It Happened One Doomsday (24 page)

Dru was about to ask him what he meant when she heard it, too. A motor, deep and distant but drawing closer.

It grew in volume, throaty and aggressive. Greyson bent his head down and blinked, as if trying to clear his eyes.

Dru put one hand on his arm, leaning close. “Are you okay?”

He gave her a haunted look, then quickly turned away. But not before she saw that the red glow in his eyes was brighter than ever. “There's a buzzing in my head. Getting louder.”

A prickly hot wind swept down the road toward them, whispering through the pine trees, picking up bits of grit that pelted bare skin.

Dru turned to face into the wind. She stepped away from Greyson, gaze focused on the empty road at the top of the hill. She reached into her purse for the familiar cube of galena. When Rane saw her do that, she raised her own fist, ready to transform back into rock.

The engine noise peaked as a black car rose over the crest of the road, hurtling toward them. The thudding of its engine sounded less like a car motor and more like a mob of caged demons trying to pound their way out through the metal.

Rane tightened her fist around her ring, and with a grinding sound her body turned to solid flint. “You two get back. I'll cover you.”

Dru put a cautioning hand on Rane's arm, slowly stepping uphill past her. “It doesn't make any sense. How could the Horsemen get here so fast?”

“Hell,
we
got here this fast. Maybe they've got some kind of trick door, too.”

The car swooped toward them, a wedge of impenetrable blackness streaking down the asphalt.

“But think about the Horsemen that chased us,” Dru said. “There was the red Mustang, a white truck, and a silver car. This isn't one of them.”

“No,” Greyson said behind them, his voice a husky whisper. “It's Hellbringer.”

Dru glanced over her shoulder at him, but he looked as surprised as she was.

Rane scowled. “I thought you zapped that thing into oblivion with the magic circle?”

“Apparently, the circle expired.”

The long black wedge shape, with its tall spoiler wing rising up in back, bore down on them. Just when Dru feared it would try to run them down, the car locked up its brakes. The tires howled as the car swung around, scribing black half circles of rubber across the pavement, like smoking claw marks.

Hellbringer came to a full stop across the pavement before them. Its engine barked twice, then settled down into a sinister growl.

No one sat in the driver's seat. It had come on its own.

Like a warhorse of the apocalypse
, Dru thought. Smart enough to come to its rider. Mean enough to fight on its own.

For a moment, nobody moved.

Greyson slowly approached the car, his boots noiseless on the asphalt. When he was still several yards away, the driver's door swung open, waiting for him. The engine revved, pounding out exhaust notes that thudded through Dru's rib cage.

Beside her, Rane muttered, “Oh,
hell
no. I'd rather walk.”

Dru tried to weigh the apprehension pulsing inside her against their other options, then realized she couldn't come up with any.

That thing was created to be evil, no doubt about it. It was a demon, an instrument of the apocalypse. And it had already tried to kill Rane once.

But now it seemed to be responding to Greyson, and somehow it had come to find them when they needed it most. Could Hellbringer be trusted?

“D? We are
so
not doing this. I don't care if we have to walk back to town. Tell me we are not getting in that car.”

“Do you want to save the world?” Dru said.

Rane just grunted.

Greyson looked back over his shoulder at them, his eyes a fierce red. “So. You ladies want a ride?”

Dru and Rane traded glances.

After a tense moment, Rane blew out her breath and groaned. “
Seriously?
”

30

HEART OF THE BEAST

Dru was terrified. Being strapped into the front passenger seat of Hellbringer was like being loaded into a cannon and fired out of the pit of Dante's
Inferno
.

The roar of the engine shook her entire body, reverberating not just in her eardrums but up through her lungs as well. It was a deep, all-encompassing power like nothing she had ever experienced before. She couldn't just blot it out. It swept right through her, undeniable, unstoppable.

The black car assaulted her with its very presence. Its cavernous yet oddly claustrophobic interior made her feel as if it was trying to swallow her whole. Black surfaces boxed her in, and the short windows seemed to let in as little light as possible. The air inside the car smelled of age, not unlike an old library, overlaid with a dense smokiness she remembered from childhood road trips.

