Pale Demon th-9 Read online

  “Thanks, Trent,” I said as I hefted the amulet, glowing again now that I was holding it. “You’re being useful today. I think you just saved me from beating up a coven member.”

  Ivy looked from Vivian’s Pinto to my mom’s car. “Now what?”

  I looked at the amulet, my heart pounding as I saw how far apart the two little red dots were. I wondered if Oliver had made it. Looping the cord around my neck, I crouched beside Vivian. “You take her feet, I’ll take her hands.”

  Immediately Ivy shifted, and together we lifted her, me straining far more than Ivy.

  Trent backed up a step, confused. “What are you going to do with her?”

  “Put her in the car,” I puffed, moving awkwardly to my mom’s car.

  Trent scooped up his toiletry bag. “You’re joking, right? Rachel, she’s coven. We can’t take her with us.”

  “I’m not going to leave her here,” I said, and Ivy’s eyes flicked to him as the unconscious woman seemed to gain fifty pounds with every step. “Will you get the ice?”

  Frowning, he turned away, but I couldn’t help but be impressed as he gave the waitress a story about us traveling together and knowing her and her friends, and that we’d make sure she got home okay. Pace fast, he caught back up with us in time to open the back door.

  “You can’t be serious,” he started in again, his eyes pinched as he held the door open. “They want to kill you!”

  “Maybe I’m trying sugar instead of vinegar,” I grunted as I scooted backward into my mom’s car, hitting my elbow as I pulled Vivian in after me. Ivy wrestled with her feet as Trent stood behind her and watched, his toiletry bag in one hand, the ice in the other. He looked totally different in his black clothes, his hair slicked back, his expression worried.

  “You should be tucking her away in that hotel room you rented,” he said, “and throwing her keys into the desert. She’d never find us then.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe it would just tick her off,” I said as I tossed my bag to the front seat and tugged Vivian farther in. My back hit the far door, and puffing, I opened it and backed out. Exhaling, I looked at him across the roof, tired. “I’m not leaving her unconscious in a hotel room a hundred miles from civilization to maybe wake up as someone’s desert-bunker wife. You put a zip strip on her, and she goes from coven to incapable. But frankly, the real reason she’s coming with us is that I’d rather have her tell the coven all our secrets than have a twenty-four-hour gap that they can use to invent stuff.” Seeing Vivian laid out on the seat, I carefully shut the door and looked out over the desert. “I’m driving. Who has the keys?”

  Ivy opened the driver’s-side door. “I’ll drive, you work the amulet,” she said, and I just looked at her, my heart pounding and adrenaline surging through me like a sugar high.

  Her eyes dilated at the fear I was giving off, and smiling wryly, she tugged the keys out of her pocket and dangled them for me. “Okay, you drive,” she said. “I’ll sit with my head hanging out the window like a golden retriever.”

  “Thanks,” I said, shaky as I came around to her side, got in, and adjusted everything. Ivy slipped into the front passenger seat as I cranked the engine over, tossing her overnight bag with her dirty clothes in it over the seat at Trent. He barely got his hands up in time, having been trying to arrange Vivian in a somewhat upright position.

  “You want to wait a minute so I can move some of this to the trunk?” he said, dropping the ice bag on the bump just now starting to rise on Vivian’s forehead.

  “No.” Everyone’s arms and legs were inside the vehicle, and I put the car in reverse, hitting the gas hard.

  Ivy already had her hand on the dash, but Trent went flying as the car jerked backward. Teeth clenched, I hit the brakes hard, and he was flung into the backseat where he belonged. His door, which had been open, bounced shut from the quick stop, and I jammed the gearshift into drive while ignoring Trent yelling at me.

  “You think you like speed?” Ivy said as I spun the tires and we left a cloud of dust, bouncing wildly until we found the road. “You’ve never seen Rachel drive with purpose.”

  Yeah, purpose. If purpose meant scared to death and to hell with everyone else, then I’d be driving with purpose.

  The ride smoothed out, and my eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, not to see the restaurant grow smaller in the distance, but to see Jenks’s absence.

