Witch's Pyre (Worldwalker 3)

“All of it,” Abbot answered, throwing up his hands.

Carrick followed Simms outside. She was shouting at the helmsman of a small aircraft that had rotary blades on top. The blades seemed to chop the air, and Carrick put two and two together.

“I am in charge here, not Abbot,” Simms was yelling at the helmsman, “and I don’t think I need to remind you that these are terrorists we’re dealing with, and—” She noticed another figure approaching the aircraft. It was Miller, the informant. “What are you doing here?” she shouted at the desperate young man.

“I’m coming with you,” he said. “It’s her, we both know it.” Miller shifted from foot to foot. “I have to come with you.”

Simms looked at Carrick as if noticing him for the first time. “And you?”

“Chief Abbot ordered me to go with you,” he lied smoothly. Carrick looked at the helmsman. “He said we’d better get moving,” he said with the hint of warning that two underlings would use while dealing with petulant superiors.

The helmsman threw up his hands and starting hitting buttons. “Everyone in,” he said.

Carrick jumped up into the back row of the chopper and let Simms take the place in front of him. Not that she noticed him, anyway. Both she and Miller were too intent on being near Lily’s power to care about anything else. Carrick smiled slightly and stared at the back of Simms’s head while the chopper took to the sky.

People always looked the wrong way when they were looking forward to something, he thought.

Lily. Simms has found you. She’s in flight and approaching rapidly with many people in uniform following behind. They heard you discussing Alaric’s bombs and they gave you a special name that has swelled the ranks of your opposition.

What name?

Terrorist.

Lily stopped and looked across the street at the gas station that was just a few hundred yards away, the word still whispering ominously in her head.

“What is it?” Rowan asked.

“Simms found us. She’s close.”

The coven looked down the narrow strip of asphalt until it shimmered in the distance. It was a back road, seldom used. The only car they’d seen on it since they’d emerged from the dunes was a big-rig truck that sped by with a roar and a gust of baked air.

“We need water,” Una said.

Li

ly swallowed. Tristan watched her with worried eyes. She tried to smile at him, but it hurt her cracked lips. He looked up at the gas station and made a frustrated sound.

“I’m going in,” he said. Rowan’s hand shot out to stop him, but Tristan shook it off. “We won’t make it to the next one. It’s now or never, Ro,” he said. Rowan gave in.

Breakfast sighed and followed Tristan. “I guess someone who’s actually seen American money ought to go with him.”

The rest of the coven stayed on the other side of the road with the dunes behind them. The wind whistled past, snatching moisture from their bodies. The sky was streaked with white clouds that were stretched so thin they only served to turn the blue milky. They had entered the never-ending late afternoon of a summer day—the time of antsy, exasperated waiting for sunset.

The witching hour, someone else whispered inside Lily’s head.

“I swear to Christmas that if he’s in there bullshitting with the cashier . . .” Una let her threat run out.

Breakfast appeared after what felt like an eternal five minutes. He was halfway across the street when Lily saw Tristan’s bright smile as he emerged from the shop. Then she heard the woof-woof-woof of the helicopter.

“Run!” Caleb hollered.

Blue and red lights flashed to the left and the right, both lanes suddenly filled with police cars converging on their location. Breakfast bounded the last few steps across the street to grab Una’s outstretched hands. A helicopter lifted up and over the phalanx of police cars to hover above the coven. The air spilled down on top of their heads like water being poured from above.

Rowan glanced at Lily, a regretful smile on his face. Just over his far shoulder, but separated by distance and bad fortune, was Tristan, stranded on the other side of the road. He knew what she was thinking before she did.

Not him too. Not both of them.

“I’ll protect him. Gift me,” Rowan said, his deep voice penetrating through the din.