Grant's voice sounded in my earpiece. "We're south of you. What's that purple thing?"
I keyed my radio as discreetly as possible. "Snipe her," I whispered, hoping that the throat mike would pick it up.
The oni didn't seem to hear me. "The old gods have smiled upon us tonight. I was afraid we would have to harm you. The Shadow Lord's contract specified that our payment would be halved if you were injured. Luckily, the foolishness of humans knows no bounds when their blood kin are threatened. When the Shadow Lord's minion reported that you had left in such haste to come to your brother's aid, I knew we would surely capture you tonight."
That staggered me. There is a spy. I had a clean shot at her eyes, but I was terrified she'd drop Mosh. "I don't care about your contract, just my brother."
Bia cackled. The unnatural sound caused the hair on my arms to stand up. "The contract is everything. Would you break a contract, my fellow Hunter?"
"Fellow Hunter?" I snorted, never letting the muzzle of my gun waver. "I don't think so."
"Oh, we're very much the same, we are. My brother and I deal in the same trade as you, only we're not picky who we work for." She reached with her free hand into her gray cloak and pulled out a tangle of rope. She tossed it at my feet. "Just like you, we have contracts to fulfill, and now I must fulfill mine."
It was just a small bundle of hemp rope. Then suddenly, it twitched. I took a step back. The rope moved on its own, uncoiling into a memorized circle. As the ends met, there was a flash of fire, and the cement inside the radius disappeared into nothingness. It was like there was a black hole in the floor of the overpass.
"The portal will take you to the Shadow Lord. You will step into it willingly."
"Fat chance of that."
"Or I drop your blood kin to his certain death." She shook Mosh painfully. His eyes were shut tight as he yelped in pain. "Then I will make you get in the portal. If I cannot, then my brother will be here in a moment. You would much rather do it my way than his. Cratos will simply pull your limbs off and toss you in. I would rather not lose our bonus. Either way, you will be at the feet of the Shadow Lord before this night is through."
"Violence . . ." The ragged voice came from slightly behind me. I turned.
Franks! He was alive, barely. Blood was running freely from a dozen lacerations. His suit had been reduced to rags. He must have lost his gun, because now all he had in his right hand was a folding fighting knife. He limped right past me, one foot dragging on the pavement.
He was seething.
"We have no quarrel with your kind," Bia said. "This is not your concern."
"Bullshit," Franks muttered, closing, as he left a splatter trail behind.
Bia was distracted by Franks. "Grant, you got a fifty?"
"Yeah. I've got my McMillan."
He'd been working on precision shooting with the Newbies today. I could only pray that he had a good zero. There was no wind. "Head shot. Don't miss. Wait for my signal,"
"I'm three hundred yards away," he protested.
"It's a big head, asshole," I hissed.
Bia shook my brother again. Mosh was struggling to hold onto her arm, slipping. "I only want the Hunter."
"You can't have him," Franks said slowly, still drawing closer to his target. I had to do something before he got close enough to attack, because I knew he wouldn't care if Mosh was splattered into road kill.
"Have you grown so weak, so jealous, that you would live as a slave?" She extended one huge hand toward Franks, pleading. "The Shadow Lord understands the fallen. He can grant you true freedom. Join us." Bia said something else in a strange, almost musical language.
Franks stopped, turning his head slightly, as if thinking about her offer, whatever the hell all that weirdness meant. There was a bellowing cry in the distance. Car horns were blowing. Cratos was almost here.
"Ready," Grant said in my ear. "Hostage is blocking the shot."
"Hey, Bia!" I shouted. She turned her attention back to me. I was way too far to make a grab for Mosh. "I'd go with you to save my family. Your shadow guy was right about that. But you've got one problem . . ."
"Yes?" Her red eyes narrowed suspiciously.
"That's not my brother. You grabbed the drummer by mistake."
Curling her massive arm, she pulled Mosh closer for examination. Purple lips pulled back, puzzled, over those deadly sharp teeth. Mosh was suspended over the concrete now.
