into a prone form. Hot acid boiled up inside my throat. He wasn’t looking to leave me a Christmas card. Get moving!
The guy on the floor kept cussing while I stepped into my jeans and boots. I buckled my malaika harness—a trick to do one-handed while you’re covering a squirming guy on the floor. He could have had a gun too, but if he hadn’t shot me by now, I didn’t think he would.
Duffel in one hand, gun in the other, I made it to the wall near the window. Let out a long, shaky breath.
“What did you do?” The boy on the floor had stopped cussing. I wasn’t sure I liked it. He was sounding mighty sharp and focused for someone who’d been shot. “How can you do that? How can you use the jaadu?”
I’m not going to hang around and chat with you, you know. The touch slid free of my skull, little invisible fingers questing for danger. He choked, but I didn’t have time to worry about it. No rain against the windows—it was heat lightning; no wonder everything was all staticky.
Three-floor drop. You can make it easy. I didn’t want to get trapped inside the rest of the hotel, and I didn’t know if these guys had backup. Maybe they were expecting me to go out the window; I didn’t know.
But I also wouldn’t have gone out into that hall, and stepped past that body and the crackling, nasty hex, if you paid me.
“Wait.” The boy on the floor was moving, rolling around. “Rajkumari, wait. For God’s sake, wait—”
Too late. Glass shattered, the stifling hot night full of ozone, wet heat, and the smell of Gulf rot closed around me, and I was gone.
Thank God I hadn’t been stupid enough to park the Jeep in the hotel lot. I still had a couple of bad moments getting to the side street I’d left it on. I kept jumping at shadows. Can you blame me?
The rain started just after I threw the duffel in, hard quartersized drops thudding into dirt and concrete. More lightning played in the billowing clouds like huge veined hands.
I was getting awful tired of thunder. But at least there was nothing unnatural about this storm. My left hand hurt like hell—I wrapped it up in a chunk of fast-food napkins. I didn’t smell blood, but it was weeping, and it burned like I’d held it in boiling water for a while.
And I’d only touched that hex for less than a second. What would it have done if it hit me? For a couple seconds I braced my forehead on the steering wheel while my ribs heaved with deep ragged gasps.
But Dad’s voice inside my head was pitiless. Move it along, honey. You ain’t out of the woods yet.
I flipped the wipers on and got out of there. Seven and a half hours later I was in Houston. But by then things had already gone even further to hell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Finding the Houston Schola wasn’t hard. I mean, yeah, I stopped on the outskirts of the city and bought a map, a bag of peppermints, some boiled peanuts, and some dental floss, and made a quick and dirty pendulum from a wrapped peppermint and the floss while I munched the peanuts and drank some warm Yoo-Hoo. The pendulum gave me the general location—a wedge of the northern part of the city, a slice of expensive real estate if the tingle in my good right-hand fingers told me anything. Close enough, and I was sure I could find it from there.
As it was, I could. But it was a matter of getting close enough and following the sirens while a column of black smoke billowed up. Traffic was snarled, and we slowed to a crawl. As a result, I got a good eyeful.
The good news was that the Houston Schola was kind of still there.
The bad news? Was the kind of. If by kind of you mean “shells of charred and smoking buildings arranged around a scorched quad that might have been pretty gardens if someone hadn’t taken a flamethrower to them.” Emergency personnel were still swarming, and black smoke hung everywhere.
The Jeep crept through heat shimmering up from the pavement and the traffic snarl created by a bunch of what Dad would call lookie-lous, cars slowing down to gawk.
I stared. Little crackling strands of red and blue hexing crawled over every surface. The knots that had held them fast while they did their dirty work