  I had a chance to find him. A chance. And if he wasn’t okay, I was going to do some serious damage to my already wafer-thin credibility as a good witch, even if I was a black one.

  Ten

  My grip on the wheel tightened until my knuckles hurt. I was trying to keep my worry from turning into anger, but it was hard. Especially now that Trent was awake. “I don’t care how far we’ve not gotten,” I said tightly, glaring at Trent by way of the rearview mirror. “If we only make three hundred miles today, then we’ll deal with it. They have to stop sometime.”

  “I understand you’re concerned about your partner,” he said in that same persuasive voice that was starting to sound patronizing, “but I doubt they’re planning on sacrificing him to their local god. You have a locator amulet. You’ll find him. Slow down. Let them land. They’re running because they know you’re chasing them.”

  It was a nice thought, but they weren’t running because of us. They were running to somewhere, their path arrow straight and their pace unflagging. I wasn’t about to slow down, and Ivy didn’t look up from her map, a long white finger touching where our paths might cross again.

  Vivian kicked the back of my seat as she tried to find a more comfortable spot. On the other side of the backseat, Trent frowned out the window. Okay, so maybe I was going a little fast, but I’d been driving a huge, frustrating zigzag for the last four hours. I had raced down I-40, then gone south on 602 to get in front of them, as Ivy had suggested. We had, only to see them rise up right over the car and swear at us. We spent another hour on 61, watching them go a rather speedy forty miles an hour, paralleling us until we roared ahead to where 191 crossed their theoretical path. They simply flew higher, shooting arrows at us when I demanded they stop.

  From there, we’d taken 191 north in an effort to get back to the interstate. We didn’t know the next time we’d find gas, and Ms. Worries-a-lot in the front seat next to me was getting fidgety. By now, Ivy had enough data points to predict where they’d cross the road next. I was hoping that if we could get far enough ahead of them in time, I could hide behind a rock and simply catch them in a big bubble. Every time they saw the car, they raced out of my reach.

  Right now, they were somewhere behind us, me going about eighty and the pixies hitting a steady forty miles an hour. It was their top speed—which meant Trent was wrong and that this was a planned snag-and-drag; pixies couldn’t go that fast for that long. They were switching off and carrying Jenks. Carrying Jenks who knew where.

  It was about two in the afternoon and hot. I was frazzled and ready to snap. Ivy wasn’t much better, leaning over the seat to shake Vivian awake every half hour in case she had a concussion—which was totally pissing off the coven woman. Trent had been up for only a few minutes, but he already looked bored, staring out the window and clearly irate that the time he’d made was being wasted. It was all I could do not to reach over the seat and slap him.

  As I fidgeted, Ivy rolled her window down to let in a warm blast of air, overpowering the hefty air-conditioning my mom’s car had. Her eyes had gotten dark and her posture was tense. She wasn’t hot, she was randy, and I rolled my window down a bit as well.

  “I think they stopped,” she said, eying the amulet. “Somewhere by 180. See?”

  She held out the map with her notations and calculations. I didn’t look, teeth clenched as I blew past a van with a wizard painted on the side.

  “Rachel?”

  “Just tell me what road to take,” I muttered.

  She pulled a strand of her blowing hair out of her mouth. “The next exit,” she said, putting on
a pair of dark glasses to hide her eyes. “You’re going to have to go north for a few miles before it loops around and goes under the interstate.”

  “More backtracking?” Trent said, hardly audible.

  “Shut up! Just shut up!” I yelled, then exhaled, trying to relax. “I mean, I understand your concern,” I said softly. “I’ll get you to the West Coast in time if I have to buy a trip for you from Newt.” If only Al would’ve jumped me there, but he wanted me to fail. “But if you don’t shut up, I’m going to pull this car over and shove you in the trunk!”

  Trent sighed and shifted his knees, and Ivy looked up from the map, eyebrows raised.

  “I’m trying,” I said softly to her. “He’s got about as much empathy as a demon. It’s always me, me, me. What if it had been Quen who was kidnapped? I bet he’d be all over that like pixies on elf trash.”

  Trent cleared his throat, and I huffed. Point made.

