Wonder Woman: Warbringer (DC Icons #1)(85)

Jason stared straight ahead, and Diana saw him touch his fingers briefly to his now-bare wrist.

“Jason,” Alia said tentatively.

He gave a short, sharp shake of his head. “Don’t.”

They drove on in silence, but after only a few miles had sped by Nim pulled to a halt by the side of the road where several cars were parked, their drivers somewhere down on the beaches below.

“Why are we stopping?” asked Diana. They still had until sunset the next day to get to the spring, but the farther they could get from their pursuers, the happier she’d be.

“We should switch the plates,” said Nim. “The license plates. That guy at the gas station is going to remember us. We don’t want this car matching up with a missing Fiat.”

“Or we could borrow another car,” Theo suggested.

“No,” said Nim. “We steal a car, it gets reported, we’re back on the grid, and they know which way we’re headed. But no one pays attention to license plates. They won’t notice the change until we’re long gone, if they notice at all.”

Alia leaned forward and gave Nim a tight hug over the back of the seat. “You’re brilliant.”

Nim beamed. “How much do you love me?”

“So much.”

“How much?” hissed Nim.

Diana saw her fingers dig deeply into the flesh of Alia’s arms. They were black talons, her arms corded with muscle. A stench filled the car, the dusty smell of decay. “If you loved me, you would let me kill him. You would let me kill them all.”

“Nim!” Alia cried out, trying to pull away.

“Let go of her!” Jason grabbed Nim’s wrist, then recoiled, his hand seared an angry red.

“I see you, Daughter of Earth,” said Eris. Hollow black eyes deep as wells met Diana’s in the rearview mirror. “You and your sisters have evaded our grasp far too long.”

Diana shifted to launch herself forward, but Theo grabbed her arm.

“Our time draws near,” he said, and Diana saw that he was not Theo. His face was pale as wax, his teeth yellowed points wet with blood. He wore a battered black helm, crowned by the face of a Gorgon.

Diana growled and shoved him from the car, tumbling with him to the ground.

“Get out of here, Alia!” Jason bellowed.

Diana heard the car door open and Alia’s footsteps as she ran.

“Phobos,” Diana said, looking down into the face beneath her. God of panic. A god beneath her.

He was beautiful until he smiled, the points of his teeth like spikes of sharpened bone. “We see you, Amazon. You will never reach the spring. War is coming. We are coming for you all.”

She could feel his power coursing through her, flooding her mind with terror. Her heart pounded a frantic rhythm; cold sweat bloomed on her brow. She had failed. Failed her mother, her sisters, herself. She had doomed them all. A wild, gibbering panic slashed at her chest. She couldn’t breathe. Run, her mind commanded. Hide. All she wanted was to obey, to let her legs carry her as fast and as far as they could, to find somewhere she could bow her head and weep. She wanted to cry out for her mother. Her mother. Through the horror, she held to the image of Hippolyta, warrior and queen, subject to no one.

“We are stronger,” Diana gasped. “Peace is stronger.”

“If only you believed that.” His grin widened. “Can you imagine the pleasures that await? I can already taste your suffering on my tongue….And it is sweet.” He drew the last word out, his tongue waggling obscenely from his mouth.

It isn’t real, she told herself. Nothing terrible has happened. There’s still time to reach the spring. This fear is an illusion.

She needed something real, something indestructible and true, the opposite of the false fear Phobos created. Diana seized the lasso at her hip and pressed its golden coils against Phobos’s throat. He screamed, a sound that seemed to pierce her skull, high and rattling.

“Get out,” she snarled.

“Out of what?” Theo said desperately, batting at her arms. “Just tell me and I’m gone.”

Diana rocked back on her heels. He sat up, looking dazed, his face as sweet and ordinary as it had ever been. She shook her head, eyes blinking furiously, body still trembling from the terror that had washed through her.

She shoved to her feet and rounded the other side of the Fiat. Nim was sobbing, but she was Nim again. The skin of Jason’s hands and forearms looked badly blistered, though she could see they were already starting to heal. Apparently, the blood of kings was powerful stuff. Alia stood a few feet away, arms tight around herself, chest heaving.

Diana could feel the fragility of these mortals, and for the first time, something inside her felt breakable, too.

“We need to go,” said Alia. She kept her arms wrapped around herself, as if trying to keep from flying apart, but her voice was steady, resolute. “Nim, can you drive?” Nim nodded, shakily. “Diana, can you and Theo switch the license plates?”

“Alia—” Jason began.

“We’re getting to that spring. If they didn’t think we were going to make it, they wouldn’t be trying to frighten us.”

Gods don’t work that way, Diana thought but didn’t say. Amazons were immortal. They didn’t think in minutes or hours or even in years, but in centuries. And the gods? They were eternal. Alia’s power had called to them, and like hibernating beasts they’d come awake with empty bellies. She could still hear Phobos crooning, Can you imagine the pleasures that await? The mirth in Eris’s teasing voice when she’d said, You and your sisters have evaded our grasp far too long.