The car rolled toward me, glass flying everywhere, metal sparking. I jumped, felt the car clip my feet from beneath me as I failed to avoid it. I landed with a thud on my back. The woman lay atop me, her eyes wide with fear and loathing as she looked into my demonic face.
I scrambled to my feet, leaving her on the ground with a look of astonishment on her face. She suddenly crawled on hands and knees toward something—her staff. I snatched it, and broke it into four pieces. I looked at the flipped car and saw the driver woozily pulling himself out while the other two Darkwater people did the same from the second car.
"Let's go!" Shelton said.
I ran to him, scooping him up beneath an arm.
"Wait," he said, aiming his staff at the blue sedan. He said a word, and the vehicle burst into unnatural flames, melting the vehicle down to slag in seconds.
I clambered up the hill and leapt the fence into the apartment complex where trees hid my monstrous form. I put Shelton down, suppressed my demon essence. Thankfully, my clothes hadn't torn completely, but they were definitely ruined. I kicked off my now useless shoes and cursed. "How many clothes am I gonna go through if this keeps up?"
"Think about it later," Shelton said, motioning me on. We entered the parking garage. He walked down the row of vehicles and chose an identical make and model to the car he'd just blown up, though this one wore a disgusting shade of mint green. He aimed his wand at the lock, and made a flicking motion. The handle sprang up. The inside of the car reeked of pine air freshener as we slid inside, though it was infinitely better than the stale food odor from the last vehicle. Shelton aimed the wand at the ignition. After a few false starts, the car thrummed to life, sounding more like a cheap lawnmower than a car.
"Couldn't you have chosen something a little faster?" I asked.
"It might take me too long to steal a car I'm not familiar with," he said, backing it out of the spot and steering it from the parking deck. "If you think magically hotwiring a car is easy, maybe you should give it a try sometime." His brow furrowed. "On second thought, don't do that. You might blow it up."
"Ha, ha," I said, taking a deep breath to calm my frayed nerves. I felt weak with relief for a moment before realizing something. "They know I'm Daemos now," I said.
Shelton nodded. "Yep, their search list just got a lot smaller." He waved a hand dismissively. "Nothing else you could've done."
"If I could master my damned magic," I said. "Hell, even throwing standard fireballs would've been better than giving away the one thing that makes me different."
"They'll probably figure out your name," Shelton said. "I don't know of too many other Daemos who hang with us regular folk." He took a left to avoid going back past the road we'd just come from.
"As if you're regular," I said, keeping an eye on the back window in case Darkwater had magically repairing cars.
Shelton's phone rang, and we both nearly jumped out of our seats. He answered. I heard Bella's cheerful voice on the other end for several seconds before Shelton interrupted and told her we would be at the hideout in fifteen minutes and send her a picture so she could open a portal for us. He parked the car in an alley when we arrived, and ran a simple cleansing spell to wipe down the interior of fingerprints. We walked a few blocks back to the spot where Shelton had stored the blue sedan, and opened a hidden staircase.
I recognized the hideout as one of the few we'd circulated through while on the run from the numerous jackasses who wouldn't leave me alone. Bella was already waiting inside, standing outside the portal. She looked from Shelton's rumpled state to my stretched clothes and groaned.
"Oh, dear. You two did something terrible, didn't you?" she said.
Shelton held up a hand to stop her. "I don't want to hear it now. I'm starving, and I want a beer."
She pressed her lips together, as if it was an effort not to say something, and nodded. "I brought you some potion beer from town. It's in the cooler."
He sighed, bent down, and kissed her on the lips. "You're the best."
She giggled.
I went through the portal back to the mansion cellar and ran upstairs to find Elyssa and Stacey hunched over a game of Scrabble. A third spot at the table—presumably Bella's—remained empty while she and Shelton smooched downstairs and a thousand miles away on the other side of the omniarch. From what I could tell, Bella was beating the other women handily.
"I've never cared for these board games," Stacy said, her British accent loading the sentence with disdain. She looked up at me, and a sensual smirk drew up her lips. "I see someone has been naughty as usual."
Elyssa's forehead scrunched. She rose from her chair and inspected me. I told her what had happened before she could ask.
