Only Jack wasn’t listening. He was staring ahead, determined.
“We can. I just have to wait until the last second,” he said, and it should have been reassuring, really. But something about it made her stomach drop. It made her want to tell himwait, no. It made her think of when he’d left her to fight alone.
If you do that again I’ll never forgive you, she thought.
Only she did it just as he told her, “Hold on.”
And then suddenly they were off the ground. They were in the air. They were flying through it—and not just in awe hit a really huge speed bumpway. In a way that came with wings. She looked out of the passenger-side window, and there they were. Great bigblack ones that beat the air. That held them aloft. That sent them so high for a second she thought she saw treetops.
“Oh mygod,” she tried to say.
But the words fell inside her throat.
Everything fell inside her throat. She couldn’t do anything but watch in wonder and terror as they flew over Main Street, as gracefully as a swan. The truck even said it himself, as they glided. “I’m Like a Bird,” he played, cheerfully. As if this were all normal, instead of completely deranged.
And it only got more so.
Because now she could see her store. It was rushing up to meet them, incredibly fast, and once she’d registered that, she knew what Jack was going to do. She could see it in the determined but terrible wince all over his face—like he knew this was going to be bad and very foolish. But by god he was going to do it anyway.
Man, she couldn’t believe he was going to do it anyway.
Until he said it, a second before he went ahead.
“You got her?”
And the truck did. It surrounded her completely.
Just as it smashed through her roof, and into her home.
THE FIRST THINGshe did when the soft foam the truck had swaddled her in dispersed was check that Jack had not “mysteriously” failed to protect himself, and wound up beheaded. Then after that came a lot of fuming, ending on her spelling out what she thought was very obvious. “We could have just flown the whole way,” she said. But he had an answer for that.
A sheepish one.
But he had it.
“I wanted the element of surprise.”
And honestly, she didn’t want to let him have that. She reallywanted to stay mad. But the thing was: too many other things were getting in the way. Starting with the fact that the armies of Hell were most likely remembering, right around now, that they, too, could sprout wings and fly.
And ending with a jarring realization:
She could see her own bed, through the now nonexistent windshield.
It was right there, just below the bumper of the suspended-at-a-diagonal truck.
Then just as she was thinking that looked like an impossible drop, she felt the seat ease her up, and sort of slide her into a position where she could get through. And Jack did the rest. He went first—carefully, so as to not dislodge the truck. And once he was on the bed, he urged her to come to him. So she did, and he caught her as she slid over the bonnet. Slow and gentle, his hands on her waist. But then they were a little more frantic once she was standing in front of him.
And she could see why.
The truck was already shaking as things clambered onto the back of it. She saw a hand claw into the hole they’d made, searching for purchase. “Go, go, find it, I’ll hold them off,” he yelled, and in answer she scrambled down to the bedroom floor. She raced to her closet, with the sound of them scrabbling at the metal drilling into her brain. Driving her on. Turning this all into a psychotic countdown to them breaking through, and hurting Jack.
Because they could hurt him like this.
It would be easy to do, when he was human.
You should have never talked me into blocking your demon form, she thought at him as she started frantically going through the closet. But it did nothing to help her. It just made her shaky, made her toss shoeboxes then realize they could be it. She rippednails opening an old suitcase and struggled for twenty seconds with a zipper that didn’t even need to be unzipped.
And all the while that sound got louder.
