He offered me a hand. I stood up and looked back at the car, covering my mouth with a hand. Ethan’s car—his beautiful, sleek Mercedes—was a wreck. It lay upside down in the ditch, two of its wheels still turning impotently. It was undeniably totaled.
“Oh, Ethan. Your car…”
“Just thank God it’s November and we had the top on,” he said. “We’d be in a world of trouble otherwise. Come here. Let’s see if we can get our things out of the trunk.”
The trunk had popped halfway open in the fall, so we maneuvered and tugged until we could wedge our bags and swords out of it.
“You didn’t hear me,” he suddenly said.
“Didn’t hear what?”
“Before he threw us off the road, I called you. You didn’t hear me?”
I shook my head. Vampires had the ability to communicate telepathically, that power usually, but not always, limited to Masters and the vampires they’d made. Ethan and I had talked silently since he’d officially Commended me into Cadogan House as its Sentinel.
“I didn’t hear you,” I said. “Maybe that’s a side effect of your coming back? Because Mallory’s spell got interrupted?”
“Perhaps,” he said.
We’d only just pulled our swords out when a shout echoed down from the road. We looked up. A woman in a fluffy down coat waved at us. “I saw that twister throw you off the road. Came out of nowhere, didn’t it? Are you okay? Do you need help?”
“We’re fine,” Ethan said, not correcting her about the twister comment, but casting one final glance back at his former pride and joy. “But I think we’re going to need a ride.”
Her name was Audrey McLarety. She was a retired legal secretary from Omaha with a brood of four children and thirteen grandchildren scattered across Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota. All the grandchildren were in soccer, dance class, or peewee baseball, and Audrey was on her way back to town after watching a dance recital for three of the girls near Des Moines. Late as it was, it hadn’t occurred to her to spend the night with her children afterward.
“They have their families to attend to,” she said, “and I have mine.” She meant her husband, Howard, and their four terriers.
As much as we appreciated the ride, Audrey was a talker.
We drove toward Omaha through pitch-black darkness, past more empty fields and the occasional factory, its lights and steam pulsing across the flat plains like a sleeping monster of metal and concrete.
As we neared the city, the horizon began to grow orange from the glow of streetlights. Fortunately, Audrey had grown up near Elliott and agreed to drive us all the way to the farmhouse. Doubly fortunate, actually, because the sun would be rising soon, and we needed a place to bed down.
We crossed the Missouri River and drove north through Omaha’s compact downtown, passing a pedestrian-heavy plaza with a lot of old brick buildings and a hilly string of skyscrapers before popping back into a residential neighborhood. Older houses and fast-food joints eventually gave way to flat fields and farmland, and we ended up on a long, bone white stretch of gravel road.
The road was long and straight, and it divided fields now stripped of their crops as winter approached. Dust rose in our wake, and in the darkness I couldn’t see much behind us. That made me nervous. Tate could be hiding there, waiting for us. Ready to strike again, ready to throw us off the road—and on his second try, we might not be so lucky. And we’d have dragged an innocent human into it.
We passed farms that all followed the same form—a main house and a few outbuildings behind a wall of trees, which I assumed was protection against the wind. The houses glowed under the shine of bright floodlights, and I wondered how their inhabitants slept with the glare…or how they slept at all. Something about the idea of sleeping under the flood of a spotlight in the middle of an otherwise dark plain made me nervous. I’d feel too vulnerable, like I was on display.
After fifteen minutes of driving, we reached the address Catcher had given us, large steel numbers hammered into a post that stood sentinel at the end of a long gravel driveway. A farmhouse much like the others sat at the end of it, a few hundred yards back from the road, glowing under its security light. Its wooden clapboards were dark red, and it was accessorized with white awnings and wooden gingerbread in