The vehicle was still sliding.
The orange magics were gone. The twins were gasping.Weeping. When I looked at them they were holding their own defensive magics around them and Wrassler, like a tapestry of lights. There was a broken space in their circle, where I had been. Wonderful crazy witches had been trying to protect me too. Myattackmagic had broken through and punctured the defensive working, damaging their ward before it killed the orange green attack spell. That hadda hurt.
The SUV died. Slid to a stop.
Wrassler slumped over the steering wheel and airbag. I hoped not dead.
The white motorcycles were down, my people lying on the street. The enemy bikes shot toward us, two red, one black. The beige van followed.
The hedge in the SUV snapped back closed, with me outside it. Still shielded by Everhart magics, Liz and Cia were holding an undulating ball of purple-and-white power. With one finger, Liz opened the SUV door at her side. Cia shifted the weird ball into Liz’s sure grip. Thehedgefell. Liz threw the magic at three enemy motorcycles. Thehedgewhipped back up. The bikes crashed as if they had hit a wall. Flipped into the air. The attacking humans were flung from the bikes as if whapped by a huge hand. Wheels screaming, the beige van spun around backward and hit a building. The bikes landed.
The twins fell to the side, exhausted.
The attackers lay in the street, twitching.
Holy crap.
A whir sounded. I looked up. Approaching overhead was a drone, a remote viewing aircraft. Before I thought, I ripped the Benelli from its spine sheath. Stepped out of the SUV. Gauged the distance and its speed. Not more than fifty feet away and slow. I braced. Brought the weapon up. My finger squeezed the trigger. Fired.
The drone exploded. I ducked. It had been carrying a small bomb.
My hearing was ruined, but I somehow heard Wrassler cough and mutter, “The SUV is done for.”
Two of our white HQ motorbikes pulled up to the beige van. One rider fired point-blank into the van. Emptying mags. Rubber rounds, I hoped. Something wentwhomp.Smoke boiled out of the van. Tires screamed. A white bike rode up to us. Stopped.
Quint glared at me through the faceplate. Cold, hard, and furious. “Get on the bike,” she said to me.
I twisted to the side and picked up Liz. I carried her to Quint’s bike and sat her on pillion. I returned to Cia and put her on the other bike with one of the new security people. “Go.”
“You’re my asset,” Quint said.
“That’s an order,” I said.
Quint cursed but both bikes took off.
Over the earbuds, between staticky bursts, I heard Wrassler call for pickup of our people who had been hit by the magical attack and the enemy combatant humans, who were still twitching and clearly alive. A third white crotch-rocket wailed up the street. Braked hard. Skidded, rubber on asphalt. Stopped. Eli. Battle face. Expression colder than Quint’s. No armor. He pulled a semiautomatic, pointed it up. Fired twice. Debris fell. He had taken out two more remote aircraft. I hadn’t seen or heard them approaching.
Eli had just saved our lives.
Wrassler opened his door. Coughed. There was a smattering of blood on his lips. Eli cursed and called again for a medic. Wrassler coughed harder. There was more blood. “Can you ride?” Eli asked him.
Shaking his head no, the big man pointed to a stairwell between two buildings, one a warehouse with an exterior staircase and a second-story door under a metal roof. Eli dropped his bike, got an arm under Wrassler’s shoulder. Both men limped to the stairway. Wrassler crawled up to the top of the stairs to the protected landing. I was useless, so I covered the still-twitching humans and kept an eye on the skies for more drones. From farther down the street, more of HQ’s bikes converged.
When one of my helmeted riders tried to get me on pillion, I turned the Benelli on him. “No.” Not without Wrassler. Wrassler, who was too big and too injured to ride pillion on a crotch-rocket.
The anonymous guard spun to another SUV and allbut carried Carmen out of it and roared off, the witch riding behind, holding on as if for dear life. It looked as if she had left her kid in Asheville, or maybe the kid was in Angie’s SUV. The drivers and the men and women who had been riding shotgun in the SUVs behind me also got rides. None of them were coughing blood.
My hearing was coming back online, but my SUV was... melting. It had received special treatment, a death magic bomb. As if the attackers had known which was mine. Or maybe my magic had done something to the attack spell. Could be.
“HQ SUVs will be here in ten to load up Wrassler, the rest of our security people, and the three humans taken out by Liz’s magic bomb,” Eli said, speaking to me but not looking at me. His eyes and hands were checking out one of the enemy’s crashed bikes. Mad as a hornet. Limping badly. Shouldn’t even be walking.
I felt his rage and his pain like my own fury and aches in my own flesh.
“Alex,” he said. “Can you tell who’s running this attack against us? General location? Because we’re shutting them down.”
“Affirmative. Maybe.” His voice cracked slightly with strain and I could hear clacking of keys and tapping of fingers on tablets, banging against the surfaces like castanets. “Hang on.”
Still holding the Benelli, nominally covering us all as Eli half carried Wrassler up the exposed stairs, I studied the enemy humans, who were now trying to make coordinated movements. One vomited. By the stink, they had peed themselves.
