Cherise grabbed my arm, locked eyes with me, and panted, "Run! Come on, we have to go, now!"
"But-you were shot-"
She waved that off impatiently. "I'm okay. Come on!"
We ran. The trail was thin, and heavily clogged with debris, but Cherise was fast, and I moved as quickly as I dared, leaping over logs and branches and struggling to keep up. I was cold, very cold, and I couldn't believe she was this active without at least a coat. But I guessed that if she was bullet-resistant, being immune to the chill wasn't much of a stretch.
I felt a pulse of energy so strong it knocked me to my knees, and Cherise yelled and dropped flat, and a wave of heat rolled over us, thick and shocking.
A fireball erupted behind us.
"Kevin!" Cherise was up and running back toward the inferno, but she didn't get far before the flames drove her back. "Kevin!"
She didn't need to worry. The boy plunged through the flames as if they weren't even there and doubled over, breathing hard. He wasn't even singed. "Damn," he gasped, and coughed. "Ow. That hurt."
Cherise immediately went to him. "What happened?"
"He went for it," Kevin said, and braced his hands on his knees. "Damn. I'm sorry, I thought I could contain him, but he-he just-"
It dawned on me that Lewis wasn't coming out of the fire. "You killed him," I said numbly. "You killed Lewis."
Kevin glanced up at me. "He did it himself. I just couldn't stop him. Look, the dude was going to kill you. We were lucky to get to you in time."
I wished I'd picked up Lewis's gun. I felt hot, sick, disoriented, and oddly on the verge of tears. I didn't know the guy, not really, but...I couldn't believe what Kevin was saying. Lewis, going to kill me? No. That couldn't be true.
I needed to think, but I didn't have time. The fire was spreading. It had already jumped from one winter-dried treetop to another, and there were tendrils of flame and ash falling on us. Kevin might be fireproof, but I was pretty sure I wasn't.
Cherise yelped as a branch exploded from the heat, spraying us with burning splinters.
I didn't even plan what happened next. I don't even know how it happened. I just reached blindly for help, any kind of help.
And it came in a blinding, disorienting flash. Rain, driving down like a firehose to douse me to the skin. Cold water met hungry flames, and the resulting steam flooded the clearing in fog. The rain kept falling, a tap I didn't know how to turn off. Hell, maybe I'd broken off the knob. The underbrush was still smoking, but the flames were out, and they couldn't flare up again while the downpour continued.
Kevin looked like a stunned, drowned rat. He stared at me with narrowed eyes, measuring me, while rain beat down on his head and plastered his lank hair to his skull. "You shouldn't be able to do that," he said. "How did you...?" Weirdly, I could almost hear another voice overlaying his, a female voice. Not Cherise's, who was just mutely staring at me.
"How'd you get here?" I yelled over the roar of the rain.
"Not that again!"
"It's a good question! How the hell did you two find me?" I backed away, and saw Cherise and Kevin exchange a glance. Not one that was particularly reassuring. Man, I wished I'd picked up the gun-not that it had done Lewis a lot of good. But I felt particularly vulnerable right now. "Lewis was going to a lot of trouble because he thought somebody was following. He thought we were in danger."
"Not from us," Cherise said, and I almost believed her. She just had that kind of innocent trust-me face.
But I caught Kevin smiling, and my heart went cold.
I backed away a few more steps. Kevin's smile faded, and Cherise's blue eyes turned cool and expressionless.
"All right," she said. "I guess we do this the hard way."
The downpour was localized around us, but as I reached the margins, fire suddenly flared up. Kevin. I could feel the energy pouring out of him. I held my ground, because running would be damn near suicidal; once I got outside of the downpour's zone, he could toast me up like a s'more. I wasn't sure I had a second trick up my wet, dripping sleeve.
Cherise and Kevin didn't make a move toward me. They just watched me, and I got the strangest feeling, like they were just...there. And not there. Like they weren't really present anymore.
And then I sensed something else. I couldn't even put a name to it-big, dark, wrong. Very, very wrong. It wasn't a real shadow, but I could feel it, spreading over the ground toward me.