  “You want me to drive for a while?” Ivy said. “You need a break.”

  “No, I’ve got this,” I said quickly, then added, “If I don’t do something, I’ll snap.”

  I waited for Jenks’s comment that I had already snapped, but of course it never came. Checking the speedometer, I pressed the accelerator. We had to stay in front of them, and there was a whole lot of distance left.

  “We’ll find him,” Ivy said, the amulet getting dark as she set it aside to fold up the map.

  Silent, I scanned the distant horizon for cops, my senses stretching as I took in every nuance of light and shadow. Jenks was out there somewhere. My stomach clenched. This shouldn’t have happened. He didn’t need me to watch him, but this altitude thing had caught us all by surprise. I should have made him take that curse.

  Ivy shook the map out with a rattle. “Trent, jiggle Vivian. Ask her what her name is.”

  “My name is Vivian,” the irate witch grumbled, clearly awake. “And if you touch me, Kalamack, I’ll turn your hair pink. I do not have a concussion! Leave me alone and let me sleep!” In a huff, she repositioned herself in the corner, her feet kicking the back of my seat as she shook out my mom’s shabby car blanket and rearranged it over her head.

  “I think she’s fine,” Trent said sourly as he looked out at the changing nothing.

  The car was full of unhappy people heading west. It was the Great American Family Road Trip, all right. Whaaa-hoo!

  I sniffed, my stomach hurting from too much stress and not enough food. I was upset, but it was hard not to see the scenery and call it beautiful. It was nothing but dirt and rock, but it looked clean, pure, the angles and gullies standing out in the strong sun. I could tell that Trent was hot with the window open and the air-conditioning going full bore, but I was comfortable. He’d have to suck it up.

  “That’s our exit,” Ivy said suddenly, and I slowed, not wanting to take it at ninety miles an hour. Trent sighed again, and I tapped the brake to shake him up.

  “It’s a state park,” I said, seeing the faded PETRIFIED FOREST sign. “Maybe this is where they’re heading.”

  “The Petrified Forest?” Trent said, sounding interested. “I read about this place.”

  Ivy leaned forward. “Everyone who’s been to school has read about this place.”

  “I’ve never been here,” Trent said, his words clipped as he tried to hide his interest. “It’s not the kind of thing that—”

  “They let you do, huh?” I finished for him, pissed for some reason. I’m chasing down my partner from kidnappers, and Trent’s more interested in chunks of rock?

  Ivy handed the map to him over the seat. “Now’s your chance, Johnny Boy Scout,” she said, apparently not needing it anymore. “We’re going right through it.”

  My heart gave a thump before settling into a faster pace. There was a park-ranger hut straddling the road. Crap. “Vivian? Are you going to give us any trouble? Tell me now.”

  “Just let me sleep,” she grumbled. “Let me sleep, and I’ll sign a paper that you’re a fucking angel.”

  “I didn’t know they let coven members talk like that,” Trent said dryly, probably trying to cover his curiosity, but he was leaning forward, wanting to see more.

  “Fuck you, Kalamack,” the usually posh woman shot back.

  Oh yeah. We were all having fun now.

  Ivy shrugged, so I pulled up and rolled my window completely down.

  “Hi. Can we have a day pass?” I asked after reading the rates painted on the brown sign.

  “That will be five fifty,” the weathered woman said, and Trent shoved some money at me over the seat.

  “Let me get you a receipt,” she said, ducking inside her window to hit a few buttons. “Are you camping?” she said as she leaned back out and handed me a receipt stapled to a brochure. “We don’t suggest it this time of year. And you’ll need to take a class before you can get your camp permit. If you’re not prepared, the desert can be deadly. The class just takes twenty minutes.”

  Twenty minutes to preserve your life? I thought. Is that all? “We’ve got lots of water.”

  Seeing Trent’s eager hand on the seat, at my shoulder, I handed him the brochure, and he settled back like a kid with a new toy.

  “It’s not just the water, it’s the heat and elevation,” the ranger said, her gaze on Vivian. “Is she okay?”

  The bar ahead of us was still down, and I took a deep breath.

