Madoc brushed a kiss over his cheek and murmured, “Maybe I’m trying to impress you.” He propped Took against the wall and turned to the guards. “Get Waring into a Viper. If he wants credit for this, I want confirmation and an escort. Get Sheriff Anderson and whatever deputies he can pull off cow-tipping duty in case we need them.”
On the floor, singed and scarred, Waring struggled to turn a groan into words. The wounds on his hands had split open and bled through his bandages like stigmata. As he tried to speak, the magic still in his blood jolted and spasmed through him.
Took crouched down and pressed his hand to the boy’s shoulder.
“We know what we’re doing,” he said. After a second, he glanced at Madoc’s back and made a decision that he probably should have made a while ago. “You can trust him.”
Chapter Twenty
THE VIPERbounced along the rutted country road toward Appleberg. Madoc slouched in the passenger seat, leather uncomfortably hot against his skin, even though it would have been worse if he still sweated, and divided his attention between the road ahead and the rearview mirror. In the back seat a still barely half-conscious Dom Waring sat next to his mother, her arm wrapped tightly around his shoulder. She gripped his bicep as she looked around nervously.
“You know what happened,” she blurted out as she caught Madoc’s eyes on her. “Why does he have to go out to this place? Can’t you just let him go, let me take him home? All he did was try to help people.Yourpeople.”
“So he says,” Madoc countered. “If he wants that to stand up before the Senate? He needs more than a sob story and a sweet face to convince them he’s innocent.”
Heather glared at him and went back to rubbing gel into her son’s burned hands. It wouldn’t help. The blisters were under the skin, not on top, but she persisted. Perhaps it was a mother’s instinct, not that Madoc would know anything about that. His grandmother would have been more likely to stick his hand back in the fire to teach him not to get burned than offer him a salve.
“Should we have brought her?” Lawrence asked as she veered around the thin, black ribbon of a snake in the road. “If things go wrong, she could be in danger.”
“Then don’t let anything go wrong,” Madoc told her. The sun had started to come up. Madoc grimaced as a ray bounced off the front of the car and caught his eyes. He fished his sunglasses out, slipped them on, and glanced in the mirror again. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Waring. If your son told us the truth, then this will give him his life back.”
Heather reached for her son’s hand and clutched it. Her knuckles showed tight and white through her skin as she squeezed down. Waring barely stirred, even though it must have ached down to his charred bones.
“You say that like it’s meant to matter,” she said bitterly. “You’re the ones who put him under Salt in the first place. I told you that he was innocent, that my son would never do that, but nobody would listen. How am I supposed to trust you now?”
Madoc studied her face, rendered in lilac tones through the purple lens.
“You don’t have to,” he said. “Just trust your son.”
She winced and turned back to her son, one hand raised to touch his scarred cheek. “I did,” she said. “I do. That’s not the point.”
Lawrence lifted her foot off the pedal and the car slowed down. She glanced in the rearview mirror.
“What do you mean?” she asked sharply. “Mrs. Waring?”
Madoc grabbed the wheel and wrenched it to the left. The Viper’s tires squealed as the heavy SUV veered sharply across the road and the heavy truck that accelerated out of the trees only clipped their rear bumper.
In the back seat, Heather screamed in shock as she wrapped her body around Dom’s to protect him. Lawrence bounced off the door and grabbed at the dashboard to steady herself.
“What the hell?” she blurted out in shock.
The Viper tipped over the shoulder of the road and crashed into a tree. The hood crumpled and the windshield cracked across in three jagged lines. A branch broke jaggedly off the tree and crashed down onto the car.
Lawrence wheezed as she slumped against her seat belt. One hand fumbled at the clip on her gun as she tried to pull herself together. When she pushed herself upright, there was a bloody split through her eyebrow. She staunched the blood with her sleeve.
“I’m sorry,” Heather said. Her voice was wet and frightened as she fumbled at the catch on her seat belt. “I am, but he’smyson, and I have to put him first. Those other parents would do the same.”
Lawrence twisted around and grabbed at her arm. “What did you do?” she demanded.
“What I had to,” Heather said as she pulled away, bloody runnels left in her skin from Lawrence’s nails. She tumbled out of the car onto the concrete and scrambled to her feet, both arms raised over her head. The heavy truck had slowed to a stop in the road and the men inside clambered out. Through the broken glass, Madoc caught fractured glimpses of camo gear and automatic weaponry, tattooed arms and hard-worn faces. Heather limped toward them, one shoe forgotten in the car. “He’s in the car. Don’t hurt him. Please.”
“Bitch,” Lawrence hissed as she dragged her gun free. “What do we do?”
Madoc’s door was wedged against a rock. Rather than fight with it, he twisted and kicked out the front window with one heavy-soled boot. It shattered into a thousand diamond-shaped pieces and burst out over the front of the car.
“Exchange insurance information?” he said wryly as he boosted himself out through where the glass had been. “We’ve been looking for these gentlemen for a long time. We should go and say hello.”
Lawrence cursed him. She shouldered her door open and climbed out, too much of her weight supported against the Viper’s door to bode well for a fight.
