I pulled back. “All right! But I need my bag! The charges are in there!”
I pointed to where it lay on the floor in back of the truck.
“I’ll get it.” He swung out of the cab, grabbed the bag and was back in a second, his body framed in the passenger side door.
“I love you,” I said, and saw when his eyes caught the flash of white on my wrist—the bracelet I’d taken from his pocket when I kissed him.
But it was too late.
I lashed out with both feet and swerved at the same time, and he was gone, they were all gone. A second later, I had my foot back on the gas the second bomb I’d taken for the dragon pressed to the passenger side dash. It was just in time.
I sent thousands of pounds of solid steel crashing through the too small doors of the still-intact building. Or still-intact before I exploded the charge, because the only way to survive this was to make sure that our pursuers thought we hadn’t. And then the world whited out.
Chapter Forty-Six
Dory, Hong Kong
Maybe I passed out, or maybe it was just the force of the blast making it feel that way. I didn’t know. I just knew that I came back to myself inside a giant orange fireball, watching the seat flaring up around me, the rubber on the steering wheel melting onto my lap, and the now missing windshield showing nothing but a solid wall of flame.
It was mesmerizing. Until a huge piece of masonry caved in the passenger side roof, and I snapped out of it. I scrambled out of the now missing driver’s side door, hit the floor and rolled through the fire.
I was all but blind from the smoke, but I was also almost out of time on the shield. So, I crawled, across a burning hellscape until I cleared the wreckage, although it was hard to tell exactly when that was. The whole world was on fire. But I kept on going, trying to get away from anything lethal.
I didn’t make it.
When the smoke cleared enough to let me see anything, it wasn’t another ruined lobby. It was an echoing space that looked more like a warehouse, with a high ceiling, red brick walls, and a concrete floor covered with burning debris and dead guys.
And fey.
A lot of fey.
They were not burning and they were not on the floor. But I didn’t immediately react because I was dizzy and my eyes kept wanting to cross. However, I’d have probably needed a moment, even on a good day.
It was a lot to take in: the human corpses on the floor, which I didn’t think had gotten that way because of me, since I didn’t recall shooting anybody full of arrows; the burnt concrete around the blast, radiating outward to burning detritus sticking out of the brick walls; the large group of Svarestri warriors, now headed this way.
I belatedly began to scramble for weapons, only to recall that I’d given most of them to Louis-Cesare. And it probably wouldn’t have mattered in any case. There were twenty, maybe thirty fey here; I couldn’t tell through all the drifting smoke.
Too many.
But I’d make them rue the day anyway.
I drew a gun and tried to remember how my feet worked, getting ready for the moment when my shield failed. I vaguely wondered why I hadn’t been attacked already, while I was off-balance and vulnerable. But I hadn’t, probably because they didn’t view me as much of a threat.
Yeah, we’d see how much threat I was, I thought, surging to my feet.
And then abruptly plopping back down on my butt, when I almost blacked out.
I snarled at them like a wounded animal. Nobody snarled back. And they seemed to be taking an awfully long time to get to me, or was my brain playing tricks?
I blinked at them, trying to bring my fuzzy vision into better focus. And belatedly noticed something I’d missed. Because these . . . were not normal looking fey.
They kind of looked like they’d been hanging out in the dead zones a little too long. The bodies were mostly all right, except for one with a huge hunchback and what looked like some spines growing out of it. But everything else . . .
I scuttled out of the way of one with long, greasy white locks that weren’t the usual silver bright color I was used to, like moonlight distilled. Instead, these were flat and dead,