“The one they made from their past explorations,” Louis-Cesare said smoothly, causing Tomas to do a double take. Probably because he wouldn’t have been able to lie that quickly or that well. “The one to the approximate location of Eternity’s base.”
“But you know the general locale, right?” Zheng said. “I better not have come all this way for nothing!”
“I know it,” Sarah said.
Everybody looked at her.
“He had it right out there in the open. We all saw it.”
Yeah, but none of the rest of us had remembered.
I smiled at her. “Thanks.”
She smiled back. “At least, I’m pretty sure—”
“Pretty sure?” Zheng said. “We can’t roam around, looking for the damned thing! It’s like the apocalypse out there! We get in, we get out, we get—”
He cut off abruptly, and one glance out of the open side of the truck told me why. Because in our relief at our getaway, we’d forgotten one, tiny thing. Dragons can fly.
Chapter Forty-Five
Dory, Hong Kong
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Zheng yelled, beating on his driver.
“Move! Move! Move!” I said, wishing I knew the word in Cantonese.
I didn’t need it. There are some things that are universal, including having a two-ton dragon come swooping after you. The men screamed, automatic weapon fire tore through the night, and the big truck lurched ahead, driving faster than I’d thought possible from its previous performance. And then more than driving.
“Hold on,” Zheng said.
I didn’t have to ask why, because Bertha and the boys were all cramming this way as a huge fan pushed up from the back of the cargo area, and started blowing up a hurricane in our wake. The device looked like the kind used on the local rickshaws, only bigger, although it did not seem to faze our pursuers. But then, that wasn’t the point.
As demonstrated when the old truck, laden as it was, slowly lifted off the roadbed and into the air.
I looked down to see the wheels turning flat and retracting beneath the undercarriage, like landing gear on a jet. Only this thing didn’t seem to be nearly as well balanced, because the movement sent us careening across the road. Or maybe that was the driver, or should I say drivers, because three different guys had their hands on the wheel.
“Zheng!” I yelled, because the dragon was matching our speed—and gaining.
But he was already on it.
“Get outta my way! You guys can’t drive worth shit!”
Zheng took over, but it didn’t seem to help much. The truck, while making considerably better time than it had while bouncing over piles of debris, was not getting away. Probably because the fan-driven contraptions they used around here were built on old rickshaw bodies for a reason: they were light and easily maneuverable. Neither was true for the truck.
It also seemed to have a steering issue. We ricocheted around the narrow street like a giant pinball, but couldn’t seem to rise above it. Unlike our airborne pursuer.
A wash of fire rained down on us, hot as hell, for a split second. Then Zheng jerked the wheel, sending us scraping along a wall and plowing through a mountain of debris, throwing it up on all sides and discouraging our attacker. But not for long.
I saw it wheel away in an arc that clearly signified another attack incoming, one we couldn’t survive considering that I was watching it through the burnt-edged holes that had been eaten through our roof by the last one.
“Dory!” Tomas grabbed my purse. “We can hide in here!”
“We can’t!”
“It’s the best chance we have. We can’t fight that thing!”
“Listen to me. Fire will burn the purse to ashes—”
“But we won’t be in the purse. It’s just a gateway—”
“And what happens if a gateway is destroyed?” Louis-Cesare demanded. “It’s what we tried to tell you before—”
Tomas scowled. “I don’t need to be told anything by you!”
“Screw this,” I said, and disappeared into my armory.
Tomas was right behind me as I threw open the door to my main stash of weapons. Something big, something big, something—okay, yeah. If those two didn’t do it, nothing would.
“Why are you so resistant to this?” he demanded, catching my arm.
I would have had something to say—and possibly more than say—about that normally, but there wasn’t time. “Because, if the doorway is destroyed, we are stuck in here, unable to get out. Me and Sarah and the other humans will asphyxiate quickly enough, when we run out of air. But you and the other vamps will be stuck forever. Do you get