it on such a mass scale. The reason he was being kept alive was so others could figure out his techniques. Witches don’t like when people die, and they’re the only ones who know how to do something.” I had my qualms with why most of the northern cell block inmates were allowed to live.
“Tornadoes don’t happen naturally in the desert, do they?” he asked softly. I narrowed my eyes on the sky and noticed the swirling as well.
“They’re not common, no.” Fury and fear coursed through my veins like a drug, creating a trip I didn’t want to be on. “Hold on. Make sure your seatbelt is on.”
I took my hands off the wheel quickly and clipped myself in before grabbing the wheel again. We watched the tornado touch down just to the north side of the road, two hundred yards ahead of us.
“Kaliya…” I never thought I would hear Raphael genuinely afraid of anything because of his rapid healing, but it was there. No one wanted to get tossed hundreds of feet by a tornado while in a metal death trap.
“Let me focus,” I said, trying to blank out my emotions. I needed to keep a level head. “I can get us around it, and once we pass it, it won’t catch up. Promise.”
I saw him nod jerkily, even got the chance to note how pale his tawny skin was looking. I could only imagine I looked the same.
I floored the gas, holding the wheel so tight that my knuckles went white. The tornado swirled, picking up cacti and other vegetation from the dusty desert. One hit the front end of my BMW, but it didn’t throw me off course as it smashed into thousands of pieces.
I veered right as the tornado drew closer, desperately hoping my wheels stayed on the ground. I went off the road, bumping over the rocks of the Arizona landscape. I was going over a hundred now, and losing control would be easy. Once I tricked Levi into sending his tornado off the road again, I turned back toward the road and found the pavement again. We bumped roughly as I turned to head down the road again, the tornado storming after us.
“Are you sure you can outrun it?” Raphael asked, looking through the back window once we were on the road again.
“Yes.” I kept my foot on the gas and let the speed climb. One-twenty. One-thirty. One-forty.
My BMW would only hit one hundred and fifty-five miles an hour if it was standard. Mine wasn’t standard. I could push it to nearly one-eighty, having taken off the limiter most German cars had.
I reached one-seventy when Raphael sank into his seat and relaxed. We flew through the barrier, barely noticing it, and I knew we were free from the current warzone.
“Do you think we’ll see any more on the road back to Phoenix?” he asked. I could hear a shake in his words, but there was no faulting him for that. He was very well composed otherwise.
“No,” I answered softly. “We’ll be home in about an hour and a half if I keep speeding, maybe faster. They won’t have vehicles, but they’ll move fast. Dawn tomorrow is probably when we’ll see them pop into the city. Thankfully, that gives me time to lock the city down.”
I reached out and started hitting names in my contacts with my touch screen dashboard. Once I collected as many as I could think of—leaders of different species factions to business owners with no allegiance—I hit call.
They all started answering within a ring.
“Why are you calling me, Kaliya?” the vampire Mistress snapped.
“What’s going on?” Paden asked at the same time. There was a moment of silence as they realized they were in a group call.
“What’s wrong, Executioner Sahni?” the thick, deep voice of the Phoenix werewolf Alpha asked next, taking his chance. He and I had no real opinion of each other, so it was always professional between us.
“Hold on, I’m waiting for more to answer,” I said quickly. I looked at Raphael and mimed texting with my fingers, then mouthed Cassius. He nodded and got his phone out to reach out to our only friends.
“Well, well. Never thought I’d get a call,” a fae said with a laugh. “What’s going on?”
Others answered and quickly realized they were all in the same call. There had to be eight people on by the end, and I knew a few of them didn’t like each other, but it wasn’t common that