We should have come up with a better plan. There has to have been another way. Her voice turned bitter. If anyone should have known better, it was me.

I didn’t argue with her. George was stubborn even when she was alive. Dead, she was basically impossible to convince of anything she didn’t agree with. “So now we head home, we regroup, and we head someplace where we can be invisible. We can’t stay with Maggie anymore. It’s not safe.”

We can’t leave her there alone, either. I could almost see the resignation on her face as she added, in an intentional echo, It’s not safe.

“Fuck,” I whispered, and settled against the seat, eyes still on the road.

Maggie never needed to be a blogger. She never needed to be anything. She had her parents’ money and could have spent her entire life doing nothing as ostentatiously as possible. I’ve never been sure how she and Buffy met. It never really mattered. They were friends when Maggie joined the site, and they stayed friends right up until the day that Buffy died. She was our only real choice to take over the Fictionals, and she’d done an amazing job from day one… and she never needed to. Most people come to the news because there’s something driving them, somethng that they need to find a way to cope with. Maggie was just looking for something to do with her time. She did it well, she did it professionally, and now she was in just as much danger as the rest of us.

She knew the job was dangerous when she took it, George said. She was trying to be reassuring. She was failing.

“Really?” I asked. “Because Buffy didn’t.”

Not even George had an answer to that one.

“Shaun?” Mahir pitched his voice just short of a shout to be heard above the roaring wind. “The wireless has gone out. We’ve no more GPS connection from here, so we’re going to need to pray for clarity of road signs.”

“That’s awesome,” I called back, as deadpan as I could manage. “What’s our last known position?”

“We crossed into Colorado about twenty minutes ago,” shouted Becks. “I’m going to go around Denver—cut through Centennial and skip Wyoming entirely. You can have the wheel when we hit Nevada.”

“Deal.” I crawled over the back of the seat, turning to face the front of the van. “But I have to get some sleep before I drive again. Mahir, can you watch the back? Just scream if anything looks funny.”

“I think I can manage that,” said Mahir, unbuckling his belt.