Page 40 of Soothsayer

I did. “What about yours?” I asked.

“I can heal any damage, and I dislike limiting my peripheral vision. Come.” He jumped over the edge of the bunker and headed casually down the hill.

“Hey!” The guy I’d used as my human shield looked at me, anger in every line of his recumbent body. “You were supposed to shoot him!”

“Was I? Huh.”

I kept going and didn’t even mind when he yelled out “Prick!” and shot me in the back.

Ididmind when someone else screamed. It wasn’t a fun, playful “Omigosh run!” kind of scream; it was a genuinely terrified scream. “He’s got a gun!” someone else yelled, and I groaned.

“Fucking perfect.”

“Ah.” Sören had stopped, his eyes clouding over with purple mist. “It’s my brother Art?r.”

Yeah, I remembered Art?r. Some of these guys might have been coerced into obeying their father, but if anyone was helping of his own accord, it was Art?r. He’d been the one to dunk me over and over again into the bathtub filled with ice water. He’d been the one to pull out two of my fingernails when threatening to drown me didn’t work.

Art?r wasn’t the cleverest of the brothers, but he was the biggest, the meanest, and the one least likely to give a fuck about his risk-to-reward ratio, as evidenced by the fact that he’d pulled a fucking gun in the middle of a theme park. I could see him now, coming at us like a black-suited behemoth through the trees. And all I had was a paintball gun.

Well, I’d better make it count.

My hopper was mostly full, thanks to my stinginess with my shots. As soon as Art?r rounded the last tree, I dropped to one knee and fired my gun as fast as I could, right at his groin. The paintballs actually had a pretty slow muzzle velocity, just enough to burst on impact, but level enough of them at someone’s crotch and they were going to feel it. Art?r didn’t disappoint. He groaned and jackknifed onto both knees, one hand clutching hisbespattered manhood, the other shakily raising his real, live gun in my direction.

I pushed to my feet and darted to the side just as the first bullet flew. More people screamed, and the guy I’d left “dead” on the hill quickly rolled over the top into the bunker for shelter.

I turned and faced Sören, who stared at me with a little smile on his face. “We have to go, now!”

“All right.” He let me lead him away from his bellowing sibling, even though a cry of,“Þú getur ekki bjargað honum! Hann mun deyja!”made him pause for a moment.

I led the way out of the field of battle at a run. Sören could explain later, if we survived.

Chapter Twenty-One

Iwas getting paint on Andre’s seats. He’d probably be pissed about that whenever I got this car back to him, but at least it wasn’t bullet holes. Chock that up in the “win” column, I guess. Ha,thiswas my life: where not being actively shot at with a deadly weapon was the best thing that had happened to me all day. I should’ve probably ditched the car, honestly, and gotten a new one just in case they had some way of tracking this one, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I settled on switching out the license plate at a gas station and just kept going.

We were an hour out of St. Louis now, and I was doing everything in my power to keep calm as I drove down the highway. I had to go fast but not too fast, burn away the miles but not get burnt in the process. Every time I saw a black SUV, my heart clenched and my hand made an abortive twitch toward my shiny new gun resting between the front seats. It wasn’t them, I was almost sure of that, but the potential was enough to make me sick to my stomach.

Fuck, I wasn’t meant for this vigilante desperado thing. I wasn’t a guns-blazing, sharpshooting, badass motherfucker. I was an idiot with a talent he didn’t want and a lot of luck, both good and bad. I wasn’t sure which type was making more of an effort right now.

I’d given Sören the game console, but he wasn’t using it. Instead he was quiet, eyes closed, head tilted toward the window as warm air streamed through the car, making a mess of his pale hair. Every so often his mouth opened, like he was going to say something, but a moment later, he’d close it without a sound.

I was happy for the silence and focused on the road and what a moron I had been. Kissing him? Kissing him to get him to go along with me? Great idea, really brilliant. Mixed messages much? I’d already told him I wasn’t going to have sex with him, and I stood by that, but it had seemed so…so right, in the moment. Like it was the only thing I could do, and it had worked. And it had feltgood. Shamefully good.

I drove nonstop until it was dark and we were close to the Oklahoma border before I finally couldn’t ignore my hunger anymore. “Drive-through okay for dinner?” I asked, and Sören finally opened his eyes and looked at me. Not with the purple I’d been expecting to see, but with red-rimmed blue eyes.

“It’s so warm,” he whispered, and my heart suddenly tried to beat its way out of my chest.

“Sören…oh my god, really?” My throat was incredibly tight, my words almost inaudible.

“Yeah.”

I couldn’t handle this and drive at the same time. I took the first exit and pulled into a parking lot, mostly abandoned except for a few big trucks parked lengthwise along one side of it.

I shut the car off and stared at him. “What?I thought this wasn’t allowed.”

“So did I,” he whispered. I recognized the smile on his lips, small and trembling. It was the one he’d worn when he’d told me to go, to leave him and escape. “It’s colder now,” he said, and I saw his hands start to shake. “I need…”

“Hang on.” I got out of the car, came around to his side, opened the door, and held out my hand. “I know just the thing.” Sören stared at my hand for a moment, and I waited breathlessly to see if he’d reject it, or if the landvættir would reemerge and take control. Eventually he took a deep breath and grabbed hold of me. I pulled him out of the car and into my arms, but his shaking got worse.

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