“What’s the plan?” I whispered, eyeing the nearest guard and his gun.
Finn glanced at the vehicles parked near the gate, and I realized that unlike in New Temperance, there was no patrol assigned to walk the perimeter. Evidently no one wanted to break into a city openly full of demons.
The only guards were four armed men standing in front of the gate itself.
“The plan is to put Grayson in a car and drive right through,” Finn whispered. “Don’t stop for anything.”
I searched the three nearest cars for keys as quietly as I could, and on the fourth, I finally found a set hidden in the visor.
Finn laid Grayson across the backseat, and I sat on the floorboard in the back to keep his shirt pressed to her stomach. Finn slid into the driver’s seat and started the car. He backed it carefully out of its spot, and the nearest of the guards walked toward us, carrying his gun.
“Kastor? Is that you?” he called.
Instead of answering, Finn stomped on the gas.
The remaining gate guards scrambled out of the way. One of them fired his gun, yelling for us to stop, and a bullet went through both our front and rear windshields.
The grille of the car rammed into the gate itself, which ripped free from its hinges with the spine-scraping squeal of metal and clunked onto the roof of the car hard enough to dent the center. Finn hit the gas again, and we lurched out of Pandemonia and into the badlands. The broken gate flew off our roof and hit two of the guards running afterus.
We veered wildly around the gray car I’d abandoned when I’d turned myself in, then shot off into the badlands.
I stared out the rear windshield, watching to see if we’d be pursued, but no one came out of the city after us. A second later I understood why.
If Pandemonia had been extravagantly illuminated upon my arrival, it was lit up like a bonfire in the wake of our departure. Through the holes in the steel patchwork fence, I could see that not one, but at leastthreebuildings were now on fire, and the residents—blissfully unaware that their hosts had become ticking time bombs—were no doubt more concerned with saving the city than with pursuing the invaders who’d set it on fire in the first place.
My pulse raced in my ears as I watched the flames blaze smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror, and I laid one hand on Grayson’s sternum so I could feel her breathe. I’d already lost one sister, and I had no intention of losing another one.
Half a mile later headlights suddenly lit the interior of our car, and I twisted toward the front to see a vehicle headed straight for us from the depths of the badlands.
“Brace yourself.” When Finn lifted a pistol in his right hand, I realized he’d picked up Kastor’s gun on the way out of the alley.
“Wait!” I cried when the left headlight of the vehicle in front of us winked out for a split second. “Don’t shoot! That’s our truck!”
Finn blinked into the headlights and finally slammed on the brakes. Our car swerved on the crumbling road, then skidded to a stop. The cargo truck we’d appropriated from the Church slowed to a much more civilized stop beside us, winking headlight and all. Reese leaned out of the passenger’s-side window with Carter’s rifle aimed right atus.
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded, and I peeked up from the backseat.
“Reese. It’s us. That’s Finn’s new body. It used to be Carey’s.”
“Carey James?” He set the gun down on the floorboard and threw his door open. “Where’s—”
“Grayson is back here,” I called. “She’s hurt, beyond what we can fix. We need to get her to the Lord’s Army and hope they know how to remove a bullet.” That, and because the Lord’s Army had baby Adam.
“She gotshot?” He was out of the truck in an instant.
“We can’t stop here,” Finn warned as Reese circled the truck toward our car. “We have to get away before the demons get their shit together.”
I climbed into the front seat to make room for Reese in the back. “You really think they’ll come after us?”
“The ones who don’t know about the virus will,” Maddock said from the truck’s driver’s seat, and I realized they’d talked to Eli and Anabelle. “Once they get that fire under control.” He nodded toward the demon city, which still blazed in the distance. “I assume that’s your work?”
“Damn right,” I said as Devi slid into the passenger’s seat of the truck. She looked impressed for the first time since I’d met her.
“Kastor’s dead, Maddy,” Finn said. “And soon all the rest of them will be. Nina figured out how to infect the whole damn city.”
Devi pushed her long braid over her shoulder. “You mean we drove like hell andstillmissed the party?”
“You can tell us about it down the road,” Maddock said. “Let’s get out of here.”
