Curse the Dawn (Cassandra Palmer 4)

“You knew that was there, right?” I asked, shaken.

Pritkin swallowed. “Of course.”

I shut my eyes. “Can we make it as far as Chaco Canyon?”

“Even if we could, he would simply hop with us! He can follow us wherever we go!”

“But can we get there?”

“No,” he said tersely. “My weapons aren’t designed for fighting a god, and I’m running out of tricks.”

I opened my eyes and stared at the dashboard. “Then maybe Marsden has a few.” There was a panel of buttons by the steering wheel that didn’t look like standard equipment. “What do those do?”

“I don’t know. Some of Jonas’ meddling. And don’t—”

I punched a green one and we rocketed forward. We were going fast enough to throw me back against the seat and to flatten my cheeks to my face. I couldn’t see. The pressure was too great for me to even catch a breath, too great for me to so much as move. The ley line looked like an almost solid tube around us, the flashes and flares streaming together into one long line of color.

“—touch anything,” Pritkin finished as we shuddered back to normal speed.

I drew in a gasping breath, my lungs feeling flattened in my chest, and leaned forward against the dash. I groaned when I had enough breath, feeling every pain, every bruise. But when I raised my head, the vortex was shining like a small star in the distance.

We made it there ahead of Apollo, but only just. We jumped from the dazzling energy of the line into the non-space pooling around the vortex with maybe a ten-second lead. Pritkin was desperately searching for the correct current that would allow us to hop to the next vortex, so he didn’t see Apollo enter. But it was all I could see.

This time, it seemed, Apollo was done talking. The boiling energy ball never even slowed down. Neither did the huge flock of demons that poured in after him. The faint glimmers of thousands of Rakshasas were visible even to my eyes as they wheeled around us like a colony of bats.

I grabbed the wheel and jerked it straight at the vortex. “We’ve got to get closer in!”

“Closer to what?” Pritkin snarled, fighting the current to keep us from doing exactly that.

“The vortex!”

“Are you mad?”

“You said we need a weapon to use against a god.” I pointed at the Rakshasas. “I think we’ve found one!”

Pritkin’s head jerked up, watching the long arc of demons flowing around the vortex. I saw when he realized the same thing I had—they weren’t following us. Every single one of them was clustered on Apollo’s tail, like dust following a comet.

“Apollo is an energy being,” he said slowly.

“Life energy,” I corrected. The very kind the Rakshasas fed on.

“And he isn’t from Earth. So the prohibition doesn’t apply.”

I nodded. “But he’s shielded. If he gets close enough to the vortex, it may weaken his protection enough for them to get at him.”

“And it may do the same to us!”

“Do you have a better idea?” I demanded as the black cloud caught up with us.

“No,” he said, and swerved straight for the heart of the vortex. It had been my plan, but I screamed anyway, staring into the face of oblivion. Then Pritkin threw on the brakes and bumped across three currents before sliding to a halt on an inner one. It had a shorter orbit and whipped us around the phenomenon at a crazy pace.

We came rushing back around the vortex, Pritkin fighting the current to keep us from falling in, the car groaning and shaking in protest. And then we had to duck as Apollo came rocketing by in front of us. He must have gotten a lot closer to the phenomenon than we had, because his shields were virtually gone.

The Rakshasas realized it the same time I did and dove as one entity straight for him. We passed out of sight once more, and by the time we zoomed back around, the cloud of raw energy had been savaged. It looked like the Rakshasas didn’t have much reverence for gods of any sort.

Apollo broke and ran, but they pursued him over and around the vortex, weaving easily through the lines of energy. The massive battle churned up the currents, tossing us around like a ship on the high seas, and for a few moments, I couldn’t see anything. I finally caught sight of a much reduced energy sphere edging closer to the pulsing heart of the vortex.

That may have been deliberate—Apollo might have thought that the energy it was giving off would hurt the demons badly enough that they would give up the chase. But it didn’t seem to affect them much that I could see, possibly because they weren’t entirely in this world. Maybe that’s why they were able to pull back when he got a little too close and the vortex sucked him in.