And then there was a shadow in the trees, something flickering and indistinct.
Cherise blinked and said, "There's nothing to be afraid of."
But there was. There most definitely was. Whatever that was in the trees was not right; I could feel it like a sick black ache in my chest that was only getting worse with every breath.
The shadow seemed to be flickering in time with my heartbeat, and with every frantic beat it looked a little bit...darker. More real. More distinct.
I saw the curve of a pale face, dark hair.
I didn't want to see what came at the end, but I felt weak now, and bitterly cold. My knees threatened to fold up under me, and I thought, This is it. I'm done.
And then something inside me just refused, cold and furious, and I felt myself get steadier again.
"There's something to be afraid of," I heard myself say to Cherise. "Me."
And I reached up into the sky and pulled at the air, pushing a whole wall of it like an invisible hard shield at them, driving her and Kevin backward.
Driving away the shadow.
I turned and ran, dodging blooming flames, barely managing to avoid slipping in the squelchy mud under my boots. Overhead, the downpour sputtered, let loose a final shower of ice-cold drops that froze into sleet as they hit the ground, and subsided. I kept running, and checked over my shoulder. I could see Cherise and Kevin standing there, dumb statues, and that shadow, that shadow was with them, and for a second...
For a second, in a flash of lightning, it looked just like me.
And then it just...vanished.
Cherise and Kevin toppled over facedown to the ground. Dead, stunned, I couldn't tell, but there was no way I could go back; I knew the shadow was still there, hoping to lure me in, and I couldn't fight it.
I hated myself for running, but I ran. It was survival instinct, nothing more, nothing I could be proud of, and tears streamed down my face, self-pitying and turning to ice in the cold, cold wind. You should have tried, something was screaming inside me, but I knew better. If I'd tried, I'd be dead.
I was alone, and I couldn't risk it.
I had no warning of another approach, but suddenly there were hands on my shoulders, and I was spun around, violently, slipping in the mud. I instinctively raised my arms, trying to block a punch, trying to break free, but stopped when I recognized the stark pale face, dark eyes, and rough growth of beard.
Not dead, but definitely singed around the edges. There was a quarter-sized raw burn on his cheek, and bruises forming.
Lewis looked terrible, but he was alive.
"I thought you were dead!" I yelped, and his hand closed around my left wrist. He silently jerked me into a run. I barely had time to gasp, because we were running straight for a thicket of thorns and he wasn't slowing down...
And the thorns pulled right out of the way. I tripped, trying to twist around and stare, but Lewis's grip around my wrist was unforgiving.
"Wait," I panted. "We can't just-"
"Damn right we can. Run or die." He sounded raw and exhausted, but he was outpacing me. I concentrated on not slowing him down; for some reason, having Lewis afraid and vulnerable was worse to me than my own terrors. The forest flew by in a blur of tree bark, flashing leaves, the occasional glimpse overhead of gray cotton sky.
It felt like we ran forever. I caught one glimpse of what might have been the shadow standing at the top of a hill, but it misted away like a bad dream.
We just kept on running. When I looked back again, I didn't see anything. No sign at all, just the sullen smoke still rising from the place where Lewis and Kevin had combusted.
"Where's David?" I finally gasped. Lewis shook his head without answering, still struggling for breath. He was holding his side with his left hand as we ran, and I didn't like the color of his face and lips. Or the bubbling sound when he took in air. "You need to stop!"
"Not yet."
"No, we have to stop now!" I insisted.
His effort to reply brought on a coughing fit, and when it was over he spat up blood. A lot of it. Enough to make my skin shrink all over.
We needed help. We needed it badly. And we needed it now.
And he must have known it, because he finally nodded. I could read the exhaustion in his face.
"Cave," he said. "Over there."
