Curse the Dawn

Chapter Ten

I woke up to find myself lying in a backseat, draped over a couple of smelly red men. Tremaine and Caleb looked like the Blue Man Group would if they'd suddenly changed their color scheme—completely coated in a thick red paste from head to foot. Dust and sweat, I realized as my eyes managed to fully focus. And I was in no better shape myself.

My lungs felt caked with about an inch of desert and I was having trouble breathing. I managed to cough, and that was both good and bad, because it opened my airway a little more, but then I couldn't stop. I coughed and hacked and gagged and coughed some more until I was sure I was going to bring my lungs up.

It would have helped to have had some water, but there wasn't any. Because we weren't out of the woods yet. I slid into the modest gap between the two mages and peered over the seat. A red man who I vaguely recognized as Rafe was at the wheel. The speedometer said eighty-six despite the fact that the narrow red tu

Pritkin was riding shotgun, but he didn't turn around to look at me. I sat back and tried not to stare at the almost hypnotic tu

"What was that?" I asked when the shaking finally stopped.

"Another level collapsing on top of us," Tremaine answered, sounding a little choked.

"We had to go down a freight elevator to a lower level to avoid being crushed," Caleb added. His voice was expressionless, but his hands kept clenching and unclenching on his thighs.

"Only the Senate level is below us now," Rafe chimed in. He sounded the same as always, although I noticed he had a pretty good grip on the wheel. "And it is completely flooded. I am afraid this is as far down as we can go."

Pritkin still didn't say anything.

We were in some kind of bulbous mid-century car, huge and gray and probably made of solid steel. Too bad that wouldn't hold against a few thousand tons of rock. "How many levels are still on top of us?" I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

"That was the last before ours," Tremaine said, and a small giggle escaped his lips before he clamped them shut.

"Can you shift?" Pritkin suddenly asked me, his voice harsh in the stillness.

"Why?"

"You told Caleb you can shift. Was it true?" I licked my lips and saw him watching me in the driver's mirror. "You lied."

Tremaine looked slightly shocked, as if surprised that a Pythia would do such a thing. He obviously hadn't known Agnes. Caleb put a hand to his head."I should have knocked you out and shoved you in a car."

"Yes! You should have!" Pritkin snapped.

Rafe merely sighed. "You shouldn't tell lies, mia stella," he reproached, and floored it.

The car leapt ahead, its gas-guzzling engine tearing through the tu

At that speed, even vampire reflexes aren't perfect, not to mention that I'm not entirely certain that the tu

Then something hit the panel behind my seat hard enough to bruise my lower back. I sat up and twisted around to find a man's fist poking through the upholstery. "Who is that?" I demanded, sliding lower to get a look.

"The man the commander was forced to shoot," Tremaine told me as the mysterious hand wrapped around my throat.

Caleb took out a gun and smashed the butt down on the man's wrist. I heard a howl, and the hand was withdrawn. I sat up, careful to stay well away from the back of the seat. "I thought he was dead," I said.

"Not yet," Caleb replied.

"So you put him in the trunk?"

He shrugged. "This was the last car."

We hit a particularly narrow patch, and everyone slid to the center of the seats as the doors on either side buckled like a soda can in a giant's fist. "Who designed this tu

"It hasn't been in use in years," Rafe said. He burned rubber and we shot out into a slightly broader area in a burst of rubble and glass.

"Why not?"

"It was shut down in the thirties after Lake Mead was created. The lake bisected the old route."

"What do you mean, bisected?" I didn't get an answer, because there was a rumbling and a groaning behind us and another billowing wave of dust. And suddenly we were flying out into dazzling sunlight.

The ride immediately became incredibly smooth, with no traction at all other than the wind whistling through the missing windows. I realized why when I wrenched my neck around to look behind us and saw a small cloud poofing out of the pale side of a cliff. The cliff we'd just fallen out of.

"Oh, shit."

We fell more than fifteen feet before nose-diving into a boulder the size of a VW Bug, cartwheeling over and finally hitting a shining expanse of water. The car was built circa 1955, which meant that it had no air bags, and I wasn't even wearing a seat belt. We should have been dead. But Tremaine somehow managed to get a rudimentary shield around us, which popped shortly after encountering the boulder, but spared us the worst.

We survived; the car wasn't so lucky. But at least it sank slowly enough for us to slither through the windows and for Caleb to drag Red out of the trunk. He accomplished that by kicking out the partition between it and the backseat, and I think he might have kicked Red a few times, too. Either that or the guy couldn't swim, because he didn't give us too much trouble on the way to shore.

Cell phones don't work all that great after being drowned, leaving us with little choice but to hike around the side of Lake Mead. In one direction, heat shimmered off miles of dusty earth, scrub brush and distant purple hills. In the other were towering clay-red cliffs with a stark white mineral line striping them near the water's edge. There was little vegetation to soften the austere canyon, giving the place an oddly alien vibe: a big body of water in an almost bare landscape, like a lake on the moon. But with the cobalt sky and the deep azure of the river, it was undeniably striking.

I trudged through the shallower water near the shore, the high heels that were miraculously still strapped to my feet catching on underwater rocks and threatening to trip me. I didn't care. I just kept gazing around in something like awe. Everything was blisteringly hot and breathtakingly beautiful.

It took me a few moments to notice that everyone was looking at me oddly. I just laughed, almost giddy. We'd made it—dust-covered, red-faced and dripping wet, but alive. Rafe gri

We eventually came to a small trailer park. Most of the plots marked off by white stripes of paint were empty except for some windblown gravel. It was summer, and few people thought that 120-degree heat equaled a fun vacation.

I watched dust devils blow across the sand like miniature cyclones while the guys broke into one of the trailers that stayed there all year round. It looked like it came from the same era as the car, miniscule and vaguely round, with white aluminum sides and a small covered patio. A bedraggled honeysuckle vine was trying its best to decorate the latter, along with a wind chime made out of old forks.