"If they figure out your name, they'll know you're going to school here," she said. "That narrows down the search parameters by several million people."
"Survival was higher on my priority list at the time," I said.
She rubbed my arm. "I know. I'm not blaming you, but we need to be even more on guard now." Her eyes lost focus. "Posting sentries to watch the way station entrance was a smart move on their part, though I would have put people at the entrance to the pocket dimension instead of at the bottom of the parking ramp."
"We didn't see them until the last minute," I said. "For all we know there were others waiting at the door, too."
"I doubt it," she said. "Unless they have more manpower than we thought." She kissed my cheek. "For what it's worth, I'm glad you saved that woman even if she was trying to catch you."
I shuddered. "I'm already responsible for one death. Plus, I don't think I could stand the sight of seeing her hit the asphalt at fifty miles an hour."
"You've seen worse."
I'd cut vamplings to bloody chunks before. Crushed a man's skull with my bare hands after a drug lord had taken me captive. I'd seen Maximus blow his master's head off with a gun. Yeah, I'd seen worse, but that didn't mean I wanted to see it ever again. I knew with absolute certainty my wish was an impossibility.
Shelton and Bella appeared from the cellar. Bella looked concerned. She locked eyes with Elyssa, probably communicating something in girl code. Women had a knack for saying more in a silent look than most guys did shouting what they wanted in everyone's faces.
"Justin, let me grab a potion beer, and we'll go over the footage on this ASE," Shelton said, heading toward the kitchen.
"Need help?" Elyssa asked me.
"Always," I said with a smile. I leaned in and whispered in her ear. "You can sit in my lap."
Bella laughed, her supernatural hearing obviously picking up my words.
Elyssa blushed and pecked my lips.
"How adorable," Stacey purred, her hearing no worse than Bella's.
It was my turn to blush. I still had trouble remembering to keep certain things to myself if I didn't want every super in the vicinity to overhear me. Or maybe I just needed to learn how to craft a muffling spell.
We gathered in the briefing room slash war room, presumably the safest place to discuss super-secret things. Cutsauce followed the crowd, growling and yipping at anyone that didn't bend over to scratch his ears. He snuggled into Bella's lap as the meeting commenced.
Shelton copied the ASE by waving his wand at it, and directing four streams of aether to blank ASEs so everyone would have one to look at.
"We're looking for a specific limo," he explained. "According to the informational brochure Walter gave me, the illusions last for up to twenty minutes. Each illusion is spelled to drive a random route and find a good spot to pull off the road, like a parking garage, before vanishing." He pulled up the images, and showed an overhead view of Phipps Plaza. "We need to eliminate the limos that vanish in plain sight. The ones that vanish into parking garages make things a little more difficult because we won't know if they disappeared or not."
"A bloody needle in a haystack," Stacey said.
"Let's count the limos as they exit the garage," Elyssa said, zooming the image of her ASE on one limo, and slashing her finger across it to number it. "That way we can eliminate the fakes."
"How do we even know this is the right set of cars?" I asked. "I don't remember Oliver giving a specific time."
Shelton grunted. "I called him a minute ago. He told me he doesn't remember the exact time because he was in the stable. He also said there were four limos using similar illusions that day."
A brilliant idea suddenly occurred to me. "Hey, if Overworld Transportation Administration tracking system monitors magical transportation, why don't we just find the residences where the limos originated? That would pinpoint the exact house, right?"
"Nice thinking," Shelton said, "Except we'll have to look at every magical limo in the city no matter where they're coming from."
"There could have been fifty other limos driving around the city that day," Elyssa said. "The number leaving the Grotto should be a lot smaller, so tracking them will be a lot easier. Using the common point of origin of those vehicles eliminates work."
"What if the Conroys have some kind of charm to prevent the OTA tracking system from following them?" I asked.
"Then we're screwed, and everything we went through today was for nothing."
Chapter 16
"Dramatic much?" I asked. "Maybe you could have mentioned the possibility of a blocking spell before we almost died in a car chase."
Shelton raised an eyebrow. "It would be too aether-intensive to cast blocking spells on all the illusions, so the tracking system should follow them. But the original limo could have a blocking spell preventing the system from picking up on it." He shrugged. "There's still a good chance we'll find something useful."