Undone

I knew by this time that they would try to use the children to stop me, so it was not a surprise to see those ragged young bodies lined up in front of the gate, only a grim confirmation.

I couldn’t stop. Not this time.

“Luis!” I yelled. “Can you open a gap somewhere else?”

He nodded. I pointed.

Where I pointed, the i

I slowed just enough to grab the boy by the scruff of his neck and sling him into the jeep on the passenger’s side, into Luis’s surprised embrace. “Put him out!” I ordered, and then I was testing the jeep’s ability to scale a shifting mess of broken wall. The tires slipped; the vehicle tilted—then held and climbed.

Beside me, Luis slapped a hand to the child’s forehead and used a burst of power to put him to sleep. “I don’t like doing that!” he shouted, which forced me to laugh a little wildly. There was nothing in this I liked. I didn’t like the fact that we were in an open vehicle, with gunmen drawing their aim on us, while we slithered across broken bricks into a killing field. I didn’t like the fact that I had little chance of surviving this.

I didn’t like the gnawing terror of knowing how much I could lose even if I did survive. Isabel. Luis. My . . . family.

I glanced over at him, through the blowing fury of my pink hair. He had the sleeping little boy in the crook of one arm and the other braced against the dashboard, and Luis’s answering look was full of mad, unbelievable energy.

Just like mine, I suspected.

“Here we go,” I said, and the tires bit the barren ground between the walls. I took one hand off the steering wheel and held it out to him, and Luis stopped bracing himself on the dash and instead gave me his hand, his power, his will. There was no conversation between us. None needed.

I pulled power from him and drove it deep under the wall. I softened the ground beneath a long swath.

The wall sagged, but didn’t fall. Braced with an internal lacing of steel.

Luis battered at the bricks, but the external wall had been hardened against magical attacks, and now we could feel the dampening influences around us—Weather and Fire were at work, as well as opposing Earth forces.

We weren’t going to make it. The jeep was hurtling at the wall at speed. If we hit and it didn’t go down, we would die. C.T.’s small body would be smashed by the impact; if Luis and I survived, we’d be easily picked off by the Wardens and soldiers.

The wall had to come down. I shook the ground, and the entire structure shuddered and bled dust. Some of the concrete shattered and fell away, revealing a sinister skeleton of iron beneath.

I hit it with a final blast of power a millisecond before the jeep’s front grille smashed into the structure with stu

I ducked instinctively, as did Luis, curving over the unconscious boy on his lap. A shower of shards blew over us, and I felt a hundred hot cuts, but all superficial.

We were lucky. A sharp, daggerlike fragment landed between us and buried itself several inches deep in the plastic and fiber of the edge of Luis’s seat. Another few inches and it might have severed an arm, or landed in his skull.

Bullets rang in a hot chatter along the metal. I pressed the accelerator, and we bounced over the remains of the wall and out into the open ground.

“Faster!” Luis yelled.

I knew that. My foot was all the way down, and we were still accelerating, tearing along the rough dirt road that led into the forest.

The forest tried to close against us, but I didn’t pause; the Earth Warden back in the compound didn’t have time to grow the barricade with any degree of care, and plants forced to cycle into maturity at that rate were naturally fragile. The jeep crushed the saplings trying to block our path, and we sped on.

“Watch for more children!” I snapped, intent on guiding the increasingly loosely steering jeep through the turns. I missed my motorcycle. I wondered if they’d simply abandon it in the woods, leave it to rust. It was a sad end for such a beautiful thing.

If they pla

We rocketed out of the forest and skidded onto clean, black pavement.

Free.

I looked back as I sped along, going as fast as I dared; there was no sign of pursuit.

No sign at all.

Relief began to creep through my body, slow as poison. I began to feel all the hurts, all the cuts, the bullet wounds that disfigured parts of my body. I was battered, but alive.

Luis was alive.

One of the children I’d promised to retrieve was alive. The other . . .

I drew in a ragged breath, startled by a burn of tears in my eyes. Why am I crying?

Luis was still holding my hand, though I was not drawing any power from him. It was merely comfort. Human touch.

“Cassie,” he said. His touch moved from my palm up my arm, stroked my shoulder, and trailed along my cheeks where tears spilled down. “Big Dji

I laughed madly. “Cassiel,” I said. “Cassiel is my name.”

And I heard the Voice in my ears, blocking out the world, whisper, I know your name, Cassiel. I have your heart now, and you will come back to me. You must.

Chapter 15

OFFICER STYLES MET us just outside of LakeCity. I told him to come alone, and not to tell his wife.

He disobeyed both instructions.

Luis had helped with the worst of my injuries—again—but I was bitterly tired now and aching and afraid. Pain, I had discovered, tends to make one afraid, once adrenaline fades. I had never truly understood that before. We sat on a fallen log, in the shadow of a pine tree. C.T. was still unconscious, but sleeping normally. Luis had wrapped him in a blanket he’d found in the back of the jeep.

We were drinking cold bottles of water when the Colorado State Highway Patrol car pulled into the rest stop near our stolen vehicle.

“Heads up,” Luis said. “He brought company.”

The second person in the car was not, as I’d have assumed, Officer Styles’s partner. It was his wife, a fragile little blonde who seemed genuinely relieved and overjoyed to see her sleeping little boy. Officer Styles was grateful, but wary.

I held out my hand to stop Mrs. Styles from approaching, and pointed at the policeman. “You,” I said. “Take the boy.”

He didn’t understand, but he stepped forward and scooped up his son, blanket and all. C.T. murmured sleepily and nestled closer to his father’s chest. I felt Luis relax as the last of the control he’d been exerting slipped away.

“We’re in your debt,” Officer Styles said. He didn’t look happy about it, but that might have been an overload of emotion in a face not equipped to process such extremes. “I can’t believe you found him.”

“You should know,” I said, “that your wife was aware of his location the entire time.”

For a second, neither of them moved, and then a breeze shifted the pine tree behind us and skirled up dust from the road, and Officer Styles shifted to stare at his wife. “Leona?”

The pretty little blonde beside him was hardening before my eyes. Her eyes took on a bitter shine, and her smile curdled into something toxic.

She showed that only to me, and only for an instant, before turning toward her husband with a look of wounded i

“Don’t,” I said, “if you want to see him again. She’ll take him. She intends to take him.”

Whether he believed me or not, Officer Styles backed up a step as his wife came toward him. “Hold on. Are you saying Leona had something to do with this?”