Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,89

as if they’d come from some supernatural junkyard. Their windshields were shattered, their tires were flat—and some had no tires at all. Lashed to every grille or hood was a set of antlers: deer, elk, even moose. And every set of antlers was garlanded with a withered wreath of evergreen.

But that wasn’t the most terrifying thing about them. Because each vehicle held passengers.

Some leaned out the sides of doorless roofless SUVs. Some stood in the passenger seats of roofless Jeeps. Some stood in the beds of pickup trucks, whooping and hollering and urging the drivers onward. All of them were dressed in the ragged remains of hunting clothes—hunter’s orange and red-and-black buffalo plaids and woodland camo—and every single one of them was dead. Skeletal hands gripped roll bars and steering wheels and door frames. Eyeless skulls covered in tatters of rotting flesh gazed avidly toward their prey. All of them were carrying shotguns or rifles.

Suddenly all the headlights of the Hunt’s vehicles came on at once. For a handful of seconds the five teenagers stood petrified in the glare as the Wild Hunt raced closer.

Then Burke raised his shotgun to his shoulder and fired.

The sound of the gunshot was loud enough to shock them out of their terrified stupor. Even through the dazzle of the headlights, Spirit could see Burke’s first shot had taken the driver of one of the Jeeps square in the chest. The hunter had dissolved into smoke, but the Jeep seemed capable of acting on its own. Burke fired again—at the Jeep itself this time—but his second shot had no effect.

“It’s not a ghost! Run!” he shouted.

But Addie had already raised her Super Soaker. She’d said its maximum range was fifteen yards—but Addie was a Water Witch. It didn’t matter that she was firing into the wind; when she pumped the trigger, the jets of water flew from the nozzle and kept going, as if they were arrows—or bullets. When the jets of iron-laden water struck the same Jeep Burke had ineffectually fired at, there was another ear-splitting howl—like an animal in pain—and the Jeep suddenly reared up on its back wheels and sank beneath the snow. It vanished without leaving any trace behind it—aside from its undead occupants, now sprawled in the snow. They scrambled to their feet and ran to one of the trucks, climbing aboard quickly, and left no footprints behind them.

Burke had already reloaded. He didn’t bother to shoot at the vehicles now; he aimed only for their occupants. When he hit them, they vanished. Banished.

The wind was almost a gale now, chilling them even through their warm coats and boots, numbing exposed flesh, making it hard to hear anything other than the howls of the Wild Hunt. As soon as they’d begun fighting back, the Wild Hunt had changed its tactics. It wasn’t approaching them at a slow stately pace any longer. Now the remaining vehicles were speeding up, driving back and forth, trying to confuse them.

Trying to surround them.

“Run!” Burke shouted again, but it was already too late. Now they were in the center of a ring of trucks and Jeeps and SUVs, and any time he or Addie fired at one of them, their target would simply dodge out of the circle so that their shot went wild. Soon they would have used up all their ammunition.

They’d be helpless.

“Fish in a barrel!” Muirin snarled, brandishing her slingshot. “Come on, Ads! Let’s give these losers a run for their money!”

“Glad to!” Addie shouted back. She and Muirin both targeted the same vehicle. The SUV swung out of the circle. Muirin’s iron missile whistled harmlessly past it . . . and Addie’s jet of water made a right-angle turn in mid-flight, spraying the unsuspecting truck behind it.

Once again, her target screamed and sank beneath the snow, bolting for the Hollow Hills and leaving its skeletal passengers afoot. The pickup truck behind it swerved to avoid running them over, and Burke took advantage of the moments that the hunters were afoot and vulnerable to empty both barrels into them. The shotgun shells filled with blessed salt did their work, and the ghostly huntsmen vanished.

Then, for an instant, there was a gap in the line. Loch grabbed Spirit and dragged her through it. She was running with him before she realized what she was doing. “What—? We—We can’t!” she gasped.

“Ghosts—Elves—” Loch panted. “Have to lead them—Back over Muirin’s—Traps—”

The nails in the snow! Would they work if the elf-trucks just drove over them? Were