The acceleration crushed her back into the seat. Each bend in the road jammed her against the hard door panel on her right or the edge of the console on her left. Since the front seat only sported a lap belt, without any shoulder strap, it didn't do much to hold her in place.

She braced herself the best she could, knuckles white, and raised her voice to be heard over the oppressive motor. “There aren't any airbags in this thing, are there?”

Greyson, grinning, pulled a spare pair of sunglasses from the visor and slipped them on. “If they still built cars as solid as this, we wouldn't need airbags.”

Dru decided not to debate the logic in that statement.

After a few miles, Dru relaxed her grip on the armrest and tried to take some deep breaths. Despite the insanely fast speed they were traveling, Hellbringer moved in a sure way that felt practically alive, curling into the turns like a lithe animal.

Soon, she found that she could anticipate the movements and correspondingly tilt her weight one way or another to stay planted in the seat. It was more like being an active rider than a passive passenger. In other circumstances, it could have been exhilarating, but right now it was simply exhausting.

Something about that thought nagged at her. In all her years of research on demons, she had studied reports on hundreds of different varieties. And although none of her books ever made specific references to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, she had read more than one account of supernatural beings riding demonic mounts.

Some mounts were trained to destroy their enemies in battle. Some were chosen for their loyalty to a particular force of darkness. A few, she was sure, were selected simply to terrorize their foes. But one thing Hellbringer clearly excelled at was speed.

Dru glanced over at Greyson, his glowing red eyes hidden behind his sunglasses, then turned around to Rane, who sat in the back seat with arms petulantly folded across her chest.

“I think I know what this thing is,” Dru said over the engine noise. Rane leaned forward, one ear cocked, and Dru repeated herself, louder.

“It's going to kill us, is what it is,” Rane said. “Come on, you saw
Christine
, right? This thing could just go ahead and flip over, crash into a wall, catch on fire, do whatever. And what does it care? It can heal itself. And dump our dead bodies on the side of the road.”

Dru stared at her in horror, struck speechless.

Rane nodded. “Tell me you're not thinking the same thing, right?”

Actually none of those thoughts had occurred to Dru at all. She decided it would be a good time to change topics. “Listen, I have an idea. The Four Horsemen are supposed to ride all around the entire world, bringing the apocalypse. To do that, they'd want to move fast, right? Demonically fast.”

“I guess. Why?”

“Well, what if Hellbringer is a speed demon?”

“That's a thing?”

Dru nodded. “Not just a figure of speech.”

“Still, going around the entire world?” Rane looked skeptical. “First off, the world is really freaking gi-
normous
, so you'd have to go like NASA speed to circle around it in a day. Second, what about all the oceans? You can't drive across water.”

“Maybe this thing can.” Dru shrugged, wondering. “But that's not the point. The point is, if it really is a speed demon, I might know how to destroy it.”

“Destroy it,” Rane echoed, as if savoring the word. She nodded her approval.

The roar of the engine dropped into a guttural warble, then coughed and went silent. The sudden lurch of deceleration threw Dru off-balance. She reached out both hands to steady herself.

“The hell?” Greyson said in the deafening quiet, then played with the gear shift and the ignition key. It didn't seem to do any good.

Dru tried to peer across to see the gauges. “Did we run out of gas?”

“No. Something's wrong.”

They coasted down a long slope, a brown rocky cliff rising up on their left, a steep chasm open on their right. Ahead, the road made a sharp left turn, protected by a guardrail. Beyond the guardrail lay nothing but empty air and the distant pine trees of the far slope. If they didn't turn, they would go right through the guardrail and down untold hundreds of feet to the next rocky ledge below, or possibly all the way to the bottom.

Out of the corner of her mouth, Rane said, “Maybe the
speed demon
heard you.”

Greyson gave Dru a sharp look. “Heard you what?”

“Nothing.” Dru tried to look innocent. “Did you check the gas?”

“We didn't run out of
gas
,” Greyson snapped. “What did you say?”

“Just . . .” She tried not to wither under Greyson's glare. “I may have, maybe, alluded to . . . destroying Hellbringer.”