Grant was calm. "Clear."
"Send it."
The impact made a distinctive sound, like a watermelon being struck by a bat. The boom of the .50 BMG sniper rifle arrived a split second later. The bullet missed her vulnerable eyes but pierced directly through her ear hole.
Bia's head jerked violently to the side. Mosh was thrown against the concrete, landing hard on his shoulder and rolling away. A terrible whistle emanated from the oni as something unnatural ruptured. Her hands clenched spasmodically over her ears, trying to staunch the energy screaming from her collapsing skull. The inner creature had been ruptured. There was a vortex of white light and vapor shooting from her ears, eyes, and mouth, spinning, flashing upward under the halogen lights.
Franks covered the last few feet, stopped, and glared up at the monster as Bia added her inhuman shriek to the noise. "You always did talk too much," he said simply. Then he put one hand on her chest and shoved the oni over the side.
It was a twenty-foot drop to the freeway, but I couldn't tell if she actually hit the ground before the speeding 18-wheeler's grill struck her. The entire engine block of the semi instantly collapsed around her, driving steel through Bia's animated body. The truck turned brutally to the side, trailer jackknifing as the truck's weight slammed the oni solidly into the base of the overpass. The truck shuddered to a smoking-rubber halt. Suddenly a shockwave expanded outward from the impact point. Brilliant white light turned night temporarily into day. The wave passed and there were ghostly figures, literally hundreds of shapes, men and monsters, intelligences and lives that had been captive for thousands of years, now freed, leaping into the sky. They were gone in an instant.
"All those people . . ." I muttered as I walked to my brother's side, trying to comprehend the sheer horror of the creature we had just ended.
"What people?" Mosh asked hysterically, surely waiting for something else to try to kill him. "Where?" He hadn't seen them.
Franks regarded me suspiciously, shook his head, then stepped forward and peered over the edge. The truck was crushed below us. The trailer—a giant, stainless-steel tube—was sideways directly underneath the overpass, blocking two full lanes. It was tall enough that I probably could have just jumped down to the trailer and been fine.
Franks still had his radio. "We're on the overpass." I was far enough away that I couldn't hear the response. "Good. Evacuate the road." The southbound traffic was stopped by the wreck. The Feds must have blocked the northbound route, because nothing was coming from that direction either.
The orcs materialized, Edward balanced between his brother and sister-in-law. I checked Mosh. He was shaken, confused, but seemed okay. It was when I stood up that I noticed how badly Franks was injured. His left arm had been ripped apart from hitting the road, flesh shredded and hanging in strips, splintered bone shards visible through the welling blood. His clip-on tie had been applied as a tourniquet around the top of his bicep.
He caught my shocked expression. "Just a flesh wound," he said nonchalantly.
"BIA!"
The cry was so loud that the halogen lights overhead exploded. All of us flinched. Glass rained from the sky.
"SISTER!" Cratos was crashing down the freeway, colliding with the stopped cars. His gray cloak was flapping behind, rendering him visible to all. People ditched their cars and fled screaming from the red nightmare giant. "Filthy souls! Filthy souls must die! Kill! Killed SISTER! NOOO!"
"Oh, man. We've made him mad," I said.
Franks scowled, doing the math. The oni was a few hundred yards away and closing quickly. "Go," he ordered without looking. He limped to a nearby construction vehicle and retrieved a length of heavy cable from the back with his good arm.
I didn't know what Franks was planning, but anything involving staying and fighting was suicide. "Come on!" I shouted at him as I ran to one of the Alabama DOT trucks. Of course, there were no keys in it. I swore.
"Primary mission, protect Pitt from the Condition," Franks stated as he pulled out the cable. His injured arm was leaking everywhere, but he still managed to use his left hand to open the steel clip on the end to fashion a loop. Franks tugged out the other end of the cable, pulled it over to the bus and crawled under. He started wrapping the cable around the frame.
