I hung my head as the images of cars on the expressway suddenly began to make sense, blinking when Edden touched my knee. “Rachel, are you okay? You look like crap.”
“I feel like crap.” I took a deep breath and sat up. “I’m fine. Just channeling the home world a little too much.”
Trent was on the phone, one finger in his ear to block out the noise. If anyone knew the train schedule, it would be Trent. He owned most of the lines that ran through Cincinnati.
“Where am I going?” Ivy called out as we picked up speed.
“North,” Trent said as he closed his phone. “They’re already on the train. It will pass through Cincinnati in about fifteen minutes, and from there they hit Chicago, but I doubt that’s their final destination.”
“But where am I going?” she asked again, stress showing in her voice, and he got to his feet, balance shifting as he made his way up to the front. He gave David a look, and the man eased out of the front seat to take the open spot beside me.
“This is kind of unusual for you, Rachel. A group thing?” Edden said as he gave a respectful nod to Scott across from him. The vampire was clearly uneasy with the FIB captain joining our joyride, the man years older and tons more sedentary than everyone else in the van.
“Tell me about it,” I grumped. Everyone wanted to help. Damn it, I felt like Frodo being chaperoned to Mordor, and like Frodo, I was beginning to wonder why I couldn’t have just taken the eagles and flown out there by myself and saved everyone a lot of grief. But I suppose everyone wanted to help save the world.
“What happened?” David asked, open phone in hand. “My sources are coming up empty.”
Edden brought his gaze back from Nina’s weaponry. “The intel was wrong. We moved early and found the place empty.”
The intel was wrong? Maybe the I.S. was lying to Edden as well and had thrown their own private party before inviting him. “That’s not what I saw,” I said, remembering what the mystics had shown me. “There was a fight. At least three singulars, I mean people, died.”
Edden hesitated, feet spread wide to balance himself as we swayed and leaned. “Then they cleaned up after themselves, because it looks clean.” His mustache bunched. “Too clean,” Edden muttered, coming to the same conclusion. “Seems as if Landon and Ayer had a difference in opinion.”
In a rush of wings, Jenks flew in with Bis, the pixy clearly drafting off Bis, the stronger flier. “Thanks for waiting for us, blood bag,” he snarled, panting as he landed on the rearview mirror. “We got everyone?” he asked, and a chorus of tiny, high-pitched yes’s came back.
David closed his phone with a snap. Swerving, we tore through an intersection, the traffic lights black and the road empty. “It wasn’t my people,” David said as he tucked it away. “But I do have reports of a, and I quote, ‘weird feeling’ about sunset.”
A chiming of voices in me said that was the singulars ending their incongruent thoughts, but before I could say anything, Ivy exploded with a sharp, “Are you insane?”
I jerked until I realized she was talking to Trent, still in the front seat. “And just how do you propose to get on the train?” she asked. “Those things go almost eighty miles an hour.”
“Trust me.” Trent leaned back, clearly miffed she was questioning him. “Get us on Rail Drive, and it will happen.”
Ivy sighed and made a sharp turn.
“You know, maybe I’m not understanding what the mystics are trying to tell me,” I said as I caught my balance in the wildly shifting van.
But Jenks was shaking his head, a blue-edged dust slipping from him as he hovered in the middle of the van. “No, you’re right,” he said. “We got the intel, Bis and me and my kids. According to the pixies across the street, a bunch of elves put three dead people in the back of the El Camino and headed south. There weren’t any I.S. vehicles around at the time. Something spooked them, and they ran.”
I looked sorrowfully at Trent, watching his expression become grim. Landon had cut the Free Vampires loose and taken the mystics for himself. His people were behaving badly, and there was nothing Trent could do to stop them except with muscle and magic.
“They went to the train station,” Scott said, bracing himself when Ivy took a sharp turn.
“Either Landon or Ayer or both have been scooping mystics up like cotton candy on a stick ever since you got the Goddess riled up,” Jenks said, a still spot of wings and dust in the careening van. “They took a dozen little boxes, and if they get to Chicago, they’ll be coast to coast in a matter of days.”
“Call ahead. Stop them,” Scott said, and Edden nodded, surprising the young vampire.
Trent, though, shook his head. “They would know we’re onto them and will disappear. We either stop them on the track where we have a chance of catching them, or nothing.”
I remembered how Trent’s father and mother had escaped the West Coast by hopping trains in a plague-torn United States, making it all the way to Cincinnati during the Turn. He was right. We had to catch them unawares or they’d be gone cross-country.
“If we can’t head them off, we’ll have only a day to find each individual cell before the vampires start to sleep,” Jenks said, the van suddenly silent but for Ivy pushing the old engine into a faster pace. “Their new agenda is to shut the vampires down, coast to coast.” His dust shifted to a dull orange as he looked at Trent as if he could do something. “And when that’s done, there’s nothing to stop them from turning their eyes on the Weres and witches.”
Damn it all to the Turn and back. Between the elves’ quest for superiority and the Free Vampires’ holy mission, they were going to throw all of us back in the pre-Turn dark ages.
“That’s not going to happen,” Edden said, his thick hands opening from tight fists, and Scott looked at him as if he’d never seen a human before. “The I.S. in Chicago can catch them.”
Ivy met his eyes through the rearview mirror. “I’m not trusting anything to those yahoos,” she said, and Trent glumly nodded. “We have to stop that train.”
“Blow it up,” Scott said. “I know a guy in the Hollows—”
“We are not blowing it up,” Trent interrupted, and I watched, intrigued when he stared Scott down. David met my gaze knowingly as if to say, See?
“There are people on it,” Trent said, almost as if embarrassed.