“How far away are we now?” Eilish asked, a little sleepily, from the back seat. I wondered how long she’d driven.
“It’s about four or five miles to Woodbury, which is basically directly east of the city of St. Paul,” I said. “It’s a massive suburb, tons of shopping and whatnot.”
“And where are we going?” Eilish asked.
I thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know. We should probably find a hotel to check into, start our search first thing in the morning.” I yawned. I might have been able to do something sooner, but taking the temperature of the room around me, most of my crew seemed to be sleepy. I looked back at Cassidy; she still seemed bright and attentive by the light of her screen, but if she’d popped a little something to keep her awake, that was hardly a surprise, was it?
The miles before Woodbury, I-94 was shrouded on either side by thick woods, broken by the occasional pasture or stretch of farmland. I couldn’t see the bare land in the dark, but I could see the outlines of the trees by the side of the highway as we passed, and there was something comforting about it.
“Brake lights ahead,” Harry murmured from beside me. I looked; he was right. People were tapping their brakes ahead, just as we were coming up on the first Woodbury exit.
The big semi truck next to us slowed as we did. Pretty soon we were both crawling along, right under the overpass for Woodbury Drive. Radio Drive, the big Woodbury exit, was still a mile ahead.
In the darkness, the glow of headlights, brake lights and street lamps hanging over the freeway combined to give Harry a soft glow while we were under one of the overheads, and then a shadow cast by the roof of our SUV would pass over him when we moved under one. We were crawling along now at less than twenty miles per hour, inching up to the Radio Drive exit, where I could see the lights for the Woodbury Lakes shopping plaza glowing past all the brake lights on the freeway.
“What the hell is all this?” I asked, leaning forward, like moving my head twelve inches in that direction would make any kind of difference in my visual acuity. “A traffic jam at two in the morning?”
Harry’s face was all screwed up in concentration and suddenly we came to an abrupt stop.
“What are you doing?” I asked as he shifted into park, blinking a few times as he did so.
He turned and looked at me, and I saw his confidence again, though he lacked the boyish smile. “We need to bail out of the car. Now.”
“What?” Eilish piped up from the back seat.
“We need to go now,” Harry said, turning back to the ladies in the back seat.
Cassidy didn’t need to be told twice; she clapped shut her laptop, tossed it in her bag without ceremony, and was ready to move in a second.
Eilish seemed to need a little more time, fishing around in the floorboard around her ankles, gathering up her plastic bags of junk food. “So … is this going to be a fight, then? Should I carb up to prepare myself?”
“Only if you want to crash hard in the middle of it,” I said, frowning. I’d been in those kind of fights before, the ones where I wished I’d had something more than a donut when my blood sugar dove off a cliff in the midst of a battle. Adrenaline tended to keep the damage from that to a minimum, but adrenaline couldn’t cover up everything when it came to crappy eating habits.
“Well, I need these,” she said, shoving bags onto her arms, like she was some homeless lady from the park.
“Come on,” Harry said, throwing open his door. “We need to move.” He reached across the center console and grabbed me by the wrist for a second as I was about to get out. My eyes met his in the dark car, and I felt electric to the touch for a second. “We will find you,” he said, and then he let go, was out the door.
“What does that mean?” I got out and watched Harry grab Cassidy by the arm and point her toward the median. She took off at a run, heading for the center of the freeway.
“Eilish, this way,” Harry said, as the Irishwoman scooted across the seat and emerged on his side of the car. He helped her out and then nodded at the median. “Go.”
I started toward him, but he looked at me and shook his head. “This isn’t your path, Sienna.”
“What the hell, are you my spirit guide now?” I asked.
He just smiled, a little tightly. “For best results … just be yourself.” And then he took off at a run after them.
I stood there, now three lanes of traffic between us, and watched them go. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I asked. If he was heading that way, and said it wasn’t my path …
Then, logically, whatever we were dealing with here would be …
In the other direction.
I whirled, eyes scanning, and sure enough, in the channel between lanes directly in front of me was a figure. Tall, broadly built, his ebony skin dark in the night, he came striding toward me, full of the swagger and confidence of a man who’d already squarely kicked my ass in a Waffle House once today.
The Terminator.
29.
“Be myself,” I muttered, under my breath, as the Terminator strode toward me, sheltered on either side by two big semi trucks. “That’s great advice, Harry. A wonderful mantra for someone who’s had entire sections of her mind wiped clean like a dry erase board. Super helpful.”
The Terminator didn’t bother to speak, or issue an ultimatum, or even say something cool like, “Hasta la vista, Sienna.” He just came at me, picking up speed, that shadowy effect melting behind him as he ran, smoking off him like he was carrying a pound of evil dry ice in his clothing.
“Be myself,” I muttered again. “Here’s a question, then—who the hell am I?”
The Terminator came at me in a blur, and I reacted—a little slowly—by throwing up a blocking hand. It was old instinct, something ingrained in me by my mother over years of sparring sessions and reinforced in my adulthood by countless ones I’d forced myself to partake in to keep fresh. Speed had been less of an issue these last few years, with all those other metas in my body to give me attacks I could use at long range.
Now, though … these old techniques were going to have to find new life, or else I’d be seeing the end of mine at the hands of someone faster and more prepared than me.
My forearm thudded against his wrist, turning aside his blow as I shifted my balance on my front leg. I don’t know if the Terminator was expecting me to cower and retreat a little more—like I had in our last encounter—but he’d committed his full weight to his attack and my brain had recused itself from the immediacy of the threat. Adrenaline had kicked in, and now life was moving at both an alarmingly fast pace, and yet still a slow one.
Years of practice, years of training, had allowed me this detachment in the frenetic pace of a battle. The crazier things got, the cooler I got, because …
Well, because I’d fought world-ending threats before, and this guy was just an aspiring Sienna-ending threat.