Witch's Pyre (Worldwalker #3)(58)
“We need water,” Una said.
Lily swallowed. Tristan watched her with worried eyes. She tried to smile at him, but it hurt her cracked lips. He looked up at the gas station and made a frustrated sound.
“I’m going in,” he said. Rowan’s hand shot out to stop him, but Tristan shook it off. “We won’t make it to the next one. It’s now or never, Ro,” he said. Rowan gave in.
Breakfast sighed and followed Tristan. “I guess someone who’s actually seen American money ought to go with him.”
The rest of the coven stayed on the other side of the road with the dunes behind them. The wind whistled past, snatching moisture from their bodies. The sky was streaked with white clouds that were stretched so thin they only served to turn the blue milky. They had entered the never-ending late afternoon of a summer day—the time of antsy, exasperated waiting for sunset.
The witching hour, someone else whispered inside Lily’s head.
“I swear to Christmas that if he’s in there bullshitting with the cashier . . .” Una let her threat run out.
Breakfast appeared after what felt like an eternal five minutes. He was halfway across the street when Lily saw Tristan’s bright smile as he emerged from the shop. Then she heard the woof-woof-woof of the helicopter.
“Run!” Caleb hollered.
Blue and red lights flashed to the left and the right, both lanes suddenly filled with police cars converging on their location. Breakfast bounded the last few steps across the street to grab Una’s outstretched hands. A helicopter lifted up and over the phalanx of police cars to hover above the coven. The air spilled down on top of their heads like water being poured from above.
Rowan glanced at Lily, a regretful smile on his face. Just over his far shoulder, but separated by distance and bad fortune, was Tristan, stranded on the other side of the road. He knew what she was thinking before she did.
Not him too. Not both of them.
“I’ll protect him. Gift me,” Rowan said, his deep voice penetrating through the din.
Lily called the heat of the desert to her. There was a lifting, like gravity had given up, and for a moment the cars, the police who were running toward them, and even the rocks and dust on the ground, let go of the earth and swam up for the sky. A boom sounded across the barren land and Lily’s witch wind spiraled up in a column as it threw her into the suddenly freezing-cold air. The helicopter gyrated drunkenly to the side in the updraft, and as it listed off, Lily saw the passengers inside as if in tableau.
The pilot wrestled desperately with the stick and didn’t even see Lily floating level with the helicopter. Simms stared at her in a mixture of horror and triumph. Lily recognized Miller, who was utterly terrified, and couldn’t imagine how he’d ended up in the mix. And behind them all was Carrick. The look of hunger he gave Lily stole the breath from her body. She watched him move easily through the cabin, never taking his eyes off her, open the door, and throw himself out of the falling aircraft with the slithering grace of a snake.
The helicopter careened to the ground, narrowly missing the gas station, while Carrick dropped lightly to his knees and rolled smoothly over a shoulder, hitching his stride and flapping the dust off his jacket as he strode forward toward the small army of police that were streaming toward Rowan.
Alone, in the middle of the road, Rowan stood waiting for them. He looked to make sure Tristan had joined the rest of the coven on the dunes, and then looked up at Lily before launching himself at the oncoming tide.
She Gifted him as he leapt into the fray, throwing back her head and shouting with mad joy. Magelight pulsed out of Rowan’s willstone, phosphorus bright. It stunned the officers closest to him and dropped them to their knees as they clutched at their faces to shield their eyes. He hit the second line before they could draw their weapons and wove through their ranks so quickly his progress was only made visible by the trail of unconscious bodies left to slide to the ground behind him.
The third line had their weapons ready by the time he faced them, standing knee deep in a swath of immobile bodies. They fired as one.
The crack of gunfire halted before it could resound across the sand. Lily took the thousands of little explosions into her as jubilantly as the night sky receives fireworks. She Gifted the rest of her coven with the fresh burst of power, and they streamed down the now-frosty dunes like falling stars.
Police cars continued to arrive at both ends of the street until the road looked like a garish river of flashing lights. The gunfire came randomly now, and although Lily was stealing momentum from the bullets as fast as she could, there were some that were starting to slip past her. She couldn’t risk losing any of her claimed. She needed to make them impervious as she had done against the Hive. It was a little thing. One small difference that wasn’t so bad, after all—at least, not compared to death.
Rowan was the only one who felt the difference when Lily invaded his stone and took it over.
No, Lily. What are you doing?
Making you stronger by making myself stronger, she replied. He balked for just one moment more, and then relented.
Lily used their willstones to transmute energy, and with five more loci of power to add to her three, Lily drank a bigger measure of energy than she ever had before. She flooded the bodies of her claimed with so much power even Rowan forgot anything was wrong.
She became They.
They bellowed and screeched with bloodlust, vaulting over the cars in their way to get at the fresh foes behind. It didn’t matter how many They faced. As one, They were unbeatable. Every line but the last fell before Them. They looked down from their throne of air, purring with pleasure, and saw one among themselves who did not belong. He was a sour note that jangled out of tune in Their symphony.