They growled at each other like animals.
"If you think you can land another punch," Tate said, "I invite you to try."
"I won't have to try," Ethan gritted out, taking a step forward.
But before he could lash out again, I wrapped an arm around him and hauled him back.
"Ethan! We have enough trouble right now."
Tate was already in rare form; the last thing we needed was for Ethan to rile him up further—or for Ethan to get riled up any further.
Ethan freed himself from my arms, then straightened his shirt.
The pause didn't diminish Tate's indignation. His magic deepened and strengthened. A thick fog began to seep across the freeway toward us, covering the ground like roling smoke. It took me a second to realize this wasn't just fog. Filaments of bright blue shot through it, each spark punctuating the air with a sharp, irritating tingle.
Ethan's gaze didn't waver. "We won't let you destroy the world."
"No one is going to destroy the world. If anything, it wil be made better—stronger—by a return to the natural order and the rule of natural laws. To that which existed before."
The air warmed, and the wind began to swirl around us. Tate stared at me, his body frozen, the energy stil growing. Smal blue sparks hopped across the fog, like electricity beginning to build toward something big.
This wasn't weather. It was magic.
Goose bumps peppered my arms, and I glanced back over my shoulder. Behind us, the fog of magic began to rise, one foot at a time, into a shimmering wal of sparks. My hair stood on end.
I looked back at Tate, whose arms were crossed as he glared at me. He stared back at me with unconcealed malice.
"What are you going to do?" I asked.
"What needs to be done. What must be done. You seek to interrupt that which should happen—and should have happened long ago. The emptying of the Maleficium. Sorcerers split magic asunder, Merit, and it's time to bring the pieces back together. I won't alow you to stop that. I cannot alow you to stop it."
Whoever Tate had been before—reformer, politician, romancer of women—he'd changed. He meant to stop us, whatever it took.
"Get in the car, Merit."
My gaze was glued to Tate's, so it took a moment for my brain to register what Ethan was saying. I looked back at him.
"What?"
"Get in the car. Now." Ethan stil had the keys, so he pushed me toward the passenger side as he ran for the driver's.
We both yanked open the doors and hustled inside, and he started the car and punched the accelerator, zooming around Tate and farther away from the wal of magic behind us.
Whatever Tate's origin, he must have been pouring his power into the magical cloud; I assumed that was the only reason he wasn't controling the car again.
I yanked on my seat belt as the speedometer climbed. Sixty miles an hour. Seventy. Eighty. We were gaining speed, but when I turned around to check the back window, the wal—now shimmering with blue filaments—was moving ever closer. It was gaining speed even faster than we did, its acceleration exponentialy faster than ours.
And that wasn't even the worst part. It was growing.
It spread left to right across the median and both strips of the freeway, and it didn't spare anything it touched. The asphalt buckled and split like crushed-up crackers, chunks of debris flying through the air. Trees split and fel with thunderous cracks.
A reflective green mileage sign folded in half as if made of construction paper instead of construction-grade steel.
And the distance between us and the wal of destruction kept shrinking.
"It's going to catch us," I yeled out over the howling wind.
"We'l make it," Ethan said, knuckles white on the wheel as he worked to keep the car on the road. Another sign flew past us, barely missing the Mercedes and skittering across the road and into a field on the other side.