An entrance onto I-87 appeared as soon as they were on the downtown side of the bridge, and the directional signal sounded loud in the interior of the station wagon. Heading north, Mary stayed at the speed limit and got passed by a couple of eighteen-wheelers doing eighty in a sixty-five. From time to time, lights marking merger zones flared overhead in a rhythm that never lasted long, and what little local traffic there was thinned out even more as they continued onward.
When they got home, Mary decided she was going to try to feed the girl something. Bitty hadn’t had First Meal, so she had to be starving. Then maybe a movie until dawn, somewhere quiet. The trauma was so fresh, and not just the stuff around losing her mother. What had happened at Havers’s had to be bringing up everything that had come before—the domestic abuse, the rescue where Rhage, V and Butch had killed the father to save Bitty and her mom, the discovery that the mother was newly pregnant, the loss of the baby, the lingering months afterward where Annalye had never fully recovered—
“Ms. Luce?”
“Yes?” Oh, God, please ask me something I can answer decently. “Yes, Bitty?”
“Where are we going?”
Mary glanced at a road sign coming at them. It read, Exit 19 Glens Falls. “I’m sorry? We’re going home. We should be there in about fifteen minutes?”
“I thought Safe Place wasn’t this far away.”
“Wha—?”
Oh, God.
She was heading for the damn mansion.
“Oh, Bitty, I’m sorry.” Mary shook her head. “I must have lost track of the exits. I…”
What had she been thinking?
Well, she knew the answer to that—all the hypotheticals she’d been running through her head about what they were going to do when they got out of the car were things involving the place where Mary lived with Rhage, the King, the Brothers, the fighters and their mates.
What the hell had she been thinking?
Mary got off at exit nineteen, went under the highway, and hopped back on going south. Man, she was just hitting it out of the park tonight, wasn’t she.
At least things couldn’t get any worse.
Back at the Brownswick School for Girls, Assail, son of Assail, heard the roar even through the sensory overload of battle.
In spite of the chaos of all the gunshots and the cursing and the mad sprints from cover to cover, the thunderous sound that rolled out across the abandoned campus was the kind of thing that got one’s attention.
As he wrenched around, he kept his finger on the trigger of his autoloader, continuing to discharge bullets straight ahead at a line-up of the undead—
For a split second, he fell off from his shooting.
His brain simply could not process what his eyes were suggesting had magically appeared a mere fifty yards away from him. It was … some kind of dragon-like creature, with purple scales, a barbed tail, and a gaping mouth set with T. rex teeth. The prehistoric monster was a good two stories high, long as a tractor trailer, and fast as a crocodile as it went after anything that ran away—
Free fall.
Without warning, his body went flying forward and a searing pain streaked down the front of his calf and sliced across his ankle. Twisting in midair, he landed face up in the tangled grass—and a breath later, the partially wounded slayer who’d gotten him with a knife lurched up onto his chest, that blade arc’d over its shoulder, its lips curled into a snarl as black blood streamed out all over Assail.
Right, fuck this, mate.
Assail grabbed a fistful of still-brown hair, shoved his muzzle into that wide-open maw, and hit the trigger, blowing open the back of the skull, incapacitating the body such that it fell on him as a writhing deadweight. Kicking the animated corpse off, he sprang to his feet.
And found himself directly in the cross hairs of the beast.
His movement up to the vertical was what did it, the dragon’s eyes snapping to him and narrowing into slits. Then, with another roar, the killer came at him, pounding over the ground, crushing slayers under its massive hind feet, its front claws curled up and ready to strike.
“Fuck!”
Assail surged forward, no longer worried about where his gun was pointed and absolutely unconcerned about the fact that he was now headed directly into an advancing line of lessers. The good news? The beast took care of that little problem. The slayers, likewise, garnered one look at all the hell-hath-no-fury coming at them and scattered like leaves unto the autumn wind.
Naturally, there was naught directly up ahead that provided any cover. By bad luck, his escape route offered nothing but scrub and brush, without any meaningful protection. The nearest building? Two hundred yards away. At least.
With a curse, he ran e’er faster, reaching down into the muscles of his legs, calling for more and more speed.
It was a race the beast was due to win—a victory that was inevitable when a five-foot stride tried to outrun a set of legs that could cover twenty-five in a single bound. With every second, that pounding grew louder and closer until hot blasts of breath hit Assail’s back, flushing him in spite of the cold.
Fear struck to his core.
But there was no time to try to harness the panic that flooded his mind. A great roar blasted at him, the force of the sound so great that it spurred him forth, providing a gust of foul-smelling air that ushered him along. Shit, his only chance was—
The bite came after the great roar, those jaws snapping so close to the nape of Assail’s neck that he cringed down even though it slowed his gait. Too late to save himself, though. Airborne. He went airborne, plucked from the ground in mid-stride—except why wasn’t there more pain?
Surely if the beast had gotten him by the shoulders or the torso, he would have been racked with—no, wait, it had him by the jacket. The thing had him by the leather jacket, not the flesh, a band of constriction cutting across his pecs and lifting him by the armpits, his legs flopping, his gun firing as he made fists of his hands. Below him, the landscape tilted like it was on a seesaw, the bolting lessers, the fighting Brothers, the overgrown bushes and trees flipping around him as he was shaken all about.
The fucking thing was going to toss him up and gullet him. This back-and-forth nonsense was just tenderizing a meal.
Goddamn him, he was the vampire equivalent of a chicken wing.
No time. He let his gun go and went for the zipper at his throat. The shaking motion made his tiny target fast as a mouse, slick as a marble, all needle-in-a-haystack for his trembling hands and slippery, sweaty fingertips.
The beast’s very hold did more for him.
With those teeth locked in the back of the jacket, the leather couldn’t hold his weight, and he broke free, falling from the jaws, the hard ground rushing to greet him. Tucking into a roll so that he didn’t break anything, he landed in a heap nonetheless.
Directly on his shoulder.
The crack was something that registered throughout his body and rendered him as useless as a babe unattended, all breath lost, his sight blurring. But there was no time if he wanted to live. Wrenching around, he—
Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop—BOOM!
His cousins came out of the night, running as if they were being chased when in fact they were not. Ehric had two autoloaders up and discharging … and Evale had an elephant gun on his shoulder.
That was the BOOM!
Indeed, the weapon was, in fact, an actual elephant gun, an enormous firearm that had been left over from the time of the Raj in India. Evale, the aggressive bastard, had long ago seemed to have bonded with the thing in an unnatural, “my precious” kind of way.
Thank the Fates for unhealthy preoccupations.
Those forty-millimeter bullets did nothing to slow the beast down, pinging off the purple scales as if they were peas cast upon a motor vehicle. But the elephant gun’s payload of lead caused a howl of pain and a recoil.
It was Assail’s only opportunity for escape.
Closing his eyes, he focused, focused, focused—
No dematerializing. Too much adrenaline on top of too much cocaine with too much pain from his shoulder as a chaser.
And the beast went right back on the attack, refocusing on Assail and giving him the dragon equivalent of a fuck-you in the form of an enormous roar—
The massive shotgun went off a second time, catching the thing in the chest.