“Awesome.” I reached forward and flicked the wiper lever twice, activating another spell. True invisibility would have been suicidal, so de Leon had opted instead for a spell that encouraged others to forget what they had seen. I’d piss off plenty of drivers tonight, but they would get over it as soon as I passed out of sight.

More importantly, if we passed any police cars, they should soon forget who they were chasing and why.

I pushed the car past a hundred miles per hour. As I did my best to dodge through traffic, the rest of my mind struggled to figure out how we were going to take on Charles Hubert and survive.

The needle was on empty when we reached Mecosta. I stopped at a gas station on the edge of town and filled the tank while Lena hurried inside. It was difficult to plan without knowing exactly what we were heading into. Maybe Hubert had already succumbed to madness, and we’d find him unconscious or dead in some shack in the woods, but I doubted it. More likely, that shack would be guarded by automatons and vampires both.

We could hold our own against a vampire or two, but Hubert wouldn’t make it so easy. The characters in his head might be mad, but they were also brilliant, and Hubert himself had years of military experience.

I peered through the window at the books tucked behind the driver’s seat. I had kept a copy of Gutenberg’s biography. If it worked for Hubert, it should work for me. Possessed by Gutenberg, I could slow or confuse the automatons long enough for Lena to reach Hubert.

At which point he could still use the Silver Cross against her. Crap. Okay, so what if I used Moly or some other magic-inhibiting substance to try to protect her from the cross’ effect? Only Mister Puddles had ignored the effects of my love magnet, back in Detroit. Hubert’s magic was too damn strong.

Lena emerged carrying a warmed-over hot dog, a one-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, and a handful of frosted fudge cakes. She handed the hot dog to me and kept the rest. “I fight better on a full stomach.”

“How do you even function on a diet like that?”

“Trees use glucose for energy, too. Anything I don’t burn off, the tree pulls for itself.”

I stared warily at the shriveled hot dog in its stale bun. Anxiety and overuse of magic churned in my gut, but I forced the hot dog down.

“What if we go in small?” Lena asked over the crinkle of cellophane. She broke off a few crumbs of chocolate and set them out for Smudge. “Sneak in like we did back at the MSU archive?”