to keep balanced. Already, gravity had her in its clutches. She stretched her foot forward. It barely caught the lip of the roof. Elyssa somehow kept her feet and ran.
"I'm following!" Bella shouted, her voice echoing from the alley.
Dodging right, Elyssa ran along the edge of the roof. The buildings were closer on this side. She jumped each gap without slowing. Ahead, a motor puttered to life. A tire screeched. A tiny green car pulled out from a parking space at the end of the alley. Elyssa saw Justin's limp form slumping in the passenger seat.
"It's him!" Elyssa shouted. She leapt across the alley to a lower building. Vaulted another gap and dropped onto a concrete wall below. Bella streaked past her as Elyssa made it to the alley floor. By the time she reached the street, Bella had pulled out her wand and was looking at the parked vehicles. Most of them were rusted heaps. Something chrome twinkled in the sunlight.
A motorcycle.
"This one!" Elyssa said, rushing to it.
Bella jammed her wand against the ignition. "Contarte."
The engine roared to life.
Bella gripped her staff and shouted another word. It collapsed into a compact rod. She secured it to her waist and hopped on the motorcycle behind Elyssa, gripping her tight. "Madre de dios, this is exciting! Let's go."
Elyssa gunned it. The bike was an old Suzuki—a real piece of junk compared to her Harley—but the vampire couldn't hope to outrun it in the compact car she was in. The bike's rear tire squealed and the front end lifted off the ground. Bella squealed.
A figure leapt atop a roof several blocks down. Elyssa saw the person unroll a parchment.
"Another scroll caster," she said, shouting over the noise of the wind and the engine.
The moment she said it, a sheet of ice crackled and crept across the road in front of them. The bike hit it. The tires lost their grip on the nearly frictionless surface. Elyssa let off the gas, but it was too late. They spun out of control and there was nothing she could do about it. If they hit bare asphalt sideways, the bike would flip. Since neither of them were wearing armor, they'd end up with a bloody road rash or worse.
Bella held her wand out and twirled it. A solid blast of air hit the bike, stopping the spin and straightening the bike. Except now they were sliding backwards at breakneck speed. Elyssa slid the katana from the sheath on her back. Stabbed it against the ice and pivoted the bike a hundred and eighty degrees. The bike straightened an instant before the front tire hit pavement. The rubber squealed. The katana sparked against the cobblestones. She slid the sword back into its sheath with one hand while gunning the gas with the other.
A brilliant ball of starfire speared from the figure on the roof. Elyssa leaned hard to the side as a pumpkin-sized globe of white energy turned a nearby dumpster into a heap of glowing slag. The caster tore open another scroll. Another sphere of starfire coalesced and bolted at them. Elyssa sped up, but it was too late to dodge. Her only hope was to lay the bike down and that would hurt. A lot.
At the last minute, Bella shouted and the air overhead shimmered into a mirror-like surface. The energy rebounded like a moonshot. The scroll caster screamed and tried to dive to the side, but he was too slow. The crackling starfire caught him in the chest, vaporizing the right side of his body into blackened mist. His smoldering corpse rolled off the roof and clanged into an empty dumpster.
"Amateurs," Bella said in a loud huff.
Elyssa saw the green car weaving through traffic ahead. She almost smiled. Now that vampire bitch was hers. She split the lane between two cars. Swerved right to avoid another. Bella's grip tightened. The vampire's car broke free of the traffic jam and turned left. Elyssa weaved through the last of the cars and leaned so hard into the turn, her knee almost touched the ground, and the wheels squealed with the effort of holding the road.
The green car screeched through a roundabout, clipping several cars along the way. Elyssa spotted a break in the chain guarding the center of the roundabout and steered through it, cutting the distance between her and the car in half. A truck pulled out from an alley right in front of the car. It swerved away and crunched into another car