“Yes!” I exclaimed. “This way.” Relief that my store wasn’t going to burn made me lightheaded, or maybe that was the cabinet buzzing in my brain. “Come on! Quickly!” I ducked past Alaric and took off running, dodging around the half-seen shelves and racks as I sprinted for the back.
A brilliant green light flooded the space, startling me. I tripped, went to one knee, and looked back. Alaric, two steps behind me, held a glowing ball ofsomethingin his palm. He reached my side and extended a hand down. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” I let him haul me to my feet. My knee smarted. “What’s that green?”
“Witchlight. Easy way not to run into stuff in the dark.”
“You’re a sorcerer!” I blinked at him as that fact finally percolated into my brain.
“Well, duh,” the rat said. “Come on. The slower we go, the farther the bastards are ahead of us.”
That reminder got me running again with Alaric at my heels. We burst out the back door. It was Alaric who remembered to close it, and I left the loading bay open. There was nothing important in the store anyway, just the book, needing me, calling…
I tripped and Alaric caught me with a hand under my elbow.
“This way.” He steered me toward his car, dimming the witchlight as we reached the passenger door. “You’re distracted. I’ll drive, you tell me where to go. Here, get in.”
I didn’t argue. Whatever would get me to the book fastest. Although I yelped when Harry leaped in at my feet, bounced with small hard paws to my lap, and then rebounded up to the dashboard.
Alaric laughed, shut my door, and hurried to get behind the wheel. The engine came to life with a much smoother purr than my old Mazda. “Right.” Alaric backed out and turned the car toward the road. “Which way?”
I pointed and he turned left, the closest he could get to my direction. There wasn’t much traffic and he floored the gas. The engine’s purr became a throaty roar. The car leaped forward.
“Who’s going to bail you out if you get pulled over?” the rat asked from the dashboard.
“I’m trusting my luck.” Alaric pulled out around a slower car and powered up a hill. At the next crossroad, he turned right, then left again, following my pointing as my sense of the book wavered between the two.
“Hurry.” I bounced in my seat, fumbling with my seatbelt. Iknewjumping out and running cross-country wouldn’t get me there faster, but the bees in my head had begun flitting up and down my nerves. Urgency built behind my breastbone like floodwaters behind a dam. Somewhere in the background, I was freaked out that some weird book had done something to me, and freaked out that Alaric was a sorcerer and I’d fucked a sorcerer… but the front of my brain had no room for anything except finding that book. “Turn again. There.”
Alaric asked Harry, “Anyone we know out this way?”
The rat plastered his paws to the windshield, staring at the darkened landscape, his nose twitching. “Half a dozen, depending how far we go. No one who makes my tail itch.”
“Pity.” Alaric pushed our speed up past eighty.
I leaned forward, the weirdness of a talking rat on the dashboard eclipsed by… by… “There! There, stop, turn around!” I twisted in my seat to keep the long country driveway we’d passed in view. “Alaric, dammit!”
“I hear you.” He pulled off to the side, waited for a truck to pass, then did a three-point turn, cut his headlights, and rolled forward slowly down the shoulder.
“Come on.” I bounced harder in my seat. “They could be doing anything. Destroying it. Burning it.”
Alaric gave me an odd frown, but asked Harry, “Address ring any bells?”
“Not offhand, but I don’t know them all. Be careful and keep your shields up.”
We reached the mailbox, a banal, rusting metal oblong with a street number on the side. Beyond it, a gravel drive ledto a sprawling house and a couple of outbuildings. A pickup with an attached U-Haul trailer sat outside the smaller of the outbuildings. Faint light spilled from under the building’s door.
There!The relief I felt was almost as good as sex. The moment Alaric slowed to a stop, I released my belt, shoved the door open, and took off running.
Either Alaric or Harry whispered, “Wait!” behind me but I couldn’t stop my headlong plunge.
I heard a deep-voiced, “Damn,” that had to be Alaric and then he came after me, catching up with ease on his much-longer legs. “Stop,” he hissed under his breath as he drew level with me. “We need a plan.”
“We need the book!”
Alaric wrapped his arms around me and dragged me to a halt. I struggled, the call of the book loud in my head. He muttered in my ear. “Slow down. Besmartabout this.”
I’d always prided myself on being clever and that reminder slowed my flight. I stopped resisting as Alaric pulled me to the ground behind a bush.
