn’t really in the mood for it,” he said, the tightness in his voice undercutting the devil-may-care words.
Emily forced herself to breathe and consider the options. No one else was nearby, no one was likely to see them from the road, but there had to be something she could do. She was anti-magic, for Pete’s sake—this was the one time that cruel twist of fate could be helpful. She ought to be the one jumping in front of him .
Except she’d never had an instantaneous effect on Hartgrave’s enchantments, and if any magic was instantaneously fatal ...
Rose Red was saying something. Emily refocused in time to catch, “And Kincaid will be very interested to hear what you’ve been up to.” The woman’s scowl deepened. “But I’m just as happy to bring you back to him in pieces. Your choice.”
“You know you’re not getting out of this,” Snow White added.
Hartgrave shot Emily a look of infinite meaning, and in that instant she knew. He couldn’t get them out—but she could.
She was the key. She was.
A heady feeling, despite the danger. No, because of it. She could show what she was made of and compensate for the little matter of being rendered helpless by asphalt.
As she tore off her gloves, he whispered, “Wait until we’re both at the edge—I need to be in arm’s reach. And don’t touch my shield.”
At that, his barrier glowed red. But he didn’t need to distinguish it from the air, as it happened, because the next moment the Sisters Grimm sent a wave of fire roaring against it.
Hartgrave, who’d been taking a few cautious steps away from the center of the dome, staggered backward, shouting a warning. Emily hit the ground right before flames burst through a scorched-black weak spot and whizzed across the space she’d just been occupying .
“Stay behind me!” he ordered, shoring up his spell. To the attackers, he added, “She has nothing to do with this—let her go.”
Rose Red’s laugh was chilly. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Drop our defenses so you can go, you mean.”
Hartgrave crab-walked two more steps to the left. Emily followed, wondering why he didn’t just run to the edge of the dome, and feeling even more perplexed when he stopped altogether.
“What do you plan to do with her? That is,” he added, “if you don’t inadvertently kill her trying to get to me.”
“I’m sure Kincaid will have ideas,” Snow White said. Ominously.
Hartgrave, shuffling a yard closer to the shimmering edge, bit off a curse as two more flames sizzled through hairline fractures in his shield. It seemed as if each movement sapped at his defensive position.
Rose Red called out: “Already tiring, are you? Your shield is collapsing.”
She was right. It had curved, melting under the barrage. Hartgrave opened his mouth to respond and had a coughing fit instead.
“We’re close enough, damn it,” Emily hissed. “Let me try!”
She took his answering cough to mean “go right ahead,” leapt the remaining half-dozen feet and pushed both hands onto the barrier.
Nothing happened.
She leaned her entire body into it, knees trembling as anxiety kicked up to full-out fear. Hartgrave’s faint red shield, the only thing standing between them and immolation, was well and truly failing. Tiny bits of fire broke through at multiple pinprick points—she ducked to avoid one—and he couldn’t do anything about it, couldn’t stop coughing.
They were going to die.
“This is not what I meant by adventure!” she yelled to no one in particular—and with a hiss and a pop, the dome evaporated.
She stumbled into the storm it had been holding at bay. When she got herself turned around, expecting to find spells rushing at her, she discovered their attackers were trapped—caught in an even smaller dome. A red one. She laughed in nervous relief: Holes notwithstanding, Hartgrave’s wall hadn’t warped—he’d altered it on purpose.
The next second, he barreled into her.
“Be calm,” he said in a rasp that proved he hadn’t feigned his condition. “ Now .”
The hit squadders—yelling bloody murder—pummeled his altered spell. Already, new scorch marks formed. She wanted to shout: Calm? Calm?!
He grabbed her right hand with palsied fingers. Oh, the pain . “I’m not”—he coughed—“leaving without you.”
“All right.” She expelled a breath through gritted teeth. “All right. Calm.”
The sensation where they touched eased from terrible to merely bad.
“Focus.” He fell to his knees in the snow, pulling her with him. “You can do it, I have faith in you ... ”
Impossible to ignore the shouted threats, but she tried. Calm. Calm as a spring breeze or a silvery lake or a snowy night, a snowy night with absolutely no murderous magic-users.
Hartgrave dropped her hand, threw his arms around her and—
What happened next was the strangest sensation. Nothing—that was what it felt like. Pure nothing.
The damp chill of snow disappeared. The pressure of his fingers dissolved. The sound of infuriated killers receded to a silence so total, the idea of noise was ridiculous.
When the world rushed back in the form of what appeared to her dazed eyes to be a room, it was too much. She fell forward on her hands, head spinning.
Beside her, Hartgrave was coughing hard enough to dislodge a rib. When the fit subsided, he took a rattling breath and said with hoarse finality: “Those were wizards.”