Winter, White and Wicked - Shannon Dittemore Page 0,99

turret. It strikes the ground in front of the scrum. Ice and rock explode. The flames from the round are short-lived on the damp rock but she’s managed to set a headless monster’s leg ablaze. It stumbles but continues forward with the others.

Mars conjures a gust of wind that shoots him high above the monsters and out of the turret gun’s range. Clouds swarm about his dark form and light flashes across the sky. Lightning drops from his fist, leaving an Abaki sprawled on the road, arms and legs searching.

Hyla fires another round and another, making the rig shudder and my ears ring. But still the monsters advance.

A hand settles on my shoulder and I jump. The Dragon swerves as I strike out with my right hand. But it’s only Kyn. He’s climbed into the front seat and is trying to tell me something. I shake my head, attempting to clear the ringing in my ear.

“Incendiary rounds,” he yells. “They’re going straight through the . . .” He slams a fist into his chest.

I work my jaw, try to clear my ears, but Kyn points and I watch. A whistling bullet marks the sky with smoke as it sails into sight and through the swirling black-and-white torso of a kol monster, exploding as it strikes the ground behind it. The monster continues forward.

“She needs to aim for arms and legs. Heads,” I say, though only one in every five or six monsters that climb up onto the road seems to have a head. Hyla’s ammunition won’t explode unless it strikes something of substance, and apparently the stormy torsos of the Abaki aren’t dense enough.

But Hyla’s figured it out too. Heads explode. Legs and arms follow, the magicked torsos dissolving into puffs of black and white against the churning sea beyond.

Mismatched limbs claw up and onto the road, water-logged flesh hanging from faces and elbows and knees. The ground is increasingly pockmarked, and I have to swerve to keep out of the potholes.

The rig drops and then bounces, the trailer pitching back and forth.

“Hold on, Hyla!” I yell, though the possibility of her hearing me is nil. I navigate to the right, looking for smoother driving. Kyn’s leaning forward now, his face close to the windshield.

“What is it?” I yell, hoping his ears are working better than mine.

“I thought . . .” He’s yelling too, moving his face from the patched windshield to the plastic covering the passenger-side window. “I can’t get a good angle.”

“There’s a toggle,” I yell. “For the outside mirror.”

He grabs the toggle and twists the mirror into place. “Ah, flux.”

“What?”

He toggles the mirror, swinging it to an angle that shows me everything I need to know. An Abaki climbs the side of the trailer. It has one leg, three arms, and a shaggy flop of hair on top of its head.

Kyn jumps to a squat, placing his feet in the seat as his hands fiddle with the latch overhead. “We have to tell Hyla,” he says.

My own mirror was sheared off after the river crossing, but I keep one eye on the road and fiddle with the toggle for Kyn’s, shifting the mirror so I can see Hyla high on the turret. My view is mostly obstructed so I turn my attention back to the road.

Kyn wrestles the hatch open, flinging it wide. It bounces loudly on the top of the cab and it’s only then that I realize the gun’s stopped firing. I glance at the mirror.

“Kyn!” I yell. “She knows! Hyla knows!”

Hyla wheels around and aims the gun, but the monster is fast, leaping the final few feet and colliding with the Paradyian warrior in the lookout. Hyla falls back onto the edge of the turret and then lifts her legs and kicks the monster in the head. The beast tumbles backward onto the trailer, kol and snow still swirling.

“Eyes on the road, Sylvi,” Kyn yells, Drypp’s shotgun flung across his chest. “I’ve got this.” He climbs up through the hatch and slams it shut. But the latch doesn’t catch and the door bounces hard. I reach up to grab it, but I’m too short and the door smacks the jamb with a metallic crunch.

“Fluxing Blys,” I growl.

I move fast now—my eyes still on the road, foot off the gas, boot in the seat, hand reaching for the bobbing door. A pothole in the road judders the Dragon and sends the door flying skyward again and then down, thwacking my knuckles and shattering half the