Over there proved to be a long way off. I forced him to move more slowly, and I kept watch behind us for any telltale signs of a hot-pink sweater, or fire sprouting up around us. Nothing. The whole thing could have been a dream, except for the burned patches in my clothes. We walked for a good half hour before an outcropping of rock came into sight-the end of the ridge. It commanded a good view of the valley floor below, and had a low shelf of rock that jutted out over the cliff. Below-far below-a shining ribbon of river glittered in the dull light. The trees, tall as they were, reached only about halfway up the cliff face.
"This way," he said, and edged around the side of the hive-shaped rock formation. There was a crevasse that was larger than the others. Not what I'd call large, though. Big enough to squeeze through, if you didn't mind claustrophobic shock, and somebody was going to kill you if you didn't find a hiding place.
Lewis, without comment, wedged himself into the tiny space, wiggling his way through in grim silence. How that felt with broken ribs I didn't even want to imagine. I took a deep breath and then had to let half of it out-my chest was a little bit larger than Lewis's, and shoving my way through the opening in the rock was panic-inducing. I thought for a few seconds that I'd be stuck, but then my flailing right hand found something to hold, and I pulled myself all the way through...
...into fairyland.
"Careful," Lewis said, and pointed up when I started to straighten. Stalactites, dripping frozen from the roof in needle-sharp limestone. I gulped and ducked, following him as he crouched against the wall. There was a pool of dark, perfectly still water in front of us, and the cave was cool and silent. Not warm, but not freezing, either. The only sounds were ones we made-shuffling on the rock, chattering teeth, the drips my soaked clothes made pattering on the floor.
"I can't make a fire," Lewis said. "Too dangerous in an enclosed space. Not sure I can manage the carbon monoxide." He sounded mortally tired, but he opened the backpack he'd dumped on the floor-how the hell had he had the presence of mind to hang on to it through all that?-and dug out some packages. He threw two of them toward me, and I saw they were some kind of silvery thermal blankets. "These work better if you get undressed. Your clothes are too wet. It'll just-"
If he was waiting for me to have an attack of modesty, he was sorely disappointed. "Whatever," I said, and began unbuttoning. The drag of wet clothes was making me nuts, and the cold had driven deep enough into me to make me uncaring about things like strangers watching me undress. Or maybe I was normally immune to that kind of thing. Hard to tell. I only knew that I didn't feel inhibited with him. Boy, and didn't that open up a ten-gallon drum of worms?
Lewis politely faced away while I skinned out of the sopping-wet pants. I decided to leave on the underwear, and wrapped myself up in crinkling silver foil. My skin felt like cold, wet plastic. "So," I said through chattering teeth. "What the hell just happened?"
He glanced over his shoulder at me, saw I was more or less decent, and fussed with his own crackling thermal sheets to avoid answering. Or at least, that was how it looked. I waited. Eventually Lewis said, "Those two weren't right. They weren't themselves."
"No kidding," I said. I was feeling the cold now like sharp needles all over, and shivering violently. "There was something else, too."
"What else?" He paused, staring at me. "What did you see?"
I didn't want to tell him, exactly. "Nothing definite. Kind of a shadow." A shadow that kind of looked like me. No, I didn't want to say that.
Lewis looked like he felt sicker than ever, but he nodded. "I was afraid of that."
"Afraid of what?"
His sigh echoed cool from the stone. "There's a Demon after you. And we have no way to fight it."
"Demon," I repeated. "Okay. Sure. Right. Whatever."
That definitely told me just exactly what was going on.
I was taking a walking tour of Hell, and my Virgil was insane.
I tried to avoid discussing the whole Demon thing under the grounds that, hey, keep your delusions to yourself, but Lewis kept on talking.
"They don't come from Hell," he said very earnestly, which only made him seem even nuttier. "At least, not as I understand it. They're not from this plane of existence. They come from somewhere else. They're drawn here to our world because of power; they need to feed on the aetheric, and the best way they can do that is to grab hold of a Warden, because we're the equivalent of a straw to them-they can pull power through us. The more power they draw, the more dangerous they get."
We'd been talking for a while. I wasn't exactly believing in the whole Demon idea, but he was scarily matter-of-fact about the whole thing, and besides, I'd seen a few impossible things in the past couple of days. Including, well, him.
