was a gun. But it wasn’t a gun; it was long and rectangular, like a radio, and as the vampire stood still and Alex zipped past, he saw the vampire flip a switch.
“They’ve made me,” Alex managed to say before he felt a burst of electricity shake through his helmet. He felt the pads of the helmet heat up and start to melt as the radio whined and sizzled inside.
Alex winced as the heat hit his ears and he had to reach up and yank the helmet off, letting it clatter on the road behind him.
The cars were still bearing down, and he was helmetless and alone.
At fifty yards he could see the clean black shine of the vehicles, and now he could finally glimpse the glistening white faces of the vampires within.
They were a race as old as his own, but made of sterner stuff; humans chosen and changed and tinged with the blood of ancient demons. They were fast and cunning. But Alex was no slouch. He aimed for the space between the vehicles.
Alex watched the cars’ tires spinning, bearing down, and at ten yards he saw that the bone white faces inside could predict what he was going to do: try to cut between them. Which was why he wasn’t going to do that. Alex waited until the left Mercedes’s front wheel began to turn in, intending to mash him to jelly between the two cars. He broke and whipped left.
He heard the cars grind against each other with heavy brutality and steel as the Ninja sailed around the vehicles on the left. Alex dropped onto the gravel shoulder and then back on the road, throttling up.
Alex looked in the rearview mirror and saw them come around: With a fierce shriek of wheels against asphalt, the giant cars executed perfect opposite turns, swiveling back into separate lanes, traveling side by side once more. He heard the enormous German engines roar as they began to pursue him. By that time he was at least a mile ahead.
With his left hand Alex reached around into his Polidorium go package and drew out a long, slender weapon that was encased from end to end in black composite plastic. Called a Polibow, it fired bolts of silver and hawthorn wood, eight shots to a cartridge.
As he zoomed around the next curve, another car, small and French, came into view. He sailed past it, counting two people inside, civilians, and dismissed them. As he expected, the Mercedes wasted no time with them either, one of them tearing onto the shoulder to pass, the other passing on the left.
The road was clear. Alex watched the Mercedes in the mirror, gaining again. He needed to use his right hand for this. Alex passed the Polibow to his right hand and felt the bike immediately decelerate as he took his hand off the throttle and steered with the left. Alex turned his head, watching the cars instantly gain on him. He would get one shot and then they would be on him.
The road jolted and his arm swerved. He suppressed the urge to pull the trigger, breathed, and then fired. The bolt sailed out silently; only the small jolt in the Polibow let him know he had shot.
The passenger-side front wheel of the left Mercedes exploded with a burst of white smoke and rubber. The car instantly turned right, slamming into the other Mercedes. For a moment the vampire behind the wheel of the right car held on, but then he lost it, spinning farther right and off the road.
Alex replaced the Polibow and gunned the throttle again as he watched the right Mercedes smash into a tree, a tiny exploding image in the rearview mirror. The left Mercedes, now missing a front tire, began to disappear into the distance behind him as he rounded another curve.
Suddenly Alex heard a new sound over his own engine, higher pitched, off to the right in the woods. A motorcycle.
Leaves and grass exploded on the side of the road as a candy-apple red Ducati 848, monstrous and fast, burst through the trees. Alex sped past and looked in the rearview. The Italian bike seemed to be driving itself.
Alex slapped a button on the side of the rearview, and the mirror instantly flipped over, showing an infrared image of the dark road. The creature on the bike wore leggings and the white robes of the Scholomance. The Ducati hit a bump and the pursuer’s hood fell back.
The rider looked