CHAPTER NINETEEN
Walt
Walt couldn’t keep the smile off his face as the truck hummed along the empty street. Cutting loose and driving like a bat out of hell felt right in a way that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He glanced to the side, shooting a smile at Elysian, who looked back at him with wide eyes and a queasy smile.
Every time he looked over, he half expected to see someone else in the passenger seat, hollering and drumming on the dashboard and urging him on. The memory slipped from his grasp the second he tried to focus on it, like a placid fish that scooted away the second it felt fingertips graze its belly.
“So,” he said. “Now that operation evacuate is a success, are you going to let me in on the next part of your plan?”
“We need to go back to the house,” she said.
“I guessed that,” he said. “No matter what your plan is, I’m betting it works better with magic?”
“It’s…” she dragged in an uneven breath. “We’re only going to get one shot. Either it works or there’ll be nothing protecting us from them.”
“Still safer than doing nothing and waiting for them to starve us out,” he said.
She smiled. “I’m going with your suggestion. I’m going to cast the same spell again. Try to wipe their memories and send them away.”
“Won’t that just end with them having an awesome animal sidekick?” Walt asked.
“Not if I reverse it,” she said. She slid her tongue over her lips to moisten them. “Like I did with the healing spell.”
“So you’d be…” he chewed on that for a moment. “Sending them to search for their familiar?”
“Yes. Except they’re not witches, so I have no idea if that would even work. I could burn up the wards with a spell that does nothing.”
“Elysian,” Walt said, his voice serious. “I trust you and I believe in you. If you think this can work then I’m behind you all the way. But if you don’t want to do this, I’ll support that too. We’ve got…” he stared at the gas tank gauge. “At least an hour’s worth of gas. I can hit the highway, try to lose them. But there’s danger there too. Sooner or later we’ll have to stop for gas, or they’ll run us off the road.”
Elysian nodded, her bottom lip trembling so slightly that only someone who watched her as intently as Walt did could have seen it. “I want to do this. Midnight is coming. I want to be fighting.”
Walt thought that bad luck omens were the least of their concerns—they had to live to New Year’s Day to worry about the year to come. But he nodded. “What do you need?”
Elysian lifted her eyes to the fabric-lined ceiling, trying to recall. “The spell components are… something the color of the sky. Something that doesn’t belong to you. Something that didn’t exist yesterday. Something that existed before you were born. But.” She pressed a hand to the bridge of her nose. “Is ‘you’ in this context me, or Willa and Doug?”
“We’re all pretty much the same age, and nothing we have here belongs to them, so we should be covered anyway.” Walt glanced in the rearview mirror, and leaned on the accelerator a little more when he saw the other truck starting to get uncomfortably close. “Something the color of the sky,” he muttered.
Why was that tweaking at his attention?
After a moment a laugh bubbled up in his throat. “Oh my god. You mean the spell needs something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue?”
Elysian blinked. “Wow, you’re right.”
“Are you sure that spell is what you think it is?”
“I don’t think that’s important right now,” she said. “Lots of spells have similar features, witches don’t like to reinvent the wheel.” She scanned the inside of the truck, and let out a little cry of victory when she spotted a blue ballpoint pen tucked in where the windshield met the dashboard. “One down. Do we have something old?”
“Nothing about this truck is old,” he said. “But I think it’s borrowed. I still have no idea who the James Parke on the registration papers is, but it’s not me.”
“That’ll do,” she spun a ring on her finger, the reflected glow of the street lights flashing in its diamond chip. “I don’t like the idea of reusing a component, but this ring will have to serve as the something old. That just leaves something new.”
“The truck isn’t new enough?”
She shook her head. “The rule is ‘something that didn’t exist yesterday’. It’s nice, but it’s not what we need.”
Walt stared at the road ahead. They had pulled in to Elysian’s street, so time was running out. “Us,” he said finally.
“Us?”
“We didn’t exist yesterday. I mean, you existed and I did. But us, that’s brand new.”
She had just opened her mouth, her pink lips trying to form a response, when Doug rammed the truck. Metal screeched and somewhere behind them his tail lights turned into a shower of plastic tinkling across the asphalt.
Walt threw one arm out to keep her in her seat, steering blindly with the other hand. She brought her hands up to grab his forearm, frantically running them up his arm to his shoulder, touching everywhere she could reach as if to confirm he was still there, still whole.
They’d run out of time.
“The wards,” he yelled. “The wards will still keep them out, right?”
“For now,” she said. Her voice was so quiet compared to the chaos going on around her, but he heard every word. “That doesn’t help us if we can’t get to them.”
“I love you,” he said in reply, and hit the accelerator. The truck was going to need some serious body work but the engine was as powerful as ever. The truck mounted the curb like it was nothing, and tore through Elysian’s brick fence like it was made of plywood. The house loomed out of the darkness, threatening to become the truck’s final destination.
He threw the steering wheel to the left, then reached down and engaged the handbrake. The truck spun in a perfect bootlegger’s turn, throwing up mud and hunks of grass from the lawn, and came to rest with the rear wheels just touching the bottom of the porch steps.
They sat for a beat, the only sound in the truck Elysian’s heavy breathing as she struggled to recover from the surprise. She turned to look at him, her pupils blown wide and her cheeks flushed deep red.
“I love you too,” she said.