They kept rolling downhill without power, the wind noise whistling louder around them. A bad feeling settled in the pit of her stomach. Maybe Hellbringer really
had
heard her.

Greyson stared ahead at the sharp turn and tightened his grip on the wheel. “Hellbringer came to help us. Why would you want to destroy it?”

“Destroy a demon?” Rane said with a mock gasp. “What sort of crazy talk is that? Oh, wait. Here's a wacky idea. Let's just start
trusting
demons. Because how could that possibly go wrong?” She shot a dangerous look at Dru, who tried to ignore it.

“I thought I broke the connection with that spell,” Dru said.

“Hellbringer is still connected to me,” Greyson said. “I can feel it.”

“Apparently,” Dru agreed. “But what if this thing is actually driving
you
instead of the other way around? We know it's a demon. Demons generally equal evil.”

“Right now's not the best time for a debate,” Greyson said.

“But what if destroying this car is a necessary part of your cure?” Dru's pulse picked up as they approached the turn. “Um, you can stop the car anytime.”

“Now would be good,” Rane added.

“I'm trying,” Greyson said through gritted teeth. “We're in gear, but we're just rolling along without power. And right now, I've got the brake pedal to the floor. Nothing works.”

Uh-oh.
“That's not good, is it?”

The muscles in Greyson's jaw clenched. “I can't stop this car.”

They kept picking up speed, rolling straight downhill toward the guardrail, everything quiet but for the wind. A rush of cold fear shot through Dru's veins.

“I know Hellbringer attacked you,” Greyson said flatly. “But so did I. The demon inside me did it, and that doesn't excuse it, but that doesn't make me evil, either. Maybe Hellbringer was just protecting me.”

“Oh, sure, that's it,” Rane said, her voice dripping with sarcasm before it turned serious. “D, say the word, and I'll go stone and jump out. I can take you with me.”

Dru noticed that she made no mention of taking Greyson along.

“Dru?” Greyson said, the urgency plain in his voice. They'd almost reached the bottom of the hill, closing in fast on the guardrail. “I'm running low on ideas.”

Dru placed one palm flat on the dashboard. “Hellbringer, can you hear me?” She didn't know what she expected. Maybe not a voice, but some kind of response, maybe a creak or a growl from the engine. She got nothing.

Nothing but the rush of wind over the car as it hurtled straight down the mountain highway.

Rane seized her arm and said something about making a jump for it,
right now
, but Dru wasn't listening. She could only stare ahead at the empty air and the endless pine forests far beyond, the trees from this distance nothing more than miniature points tinged blue by the atmosphere.

The thin air. Nothingness. Endlessness.

If someone had threatened to destroy her—and these days, that felt like a daily occurrence—what would she do?

Try to work it out first. Make a peace offering. Offer assistance, especially if that person was in trouble.

And if that didn't work?

I'd try to destroy them before they got me
, she thought.

Just like Hellbringer was about to do.

The black metal of the dashboard grew warm under her hand. “Hellbringer,” she whispered, “I understand.”

Ahead, the guardrail loomed as they rushed straight for it.

“We won't destroy you,” Dru whispered. “If you help us, help save us, we'll save you. That's the truth.”

But demons didn't believe in truth, only oaths. A sorcio phrase popped into her mind, gleaned from one of her long-forgotten books.

“
Mi juras, Infernotoris
,” she intoned solemnly.
I swear to you, Hellbringer.

Something trembled through the metal beneath her fingers. Nothing she could pinpoint or explain. Just a feeling that something crucial had shifted.

The engine rumbled back to life, and the wheels locked up with a howl of rubber. Greyson, startled into action, spun the wheel. They skidded to a stop mere inches from the guardrail. The noise of the skidding tires etched itself into Dru's brain.

And then all was quiet.

Through the window, all Dru could see was the distant carpet of pine trees on the far slope, and the snowy peaks of blue mountains ranked into the fading distance. For a heart-stopping moment, she thought they'd gone over the edge. It was only when Rane let go of her arm that she fully realized they had stopped.