"Pitt! We're below you," Grant screamed in my ear. A horn honked on the freeway just south of the wrecked truck. "There's a big red thing coming this way, and I think I just killed its sister or something."
Franks was going to sacrifice himself to slow down Cratos. He looked up from his work long enough to glare at me. "I've never failed a mission."
In other words, it was time to go.
The fastest way down to Lee and Grant was to go right over the edge. Skippy was way ahead of me. He climbed over the concrete ledge and jumped down to the top of the trailer. His boots bounced, and he fell, but managed not to go over the side. He stood and gestured for his wife. Gretchen was much more nimble and she had somebody to help catch her. Ed, weaving badly, but still managing more dexterity than I would ever have, went over next. I helped Mosh to his feet and we wobbled to the side. "You've got to be shittin' me," he said when he looked at what was still a pretty darn scary leap down to a narrow, stainless-steel catwalk. Cratos roared again, much closer now. "Point taken." He jumped, landing awkwardly. I waited for Skippy to help him before I went over.
The yellow sign said that this was a 20-foot overpass. It felt like ten times that when I stepped into space. My boots hit the trailer just as the smell hit my nose. Gasoline. Pain surged up through my ankle, still tender from Mexico. Strong hands grabbed my arm. Mosh shoved me toward the ladder. "Gas truck!" he shouted.
I slid down the ladder, past a bevy of red signs saying danger/peligro and flammable, and landed with a splash. I was standing in gasoline. The tanker had ruptured on impact. My brother was down a second after me. Lee laid on the horn. "Come on!" But then Mosh was running in the wrong direction. "Damn it!" I shouted as I followed. He was running toward where Bia had died. Didn't he realize we had to get out of here, either before this thing caught on fire or before Cratos got here? Stupid idiot.
Then I felt like the idiot as Mosh scrambled his way up to the wrecked truck. He was trying to get the driver. The engine block was completely smashed into the wall and fragments had been hurled a hundred feet but the trucker could still be alive. Mosh jerked on the door but it was crumpled tight. I reached him just as he crawled, headfirst, through the broken window.
"Hurry, man. We've got to go," I insisted.
"Working on it," came the muffled reply.
"KILL! KILL!" Cratos screamed.
I saw Agent Franks standing at the top of the overpass, perched in the exact spot that Bia had been in only a minute before. He held the thick loop of cable in his hands, noose ready. Was he going to actually try to lasso the thing? The rear of the tanker shook as Cratos slammed into it, pushing past, splashing into the gasoline. He was so absurdly tall that his head terminated nearly three quarters of the way to the overpass above. He saw me.
"FILTHY HUNTER DIE!"
Franks waited patiently for the monster to step into view.
Force roared. The sound began as a rumble, but then rose in intensity, until it was a primal scream of pure hate. He lowered his head and charged.
Franks tossed the makeshift noose. The oni's head passed right through and he made it three more steps before the cable jerked tight. The bus was jerked several feet. His beady eyes bulged as the cable tightened around his throat. Too enraged to stop, he kept tugging inexorably toward me, dragging the bus with him.
The ground was littered with wreckage, gasoline quickly spreading and washing over it. I realized with a shock that much of the debris was actually what was left of Bia. The purple bits looked like dried clay. "Grab my feet and pull!" Mosh shouted. I grabbed him, glad that he was wearing those giant lineman boots that laced all the way up to his knees, and yanked as hard as I could. The adrenaline was surging through my system and I pulled my brother back out the window. Mosh saw Cratos struggling less than a hundred feet away but he was a man on a mission. "Help me with this guy."
We both reached through the window. I found an armpit, and we pulled, lifting the unconscious man through the gap. Of course, he had to be a big, heavyset guy, too. No, it would have been too much to ask to have to carry a petite person out of a probably soon-to-be-exploding truck with an angry giant thing trying to eat your soul. No, Owen Z. Pitt, you get a three-hundred-pounder. It took two strong and desperate men to pull him through the window. I slung the trucker over my back in a fireman carry and ran for our lives.