“What is it?” Malik asked.
“All hell just broke loose!” Cruz said.
“Which kind of hell?” Malik asked, as calmly as if h
e were asking their favorite type of pie.
“The FBI-kicking-in-the-doors kind of hell,” Shade said tersely.
“Gee, Shade,” Malik said, “I don’t think your clever plan is working out real well.”
“You going to snark or help, Malik?” Shade snapped.
Malik cursed under his breath and pulled his car into an open spot. He climbed in behind Cruz and said, “We need something no one will notice, something common. Cruz? Find something on YouTube on hot-wiring cars.”
The simple act of finding the right vehicle proved ridiculously hard to do, because the YouTube video explained that new cars were a whole lot harder to hot-wire, so they narrowed the search to old cars, the Subaru prowling up and down the aisles.
“Wait a minute,” Malik said, snapping his fingers. “We don’t need to hot-wire, not with your ability, Shade.”
They saw a Mercedes SUV just pulling into a spot.
“Excuse me,” Shade said, and began the swift transformation—swifter, easier each time—and then was gone in a blast of wind and a door slammed way too hard. Cruz and Malik caught a brief glimpse of her as she raced up behind the woman driver, who was extricating a toddler from a car seat. Shade dipped into the woman’s purse and took her key chain in less time than it took the woman to blink.
Malik hopped into the driver’s seat. “I got this, switch the plates.”
The Mercedes plates came off and were swapped for the plates of an Acura three rows over. Cruz got in the back, Shade climbed awkwardly into the front passenger seat, in the middle of resuming her normal appearance, and they drove off.
“We just stole a car,” Cruz said. Her normally olive face was unnaturally white, tinged with green.
“The least of our problems,” Shade said.
“Yeah,” Malik said, “this will go really well when I explain to some cop that it wasn’t the fault of the young black male, it’s the fault of the white girl. She’s the car thief, Officer, why are you pointing a gun at me?”
“Oh, my God, where do we go?” Cruz wondered.
Malik said, “I have a place we can go. At least for as long as it takes the cops to connect me to all this. My cousin has a place.”
Shade leaned forward and put a hand on his shoulder. “Sorry, Malik.”
“Right,” he said.
“Pop the SIM card out of your phone, Cruz,” Shade instructed, as she did the same. “Throw it out of the window.”
“The rock!” Cruz said. “We left the rock!”
“Nah,” Shade said, and produced the object from her bag. “I had plenty of time to grab it.”
CHAPTER 10
Turning White to Red
HE WAS HAVING the most lovely dreams.
Armo lay in a drug-induced dream state. He was, despite being in a dream, aware that he was bound at wrists and ankles and lying on a steel gurney. He was aware, in that vague, amused sort of way that the drugs allowed, that he was a prisoner. That he was being used. That he was surrounded by machines with bright LED lights and various people in white smocks with masks over their mouths.
It was an odd thing about Armo: ever since he was very young he’d had the ability to lucid dream. A former girlfriend had been the first to explain that this wasn’t normal, and so he had looked it up, and sure enough most people lucid dreamed only on rare occasions. It seemed that back in ancient times it was more common, and part of what made some people think they had the gift of prophecy.
But Armo was pretty sure this dream wasn’t the sort of thing prophets saw, because this dream was, to put it bluntly, the sexiest dream he’d ever had.