  “Too much partying,” Trent said over the crackle of new paper, surprising me. “She’s not even going to get out of the car.”

  The ranger smiled, and the bar rose. “The gift shop is up on the right. If you change your mind about the class, they start every half hour.”

  “Thanks,” I said, wanting to floor it, but she hadn’t given me our sticker yet.

  “Well, enjoy the park. There’s a large group of Weres out at the hotel for a company retreat, but other than that, all the exhibits are open.”

  Finally the little yellow sticker was stuck to the inside of my window, and I exhaled, turning it into something I could blame on the heat instead of relief. “Thanks! Bye now!”

  Waving, the woman went back into her air-conditioned hut, and I crept forward at the posted forty miles an hour. After blowing down the interstate at ninety, it felt like I was crawling. I started to fidget.

  “It says here the average person needs a gallon of water per day,” Trent said, reading from the brochure. “How much do we have?”

  “None.” I eyed the empty water bottles in the cup holders. “It’s twenty miles to any road. I think we’ll be okay.”

  “All I’m saying is if we have to walk, we don’t have any water.”

  Ivy glanced at him. “You’re not walking anywhere. You’re staying in the car.”

  From the lump of blanket came an irate, “I’m trying to sleep! Will you shut up!”

  Ivy settled back, and I said nothing, dividing my attention between the unmoving dot of Jenks on the amulet, the winding road, and the shocking views of sharp-angled ravines and colors that were like nothing I’d ever seen before. We passed pull-off after pull-off, Trent rolling his window down, sucking the cooler air out of the car, the flat of his arms on the frame to get a look at the admittedly spectacular views. It wasn’t until we found flat desert again that he sank back into his seat. As expected, we crossed under the overpass and headed south.

  “Think we’ll get to the place in time?” I asked, my mood vacillating wildly between relief and impatience as I hit the gas.

  “Lots of time,” Ivy said, fingering the amulet. “They aren’t moving anymore.”

  “He can’t fly. Not at this altitude.” Damn it, I was babbling.

  “He’s wearing his red,” Ivy said, pointing out the sign for the auto tour. It went into the desert, and Trent perked up, his gaze going up and down as he traced our path on his brochure. “They might have taken him because he collapsed. Maybe they were trying to help.”

  “Yeah, and that’s why they were swearing at us when we caught up with them,” I
said. Double damn, what if I found him, only to find that the size difference prevented me from doing anything? The curse in my bag was for making little things big, not the other way around.

  Driving with one hand, I looked at my bag, where my phone was. If worse came to worst, I could call Ceri for the curse to make myself smaller. I’d do it in front of Vivian if I needed to.

  Again Trent put his window down, and the dry smell of the desert lifted through my hair as we drove a level course on the top of the world, the canyons dipping an impossible distance down, colored with purples, grays, and blues—like mountains in reverse. It was a weird way to see things. We’d met no one since entering the park, just seen a few ravens and buzzards. Silence, still and uncomfortable, and the sun hammering at everything without mercy.

  “Slow it down,” Ivy said, eying the amulet.

  “Are we there yet?” Trent said sarcastically, and Vivian groaned, pulling the blanket over her head despite the heat.

  I drove past a sign about an ancient ruin, and Ivy stiffened. “Back up. Rachel! We’re close. I think they’re at the ruins!”

  My heart pounded as I jerked the car to a halt so fast that Vivian hit the back of my seat, and even Trent had to catch himself. Ignoring Vivian’s snarl, I flung my arm over the back of the seat and put the car in reverse. Trent’s eyes widened as I whipped the car around, landing it between two white lines and jamming it into park. Intent, I turned the engine off and bolted out of the car, my boots scraping on the pavement as it threw up a wave of heat.

  The silence hit me, and I hesitated, shocked almost.

  There was nothing out here, impinging upon me the impression of magnitude. The hot wind shifting my hair had been in motion for hundreds of miles without impediment, giving it a slippery feel as it molded around me and continued on, elastic and not even recognizing me. I couldn’t see far enough, my eyes failing due to their own limitations for the first time in my existence. It was…immense. Jenks…