“No!” Lu and I said simultaneously.
“I’ll drive,” Lu said.
She was a better driver than me. Plus, if she drove, I’d have a hand free to throttle the god if the chance arose.
I got out and traded places with Lu, trying to catch her hand as I stepped past her. But she was just out of my reach, already swinging up into the truck.
Raven had scooted over so he was in the center of the bench seat, and Lorde hopped down and curled into her familiar place in the footwell.
I got in.
It was a tight fit.
“Cozy,” Raven said.
“You could leave,” I said, yet again.
“Abbi’s fine, by the way,” he said. “The coven think she’s the best thing since the invention of the crock pot. She’ll be safe while we’re gone.”
“I didn’t ask about her,” I said.
He tipped his head. “Still. I’m watching her. She has my feather.”
I didn’t want that to make me feel better, but it did. “So, what’s so damn important we have to see it now?”
“Up the road,” he pointed in a generally northwest direction.
Lula shifted the truck into reverse. “How far?”
“A few miles. You’ll know when we get there.”
I hated the sound of that. But Lula didn’t even glance my way. She just put the truck in drive and followed the road.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ihad lost count of how many times Lula and I had driven Route 66. We’d been down this section of the road hundreds, if not thousands of times.
Still, the Route always looked different in the dark.
Felt different too.
Out here in the nothing lands between McLean and Amarillo, there were no lights to interrupt the night, nothing but a faded moon to pencil-sketch the plains rolling by on either side.
Raven was silent, watching the land slide past like he’d forgotten what the earth looked like at eye level.
I’d tried to get words out of him, but he’d only smiled, shook his head, and said, “Wait.”
Twenty minutes in, we’d passed Allenreed and two rest areas.
Finally, Raven spoke. “Up there,” he gestured north, “is where the coven’s land ends. McClellan National Grasslands, or there about. And this…” he waited until we’d gone a bit farther, another five minutes or so, “…this is where the vampire territory begins.”
Lula caught her breath, and I grunted like someone had just popped me in the sternum.
Like I said, we’d been down the Route hundreds of times. I’d been in spirit form for most of it, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t feel the living world.
Lula had been in flesh driving the Route. Beingthrawanmeant she was hyper-sensitive to vamps.
But this stretch of the Route had never felt so thick with the presence of vampires.
